Mike Scott

[Fisheries, September 20th, 1995]

Can the minister tell us why the fishermen of Atlantic Canada are faced with a massive tax increase because he does not have the courage to make the cuts that need to be made?

[Fisheries, September 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, this is not a fee, this is a tax. A fee implies that the bearer receive something in return for his payment. The minister offers only headaches to the fishermen in this case.

The minister just does not get it. Canadians are taxed to death. Fishermen are in one of the worst predicaments they have ever been in as a result of overwhelming government mismanagement of the fishery. Now the minister has decided to stick it to the fishermen again.

[Fisheries, September 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans is proposing to raise $50 million by imposing a new tax on fishermen. Of course DFO does not call it a tax, but an access fee. But that does not take away from the fact that for some fishermen this new tax will mean a 400 per cent increase in their licence fees and an end to their livelihood.

Why is the minister insisting on cutting the incomes of Atlantic fishermen rather than making much-needed cuts to the bloated bureaucracy in his own department?

[Firearms Act, June 12th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I will talk for a minute about why I joined the Reform Party. Obviously my colleagues and I supported other political parties in the past. What caused us to join the Reform Party?

We recognized a long time ago that we needed to change the system. I do not think Prime Minister Trudeau ever made a more accurate and truthful statement than when he said that MPs are nobodies. I think no MPs in this House should know that and feel that more than the backbench MPs on the opposite bench. They are nobodies. When they stand up to speak out and vote against the government on a bill, they are chastised, reprimanded and punished for representing their constituents. That is what we are here for; we are here to change the system.

The Conservatives under Prime Minister Mulroney wanted to get the GST through this House. What did they do? They cracked the whip and got their backbench MPs, even though their constituents solidly told them they did not support the GST, to vote in favour of it. Where are the Conservatives now? I do not see them around this House. That is where these people are going to be after the next election as a result of the kind of activities they have engaged in over the last few days. There is no change in sight.

I would like at this juncture to take a minute and commend those Liberal MPs who had the courage, the fortitude and the tenacity to stand up and vote against this bill even though they knew they were going to be punished for doing so. They were being true to their constituents. They were representing their constituents which is what they were elected to do. In the face of adversity they were prepared to do it and I commend them for it. We may have differing views and different philosophies but by and large I can admire people who are prepared to stand up for their constituents.

Reformers will be in every Liberal riding at the next election. We will remind the constituents how the Liberals treated parliamentary democracy in this session, what they did to ram through these government bills and how they abused their power and position.

It has been said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This goes back to the heart of why we need to change the system. We need to take some of the power away from cabinet and away from the Prime Minister and distribute it among the MPs. We would then have the opportunity to see real democracy in action and not the executive kind of authoritarian democracy we have had in Canada, these democratic dictatorships we have had over the last 30 or 40 years.

In speaking to the bill itself, it is an established rule that justice should not only be done but should be seen to have been done. In other words the law must not only be just but it must be seen to be just. Can this be said about Bill C-68 and the agenda behind it? I do not think so.

Gun control is a controversial subject. It is clear that real and serious disagreements exist in Canada over it. I am aware and I acknowledge that the opinion polls show a majority of Canadians tentatively support the government's position at the present time. I would caution my colleagues opposite that the more and more people find out about it, the less supportive they are.

I also caution that in the words of Thomas Jefferson, great initiatives should not rest on slender majorities. If a majority supports something but does not feel very strongly about it and a minority opposes it very strongly, it undermines the rule of law to ram it through.

There is something else that undermines the rule of law even more directly and that is when governments say one thing and do another. It erodes the very foundation of our society if governments misrepresent. That is why I want to ask my colleagues opposite to do a little soul searching on this bill. I want them to look at themselves in the mirror and ask this question: Is this legislation a prelude to confiscating citizens' firearms entirely? I do not expect them to concede that in this House.

Let me point out a couple of quotations that worry me. First, when this whole business began the Minister of Justice said openly that in his view only agents of the state, police and soldiers, should have weapons. He has since stopped saying it, but has he stopped believing it? His assistant, Darryl Davies, recently said that hunting is a barbaric and murderous activity and should be banned in Canada. He also said nobody in a civilized country needs a gun. This is a high level official working in the minister's office.

The minister has not to my knowledge repudiated either of these remarks. Can we believe the assurances that hunters and hunting are not targeted by this bill with these kinds of statements made by such senior people in the minister's office?

Other prominent gun control advocates including former Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board chair Susan Eng have made it quite clear: "Gun registration will start the process of stigmatizing gun use, just like drinking and driving. In their hearts, gun owners know this and this is what makes them so mad". We know what Ms. Eng is up to here and we know what

the real agenda is behind the legislation when we hear these kinds of statements.

Manitoba Liberal leader Lynda Haverstock said in May 1994: "I think what we should be doing is ensuring there is less and less and less availability to having guns", which she justified on the grounds that "sometimes our overall responsibilities have to override individual rights".

I know my colleagues opposite and my colleagues on this side of the Chamber have very serious differences about the bill as it now stands. The sweeping powers it gives the police worry us. The security of the universal system of registration worries us. The severe penalties for infringing this law in a society where murderers are free to go out on the street a short time after they are convicted strike us as unbalanced. The implied assault on the way of life of millions of Canadians troubles us.

What worries me most at this moment is that this entire bill is a massive fraud. I am concerned that all the pious assurances that confiscation is not contemplated are just a smokescreen behind which the legislation permitting confiscation can be put in place. Then the very people who say no private citizen should own guns will act on that belief.

Perhaps my colleagues opposite have not given this much thought. Perhaps they have accepted the smooth assurances of the Minister of Justice. I hope they will take the time to consider before voting on this whether the real agenda is outright confiscation at some time in the future. If it is, then I challenge them to either put it on the table openly right now and let us debate it, or put it aside and put the legislation aside that will make it possible.

This bill is bad enough as it is. What we really wonder is why the Minister of Justice is so determined to pass it when it is well established that there is no correlation between rates of violence and gun crime and laws respecting firearms ownership.

What is the real purpose of the bill? If it is a prelude to confiscation then it is extremely dangerous to the credibility of our government and to the notion of the rule of law in Canada if the government does not come forward and is clean with people right now telling them that is what is on its mind.

I hope my colleagues opposite will not vote to pass such a bill. I can assure them if they do, we will be there at the next election to remind their constituents how they voted today on closure, how they voted last Thursday morning on closure and how they voted on this very, very important piece of legislation, Bill C-68.

[Members Of Parliament Retiringallowances Act, June 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I am deeply troubled as I rise today to speak to the issue of MP pensions. My opposition to the pension plan and that of my colleagues is well known and our refusal to accept it is well known.

What especially troubles me today is the way the government is using time allocation to ram this and other bills through the House without proper debate. This is an abuse of our parliamentary system.

In speaking to the pension scheme, as I often do when I am speaking on bills in the House, I always refer back to the auditor general's observations about what government spending should be about. There should always be accountability. There should always be a designated goal and a measurement for whether those goals are being achieved by the expenditure. What is the purpose of this pension plan? What is it meant to do? Is it achieving that?

When the American government was instituted some two centuries ago there was actually a spirited public debate as to whether legislators should be paid at all. Some said they had to be because otherwise only the wealthy could engage in politics. Others said they should not because politics should not attract people who thought they could make a comfortable living if they were good at it.

The decision that they should be paid seems obvious, but back then politics was not a full time occupation. Legislatures sat less often for less time and they did a whole lot less legislating. Maybe that is something we could enjoy as Canadians. By the way, back in 1867 Canadian MPs were paid $6 a day. Things are a little different today. Now we have professional politicians. That is the consequence of the decision to pay them well.

That has both good and bad aspects. On the bad side, too many people in the House have never had real jobs. I do not say that political expertise is always bad. We do need people who understand how to get things done and how to work within the parliamentary system. I suppose it is good that some people can do politics full time as a career, but we can have too much of a good thing.

In any case, the decision was made to pay politicians so that financial barriers to holding public office would not exist. That is defensible, and it produced predictable results. MPs are also paid fairly well today. We are not paid as well as some people may think, although as my colleague from Calgary Centre recently pointed out, we are paid more than is apparent. We are paid reasonably so that we can afford to devote ourselves full time to the job and, to be quite honest, so we will be harder to corrupt. Frankly, that is money well spent. MPs who are struggling to survive and to keep the wolf away from the door are obviously more susceptible to improper approaches. So we have good reason for paying politicians and for paying them reasonably well.

What about the pension scheme? What is the reason for having this pension plan in the first place, and why is it so generous? It is obvious that the purpose of the pension is to enable people to stay with a career, knowing that when it is over they will be provided for. Private sector companies have pensions for that reason, and it is quite reasonable.

No one doubts the desirability of having pensions for MPs, as my colleague just pointed out. The real question before us today is do we have a good reason for having an outrageously generous pension system for MPs compared to their salaries and compared to the private sector and compared to other Canadians? Put another way, is there a good reason for structuring the rewards for politics so that MPs get less now and more later, that is, if they survive six years or longer? Is there a good reason for

creating a system where the reward for being an MP depends very heavily on getting re-elected again and again? Do we have a system that rewards MPs for making the right choice here and now, or one that encourages them to promise and promise to deficit spend, to go along with their leadership even when they know it is wrong, all in the desperate hope of being re-elected and becoming a 20-year man or woman and walking off with a huge pension? That is what the pension plan is doing right now.

Mr. Speaker, the other day you found it necessary to remind my colleagues on the opposite bench that this is a debating chamber and not a barnyard. The problem that time was chicken sounds from the other side, but it is also inappropriate to hear snorts and grunts.

I do not expect my colleagues opposite to agree that we are, all things considered, overpaid. Perhaps they will agree that the current system is dishonest because it conceals the real compensation MPs receive. Perhaps they will also agree that it is poorly designed, in that instead of rewarding courage and sound decisions in the present it rewards survival at any cost.

I think my colleagues opposite would be wise to go home and speak to their constituents before they make decisions on how they will vote on the pension bill, decisions that may haunt them in the next election. I also think they would be wise to take some time during the recess, if we wait to pass the bill, and before the recess if we do not, to consider the following questions.

If we are going to reward MPs at a certain level, does it make sense to put the money primarily into salaries or primarily into pensions? If we are going to reward MPs at a certain level, does it make sense to pay all of them more or less equally or to give far greater rewards to those who have been here the longest?

I want to repeat that I thoroughly understand the importance of having expertise available. I am no career politician, and I understand that this is not, in proper numbers, a bad thing. However, I also believe that a system that rewards survival in politics above all else will attract to politics precisely those people most adept at surviving election after election. Too often these are also people skilled at sacrificing the future to the present in their public policy decisions. Our national debt has essentially accumulated in the last 20 years.

Last night the member for Durham said: "I have often wondered coming to the House how it is possible that Canada created the debt it has today. I have often wondered who was controlling the cheque books.". Perhaps he should ask the Prime Minister, a consummate political survivor, a former finance minister, and a master of promise now and pay later. Such politicians have proven very skilful at convincing Canadians they can have their cake and eat it too, which has been ruinous for the country. It has been very lucrative for them, however.

Our national debt has accumulated under politicians who made promises and presented bills later and were re-elected for doing so. Our national debt has accumulated under politicians with very generous pensions. I am afraid our national debt is so huge that the only people who can shoulder the burden in the future will be MPs on their pensions. Frankly, I do not believe the hon. member for York Centre will wind up in a cardboard box collecting pogey if we reform MP pensions. I do believe the current system rewards wrong behaviour, which is very bad and ill considered.

Let us by all means adopt an honest system of paying MPs. And whatever we decide to pay them, let us put most of it into salaries, with a pension system no more generous than the private sector. Let us not reward the political survivor above the one who does what is right, who tells the truth, and who sometimes must pay the price for doing so.

Proposed changes to the MP pension plan are totally inappropriate. The members opposite imposed closure. They have heard countless complaints about the generosity of the plan. They have excluded witnesses critical of the pension plan from committee hearings, but they cannot exclude the Canadian public.

I look forward to going to all of their ridings in the next election to remind their constituents of how they behaved today. Because of their votes today, they are going to need their pensions after the next election, because I am convinced they are not going to be here.

[Supply, June 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in speaking to the estimates this evening I use the example of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in my remarks.

As I said in my earlier intervention, federal spending in this department has increased 750 per cent over the last 20 years. In the past year alone, spending in this department has increased 8.5 per cent, which is faster than the rate of increase in population and the rate of inflation combined.

What are we getting for all this spending? What are the results? The auditor general expressed serious concerns about spending in this area. He pointed out that the results are not there. He pointed out that when $1 billion was appropriated and earmarked for CAEDS, which is a native economic development program, over the period of time that money was expended the demand for social services and the rate of unemployment on native reserves continued to rise at a steady rate. This massive spending on economic development had absolutely no impact on the problems that existed on the reserves.

What does the government do? It pays absolutely no attention to what the auditor general says. It pays absolutely no attention to the hard and tough questions we ask of why we are spending this money, what are the results this expenditure is supposed to achieve, and what it is achieving. The government continues blissfully on expending the money because it feels it has to. It is motherhood to them. Them cannot possibly see any other way than to continue, because this is the way things have been done in the past.

The other major problem the auditor general pointed out was accountability. I have had occasion over the last 18 months to travel to a number of native Indian reserves in Canada. I have had occasion to hear from a large number of ordinary grassroots

Indian people who are very concerned about the accountability on their reserves, who are very concerned about the fact there is a small elite group of people in their communities who are receiving a tremendous amount of largesse from the federal government and most of the people are ignored. Most of the people are not receiving any benefits to speak of. Most of the people are living in destitute conditions.

Obviously there is a very serious problem with accountability. I personally as a member of Parliament keep bringing this up and asking the minister to investigate claims, to go to these communities and find out what is actually happening. The response I get is this is an internal matter for the band to deal with and we will not get involved.

Massive amounts of Canadian taxpayers' money are being sent to reserves, to the control of an elite group of Indian leaders with no accountability to their people and no accountability in effect back to the federal government. Is that the way we want to see our tax dollars spent in this country? Is that the way we want to see our society in Canada in 1995? I submit that this constitutes a massive fraud on the Canadian people and a massive fraud particularly on the poor people in these reserve communities, who actually believe that they are supposed to benefit from this expenditure and they actually do not.

We have built a welfare state in this country. I think everyone or most thinking people have come to realize that. Over the last 30 years we have constructed a massive welfare state and we have all the resulting problems that go along with that.

There are the increased crime stats. There is the increase in poverty and the increased lack of individual initiative. The more dependency on government, the more people are willing to look at government instead of looking at themselves as the ones who are responsible for themselves.

Nowhere is this more true than in the native communities in Canada. If we think we have a welfare state in Canada, take a look at Canada's Indian reserves and see the welfare state that has been created there. It is many times worse than what we have in the rest of Canada.

I submit that what the government is doing with these expenditures is perpetrating that. It is perpetrating a fraud on the Canadian taxpayers. It is perpetrating great and serious harm to the people the Canadian taxpayers feel they are actually helping. The net result is that we are going to end up with a greater debt. At some point we are going to become insolvent. At the same time we have created a tremendous amount of harm in these communities.

[Supply, June 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, when the hon. member started his intervention he said he was reflecting on how Canada got to be in the debt situation it finds itself in today. He was somewhat perplexed. He was wondering who had control of the cheque book.

I am a little amazed this member would think the Reform Party would be so naive that we did not know who had control of the cheque book. Does the hon. member recognize the names of MacEachen, Turner and Chrétien who all had control of the cheque book in the seventies and the eighties while this debt was being racked up?

I find it amazing that Liberal members in the House will ask how did Canada get into the situation that it is in today and will start pointing fingers at the Tories and others and not be willing to shoulder the blame themselves, because the blame falls squarely on their shoulders.

[Supply, June 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, is the hon. member aware that over the last 20 years spending through the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has increased by some 750 per cent, yet conditions in the communities that native people live in have essentially remained the same?

Is the hon. member aware that within the last four years DIAND has committed $1 billion toward native economic development? The auditor general's report last year clearly shows that the effect of that spending has been absolutely negligible in terms of its desired goals. In other words, the demand for social services continues to rise on a steady trend, the unemployment levels continue to rise on a steady trend, and the demand for social assistance increases in real dollar terms. This massive spending by the federal government has been an abject failure.

Would the hon. member agree that maybe it is time to review what the goals of the spending programs of DIAND were designed to do, whether or not they are actually achieving the goals, and whether the whole initiative the federal government has been engaged in for the last 25 years has been completely wrongheaded?

[Questions On The Order Paper, May 11th, 1995]

With respect to the Young Offenders act, ( a ) what are the objectives of the Act, ( b ) by what criteria is the attainment of these objectives measured, ( c ) what efforts has the Department of Justice made to evaluate the success of the act in terms of these criteria, and ( d ) to what extent have the objectives of the act been met?

[Aboriginal Affairs, May 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, will the minister promise that if he ever does manage to develop a coherent policy he will share it with minor players like Parliament and the Canadian people?