Chris Axworthy

[Hepatitis C, April 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister.

[Court Challenges Program, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand in the House and defend the Court Challenges Program, anything which assists in putting meat on the bones of the charter.

We know that a right in law is not much use to somebody who cannot afford it or does not have the means by which to enforce it. To hear members of parliament suggest that having a right and having the inability to enforce it is nothing other than a taking away justice for those people is surprising.

We have a modest program which is available only to those who are disadvantaged in our society who are contending that their charter rights are not being respected to historically disadvantaged groups and those who have over time suffered most at the hands of the majority. One would have thought that members of parliament would be here to protect those very people and to do what they could to ensure their rights are protected and enhanced.

The program is a modest one. It provides modest support to those who have a case to make. The decision whether to support a program does not, as the member for Wanuskewin suggested, mean that the Court Challenges Program is doing the job of the court or this House. The Court Challenges Program and the experts who are there to dispense these relatively modest amounts are of the view that the case is one which is in the public interests to debate and one in which the person bringing it forward in the public interest is in need of some support in order to do that.

The program is unique and fundamentally an important one in the sense that it provides the opportunity to generate some substantive equality in Canada where that is presently not in place. It is limited in funds and it is limited to challenges to federal laws, policies and practices.

I ask those who would want to throw this program away do they not see some benefit in that program. Is their desire to throw that program way driven by ideology and not by common sense? I cannot believe that the member who wants to get rid of the Court Challenges Program would not be in support of the Court Challenges Response in assisting, for example, the Eldridge case, a deaf women to assert her right to sign language interpretation when she is communicating with physicians in her quest for health care.

Is there something wrong with that? Is there something wrong with ensuring that a woman who is deaf and who can only communicate through sign language can assert her right to be accommodated so that she can be treated as everyone else? I cannot believe that many in Canada would oppose assisting a woman in that situation.

Neither can I imagine that there would be many in Canada who would oppose the support to persons of colour who work for CIDA and who are asserting that there has been systemic racism in the employment practices of that department. It is not whether it is true. Surely we would want to support those who assert that it is true and who are affected by a practice which we would all condemn. Are there many in this country who would say that we should not as a society support someone in that quest to eliminate racism in a federal government department? Those who are saying we should get rid of this program would I suppose say that is not a very important question, racism in employment practices in government departments. I contend that most Canadians would disagree with that.

What about the case of an Indian woman who is being denied the right to participate in band elections? We hear a lot from the Reform Party about the need for accountability in Indian affairs. Here is an opportunity to support someone who is trying to ensure that there indeed is greater participation, greater democracy in Indian band elections. Would there be many who would legitimately complain about that?

What about the case of Tracey Smith, an aboriginal woman with children in both the United States and Canada? She is challenging immigration policies which prevent her from freely crossing the border to be with her children. We hear much from the Reform Party about families. Why would we not assist this mother to clarify this plainly unfair situation? Why would we not assist her so that she can be with her children, her family? I find it odd that those who argue so strenuously that they speak for families would not assist a mother to be with her children.

I am sure that few would disagree with the Court Challenges Program in its assistance to disabled persons. We know for example that immigrant status is generally denied to persons with physical disabilities. We must all have experienced the case of members of a family wanting to immigrate to Canada and finding they are faced with a choice of leaving their disabled child in their country of origin or in another place and coming to Canada with the rest of their family or not coming at all.

We should support those who try to resolve those kinds of disputes, the kind of thing the Court Challenges Program looks to assist a person with.

We have also experienced significant difficulties on behalf of our constituents with disability pensions. I am sure we have all seen the unfairness of that system. Why would we then not support the Court Challenges Program when it assists a disabled person to challenge the eligibility requirements for disability benefits which have adversely affected them?

It seems this program has provided a useful service to Canadians. It has enabled us to ensure that rights contained in the charter of rights and freedoms mean something to those who otherwise would not have the means to enforce them.

There are many cases in which the Court Challenges Program has provided Canada and our society and our community with significant benefits. Take the case of Mark Benner. He was born of a Canadian mother and an American father in the United States. Children born abroad of Canadian fathers do not have to apply for citizenship. Canadians born overseas of Canadian mothers do, which is a plain discrimination.

Why would anybody think it would be undesirable to assist Mark Benner in clarifying and changing this situation? Is there something justifiable about that discrimination? I think not. Would it not be useful then for us as a community and a society together to provide some support for that case?

The case which seems to have raised the member for Wanuskewin's ire most of all is that which is being brought and supported by the Court Challenges Program by Dr. Ailsa Warkinson from Saskatoon regarding section 43 of the Criminal Code. That provision provides a defence to a charge of assault against a child victim, that is child abuse, to a parent or a teacher who uses reasonable force for the purposes of correction.

There are a number of cases identified by Dr. Warkinson in which that argument, that defence, has been used to gain acquittal even in serious assault cases against children.

I cannot fathom any reason why anybody would want to be critical, oppose or stop either Dr. Warkinson or the Court Challenges Program in trying to do something about a very serious problem and, if we are really concerned about children, something we should be very seriously concerned about.

It is disturbing to see an obsession with opposition to anything governments do overriding common sense and overriding something that has been useful to many individual Canadians and to us as a society.

[Income Tax Act, March 31st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, some time ago I raised with the Minister of Industry the subject of innovation and research and development in Canada. In particular I wanted to know why the minister and this government had not made research and development a priority. Why do they continue to let Canada fall behind the rest of the world in this area?

The Minister of Finance in his most recent budget stressed that our goal must be “to make Canada not just a participant in the modern economy, but a world leader”. That is right. The problem is that budgets have put Canada further and further behind. All experts agree that Canada suffers from a serious innovation in R and D gap.

President Clinton of the United States recently stated that sustained prosperity requires a continuous stream of technological innovation. That is quite right.

The minister might say that they have increased funding to the three granting councils that finance research and provide grants to students. Those three research agencies have seen their budgets restored in this last budget to 1994-95 levels. In other words, this last budget simply restored some of the cuts. By the year 2000-01, Canada's support for basic research and education for researchers will be no higher than it was six years earlier.

There are no new dollars, no new investment in R and D. That simply is not good enough. Others in Canada agree.

The president of NSERC, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, recently said that more will have to be done in the coming years to build that capacity up to a competitive, world class economy. Even the Secretary of State for Research and Development has said the same thing. The president of Memorial University, just as an example, has said that Canada is acting like a third world country when it comes to R and D.

We are a vital trading nation. We need to get the message through to the government that we have to invest in the future. Other industrialized nations have listened and taken action. I mentioned President Clinton who has proposed future spending increases for institutes in the United States which are significant in comparison to ours.

The National Institutes of Research, the U.S. counterpart of the Medical Research Council, would see its funding rise by 50% by the year 2003, which is after steady increases through the 1990s, unlike in Canada. There is a 10% increase for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. equivalent of NSERC, building up to a 24% increase by the year 2003.

I could go on, but the point is that Canada is simply not in good shape when it comes to R and D and innovation. In fact while our funding has decreased, Australia, Germany and France have doubled their funding on basic research.

When the OECD studied this question, it called Canada a middle technology country along with other countries such as India, Greece and Mexico. Of the top 14 countries, only Italy's record on R and D spending is worse than Canada's.

This is not only embarrassing but it places Canada on a very dangerous path. Relying on other countries to do our basic research for us is simply not acceptable because it means that the information we get will be based on their priorities, not ours. The fact that Canada grossly underinvests in research and development is an important reason why the Canadian economy is left with more than 1.5 million people unemployed.

We know that Canada simply cannot continue in this way. We know that being competitive is the way in which we will make our way in the world. It is time this government and this minister recognized that and acted accordingly.

[Mergers, March 30th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Finance.

We know now that our friends in the United States and in Europe are toughening up their merger legislation. At the same time Canada is just trundling along as it has before never really seriously looking at mergers and anti-competitive activities.

Why is the government not prepared to stand up for consumers in a competitive market structure? Why is it more prepared to run the franchise “Mergers R Us”?

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the member. He will know, as we all do in this House, that large corporations contribute significant numbers of dollars to the Reform Party, the Conservative party and the Liberal Party.

I wonder if he has any comments or thoughts on whether or not there is a link between the opposition of the large corporations to the significance of pro-competitive merger legislation, and the support of the Reform, Tories and Liberals for this present situation and present legislation which really does nothing to enhance competition in Canada?

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask two brief questions of the member. He talked in glowing terms about his support of this bill.

I would like to focus on two points, the first being the meagre enforcement measures which have been dedicated to deceptive telephone canvassing in this country. We have perhaps $4 billion or $5 billion worth of crimes being committed with one very small unit headquartered in North Bay that is dedicated to dealing with this question.

What steps will the member take with the solicitor general to make sure that there is adequate policing resources available to deal with this significant crime?

What is there in this bill that would deal with assessing the desirability to Canada and Canadians of the mergers between The Bay and K-Mart, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal, and the insurance companies of Mutual Life and Metropolitan Life? What is there to suggest in this bill any commitment to a competitive market economy in Canada?

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether the member for Fundy—Royal is running for the leadership of his own party or switching sides to the Reform Party, but certainly they sound pretty much alike to me.

Let me make one response to the member's question. The United Nations has said that Canada is the best country in the world in which to live. The Financial Post , not very often a friend of the New Democratic Party, said that applying those same criteria, Saskatchewan was the best province in which to live. That was the Financial Post , their buddies, not mine.

What we need in order to make our economies work is a balanced approach. If all they want to do is reduce taxes for the wealthy, that will not generate the economic growth and economic opportunities for ordinary people. They have never done that. In fact their tax policies would ensure that ordinary Canadians do not get a break at all or are in worse shape than they were before.

In addition, they might reduce taxes but what are they going to do about health care? They are going to make Canadians pay for that. What are they going to do about Canada pensions? They are going to make Canadians pay for that.

What we need is a balanced approach, one which is pragmatic, one which answers the questions Canadians are concerned about. We do not need one which is based on some old fashioned ideology which this country threw away and which most sensible people around the world threw away centuries ago.

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is not a question of being opposed to or in favour of mergers. It is a question of what is in the public interest. If a merger is in the public interest, then of course I and my colleagues would support it. It is not a matter of some ideological fixation that someone is automatically in favour of these large organizations, as I think the member for Kelowna would be. Neither is it a matter of being automatically opposed. In this modern world we have to be pragmatic. Socialists are as pragmatic as anybody else. We are supportive of things that are good for Canadians.

The member raises the question of co-ops. Let us look at the Canadian Wheat Board. That has been a huge success story for Canadians. The Reform Party is opposed to it even though it works because philosophically Reformers do not like it. It does not suit their philosophy. It does not suit their 19th century view of the world. Therefore they do not like it. But it works. Canadian farmers know it works. That is the way that New Democrats across this country are approaching our economic challenges. If it works, we do it. If it does not work, we do not do it.

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I never had a psychedelic Volkswagen bus in 1968. I always bought much more enjoyable cars than that. Maybe the member for Calgary Southeast had one.

Times change. If we look around the world, the most effective governments with regard to growth in the economy are not the governments looking back to the past, to the 19th century as the Reform Party does on economic policy, but looking forward to the 21st century.

I am sure the member is aghast at the prospects of a social democratic government in Germany. That will make 14 out of 16 developed countries in Europe with socialist governments. All of them deal with the most important issue which is to provide an economy that ensures people can earn a decent living, raise their families and look forward to the future with some kind of confidence and expectation that they will be doing better rather than worse.

Looking around at the Canadian economy and Canadian society, it is not predominantly the social democrats who take economic ventures into public ownership. There is much more public ownership of the economy in the province of Alberta than there is in the province of Saskatchewan. Incidentally, Saskatchewan also has the lowest per capita cost of government than any other province. It is much lower than in Alberta. There are significant lessons to be learned by looking left instead of looking backward.

The important element of the social democratic economic strategy is that we work in partnership. Business, governments, workers, aboriginal peoples and communities all work together to build a vision for that economy. We all undertake certain responsibilities within the performance of that vision.

It is not difficult to understand if we look at how the Saskatchewan government under Premier Roy Romanow has built that province. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the best indexes of economic growth of any province because it works in partnership.

Saskatchewan is now growing in population. Only last week I learned that last year 1,000 Manitobans moved to Saskatchewan. That has not been normal in the past. We are required to bring Canadians from across the country because that economy is booming. We have full employment. We have skill shortages. We need people for existing jobs and we cannot find them.

This is a successful economic strategy. It is a modern economic strategy. Social democrats are looking forward to the next century, not like the Reform Party which is looking back hankering after and longing for the 19th century.

[Competition Act, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to participate in the debate on Bill C-20, an act to amend the Competition Act. It is important to recognize what this piece of legislation is intended to do and then to assess the changes which have been proposed in that light.

The purpose of the legislation has been, for a long period of time under whatever name the legislation has had, to ensure that the Canadian marketplace is as competitive as possible in the interest of consumers. It ensures that consumers have a wide range of products available at competitive prices in circumstances in which sellers do not use practices which are unacceptable, misleading and deceptive to attract sales.

It is in the interests of consumers to ensure that various assertions about the quality a product or a service might possess, about the price at which that product or service might or might not have been sold in the past and about various qualities of that product or service be truthful. In that way consumers know what it is they are comparing so they can make efficient and sensible consumer decisions.

It is also plainly in the interests of competitors to ensure that all businesses within the marketplace abide by the same rules and pursue honest, clear and open business practices. If a competitor is able to generate a sale as a result of a misleading practice, then competitors who are adhering to proper and honest business practices will suffer losses accordingly.

It is in both the interests of consumers and the business community that we have effective competition policy. In that regard the legislation approaches these practices in the marketplace in both criminal and non-criminal ways. It deals with conspiracy, bid rigging, discriminatory and predatory pricing, price maintenance, misleading advertising, with which many people are familiar, and deceptive marketing practices.

The courts have the power in those areas to impose fines, to order imprisonment and to issue orders to stop the practice in question. They also have the power to issue interim orders to stop the practice in question and to administer a wide range of remedies.

In addition there are issues which at first blush are not so close to home to consumers but which have a significant impact covered by the act. These primarily deal with restrictions on competition, mergers, the abuse of a dominant position in a marketplace, refusing to sell to someone because of some of their selling practices and essentially dealing with the more macro issues rather than the ones that affect consumers precisely.

This legislation and legislation before it sets out the rules and regulations of the marketplace. This piece of legislation can be divided into two or three segments.

The first deals with deceptive telemarketing. With the growth of telecommunications and the reduction in price of telephone services, by using the telephone it is now very easy and inexpensive for a marketer in one province or country to sell to a buyer in another country or province. As a result we have seen a growth both in legitimate and illegitimate telemarketing. In order to protect those who pursue this activity legitimately, it is necessary to deal with those who bilk millions and perhaps billions of dollars from Canadian consumers. It is also important to protect those Canadian consumers.

This bill should be applauded in that it sets out much more explicitly what the crime of deceptive telemarketing will be. If enforced effectively, the legislation will serve to reduce the abuse of Canadian consumers across the country.

As every member of the House will know, the kinds of people who have been the target of telemarketing are very often those who are most vulnerable in society. Seniors, at least in my estimation, are trusting. They generally believe that people are telling them the truth because that is the way they conduct their affairs. If the evidence is correct, and I believe it is, they tend to believe what telemarketers tell them. When they are offered the $10,000 prize, if they would only send $500, $600, $700 or $800 to cover taxes and other incidental expenditures, they believe they will in fact receive the $10,000 prize.

To many of us it is an incredulous idea, but we know from the evidence that maybe hundreds of thousands of Canadians and perhaps millions across North America have been taken in, in this way, and for significant amounts of money. I have met many Canadians who have been tricked in this way.

Part of the bill is very significant. We have done little about this criminal activity, this defrauding of Canadian consumers, mostly older Canadians, to the order of $4 billion. Making something a crime is only part of the story. We have to be sure that we can enforce the sanctions which flow from making deceptive telemarketing a crime.

To date there is a very small police department headquartered in North Bay, Ontario, called Operation Phonebusters. At last count it had one person who knows the area intimately, Staff Sergeant Elliot. He has done a terrific job on this question. Many of us in the House will have spoken to him and to his very small staff attached to that operation in North Bay. They are dealing with a criminal activity which is costing the most vulnerable Canadians perhaps $4 billion a year.

Let us match that with the resources we spend across the country, province after province, to deal with drivers who speed, with people who break windows and with street crime. The mismatch of resources attached to and applied to this kind of criminal activity is so obvious that we have to ask the solicitor general and the government to make sure they commit adequate resources to deal effectively with this matter. It is not enough to have a small joint OPP-RCMP force in North Bay to try to deal with these cases across the country.

Without that commitment the legislation will mean very little to ordinary Canadians who have been bilked and are likely to continue to be bilked if the kinds of people that engage in deceptive telemarketing, those who are not likely to stop just because the House says it will be a crime, carry on in the way in which they have been carrying on.

We absolutely need a commitment from the government. Maybe the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry will be able to commit today to ensuring that the legislation is effectively enforced. It is important to recognize and to support the government in acting on the telemarketing fraud that exists.

Much of this fraud is centred in Montreal. A small number of people are using very sophisticated telephone and marketing techniques across the country into my province, my district in Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, on a regular basis, making billions of dollars off other Canadians.

We must ensure that Quebec authorities effectively deal with this question even when a loss has not occurred in the province of Quebec. We have to make sure we co-ordinate activities across the country to put an end to this kind of activity.

Let me summarize that point by saying that I support the government in its measures in this regard. I hope it will commit resources to make sure that the legislation is adequately enforced and that Canadians are adequately protected.

We need to do a little work on informing consumers. Last year, faced with complaints in my riding, I provided a telephone security tip brochure which people could put by their telephones telling them what not to do and what they might do to protect themselves from telemarketing scam artists.

Let us see some commitment on the part of the government to enforcing the legislation. Although it is late, I think we should congratulate the government for introducing the legislation.

On another part we have some serious questions which arise as a result of what I indicated in the beginning. The legislation is designed to ensure we have a competitive marketplace in Canada. Separate from issues like health care and education which we and Canadians believe should fundamentally be largely outside the markets and administered in a separate way in the public interest, things should be bought and sold in the marketplace in a competitive environment. The actors in the marketplace, the sellers and the providers of goods and services, should also act in a competitive way.

We can also support dealing with changes to trade practices and misleading advertising to provide the government with a number of different ways to approach this problem. Making something criminal is not the only way to attack an issue. That has been made clear. We need a mixture of criminal, civil and administrative measures to ensure that consumers and competitors are best protected.

Let me come to the point where I have some difficulty, the merger part of the legislation. Canada has one of the weakest anti-merger pieces of legislation in the world. Of any developed country we have not treated the question of larger mergers seriously. Only one has perhaps ever been seriously called into question.

We are now faced with merger mania, with big banks merging and with big insurance companies merging. I believe we are just at the beginning of merger mania. Many of our large corporations will be telling us that it is in their best interests to have less competition in Canada so that they can compete in the world economy.

I am sure members have heard in their ridings that Canadians simply do not buy that argument. They do not want big mergers to take place. They do not want the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal to merge. They do not want big insurance companies to merge. They do not want their fellow Canadians to lose their jobs and they do not want to have less competition. They want to have more choice, not less.

What does this merger legislation do with regard to these questions? Essentially it does not do anything. It leaves our whole structure, our whole process, pretty darn weak. It does not ensure that we will have serious review of bank mergers, insurance company mergers or any others.

Does anybody seriously think that the merger between the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal is anything other than a foregone conclusion? Is there any expectation across the country that because of the power of those two big banks and our weak merger legislation this merger will go ahead? We would be foolhardy to think this was not essentially a foregone conclusion. We can work as hard as we can to stop it because Canadians do not want it. Many of these mergers are not in the public interest.

Because of the legislation, because of the approach the government takes and because the approach of the Conservative and Reform parties and those parties that tend to support big business, there is unlikely to be anything significant in this regard without a major change of heart.

We see The Bay and K-Mart merging. Is anybody going to ask any questions about whether it is in the public interest? I do not think so, from those three parties I mentioned. Indeed the public interest seems to be the last thing anybody cares about in pro-business parties with regard to mergers.

Canadians want better, deserve better and should have better. They should have merger legislation which puts proposed mergers to the test. It would require those who want to merge to show why it is in the interest of Canada that they do so.

Nothing in the bill requires any accounting by the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank. We know jobs will be lost. The presidents of those two organizations have made sure they will not lose their jobs, but the cashiers in the branches in our communities will not be there and the branches will not be there because of the merger. That is not good enough.

Passing legislation of this sort is an opportunity to beef up the legislation so the interest of Canadians can be protected, so we have an economy that is getting more competitive and not less, and so we have an economy that acts in the interest of Canadians and not just in the interest of large banks, large insurance companies and large retailers. It is unfortunate that the government did not take the opportunity to do what it philosophically says it wants to do, that is enhance the competition inherent in Canada's marketplace.

Perhaps some would find it odd that it has to be a social democrat who asks why we do not focus on a competitive marketplace. Why do the Reform Party, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party say they do not give a damn about competition? They would rather have these big mergers taking place. They would much rather have a policy of deregulation, privatization and monopolization, which is exactly what has happened in Canada over the last few years.

It is time we had merger legislation that is actually in the interest of Canadians and not just in the interest of those who want to merge and consolidate their own power, their own prestige and their own ability to control the rest of us.

There are good parts in the legislation. I applaud the government's move on fraudulent telemarketing. It is very important to commit adequate resources to ensure these crimes can be effectively policed and Canadians can be effectively protected.

However, on the merger part, which in an odd way is kind of combined with the telemarketing legislation, much more could have been done. The government deserves significant criticism, as do those who support this weak merger regime that we have in Canada, for not taking strident measures to make sure we have a more competitive economy in Canada rather than a less competitive one.