Reg Alcock

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the member referenced the Quebec experience relative to health cards. I believe the solution in that particular case, on a contentious issue, was a model to the rest of the country. The Quebec government said, yes, we are going to do it because we see it as a value proposition, but we are going to make it voluntary. If Quebeckers want that service, then they accept the card. If they do not, they do not have to and they can still be served in another way.

Would the member's opinions on this card be different if it were a voluntary card as opposed to a mandatory card?

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was quite interested in the remarks of the member. I have served with him on other committees and know that he takes these issues very seriously.

Has he had an opportunity to examine the Quebec government's privacy statements and privacy law? I have had an opportunity to meet with some of the public servants in Quebec who work on these issues of government information and how efficiencies are brought about. Quebec has quite a strong privacy policy but it also has a system that reconciles its protection of individual privacy with the use of tools, like unique identifiers and such, to deliver better services to citizens.

That is the nature of this debate from my perspective. There is always a problem moving in a new direction, particularly a direction that reformulates how governments do business. On the one hand, one response to that is to not do it, to run away and be afraid. Some of the things the member has said about fear of government and government processes are very high on that list. I will speak about this when I speak in more detail on this.

However I note that there has been some interesting and creative work done by the government in Quebec. Has the member had a chance to meet with the officials there to get a sense of how they reconcile both the need to access better health information to do better planning and provide better social policy and at the same time provide a guarantee of the right of personal privacy or the right to private life? It is a very difficult problem for legislators.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I will have an opportunity to address this subject more fulsomely when I speak, but I was intrigued by the member's reference to the example used by the former minister of immigration who made some comments, if I understood correctly, that the possession of this card would somehow enable the police to stop someone on the street to demand identification.

Could the member explain that to me? Is there something that prevents the police from stopping people on the street and asking for their driver's licence today or asking people to identify themselves? How would the possession of another piece of identification change the powers of the police?

[Louis Riel Act, December 4th, 2002]

moved, seconded by the member for Rimouski--Neigette-et la-Mitis, for leave to introduce Bill C-324, an act respecting Louis Riel.

Mr. Speaker, I am joined in the presentation of the bill by the member for Rimouski--Neigette-et-la Mitis, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, the member for South Surrey—White Rock—Langley and the member for Dauphin—Swan River.

Members from all parties in the House have been involved in the development of the bill. It is a reintroduction of a bill that we had before the previous Parliament. It seeks to reverse the conviction of Louis Riel for the crime of high treason.

It is an extraordinary move to attempt to undo what the courts have done. There is limited precedent for this in the Commonwealth, but I think all members will agree, to paraphrase a letter that was in the Ottawa Citizen recently, “Why do we study history if not to learn from it?”

The bill seeks to remove the stain of treason from one of the founders, a person who has been recognized as one of the fathers of Canadian Confederation.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Parliamentary Reform, November 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, a topic of this sort is so wide-ranging and so complex it is difficult to know how to make best use of the time available.

I taped and watched the presentations that were made last night by the various parties as we introduced this debate. It strikes me that in this debate and in the work that has been done, there are an enormous range of suggestions and an enormous number of targets. Some want to look at changing the issues that have to do with the Senate. Some want to look at issues that have to do with matters that are outside of this chamber. Some want to deal very specifically with the rules of the House themselves, and there were some interesting, very specific comments on that.

I want to step back though for a minute because I think part of the problem that we have is that we are maybe trying to address the wrong problem. We keep coming back to this debate. It was not that long ago when we had a debate of this sort. I thought we had done some of these things. One more time we are back here trying to figure out how to modernize the House of Commons.

It is true to say that some of that will require some specific changes to the rules. However, if we really want to tackle this task, we need to spend a little time thinking about what is the problem that we are trying to fix and perhaps spend a little time thinking about how did we get to the point where we want to change this. Then maybe we can come back to looking at some of those things that we might want to change.

From one perspective, despite all the angst that we feel about how this place works, it is hard to argue that Canada as a country is not doing well. Relatively speaking, looking at other countries around the world, we have a high standard of living. We have a civil society that functions quite well. These things are the result of this structure of governance. Therefore why are we so upset about it?

At the same time we have, and I am certainly one of those who feels there is a profound need to reform this place, a growing sense of alienation from different parts of the country. We elect parties. Canadian citizens elect people to represent them who do not want to be part of this country. We elect people who have party positions that profoundly reject the values of other parts of the country. I think that is a reflection of an underlying dissatisfaction with some of the ways in which the country works.

It is also a reflection of the inability of the House to perform one of its prime functions. When I am asked to speak about this place, I describe the House of Commons, in its best sense, as an enormous values clarification exercise for the country. When I came here as an urban member from the City of Winnipeg in 1993, the first thing I was confronted with was the codfish crisis on the east coast. It was something I knew very little about, had very little expertise in and had very little interest in until I was drawn into that discussion because colleagues of mine needed some assistance in sorting out what was a very critical issue to the Canadians that they represented. I have worked with them because frankly I want their support when I have a problem with drought in my area of the country.

It is that process of articulating and establishing that consensus. We talk often about the great Canadian consensus. That is where the House adds real value. We suffer when we allow that consensus building process to become too narrowly focused. In many ways that is at the heart of part of the problem that we feel here.

At the beginning of the government House leader's remarks, I heard a comment that is another part of the problem. He said that we were trying to modernize problems which began with the previous government. There was a sense that somehow these problems were the result of the actions of an individual or a group at one point in time.

It is popular for the other side of course to blame this on the predelictions or the inclinations of the current Prime Minister. I have had my own concerns about the positions taken by the current Prime Minister and I have written to him regarding those issues, starting about four years ago.

At the same time, the problems that we must deal with began a long time ago. The report of the standing committee of the British House of Commons, that last looked at this issue, addressed a concern about effective control over government expenditure going back to 1919. It looked at proposed post-war reforms. The British House of Commons has been going through much the same thing as we are, trying to figure out how, in a modern society, a chamber of this sort can hold the government to account.

I am often drawn to a report written by C.E.S. Franks at Queen's University. This particular paper was written in May 1999. He looked at some of these issues and made the following comment:

Compared with other major Westminster style parliamentary democracies, and particularly that of Britain, the Canadian Parliament is government/executive dominated and more highly partisan. In fact, the whole Canadian system, and the provincial governments as well, are executive centred rather than parliament centred, and highly partisan and adversarial as well.

He goes on to explain a development that is kind of interesting when we reflect on what we are trying to accomplish. He talked about a country that essentially did not have a representative chamber. It did not have a democratically elected form of government in its beginning. It was run by a strong public service coming out of the British colonial office. As the country matured and as it began to develop representative bodies, consultative bodies, and finally the development of the Canadian Parliament, the latter came on as an adjunct to what was already a well established executive.

While the Canadian and British styles of government are executive centred in their nature, the Canadian version is even more centered on the executive than would be the case in the Westminster model. We see that when we look at Westminster. We see the actions of its committees and the things it is able to accomplish. It is not uncommon for a government bill to fail in the British House because members reject it. It is certainly common for members to be highly independent in their activities on select committees.

Another thing that Mr. Franks pointed out is something that I had not thought about much until I started to reflect on our history over the last 30 years or so. I would like to read the quote and then come back to how I interpret it. He said:

In comparison with other western legislatures, the Canadian Parliament is characterized by short-term, amateur members.

That is an interesting comment when we think about it. There have been three big wipeouts of this chamber since the second world war: 1958 with John Diefenbaker when he came in and replaced the majority of members; 1984 with Brian Mulroney; and 1993 when we came to office. We came from a small opposition party and went to a large governing party. A lot of the traditional opposition parties disappeared or were greatly reduced.

A lot of members came into the House with basically little experience with the place. What experience they had in political life tended to be experience built around debate in the process of election, which is highly partisan, highly charged, and highly focused on trying to prove that the other person is wrong. As a result, we carried a lot of that kind of activity to the floor of the House. Committee meetings, instead of being collaborative sessions of colleagues with an interest in seeing good government, became mini versions of question period.

I often wonder how public servants must feel when they sit in front of a committee to make presentations and are basically like set pieces to an ongoing debate, one party trying to prove that the other party is either too right wing, too left wing, too irresponsible, too corrupt, or too whatever. The business we get charged with, which is to attempt to articulate to the government the values that we would like to see represented in legislation or in the operations of the government, gets largely lost.

In an environment like that, where there is more external management, it is easy for members to be relatively irresponsible, relatively casual in their relationships to committee work because it has no consequence, nothing much happens as a result of the activity of committees.

It does not mean we cannot all point to positive experiences. I have had some good experiences in committee. Some committees have done some pretty good work, but by and large, the lack of regard for committee work has caused a lot of members to stop putting a lot of time and energy into it. Members are not unintelligent when it comes to the use of their time. They will spend their time and will focus their time, energy and intellectual capacity in areas where they think it produces the greatest return for the people they represent and the issues that they are concerned about.

I want to add another set of forces. It is interesting to note, and Marleau and Montpetit reference it, the creation of the government House leader. I believe it started casually in 1944 and was formally introduced in the Standing Orders in 1946. As depicted in Marleau and Montpetit, the Prime Minister of the day would come to the House each day and say here is the stuff we should work on, here is the piece of legislation, and then would leave. Then the whips of the various parties would sort of work it out, have their debates and then come to conclusions. If a cabinet minister wished to get something passed or worked on, he would be in here talking to people, working on the debate and trying to build upon the atmosphere that existed in the chamber to get important legislation passed.

The arrival of the position of the House leader meant that the process of negotiation delegation was largely passed over to somebody who became more of an operative expert. How something was passed through the House became more critical rather than worrying about the substance of it. The value of passage became more important than the value of the debate.

However, there are other forces at play here. If we graph the size of the public service in Canada, as a metaphor for the change and complexity, during the period between 1901 and the beginning of the second world war, the size of the public service did not increase that much, between 30,000 and 50,000 members, excluding military personnel because obviously there were bump ups during the war years. Post-war, it increased at one point to a total full time equivalence of about 400,000. It has declined a bit since then but, if we think about that for just a second, that difference in the government, that was at one time relatively small to one that is enormous, produced all sorts of different levels of complexity.

Added to that there were massive and continuing changes in the technology of communication. In 1952 television was introduced in Canada. By 1957, 85% of the country was covered by television. However, television is an interesting phenomenon because television tends not to focus well on groups. It tends to focus well on individuals, debate and aggression, as opposed to reasoned discourse.

It did a couple of things. Prior to the introduction of television, the local member in the riding would be subject to a lot of the interaction with local constituents and the Prime Minister would be someone whom one would see occasionally. All of a sudden the Prime Minister was introduced into everyone's living room. John Kennedy was considered to be the first television president in the U.S. It is fair to say that Trudeau would be the first equivalent, the first television-savvy Prime Minister in Canada. That produced, without any changes in the rule, an increased focus on the individual through the hot medium. It produced an increased focus on that office on the executive side, and greatly increased the power and authority of the centre.

Another thing also occurred. Technology began to get more broadly introduced and it has had a major impact on the pace of life. Many people have written about the compression of time and distance. Before, when people wrote cheques on their bank account they might have had a week or two before the money was actually taken out of their account. Today, it happens immediately. If we sent a document overseas it might have been a month before it actually got there, today it is faxed overnight. That compression of time has greatly increased the response demands on all of us. We see it in our daily life all the time. It has increased that need for response on government.

What has the impact been on a deliberative chamber like this one, where people need the time to sit, talk, work out that consensus, clarify those values to come to that compromise, and come to that Canadian consensus? It has been essential in order to meet those demands of the incredible pressure for a response this place has been increasingly subject to. New tools, new rules, new changes in the Standing Orders have all served to move things through the House faster.

We still have a tool called closure. If members go back into the history of this place they will find that it was used once around 1932 and I forget why. It was used once during the pipeline debate in 1956 and once during the flag debate in 1966. Closure had that kind of frequency.

Time allocation was introduced in 1972 to assist with the need to get useful information through the House. It was used on average twice a year during the 1970s and about six times a year during the 1980s. I have not checked the statistics recently, but it was over 12 to 15 times a year in the 1990s. There is talk, and I heard the House leader refer to it, about the British practice of using time allocation on almost everything. The British and members of this House have this tremendous pressure from the community and the people they serve to have a decision. They cannot wait. They need to have some kind of a result from this place.

The problem is that we have not challenged ourselves to reform the House. It is not about the minutia of what time do we stand up or sit down on this thing. It is about how this chamber becomes more relevant in the lives of Canadians. How do we engage in those important public debates? How do we work in real time so that we are working at the speed of a decision that is required in a modern economy? Instead, we pride ourselves on the arcane nature of this place, so that we can sit around and have sober debate, and become increasingly irrelevant to Canadians. It is not because people have some sort of desire to take authority away from the chamber. It is because the public must have a decision.

I heard members on the other side talk a lot about regulation and the tendency of government to use regulation. When I was a public servant in Manitoba I was in charge of writing a piece of legislation. I asked the drafters to write clauses that put important decisions into regulation rather than putting them in the body of the bill. It was not because I had any thought about the structure of power and authority in society or the nature of legislative bodies. It was because if a neighbouring province changed its legislation I needed to respond. I could not wait the year and a half or two years it would take to get the bill through the legislature.

Over time we have seen a migration of the power, authority and the influence of this place move away to other forums. It is not because of nasty desires or nasty intentions of individuals. It is because of the real need of a modern organization to respond more quickly. The profound challenge to us is to start to get our heads around how this place must change to function more effectively in real time.

There is a substantive issue at the heart of this. It lies behind the attempts to deal with some of the rules. I was about to say there is too much authority centred in the executive. There is too much authority assumed by the executive. The reality is this place has enormous authority if it chooses to exercise it. I would argue that if we actually exercised all the authority we have there would be such a public outcry against it because we would grind everything to a halt using our normal practices.

We need to erase some of the precedents and practices that have tended to make it too easy for the centre to become the articulator of values for the country and the ultimate decision makers on all things. We must rebalance that power relationship and that is not an easy thing to do.

I used to study children's rights legislation. I remember a report from a professor at Dalhousie University who said that a right cannot be bestowed upon someone without taking it away from somebody else. The professor said that power is a zero sum game.

It is much the same here. If the chamber were to assume more power and authority, then that would have to come from some other place. There will always be resistance. I believe it is something worth doing. We must be clear about what we are trying to do.

I note that there was a comment by the House leader that there is a willingness in the chamber to allow us to revisit the subject and talk in more detail. I will forward some of my suggestions.

Committee membership and the length of terms that members are appointed for should be examined. We should do away with the striking committee practice of forming committees every September. I believe that a member should be appointed to a committee and the committee should be functional at least for the period from the throne speech to prorogation, if not for an entire parliament, so that there is some consistency in the operation.

Some changes that need to take place internally are really caucus decisions. I know that our caucus is working on this and I suspect that others are as well. Perhaps we can visit those changes in a further debate, but the real challenge to us, with your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, is to think through how we can modernize this chamber so that it begins to function in a way that makes us able to play a role in the important decisions that the country has to make.

[Supply, November 19th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the minister for ACOA.

The debate raises a number of questions that are interesting for the House to consider. There has been a lot of work done, beginning with the work done some years ago by the member for Fredericton when they first began to look seriously at the question of providing greater support for people with disabilities. The work by the subcommittee that is the subject of the motion was an important piece of work that rightly had all party support.

It raises a question in the minds of all of us. I think it is a question that I and those of us who are on the government operations committee want to spend some time thinking about also. The question is why is it that smart people make stupid decisions? It is a funny question in a way.

I was a public servant within the department of family services in Manitoba for many years. Some of my colleagues and certainly those in the minister's office would call it the department of personal pain. In many ways government has to work in space that is very difficult for people, dealing with crises and great problems in their lives. The government tries to act to provide some remediation and it can never satisfy the demand.

In fairness to the public servants, they are always caught in this terrible collision between a huge level of demand and an equally strong pressure to maintain a balance or control on public expenditure. Yet every now and again caught in that nexus it is too easy to forget what is actually happening.

About two and a half months ago I received a call from a fellow I know in Brandon, Manitoba. He said he had applied for the disability tax credit for his daughter and was refused. He wanted me to help him understand why. I know his daughter. His daughter was born without her left arm; she has nothing from just below her shoulder.

I said that this could not be possible, that obviously some mistake had been made and somebody just did not understand what was going on. I thought maybe he had submitted the wrong form. I said I would see if I could sort it out. When my staff called the department they were told that because the child was born without her left arm she never would have missed it and therefore she could not be considered to be disabled.

I am not a lawyer, but I did study a commercial law course once and I remember the professor talking about the principle of the reasonable person. Would a reasonable person standing back and looking at that circumstance think that was a reasonable response? Of course he would not. It is absolutely outrageous.

By and large I have a great deal of respect for the public servants here in Ottawa and across the country, but how do smart people end up making a decision like that? How do smart people end up getting themselves so tied up in knots that they get so focused on the definition they have to apply and how to apply it that they lose sight of the fact that they are applying it to a human being?

I think that is an interesting question. It is also one that speaks to a related issue which is the need for the members of this chamber to become more active on these issues. The example of the subcommittee is an excellent one. By and large by allowing ourselves to become caught up in short term fatuous partisan debate, we have forgotten that part of our role here is to represent a set of values.

I have debates with the Auditor General all the time. I have great respect for our Auditor General. I had great respect for the last one; I worked closely with Mr. Desautels and I like the new Auditor General very much. I think at times the Auditor General gets called upon to determine or state what is valuable because of an absence of direction from this chamber. While the Auditor General's staff may be great people to count the pennies, they are not necessarily the people who should be determining the values of the country. That is a job for us.

It is passing strange to me. Just as I was sitting here listening to the debate I sent up to my office for the most recent report on tax expenditures, because this is essentially a tax expenditure. One document says it is about $360 million a year. Another report says it is $310 million but that report could be a year out of date. That is the total expenditure we are making to assist in making lives a little bit easier for some of the most vulnerable people in our country.

We seem to spend not a lot of time debating the fact that we give $1.7 billion in tax expenditures to people who win lottery tickets. We give $590 million to people who pay a little interest so they can earn more money. We give $565 million to people to deduct their union dues. We give $260 million toward the deduction of luncheon expenses. We seem to do these things with relative ease, yet when it comes to providing a relatively modest amount of additional financial support to a group of citizens who are by definition among the lowest incomes and most vulnerable in society, we tie ourselves in knots trying to find ways not to do it.

Surely it is a response of a system that has gone a little mad. It is important that the House support the work of the subcommittee. The subcommittee did what we say committees should do in undertaking their responsibilities. Members from all parts of the country and all political persuasions came together and reached unanimity.

Unanimity is not an easy thing to do around here. Many of us would argue that we would be a lot better served if we strove harder to find unanimity in our committee reports and we would be far more influential if we did that. We finally have one that did it.

The subcommittee looked at the issue in detail. Very talented members spent a lot of time looking at the issue. In their responsibilities as members of Parliament, they came to a set of conclusions they believe are in the best interests of the people who are affected by this. The members did that unanimously and the House should support that work. We should applaud them for what they have done and frankly, we should urge other committees to do the same thing.

Given the conversations I have had with other members in the House, I think that the work of the subcommittee has been largely accepted and is respected by the government. I suspect we will find that the government will vote for the motion. I look forward to the opportunity to do so.

[Question No. 21, November 18th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and add my voice to the debate. This is one of those debates that every now and again comes along and gives us an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between government, or how we are governed, and our individual lives.

I think the bill has been in and out of the House in a number of forms because people are not sure about where those boundaries lie, about how we establish our right to live independently and freely as citizens versus the need for the government to undertake actions that may intrude upon that right in order to provide another right, and that is the right to lead our lives free from the threats of death, destruction or kinds of activities that we have seen too often recently in other places.

I want to start by reflecting on how this began. Obviously there were the events of September 11, but I am reminded of the first bill we put through the House by a statement that the Prime Minister made in the House when he said that law made in haste is not necessarily good law. At that time, we were moving very quickly because of the horrific events of 9/11 to put in place a body of law enabling police forces to take additional action in order to provide protection. If we were to ask most of the people in this Chamber and certainly people across Canada if they want or expect government to provide some protection for them and to act to intercede with people who might undertake those acts, I think the answer would be an overwhelming yes.

At the same time, law is a complex issue and one needs to look very carefully at what is being proposed to try to pick apart that which is necessary in order to meet the goal of providing protection and safety for citizens and that which is sort of a natural tendency of bodies to assume as much responsibility and as much authority as they possibly can to get their job done. Always in that space there is a tension that exists between law enforcement and citizens.

I am a son of an RCMP officer. I worked in a position of social control, shall we say, when I was a director of child welfare for a period of time. There always is that area between the rights and needs of the state to function to protect people and the right of individuals to lead their lives unfettered, as long as they are conducting themselves in a lawful manner, so that they can function without fear of intrusion or problems arising from, shall we say, the over-ambitious or over-energetic activities of law enforcement.

There is another aspect to this. There is an old joke that I first heard told about university professors, although I suspect the same joke could be told about most Canadians and most of their roles. In this case the question in the joke is: How many professors does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is: Change?

We are all worried about things that change the world we have become comfortable with. In many ways, these changes are changes that have become more necessary over time as law breakers, those who act to deprive us of our rights, take advantage of new technologies, new strategies, and new ways of exchanging information, travelling around the world and financing their operations. It has strained police forces around the world to respond to them. It has left them unable to respond in many cases, simply because police do not have some of the technological capability in order to keep up.

We saw that in some of the discussion about wiretapping. A wiretapping law that attached the ability to tap to a specific phone in a specific location was fine when all phones were attached to wires and routed inside buildings, but not very effective in a regime where we are into cellular phones. That is before we get into short messaging, fax and the other forms of exchange of information if one wants to track down communication or interfere with communications between people who would do us harm.

We need to look at this very carefully. We need to pick apart those parts of the bill that are specifically involved in modernizing the tools that law enforcement has available to it in order to protect us and provide us with some measure of assurance against the real or imagined acts of others. It is that second part, the imagined acts of others, that is also important because it poses a difficult problem for us.

I just returned from speaking to a group of students who asked me how far we were prepared to go in order to protect ourselves against terrorism and how much were we prepared to spend. The problem is that we do not know.

As a result of the weather last night I had occasion to travel in from the airport with a person who works at Canada Post. He talked about the problems Canada Post was having in trying to keep track of mail going through and checking it for anthrax. It has had a number of these anthrax scares but fortunately the ones in Canada have all been false. Nonetheless, the system must respond. To build a system that would allow Canada Post to inspect every piece of mail for bacteriological agents is just beyond its financial capability and its technological capability right now. However if we wanted to be absolutely sure we would undertake that.

Similarly, in other forms of law enforcement, the capacity to spend on new technologies and new ways of intervening is enormous. The task faced by law enforcement and by us is the task of risk assessment. How much is enough in order to provide us with some level of assurance that we will not suffer the consequences of an attack?

When we speak to the experts who are involved in anti-terrorism, it seems that one of the most effective ways to do that is through intelligence gathering, to try to understand what is going on long before it becomes an event in the local community. That leads us into these activities that do necessarily begin to trammel sort of traditional rights to freedom and individual privacy.

I want to talk a bit about privacy because it will become more of a consideration as the House moves down this track. I think we need to re-frame in part how we think about privacy. There was a time when the term “privacy” meant the right of individuals to have a life private or separate from the state. As citizens we had certain obligations to fulfill but we had the right to do things that were separate from the state.

Increasingly, we began to confuse the other things with the right to secrecy. Privacy and secrecy are not necessarily the same thing. I have a simple example of that. There was a time when it could be dangerous to be a gay person in the country. Individuals had the right to be gay but it did not mean they could act out that right in any particular way, and so people tended to keep those activities secret. As public awareness and public tolerance has grown, we have seen a reduction in that need to hold things private.

The same thing was true for a Jewish person a few decades ago. A person may not have wanted to be open about that. Certainly if people were Jewish a couple of hundred years ago they would want to maintain the secrecy even though at that time they would not have had the right to a private life. Even though today people have a right to a private life and the right to live their lives free from government, they may necessarily have to keep that secret in order to enjoy that right.

I think the problem that creates for us in government is that we have allowed an awful lot of confusion between privacy and secrecy to the point where we have a culture of secrecy in government that is really quite overwhelming. It creates other problems because there are other things that flow from this, such as the right to hold one's government to account and the right to understand what one's government is doing so a person can intervene with the government when impeded upon by this need to hold things secret.

The bill, while it is in an area that is particularly emotionally charged, is one that we will need to look at very carefully and to weigh those two competing rights: the need to keep us safe and the right to live our lives in quiet enjoyment.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, if I were to stand and do that, I would have to stand behind the lineup of Liberal members already doing that.

The member for St. Paul's, as the member rightly mentioned, is the former chair of the subcommittee on the status of persons with disabilities. The member for Fredericton spent a good portion of his time a few years ago helping to develop increased programs and support for disabled people.

I can tell the member from my own experience about a friend of mine who called me a little while ago. He has a daughter who was born without her left arm. When she was a baby the cost was not a big deal. It was not much different raising her. But as she got older and ready for school, where she had to have special prostheses and other things to help her fit in, he finally applied for the credit. He was refused. He phoned me and asked how she could not be disabled? We phoned the department. We were told she never had the arm and therefore how could she be disabled by the loss of it?

I want to be really clear about this. I am quite proud to stand here and condemn that decision, as most members on this side are. I do not know what has gone wrong. I do not know the rationale. We have tried to sort it out. All of us will be looking to see what the minister says because it is absolutely wrong. I had my staff go back and pull the speeches of finance ministers when they talked about, first, the introduction of the tax credit and then the changes.

I asked for the purpose of it. Over and again we saw ministers saying it was to help people deal with extraordinary costs created by their disabilities. It is not like we are giving people a gold plated road to retirement. This is not a big credit. It is a small amount of money that helps people deal with the extraordinary cost created by not being able to function like the rest of us. The actions of the department are shameful.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 3rd, 2002]

Well, I suspect members will get out of the committee what they choose to put into the committee, frankly.

The genesis of the committee comes out of a couple of things. It comes out of an interest of many members of the House to start to get better informed about how the new information and communication technologies can be a lever for change, substantial change in the nature of public spacing, public management, in citizen involvement and a whole host of things.

One of the things that has to happen is that people need to get up to speed on that. They need to understand that. They need to develop an understanding of what the capabilities are before they begin to apply it to something as complex as government. This committee has a mandate to do that. It has a unique mandate in that it has a mandate to look at things across government, not just down one department, but across every single government department.

It also has a mandate which arose from work that was done by a member of the Alliance and a member of our party who produced a report that talked about the need for reforming and improving the estimates process. We have a tool for significant organizational change. We have a lot of background understanding about how accountability structures work in the House and we have put them together.

We are going to try to build a committee process that allows all members from all sides to lead on these topics. I invite all members to be involved. The test will be whether or not we as members can come together and work collaboratively to produce substantive change. I invite other members to join in this and we will see what happens.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my remarks today by congratulating the Prime Minister, the cabinet, all of the MPs who have worked so hard over these last few years and contributed to the development of this speech, the staff who have worked diligently over the summer, the public servants, and Canadians, whom we see reflected over and over again in this speech.

In many ways this is the starting point that gets us back on track, back where we wanted to be after the 2000 election, a course we were diverted from by the terrible events of September 11. All members will know just how the House was seized with the work on security to try to ensure that we had the capacity to respond to and to prevent a repetition of such tragedies. Now we are back to the agenda that the government laid out in the election campaign of 2000, with which so many members here have been struggling and on which they have been working over the time since the last election.

I would make the comment right off the top that this is an enormously ambitious agenda. It is an enormous number of initiatives that we have to fit into a relatively short period of time and the House will have to work extremely hard to see quality legislation produced that reflects the wishes of Canadians.

Within the speech, we see how a process within the House, within the work done by members here on the Hill, now comes together in a series of commitments that soon, with the passage of legislation, will become programs that will go on to benefit Canadians for a very long time. I want to focus on a few of them.

I was privileged to be a member of the urban task force. We spent a great deal of time travelling across the country speaking to mayors and citizens in cities all across the country, trying to sort out how we could assist them in grappling with some of the terrible problems with which cities are confronted. Our large urban centres are having difficulty, in part because of a restricted tax base, in responding to the demands for new infrastructure that will allow them to build the kind of modern infrastructure that will make it possible for them to remain competitive into the future. We heard over and over again about the need for the country to come to terms with how we treat and support our cities.

In doing this, I wish to congratulate the mayor of Winnipeg, Mayor Murray, who has been a very effective leader in this debate over the last few years. The mayors of the five big cities have contributed strongly, as has the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, to the work that the task force did. We see that reflected in the Speech from the Throne.

If there was one thing the mayors asked us for it was to please extend the timeframe for infrastructure so that they could plan, so that infrastructure would not come as a surprise that is announced every now and again. Then they have to adjust all of their planning in order to fit the funds that are available. They asked us over and over again to put in place a plan that would give them some predictability and, frankly, the opportunity to move in a more coordinated fashion toward the development of the infrastructure that they feel they need in their regions. The government has responded to that.

The House will be challenged to go through the details of this to see whether it meets some of the tests that the mayors put on us. One of the things I will be interested in looking at is whether we will be tied to the old trilateral structure for these agreements or whether the federal government will free itself and allow itself to work bilaterally with cities. That was an issue that came up over and over again in those debates. I am hoping and will be arguing that it should be included in this legislative agenda.

Above all, I want to thank the member for York West, who chaired that process and who worked countless hours. In fact none of us are sure how she managed to keep up with the demands. She produced a very competent report that we now see reflected in a series of commitments in the Speech from the Throne.

I want to stop a minute to talk about a program that was actually introduced some time ago by the government. In the Speech from the Throne there is a commitment to substantially increasing it. That is the child tax benefit. I think that some years from now when people start reflecting on this, they will recognize that the child tax benefit is as significant a social program as some of the other main programs we have put in place, such as health care and pensions, those big pillars of our social safety net.

This is a program that for the first time steps back from some of the paternalistic attitudes that we have had toward very poor people, a step back from surrounding them in a network of services that are available only if they are good, a step back from people who are caught in the welfare trap. It says that people are competent to make their own decisions, that some people simply do not have access for a variety of reasons, such as low wage rates, lack of education and other things, to the kind of financial support that allows them to live healthy lives and raise healthy children. It puts money directly into their hands and trusts them to be able to make competent decisions on behalf of their families. I think it is a radical change from the history of social welfare in this country. I think the government should be congratulated for bringing it in. I think the Prime Minister is to be congratulated for committing to substantially increase that credit.

I want to congratulate people like Wayne Helgason from the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and Mike Owen from the Winnipeg Boys and Girls Clubs, who have worked hard to help the government to understand the value of stepping back from those more paternalistic services and delivering services directly.

I also want to spend a bit of time on first nations. In Manitoba we have a very large first nations population. In the city of Winnipeg we have a large, growing younger generation. An ever-increasing portion of the workforce is made up of young first nations people. There has been a dramatic change in the leadership within first nations communities over the three decades that I have been working with them. I worked very closely with them in the early eighties. I am absolutely and deeply impressed with the quality of the leadership, the quality of the governance that is being built in those communities.

We have several pieces of legislation coming forward. There is the governance act, which we will have to look at very carefully and work on with leaders. I want to thank leaders like Grand Chief Margaret Swan and Chief Jerry Fontaine, who have worked closely with me and with others to help us understand how that legislation can be improved.

I want to congratulate the government for the commitments around economic development. If there is anything that is going to help us get out of some of the traps that have been created historically, it will be to give people the tools through education, early childhood development and support in starting to take control of their own lives economically. I think it is an incredibly important initiative. It is important for my province. I think the government should be congratulated for doing it.

On immigration, if we were to prioritize the two or three big initiatives for my province and my city, certainly assisting aboriginals would be one and immigration would be another. We live in a very large area with a relatively small population. Here again I wish to congratulate a lot of people who have worked very hard: the minister responsible for the provincial nominee program, Becky Barrett; the business council with Art DeFehr and Bob Silver; the people on our immigration advisory committee, Sharad Chandra and Ken Zaifman and the 70 or 80 people who work month after month trying to sort out ways to solve these problems. In Manitoba the provincial nominee program has a 91% success rate at bringing people in and settling them in the community with jobs and helping them become very successful. That is because of the work of the people in Manitoba who are so committed to seeing immigration grow.

I also want to thank our Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who has taken the time to meet with these people and work with them, not once but several times, and continues to do that and to pick up their challenges. One of the very first things that the group raised with the new minister of immigration was the problem with credentials and how we can bring in people who have professional credentials but cannot work in their field because they cannot get access to local licensing. That is because of the multiplicity of laws across the country and how the laws are fixed, in either arm's-length organizations or provincial jurisdictions. We have to sort that out if we are going to be effective at recruiting the best from around the world to live in our country. I think the minister has done an absolutely superb job. In the Thanksgiving break week there will be a two-day federal-provincial conference on this issue. The minister will bring together the ministers of all the provinces so that they can finally sit down at the table to try to sort out this important area.

I want to move on to research and development because there is a series of initiatives here that I think are timely and important. They are going to be difficult for the House and we are going to have to work hard to sort them out, but I also want to talk about some of the things we have done that I think need improving and which we now have an opportunity to fix.

It has been said by some that dealing in the area of public policy is a little like trying to change a tire on a moving car. The thing is in progress and has a certain infrastructure and momentum and we are trying to fix it as it goes along. That is particularly true when the government gets involved, creates a number of initiatives that get into play and then discovers that maybe some aspects have worked well but others have not. I think that is the case in our support for research and development.

I am, and I declare it every time I stand in the House, a huge proponent of increasing the support for research and development, for the development and acquisition of knowledge, as a way of maintaining our competitive edge in the world. I am also a huge proponent of beginning to incorporating new technologies in the management of public space. That will allow us to meet a whole bunch of goals that I hear members of the House talking about, such as increased transparency and accountability. They are part of the paradigm of becoming smarter as a country.

At the same time I think there are some real problems in our research infrastructure. Some of them existed before the coming of this government, but some of them have been created, fostered and enhanced by this government. Let me reference two of them.

First, we have put a lot of new money into initiatives and granting councils such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. We did a big reform of the Institutes of Health Research and again added additional funding. These are important initiatives.

The Institutes of Health Research is a model of how a network research institution can be built. It incorporates the best in every province and builds upon their existing strengths. Alan Bernstein and others in that organization should be congratulated for their leadership and the very important work they do. I hope we will find a way to steadily increase the funding that is available to them. Similarly, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is well networked and provides important support to researchers all across this country in understanding how we live.

But there are some problems. I would say that NSERC, the sciences research council, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation are stuck in an older model. Frankly, I do not think they have caught on to what needs to happen in a modern economy. I think that they basically have dismissed most of the country and have decided that there are only five universities in Canada worth supporting and have biased the majority of their funding toward those five. I think that is wrong.

There is another thing we have done. We have announced a multiplicity of programs. We now have health research, social sciences, NSERC, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the chairs program, as well as another foundation for the environment, with a number of pockets of research money scattered throughout various departments. So universities have to bring on staff and divert professorial time away from actually doing research or teaching to “grantsmanship”. They run around trying to negotiate the multiplicity of doors they have to get through in order to assemble the financial support needed to do the work that they do.

In this throne speech, we see a series of commitments about continuing to increase financial support. I would hope and I will be arguing that we need to shape this support so that we correct the imbalance created by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and NSERC, so that we begin to recognize, as the Institutes of Health Research and SSHRC have done, that there is capacity in every single university in every single part of the country. I hope we will use the tools the government has to perhaps move those two organizations into a more modern view of management, one that is more responsive to the kind of Canada that I believe most Canadians would like to see built. There are other elements within that package. If we look at how the speech is written, we will note that there are a number of sections. This one is in learning and innovation. There is another section about smart regulation.

There are going to be some debates here: changes in copyright protection, changes and finalization of a very important piece of work that was done by the health committee on new reproductive technologies, and pesticide use. These issues have been debated well by the House. The piece of work that was done by the health committee which I had the privilege to be a part of, the former leader of the Alliance, Mr. Manning, and others, was to me a model of how good work can be done on difficult, contentious issues.

Debates around here have a range from the pretty mundane, ordinary kind of boring debates right up to the hottest of emotional and personal issues. That topic took us right into all of the areas we are so fearful around, such as abortion and the rights of the unborn, and all of those kinds of things. Yet, that committee was able to grapple with those and come through that experience to produce a report that every member of the committee felt good about.

I once wrote a piece on how it is not possible for the House of Commons to make an optimal decision. What is optimal depends on the point of view of the individual putting it forward. No matter what people put forward they will not be thoroughly pleased or get 100% because the nature of this place is ultimately to compromise. It is ultimately to find the most optimal route from a complex set of opinions, a complex set of beliefs, and a complex set of needs. That was something we achieved in that committee on an exceptionally difficult topic. I was proud to be a part of it.

Now we are down to the work in the House. All the committees would like to work on their pieces of legislation. I had the privilege of being part of the work to create a new committee in the House. It was created before the summer recess. It is the new Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. Because it is a new committee there are all sorts of expectations and all sorts of things being brought to the committee for us to work on but I want to--