Monte Solberg

[Kyoto, December 9th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, government members may think it is a joke when tens of thousands of people will possibly lose their jobs because of the Kyoto accord. Obviously the government must have done some internal studies to determine the impact of the Kyoto accord on the Canadian economy.

My question is for the prime minister once again. Where are those internal studies? How many jobs will be lost? How high will gas prices rise?

[Kyoto, December 9th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the government is ignoring our questions. The government is proposing—

[Petitions, December 9th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I rise pursuant to Standing Order 36 to present a petition on behalf of people in the riding of Medicine Hat.

People are very concerned that the government is funding groups to consider the removal of section 43 of the Criminal Code. Therefore, the petitioners request Parliament to affirm the duty of parents to responsibly raise their children according to their own conscience and beliefs and to retain section 43 in Canada's Criminal Code as it is currently worded.

[Amendment To The Constitution Of Canada (Newfoundland), December 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I really must rise to the bait.

First, I do believe that what the Government of Newfoundland is proposing will lead to a bland homogeneity that we will all regret some day. I have heard this red herring before.

When we cast back over the 20th century and look at the great disasters that have occurred around the world, they were not in the name of religion. Quite the contrary. They are quite contrary to what all religions believe.

Look at the first world war and the second world war. Look at what happened in the Soviet Union. Fifty million people lost their lives because of an ideology, not because of a religion. Look at Pol Pot and what has occurred in Cambodia where two million people lost their lives, not because of religion. Look at Hitler. We look at an ideology again and millions of people lost their lives, not because of religion, to the contrary.

I would argue that even a religious war proves what people have always said, that people have a fundamental flaw in their character, original sin and all that kind of thing which is why I believe it is a good idea to teach people about these things. It helps to remind them that there is a problem of original sin and we have to be on guard for it. That has been reflected in a lot of the disasters in the 20th century.

[Amendment To The Constitution Of Canada (Newfoundland), December 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, dealing with the last point first, I am not suggesting that what is being done in Newfoundland is being done maliciously, not at all. I think they are missing a very obvious point, that if we effectively take away something the churches have done for a long time, which is to provide for religious education in Newfoundland, then effectively we are taking them out of the lives of people in a very meaningful way.

When we take away all these things that the churches used to do, practical things, things that affected people every day, then effectively we are removing them from people's lives in a very important way. I do think it has an impact on them ultimately. I think it makes them less relevant overall. We have seen the churches in decline over the past many years. Religion cannot survive and it is not just a matter of conscience. It cannot survive in the public square alone with the state.

I believe that the best possible situation is when there are large institutions that serve as a check against a big government. It is a good idea to have vibrant and strong churches. I think that is a really good idea. They serve as a check on some of the things the government wants to do.

We have seen other controversial issues come before this place. We have seen churches stand up and say, “We really disagree with that”. I think that is good and that is healthy. But when we start to marginalize the churches by taking away these abilities that they have had until now, then effectively we are making them less effective. I do not think that is good.

Again, I am not saying it is a malicious thing. I am not saying they are trying to do that. It is something that is a very unfortunate effect though of what the government is doing.

The second point is that segregation will divide people. I would point out that one of the things churches teach, and I am sure my friend will remember this from his own religious upbringing, is that churches teach people to love their neighbour. That is something churches typically teach. That is something we will find in denominational schools, love your neighbour as yourself. I do not think that is particularly harmful. I think it is good.

All those things, those virtues that are taught by churches through denominational education strengthen the social fabric of the country. They make us better neighbours. They make us better citizens. They do all kinds of good things that would not get done if it was not for the churches.

I disagree completely with what my friend has said. I would argue that sometimes by neglect, by not teaching positive things we end up allowing negative things to become part of what our children believe.

I have forgotten the first point that my friend across the way made so I will sit down now, Mr. Speaker. I did not write it down but if he wants to ask again, he is welcome to do that.

[Amendment To The Constitution Of Canada (Newfoundland), December 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this extraordinarily important issue.

We are often cautioned when we are growing up never to mix religion and politics, and that is precisely what we are doing in this debate. Having said that, I am going to plunge head long into it.

The issue, of course, is the extinguishment of the right to education in denominational schools in Newfoundland, denominational schools which until this point have received public funding. I stand four-square against what the Government of Newfoundland is proposing and what many hon. members of the House are prepared to accept.

I want to tell the House why I oppose term 17. I propose it primarily because I believe it really does shrink the ambit of personal freedom in this country. On so many occasions we see our freedoms being eroded, taken away from us. I can point to any number of examples.

We can look at the charter itself. In 1982, when the charter came in, we saw all kinds of new things added to the charter of rights and freedoms which a lot of Canadians would probably disagree with.

In section 22 affirmative action is proposed. That is something I disagree with. It limits our freedoms.

We see an erosion of our economic freedom when the government claws away more money all the time. That means we have fewer options. In fact, we have fewer options to send our children to the schools we wish to send them to, including private schools and religious schools.

In this case we are seeing the extinguishment of really what amounts to a very ancient right, a right which the Government of Newfoundland secured for its people in 1949 when it entered Confederation. It was an issue that was extraordinarily important to the people of Newfoundland when they entered Confederation.

In many ways the people and the Government of Newfoundland at the time were much more forward thinking than the rest of the country. They had essentially secured the ability of people to send their children to the school that best reflected their beliefs.

It is extraordinarily important whether somebody has a secular world view or whether, and probably especially, somebody has strong religious convictions. The ability to steep their children in the faith of their fathers and grandfathers, their forefathers, is extraordinarily important.

For people with strong convictions that is essentially being wiped out by what is being proposed. People will have the right in law if they can find the money, even though as I pointed out before the government has taxed so much of it away. They still had the right but it makes it extraordinarily difficult for people to do that.

I should declare my bias. I have two children in a separate school, a catholic school in Alberta. I am pleased that I have the ability to do that. It means a lot to me. The ability to teach children not only at home but through a chosen school system the values of right and wrong, the old fashioned idea of virtues, is very important. My friend from Elk Island did an admirable job of pointing how important that is today.

Not long ago I read an article by Richard John Neuhaus, a theologian who pointed out that one of the quickest ways to essentially kill religion in a country was not necessarily to deprive the fundamental freedoms but actually to find ways to kill the institutions. The way to kill the institutions is to deprive them of the things they traditionally have done, the very practical things that they do every day, things like providing education for people.

If that right is essentially taken away it goes a long way toward killing those religions. Frankly that is what has happened to a large degree over the last probably 40 or 50 years as governments got bigger and crowded religious institutions out of some of the things they did in the past.

We have seen those institutions become sort of less valuable in a practical sense to their communities. We have seen them shrink as a result. That concerns me greatly. That is exactly what is happening in Newfoundland.

I like the idea that my friend offered and that others have suggested. It is time to start to empower people at the local level to allow them to choose the education system that reflects their values, their world views. We now have a system that will effectively represent one world view, that is the secular world view.

That is fine. We do not have a problem with people choosing to put their children in that situation. It is absolutely up to them as far as I am concerned, but I believe we should all have the right to send our children to a school that reflects that world view.

I believe like my friend that it is time to examine the whole idea of vouchers. The province of Alberta has gone to a chartered school system which goes some distance toward that goal, if not quite all the way.

We have a necessary revolution in education when we already had an orderly evolution occurring. We already had the Pentecostal schools and the Catholic schools agreeing to some reforms. That was starting to happen.

The governments at the time had gone through this twice. This is the second time we went into a referendum with the government asking for a constitutional amendment to fix the problem. Instead of co-operation, partnership and working with the schools, the Government of Newfoundland acted with a sledgehammer when it really was not necessary.

As members have pointed out when we start to change a constitution it is an extraordinarily serious business. It could have ramifications far beyond the ones being suggested for Newfoundland. It could have ramifications for other minorities. People have pointed this out. It is an extraordinarily important point to make again.

The last thing we want to do in a country like Canada is to use a democratic tool to effectively wipe out a minority right. That is really what we are doing in Canada today. It raises the point whether or not we can use what is traditionally a democratic tool, a referendum, to determine something like a minority right. It may be democratic, but a more important question is whether it is just. I am not convinced it is just in this situation.

Is this whole idea is necessary? Is it necessary to have a constitutional amendment? For 1,000 years the church has preserved education. Where do people think education came from? It did not come from Brian Tobin. It did not come from Clyde Wells. It has been preserved by the churches over the last 1,000 or 1,500 years.

They were the repositories for all the knowledge accumulated from Greece, Rome and the early church. They were the repositories of knowledge. They were the ones that established the great universities. They were the ones that added to the body of knowledge, people like St. Augustine, St. Thomas and St. Anselm on up through the reformation. All their ideas became part of the great body of knowledge that helped form our modern society. They were the ones that helped give birth to the whole idea of having rights entrenched in a constitution.

If we look at the American experience, very much was influenced by the religious ideas that had accumulated until that time. The preamble to our charter says “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”.

If this country were founded upon a principle that recognizes the supremacy of God, where do we think the idea came from? It did not come from the public school. It did not come from Brian Tobin. It came from denominational schooling and from parents who we believe are the ones who should be driving what kind of values their children learn.

Education would occur from the churches and from denominational schools as it has for the last thousands of years. Reform was already under way. Things were changing. Schools were doing their best to ensure that there was efficiency and that people were getting the best bang for their buck. What the government has done goes well beyond what was necessary to achieve the reforms it was seeking.

Forgive me if this seems a little ancillary, but we often talk in this place about how we are a multicultural society. We are a pluralistic society. I hear it all the time. We have a department of multiculturalism. While I disagree with what the government means by multiculturalism, I think we have a multicultural society.

My people come from Norway, Ireland, Holland and England. That is my background. We have a multicultural society. We have all kinds of religions that come here from all over the world. We all believe we should celebrate that. We believe it is important to be pluralistic. We need to find ways to accommodate that.

We have that in the current system in Newfoundland. We have pluralism. We have ability for people to celebrate their faiths through the education system and still pick up a good understanding of all things that traditionally constitute an education. They have the ability to teach children the world view that is so incredibly important to them. Unfortunately the government does not seem to see this as an issue of pluralism or multiculturalism. In fact, what we are seeing now is them suggesting through their support of this that all of these multicultural values or pluralism that we think are important are going to be essentially extinguished, at least in the context of this debate in Newfoundland, in favour of a system where we have one big central school system that effectively diminishes all that.

We travel the world to see all these different cultures and religions and we are doing what we can in this particular instance to effectively diminish them in Canada. I think we are making a big mistake.

I want to answer some of the objections that have been raised by people who are in support of term 17. The first was that it was a democratic process that brought about the government's initiative to introduce the amended term 17. I do not disagree with this. It was a democratic initiative. I am not going to get into a fight about whether or not 32 days was long enough and all those kinds of things. I want to put the question: Is it possible to make a determination on minority rights using a referendum? I do not think it is. It certainly is not possible, I do not think, when we are talking about getting a bare plurality.

At some point maybe someone down the road in the past should have said that when it comes to issues like minority rights we must have a higher standard. Maybe it has to be two-thirds, I do not know. However, I would argue that in this particular case it is extraordinarily difficult to make the argument that someone can extinguish minority rights on the basis of the voice of the majority.

I heard my friend across the way say “But, you know, in such and such a district, which was mostly Pentecostal, people did not show up in the numbers to vote that they should have”, and blah, blah, blah. However, that is not the point.

The point is that people who believe strongly in these things came out and voted against it. To these people, these rights are real rights, not abstract rights. They are rights that mean a tremendous amount to them. Therefore, can we really extinguish them? Can the people who do not have religious convictions or strong religious convictions just arbitrarily say “I don't believe in these things, therefore I am going to wipe out your rights?” I do not think they can. It is not fair and it is not right. I disagree with the whole process.

Again, some people say this was necessary for school reform. Maybe I have tilled that ground already, but I do not think it was. It reminds me of a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, the gentleman who wrote Democracy in America . I remember he was commenting one time on the French Revolution. He said “We were already speaking of the French aristocracy. We were already half way down the stairs when they came up and threw us out the window to get us to the ground a little faster”.

That is what happened in this particular case. The reform was already well under way. The government just could not wait. It could not co-operate with the denominational schools and decided that it would just bring in the sledge-hammer and put an end to and extinguish ancient rights, rights that are very important to people.

I can tell members how important they are. I have had letters, as I am sure my friends have had as well, from people in Newfoundland who are begging us not to extinguish those rights because they mean so much to them.

Some people argue that religion has no place in the school system. I think my friend from Elk Island touched on this but I must say it again. I would argue that people always bring some kind of a belief system to the table. They bring a world view to the table. Now we are going to be in a situation where all the people of Newfoundland essentially pay to support one world view, a secular world view, that is taught in the schools. As my friend said, it simply cannot be otherwise. If we are going to teach people something, they are going to end up learning a set of values.

We say parents should be the ones who determine what those values are. When it is their tax dollars, that money should be used to teach their children their beliefs and their world view. That is what we believe. I am speaking on behalf not of my party but on behalf of some of my friends who I think support the same point of view as I do.

The fourth point is that some people say this does not prejudiciously affect rights granted in 1949 because they are going to offer religious observances and religion classes.

I will argue that there is a world of difference between comparative religion and allowing somebody to be imbued with the values that permeate a whole school and reflect the actual faith that the students' parents believe so strongly in. To sit like a sociologist and say here is what Muslims believe, here is what Hindus believe, here is what people at the Solar Temple believe, here is what Christians believe, and here is what people who are whatever believe, and to say are the differences not interesting, is 180 degrees away from what people believe in who want to have their children go to a denominational school. It is a completely different thing.

People send their children to a denominational school not to learn about religions but to get the faith, to be imbued in the faith. They send them there to learn the virtues that are part of the faith. They learn about right and wrong. They do not go to those schools to learn about comparative religion. That is fine and that is probably a good thing to learn but it is not the same thing at all.

Religious observances are fine but in a denominational school religious observance happens every day. We do not wait for the three or four days when the rest of the secular world celebrates religious holidays. Religious observances are essentially every day. While those things are nice tokens, I think they are virtually meaningless to people who hold their religion seriously.

I will deal with a fifth point which I have heard myself. Some people say that denominational schools cause divisions. Some people are taught something which is quite different from what other people are taught and this sets up divisions. But all freedoms do that. Freedom of speech causes divisions. People disagree. This is also true for freedom of belief and freedom of conscience. All these freedoms cause divisions.

Under the charter we recognize in Canada that religion plays an extraordinarily important role. That is under the charter which a Liberal government brought in. The current Prime Minister was justice minister when the government brought the charter in. It included in the preamble “whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God”.

I do not think it is unreasonable to allow schools to teach about the principles upon which our country is founded. That is all we are asking for. For that reason I am asking members to oppose term 17 as it is amended and to consider very carefully the effect this initiative will have on minority rights.

[The Economy, December 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, why is the government ignoring Canadians, provincial finance ministers and common sense? When is the government going to start to reduce the debt and when is it going to start to lower taxes and give Canadians tax relief? What does it have against the working poor anyway?

[The Economy, December 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, this government is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is cutting transfers to the provinces net by $6 billion and now it wants credit for returning a little bit, a fraction of what it has stolen from Canadians.

[The Economy, December 4th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, obviously they touched a nerve.

Not only does the government ignore Canadians, the cabinet can hardly wait to try out its new American Express card, because with an American Express card there is no pre-set spending limit.

Instead of showing complete disdain for the priorities of Canadians, the people they are supposed to serve, when will the government cut up its credit card? When will it leave home without it?

[The Economy, December 4th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, according to today's poll 89% of Canadians are demanding debt reduction but the government is so out of touch. To paraphrase Ernie Eves, the cabinet is hovering like vultures waiting to spend away the surplus.

My question is for the prime minister. When will the government get the message that Canadians want the backroom buzzards to buzz off, to start to address the problem of the debt and to start to relieve them from the high, staggering burden of taxation? When will this get through to the government?