Andrew Telegdi

[Hungary, October 21st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, Saturday, October 23 will mark the 48th anniversary of the start of the Hungarian revolution.

The revolution was ignited when a student-led demonstration against Soviet communism was met with gunfire. The revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks. There were 25,000 freedom fighters killed and 100,000 wounded. A reign of terror was to follow.

Two hundred thousand Hungarians fled Hungary with nearly 40,000 being granted refuge in Canada. The then minister of immigration, Jack Pickersgill, went to extraordinary lengths to expedite the movement of Hungarian refugees to Canada.

On behalf of my family and the nearly 40,000 refugees, I want to thank the Canadian people, the former St. Laurent government and Jack Pickersgill for the compassion, concern and safe haven they offered us in this wonderful country.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration in 2000 when we were dealing with the Canadian Citizenship Act. I resigned over that issue because to me it did not respect section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the legal section of the charter.

Basically the legal section of the charter outlines that if someone is charged with an offence or charged with having committed fraud that there is a very specific way that the government has to proceed.

Unfortunately, the current Citizenship Act does not respect section 7 of the charter.

Justice Robert Reilly, a Superior Court justice ruled in January of this year that section 7 of the charter must apply to citizenship and citizenship revocations.

I really look forward to bringing a new Citizenship Act in compliance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, probably one of the most challenging aspects of our job as members of Parliament is to deal with those kinds of cases, as well as visa cases. Certainly the committee will be looking at how to improve the situation and how we can modernize the whole process of immigration. We want to meet the goals that we as a country must meet in terms of our targets for a number of new immigrants, particularly because of the decline of our birthrate in this country and the demographics.

Future workforces will depend more and more on new immigrants coming to this country and becoming part of the Canadian family.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, may I start by congratulating you on your position and all your fellow Speakers, as well as all my colleagues in the House who have returned and those newly elected.

I would like to thank my family for the support they have given me over the past 11 years while representing the Kitchener--Waterloo riding as the member of Parliament.

As I stand to speak in the 38th Parliament of our country, I cannot help but think of the many constituents I have, and every member has, to represent here. I want to thank them for placing their trust in me, as I am sure is the same with every other member who occupies this place.

If I think back 11 years, when we were first elected to government, one of the biggest problems we had in the country was the level of the national debt and a deficit of $42 billion. At the time, with the exception of Italy, we had a debt load that was the second highest in the G-7. Italy had the highest debt load.

This coming year we will end up having the lowest debt load. We have eliminated the $42 billion deficit and we have started making substantial payments on the national debt, which to me is a real pay off to the hard work of Canadians. It means that Canadians no longer have the biggest expenditure that we make as a nation, and that is interest payments to finance that debt.

The riding I represent really points to the excellence of our post-secondary institutions. It also points to the need to continue to support our post-secondary institutions. My riding is home of the University of Waterloo which began in 1957. In 1957 the population of Waterloo was something like 15,000 people. The university grew and so did the city. The population of the city of Waterloo is now over 100,000 people.

We are also blessed with Wilfrid Laurier University, as well as a campus of Conestoga College. Therefore, when I talk about the new and emerging economy, my community is at the forefront of the new economy.

We have other industries besides educational industry in my riding. Many of them have grown from the universities. We are a leader in the area of insurance, having the home offices of Manufacturer's Life and Sun Life of Canada. We have a chamber of commerce. We have a high tech association of industries known as Communitech. We also have Canada's technology triangle which encompasses the Waterloo region.

When we saw t we were making headway with getting the fiscal order of the country in shape, one of the first things we did was start investing in research and development to assist emerging Canadian knowledge based companies that were coming into their own and developing in Canada. We made sure that these companies could grow in Canada and become world leaders.

In my community, in particular, we have many of these companies. One of the smaller companies is Micohealth, which involves new technology information to deal with health problems such as diabetes. It is an emerging company. As well we have Mitra and Agfa which are leading providers of imaging information systems for health care enterprises. Also, DALSA Corporation has digital imaging technology. Dspfactory is in audio processing and is responsible for the best in hearing aids, which more and more of us will be needing or are using now.

We are home to Raytheon Canada which does radar installation at airports around the world and has invented over the surface radar for maritime surveillance. We also have Sybase for managing unwired enterprises, as well as Open Text, which is the world's largest search engine for corporations. It is like Yahoo, but its clientele are corporations. Of course many members in the chamber are familiar with Research in Motion, which makes the world famous BlackBerries that many of the members have.

What is so wonderful about those companies is that they are the payoff that we get for investing in research and development. I think that is something very wonderful.

On October 1, I, along with one of the principals of those companies, Mr. Mike Lazaridis, attended the opening of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a research centre for pure physics. Mr. Lazaridis, who came to this country in 1966 as a six year old Greek refugee from Turkey, personally donated $100 million to have this institute started.

The Prime Minister, who was at the opening, talked about the importance of knowledge. He said “Sovereignty in the future will depend on the capacity of a country to demonstrate to the world that its brainpower, its ability to look into the future, is as great if not greater than the others. I think Perimeter Institute stands for the kind of Canada we want to build”.

When Mr. Lazaridis made that $100 million donation to the research institute, it was the single largest donation to a research facility.

The throne speech talks about modernizing the Citizenship Act that we have as Canadians. First let me say that this is a promise that I hope we will discharge, and I hope we will discharge it with another component of the throne speech which talks about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because this is of great importance to Canadians, particularly those Canadians who were not born in Canada.

I came here in 1957 following the Hungarian revolution, which will be celebrating its 48th anniversary on October 23 of this year. I adopted Canada and Canada adopted me. I have really been blessed to be part of this country. However the reality is that under the current Citizenship Act my rights to my citizenship are not covered in legislation that respects the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly section 7. I look forward to working with the government to make this happen. I am very pleased that I am the chair of the citizenship and immigration committee.

When I look around this chamber, we have 39 members who were not born in this country, which is really wonderful because it is a real testament to this country as to how a person can come here as an immigrant or refugee and be elected to this chamber. Of the 39 members, 23 countries are represented.

I look forward to working with members from all sides of the House, particularly on the issue of citizenship because it is an issue around which we should not have partisanship. We all recognize the importance of immigration to Canada. We are either immigrants or we are descendants of immigrants. I really look forward to this 38th Parliament.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on his maiden speech to the House. Certainly he is a proud representative from Etobicoke Centre. I liked his comments on the social charter, particularly when he referred to housing. I wonder if the member could elaborate on that point.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 7th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the member for Calgary—Nose Hill for her comments and her work on the immigration and citizenship committee. The issue that she talked about as it pertains to accreditation and citizenship is on the point.

Too often in Canada we talk about the brain drain and not often enough about the brain waste. This is exactly what the Conference Board of Canada has identified. When someone in Canada is underemployed because of a refusal to recognize their credentials, then we have a problem and the national economy suffers as a result.

The other issue that she mentioned deals with citizenship. The position that she takes and that her party has taken is one that this House should adopt in legislation.

My question for the member is very simple. It would seem to me that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly the legal section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, should apply to all Canadians, no matter if they are born here or born elsewhere. Would the member please comment on that?

[Supply, May 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I too rise to pay tribute to the member. Certainly, in some small way, I assisted in his quest which received unanimous support in the House. Therefore, I think it bodes well to say it will come back, and there is no question the member's fingerprints are all over it.

I spoke about the member on other occasions. I called him really a member of this Parliament, a man of the House. I think Hansard aptly records his many contributions.

I fondly recall when the member and I served on the citizenship and immigration committee together. Come to think of it, Mr. Speaker, you were the whip at the time. We managed to derail a government bill that we believed was not in the best interest of Canadians. After the House passed it, we proceeded together with another member of the opposition to go to the Senate to argue against its passage.

Therefore, I say, through you, Mr. Speaker, to the member that since 1993 he has left a real mark in the House. He has contributed much above his weight. In a very real sense, and I guess in some cases I believe in the tooth fairy, I do hope that he comes back because I think the member still has a contribution to make.

[Supply, May 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear on what I said, and you can look at the blues. What I said was that a story appeared in the paper and that I was withholding judgment on it because the courts were dealing with it. That is the due process and all members of the legal profession should know that. That is what I said.

All I was saying is that the courts have laid charges on the matter before us today and that we should let the process take place.

Furthermore, I was under absolutely no instruction by anyone. I was sitting in the House in a back room and I saw the story in the newspaper. I could not believe that a member, who was a former crown attorney, could say the kinds of things he said, because the Prime Minister is getting at the truth.

[Supply, May 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague across the way seems to have ignored the fact that the Prime Minister has gone to unprecedented lengths, lengths that have never been seen before, to ensure the issue comes to the forefront and that those responsible are held accountable.

I know the member opposite and both the leader of the Alliance and leader of the former Progressive Conservative Party have failed to reveal who made donations to their campaigns, something that is totally, completely and utterly in their power to do.

The member opposite was a crown prosecutor and he knows the law. People are presumed innocent until proven guilty. A story in the Winnipeg Free Press today shows that the member opposite has been charged with violating the Manitoba electoral laws when he served as the province's attorney general. The member has been charged but I am assuming he is innocent until the facts have been laid out and the case goes to court.

As a former crown attorney he also knows that the biases of the public accounts committee, chaired by a member from the other side, demonstrate a real lack of credibility and, unfortunately, the committee has turned into a partisan affair. Unfortunately, they do not believe that Canadians have a right to an interim report after the committee has been sitting for months.

Does the hon. member believe in waiting until the facts come out in court or does he believe that the charges that he faces in violation of the election act should mean that he is guilty?

[Petitions, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to be tabling a number of petitions. They call on Parliament to invoke the notwithstanding clause and pass a law so that only two persons of the opposite sex can be married. Approximately 100 people have signed the petitions.