Lorne Nystrom

[Supply, February 20th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Pauline Jewett was my seat mate in the House, so I am wondering whether or not he really understood her lectures or knew Pauline very well.

The member talked about 40 or 50 different political parties. There are many countries in the world that have PR, like Germany which has very few political parties. There are different ways to model a PR system. Some countries have a threshold of 5%. Some countries have a threshold of 3% or 2%. These are different things we can do to model the proportional representation system.

In terms of majority governments, I said we would have very few majority governments likely in a PR system. We have only had three majority governments elected by a majority in the last 75 or 80 years. What is wrong with that if that is the way the Canadian people vote? If Canadian people want minority governments or even, dare I say it, a coalition government or government that works together with opposition parties, that is what they vote for. We want to elect a parliament that is reflective of how people vote.

[Supply, February 20th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the first past the post system tends to really distort the composition of the House of Commons. If we look at election after election we can see good examples of that.

I think of 1993, for example, when the Conservative Party was wiped out. One would have thought that nobody voted Conservative in the country. The party had two members, the member for Saint John and Jean Charest. However, the Conservatives received some 17% of the vote. It took over a million people or thereabouts, if my recollection is correct, to elect a Conservative member of parliament.

As much as I opposed the Brian Mulroney government, we should have had an electoral system that gave that party some representation which would have reflected the proportion of the vote in the country. What has happened now is even worse than that. We have the regional divisions that are setting into the country where we have people in the various provinces and regions voting as a block for their particular party. We come to parliament now with five regional parties. The Liberal Party itself is basically a regional party centred mainly in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. That is not good for the unity of the country.

If we had PR it would force all parties to address the regional issues. It would force Liberals, for example, to address the issue of the farm crisis in the prairies, which they are not doing now because they do not have any members of parliament from there. It would force my party, the NDP, to address the issues of Quebec because a vote in Quebec would be worth as much as a vote in Regina. That is not happening in the current political system.

The other thing it would do is radically change the voting patterns in the country. People could afford to vote NDP in rural Alberta, Liberal in rural Saskatchewan and Reform in Newfoundland and the votes would count. That would change the voting pattern in Canada and the Canadian people would all of a sudden find a parliament that reflected the way they felt in terms of the common good of Canada.

[Supply, February 20th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words about this subject today. I appeal to the Liberals opposite to look seriously at the merits of changing our electoral system.

In Canada today there is a real crisis in democracy and I think we are sleepwalking toward that crisis. If we look at the turnout in the last election, fewer than 60% of the people voted. In 1997 it was 67%. Years ago it was 75%, 80% or 85%. People are being turned off by the political system and by politics.

If we walk down the street in any town or city in Canada we find people who are alienated from the political system. Part of the reason is that when people elect parliament their votes are not mirrored in the composition of the seats. That is one of the big problems we have today.

For example, the Liberal Party received around 40% of the vote last November. Only about 60% of the people voted. Therefore the Liberals received about 25% of the support of the electorate. About a quarter of the people have elected a government that will govern constitutionally for some five years. That is a problem in terms of the credibility of the House of Commons and the credibility of parliament. That is why we should seriously look at changing our electoral system.

It is amazing. Those of us who come here, come through the first past the post system. The last time there was a vote in parliament on proportional representation was before you were born, Mr. Speaker. The year 1923 was the last time there was a vote in the House of Commons on PR.

Last fall my private member's motion was drawn and declared votable. We had one hour of debate and the election came before we had a chance to vote on the motion.

We are saying that we should strike an all-party committee to look at the merits of the various forms of proportional representation that might be incorporated in terms of an element into our electoral system. We must have a debate on the issue. It is a fundamental issue which we should be facing but parliamentarians are refusing to deal with it.

There is growing interest across the country in the whole idea of changing our electoral system. There is an organization called Fair Vote Canada. There are other organizations out there promoting a change. I will be hosting a conference in Ottawa on March 30 and March 31 at which all five political parties will be speaking to and supporting the idea of looking at the kind of PR that might be relevant to our country. I call upon the Parliament of Canada to join the cause of looking at changing our electoral system into something that is more relevant to the 21st century.

Our system is outdated. There are now only three countries in the world with more than eight million people that do not have some form of PR. They are India, the United States and Canada. Britain, the mother parliament, has an element of PR in the Scottish, Irish and Welsh parliaments. All other members from Britain are elected to the European community by PR. In the election after next England will probably have a measure of PR in terms of what the Blair government is planning. Canada will be one of only three countries in the world without some element of PR.

Another problem with the lack of PR in the first past the post system is that a lot of people feel their votes are wasted. Many Canadians vote for people who are not elected to the House of Commons because of the winner take all political system. If we had a system of PR people would be empowered and included because their votes would be reflected in the House of Commons. If we received 20% of the votes we would have roughly 20% of the seats. That is not the case in the House of Commons today.

Canada has a very unfair system. Let us look at the last election. The party to my left over here, the Conservative Party, required 130,000 votes to elect a Conservative member of parliament while the Bloc Quebecois required 36,000 votes to elect a member of the Bloc Quebecois. That is how distorted our political system is.

Sometimes it works in favour of one party against another, but the first past the post system always distorts the outcome of elections. What we see in the House of Commons does not reflect the way Canadians are voting. That is why the political system must be changed.

In 1997 the Conservative Party got 19% of the vote and the Reform Party got 19% of the vote. The Conservatives got around 19 seats and the Reform Party got around 60 seats. The NDP and the Bloc each had 11% of the vote. We had 21 seats and the Bloc had 44. The Liberal Party, with just 38% of the vote, won a majority and can constitutionally govern for five years. That is not fair. That is not just.

In the province of Ontario we would think everyone is Liberal. In the last campaign the Liberals won about 50% of the votes and 97% of the seats. In 1997 they had fewer than half the votes, 49.6% or 49.7%, and had all but two members of parliament from the province of Ontario. The electoral system distorts the way Canadians think.

It is the same in the west. People might think all but a few people in the west vote for the Reform Party or the Alliance Party. In the campaigns of 1993 and 1997 the reform alliance was a minority party in western Canada. It received 40% plus of the popular vote, yet it won the absolutely overwhelming majority of seats.

That is the unfairness of the system. Other countries have remedied the unfairness by bringing an element of PR into their electoral systems so that people's votes are counted in parliament. It is about time we caught up with the trend in terms of modernizing democracy.

There is also the whole question of national unity and regionalism. We are seeing more of a regional Canada all the time. We are seeing it increasing day by day. I am thinking in terms of the politics of the Harris government, of the Klein government and of the Parti Quebecois that regionalize Canada. That is now reflected in the House of Commons where we have in essence five regional political parties representing one or two regions of the country.

If we had a system of PR, all parties would be forced to think of the country as a whole, of a national vision of what is best for Canada, because a vote in Newfoundland would have the same power as a vote in rural Saskatchewan or Montreal or Vancouver. It would force all political parties to have a national vision to knit and pull the country together. That is not happening today in terms of our first past the post political system.

There is also the whole question of empowerment. People feel excluded from the electoral system. If we had an element of PR in the electoral system everybody's vote would count. Nobody's vote would be wasted, not just on election night but throughout the term of the parliament. It would mean a radical change in the Parliament of Canada. It would mean almost certainly that most governments would be minority governments. It would force a radical thing upon the Parliament of Canada. It would force politicians to work together to come up with a consensus like most countries in the world.

Since 1921 we have only had three governments of a majority sense that were elected by the majority of the people. The other majorities have been fake majorities in terms of a minority electing a majority of MPs and then governing as a majority. That is true in the case of all three Liberal majorities.

There were very few majority governments elected by a majority of the people. There were Mackenzie King in 1945, John Diefenbaker in 1958 and indeed Brian Mulroney in 1984 who, with a big sweep, had about 49.9% or 50% of the votes.

Time and time again we are electing a parliament with a composition that does not reflect the voting pattern of the people of Canada. What we are saying today is that we should strike an all party committee to look at the various types of proportional representation that might be relevant to this unique federation of Canada and make a recommendation back to parliament as to the best type of system for the Canadian people.

People talk across the way of Israel and Spain and many years ago. There are all kinds of proportional representation systems. We are saying that we should bring an element of PR into the Canadian system. We are not specifying as to what that element should be, that is for the Canadian people to decide. It is the unique federation. Perhaps we could look at a model that is similar to Germany. It has half the members chosen on a riding by riding basis and half of the members chosen through the proportional representation of the parties. It has what is called the mixed member proportional system which seems to have worked very well for Germany as a federation.

There are all kinds of other examples. Some countries have 15%, 20% or 25% of their members elected by proportional representation and that may also work well for them.

These are some of the things we should be considering in reforming and changing our electoral system and making it more fair, more just and more reflective of how the Canadian people vote. People are losing confidence in the political institutions, in politicians and in the very democratic practice of voting by itself.

We are also saying in the motion today that we should look at other various electoral and democratic reforms as well. The time has come, for example, to abolish the unelected, undemocratic and unaccountable Senate. I would abolish it and bring those checks and balances into the House of Commons by way of stronger committees, more independence for committees, less power for the Prime Minister's office and better reflection of the regions through proportional representation.

Others want to elect the Senate, but either way we look at it, all the polling shows only about 5% of Canadians support the existing Senate. Yet members of parliament decade after decade support keeping the other place the way it is. No wonder Canadians are losing confidence in the people elected to the House of Commons. This is another reason why we have to change the electoral system in Canada.

My time is up but I want to move the following amendment. I move:

That the motion be amended by inserting the word “immediately” after the word “House”.

[Canada Elections Act, February 14th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the government House leader. In the November election there were problems with thousands of people being left off the voters' list across the country. I think this is a problem that all members of parliament agree on.

In light of that I would like to ask the minister whether or not he is willing to bring in amendments to the Canada Elections Act to deal with these problems to ensure that no Canadian citizen will be denied his or her democratic right in a future election campaign.

[Agriculture, February 13th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I intend to share my time with my colleague from Nova Scotia who has a brilliant dissertation to make about the problems facing maritime agriculture, including the problems in Prince Edward Island.

This is the worst crisis in prairie agriculture since the 1930s. I am talking specifically about the grain and oilseed industry. In the 1930s many people were forced off the land. Today the same thing is happening and it is happening in spades.

From the fall of 1999 to the fall of 2000 some 22,000 prairie farmers were forced off the land: 6,500 in my own province, about 4,000 or 5,000 in Manitoba, and more than 10,000 in Alberta. So many farmers were forced off the land that statisticians at Statistics Canada at first could not believe what their computers told them. About 40,000 people in the farm industry were forced off the land at the same time.

The crisis on the prairies is unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. All one has to do is drive around small towns in Saskatchewan and Manitoba to see how real the crisis is. The situation is the same in Alberta outside of Edmonton and Calgary. Regina and Saskatoon are not doing badly, but the rest of Saskatchewan is really suffering because of the farm crisis.

During the election campaign and last summer I went to every small town and village in my riding. With the exception of one or two, every town is suffering a loss of population. People are moving out and businesses are closing because of the collapse of the farm economy. The towns that are doing well, like my hometown of Wynyard or the town of Fort Qu'Appelle, are doing well because of other industries.

There is a chicken plant in Wynyard called Lillydale that employs about 500 people. The employees are unionized and receive decent wages and have decent working conditions. Despite that, the town is only holding its own.

Fort Qu'Appelle is a tourist town with a big tourist industry, particularly in the summertime. There too the people are only holding their own. Most other towns are shrinking because of the crisis in agriculture.

Two things have to happen and they have to happen soon. First, we need an immediate injection of cash into the farm economy so that farmers can seed their crops in the spring. If that does not happen thousands more farmers will leave the land.

Second, we need a long term farm program that has some relationship to the cost of production so that farmers have basic some guarantees about the commodities they produce. We can do that within the confines and context of the World Trade Organization.

It strikes me as strange that farmers in Canada are not as supported as farmers in the United States. Canada has a $100 billion surplus for the next five years. We can afford now to help grain farmers. Washington helps American farmers in North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma and right across the midwest of the United States. Brussels helps European farmers. What does our federal government do? It does very little when it comes to helping grain and oilseed farmers across Canada.

What we need is a long term farm program that is based on the cost of production so that farmers have an idea in the spring what they will receive in the fall. They need to know they will get back at least the cost of producing a crop and a decent living wage for their families. That is the kind of thing that will have to happen.

We also have to realize that if the government does not take the initiative to intervene in terms of long term programs to support the family farm and its way of life, those farms will disappear and corporate farms will take over. Small towns will be gone and soon Cargill, Dow Chemical, Monsanto and big corporations will run the entire western Canadian farm base. The only institution large enough to turn the trend around is the Government of Canada representing all the people of the country.

What we should realize is that agriculture is the basic foundation industry of this country and when the farmer is better off then we are all better off in terms of our economy and the creation of jobs in Canada. That is what a lot of people in the government do not seem to realize or understand.

There are some sections of farming that are not doing badly. The member for Malpeque said earlier that in the late 1960s legislation was read in the House to bring in supply management and marketing boards for four commodities. We have the Canadian Dairy Commission, CEMA, the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, the Canadian Chicken Marketing Agency and the Canadian Turkey Marketing Agency. These supply management boards guarantee to the producers in those areas a cost of production and a standard of living which is reasonable and decent for the products and foods they produce. For the consumers, they produce a stable price for people who buy milk, turkey, chickens and eggs.

Even those marketing boards are now under threat because of the World Trade Organization and mainly because the Americans see them as an inhibition to a so-called free market. For the Americans, the free market definition is what is good for a huge transnational corporation is good for the people of the United States. I say that is wrong. We have to fight to maintain our supply marketing boards. We have to fight to maintain the strength of the Canadian Wheat Board. It is very important that we have a single desk marketing agency which is the Canadian Wheat Board.

I am surprised time and time again to see the Alliance Party get up and talk about a dual marketing system which in effect would destroy the Canadian Wheat Board.

Those are issues that are very important if we are to preserve the farm in Canada. If we had a dual marketing system, the Canadian Wheat Board would not survive because it would be in competition with the huge transnational, multinational grain companies in Canada.

These are some of the issues. We plead tonight with the Minister of Finance to loosen the purse strings a bit and come up with an immediate injection of cash so that grain farmers can afford to put in a crop. We plead with him to come up with an immediate injection of cash that would help the farmers. There are stories after stories being told of their hardships and about people being forced off the land.

More important, in addition to that number one priority, is to make sure we have a long term program that is based on the cost of production so that farmers, like grain farmers, dairy producers, chicken producers and turkey producers will have some kind of a guarantee for the price of their commodities when they plant a crop in the spring. They should have some kind of a guarantee of a decent price come the fall.

I do not know why this has not become a priority of the Liberal government. We get up here day after day and say there is a crisis. We have Liberals day after day saying there is a crisis. My God, if there is a crisis, let us do something about it. Let us restore some democracy to this institution. Let us separate parliament from the executive. Let us have parliament say to the executive, the Government of Canada and to the cabinet, that this is a crisis, that as a crisis it is a priority and if it is a priority then money should be spent in making sure we solve the problems, not just for the farmers but for the people of Canada. That is what has to be done.

Instead we have an institution that has become more of a debating society where people get up and pontificate and make speeches. Some of them are good, like the member for Brandon—Souris who made an excellent speech. We come up and make these speeches time and time again. No wonder people are getting cynical of this institution. No wonder only 60% of the people voted in the last election. In spite of all the good words, the good intentions, all the speeches, the research and the money spent to run this place, it is falling on deaf ears when it comes to the Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister, the mandarins in the Privy Council Office and in the Department of Finance.

It is about time the House passed a motion insisting that the will of parliament is to make sure we have an immediate short term program for the farmers and a long term program based on the cost of production to keep our farmers on the land.

My time has expired and there is going to be an absolutely eloquent speech coming from my friend from Nova Scotia.

[The Senate, February 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. As he knows there are now 12 vacancies in the Senate.

Since the government now has the majority in the Senate and there is no necessity to have immediate appointments, and since there is no election in the immediate future, will the Prime Minister, in the spirit of democratic reform, at least place a temporary moratorium on the appointment of new senators and instead contact the premiers and ask them to join him in beginning the process of abolition of the existing unelected, undemocratic and unaccountable Senate, which nobody in the country supports except the senators themselves?

[Supply, February 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, with respect and with deference, I wonder if the member would answer the question I asked. I asked him whether the ethical thing for the deputy leader of the Canadian Alliance Party to do, because of her decision after the election to buy back into her pension plan after promising not to, a fundamental commitment that she made, would be to voluntarily resign and face her electorate in a byelection like the member for Hamilton East did on the GST issue?

[Supply, February 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I support the motion put forward by the opposition leader in the House today and the comments by the Canadian Alliance about the importance of ethics and accountability.

I want to ask a question of the former House leader of the Reform Party about the message it conveyed when members of his party like the deputy House leader spoke often about parliamentary pensions and pigs going to a trough and then after the election did a total flip flop and bought back into the plan.

I am just wondering whether he would agree that she should follow the precedent of the Minister of Canadian Heritage and resign her seat, in other words be voluntarily recalled, go back to her riding and consult her voters through a byelection. It seems to me that would be the proper way in terms of ethics and in terms of accountability. Otherwise, how can an opposition party criticize the government for the lack of ethics when its own ethical standards in terms of accountability are also tarnished?

[Supply, February 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I should like to clarify what might be a misunderstanding. Mr. Vander Zalm was not an NDP premier but a Social Credit premier. Mr. Harcourt was a New Democrat and he did resign. Mr. Vander Zalm is now the leader of the Reform Party of British Columbia. His cousins sit over to my extreme right.

The ethics counsellor should be an independent person. Perhaps he should have the power to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate certain things. A committee of the House could look at what additional powers the counsellor should have. He should certainly have the power to launch independent investigations.

[Supply, February 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the member from Toronto made a very good comment. He talked about the multinational or transnational corporations that can hold us to ransom for the jobs in our communities.

Part of the problem with the trade deals today is that they are like charters of rights for transnational corporations. We must somehow augment that with an international people's charter of rights which builds into these agreements minimum standards in terms of labour and labour mobility and in terms of environmental and social standards. Such a charter might even look at radical ideas such as a minimum global tax on transnational corporations so they cannot play off one country against the other.

In other words, I think many powers once enjoyed by the nation state must now be transferred to the international forum.

We have transferred the powers of capital to huge transnational corporations, but we have not counterbalanced that with a counterweight, which is the democratic control of people through their governments as institutions, and transferred other powers such as people's rights, labour rights, agricultural rights, environmental rights and environmental standards. One of them might be a minimum tax on transnational corporations.

Another idea endorsed by parliament in a 2:1 vote was contained in a private member's motion which I put before the House two years ago endorsing the idea of what was called a Tobin tax on currency speculation to help curb speculation in currency. About a trillion dollars are traded every day. There is no control of this or of the international casino of currency which distorts a lot of economies.

We became the first parliament in the world to endorse the idea of a small currency tax, which is called a Tobin tax, in concert with the world community. Our government should be aggressively selling the position of the Parliament of Canada at international fora like the World Bank and the IMF. These are some of the things we can do.

The main point is that democracy has been denied, thwarted and abrogated because of trade deals and because of transnational corporations. We have lost that democracy. These people report to no one. We as a nation have to take a leading role in trying to get that power back for ordinary people.