Tom Wappel

[Canadian Human Rights Act, May 7th, 1996]

moved:

Motion No. 18

That Bill C-33, in Clause 2, be amended by adding after line 8, on page 2, the following:

"3.(2) For greater certainty, nothing in Sections 2 or 3 of this Act shall be construed by any court or tribunal in such a way as to add, read in, or include the words sexual orientation in Section 16 of this Act."

[Petitions, May 3rd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is signed almost exclusively by residents of the town of Unionville in the area north of metropolitan Toronto.

They pray and call on Parliament not to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act or the charter of rights and freedoms in any way that would tend to indicate societal approval of same sex relationships or of homosexuality, including amending the human rights act to include in the prohibited grounds of discrimination the undefined phrase sexual orientation.

[Petitions, May 3rd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions today.

The first petition is signed by Canadians primarily from the Calgary area. They ask Parliament to act immediately to extend protection to the unborn child by amending the Criminal Code to extend the same protection enjoyed by born human beings to unborn human beings.

[The Budget, April 16th, 1996]

Now that I have the attention of my hon. friends, perhaps they can listen to this lecture. I am quoting again from the red book:

Given the current state of the economy, a realistic interim target for a Liberal government is to seek to reduce the federal deficit to 3 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of its third year in office.

That is the goal we set ourselves. We said this is what we would do. Let us put that into some kind of a context. Let us put that into the context of my home.

Let us say that I am running a debt and I am running a deficit with my credit cards. I can say to my family: "Look. We owe a few thousand dollars. We are going to have to cut back a little bit so you will not be able to take all of the lessons you want to take. I will not be able to go out as often as I want. Even though I might like to go to the concert, I will not be able to pay $100 for a Julio Iglesias ticket because we cannot afford it. Yes, we will be able to go to something else. Maybe we will be able to go to a free concert offered by somebody on July 1". I will cut back here and there. I will still buy groceries of course. I will still buy clothing. I will still put gas in the car. I will still have a car that I can drive so I can take the children to and from their various activities. I will still do those things but I will cut back.

What will this mean? Yes it will be a little tough but over a period of time, over two or three years, we will pay off that $2,000 or $3,000. Once we have that $2,000 or $3,000 paid off then I will be able to handle the debt load.

That is one approach and it is the approach I think the Liberal Party is taking. It is the reasoned responsible approach to reducing the deficit.

There are others who might approach their family and say: "Listen. We are $2,000 in debt so we are not going to buy any groceries this week. We are not going to go anywhere. We are not going to go to any lessons. We are going to get rid of the car, we are going to get rid of the house, we are going to get rid of everything. By golly we are going to pay that $2,000 back". I am not going to have a family left if I take that approach.

That is not the Liberal approach. The Liberal approach is a reasoned, carefully considered slow approach to deficit reduction, to running a deficit of zero. Once we get to zero then we get to positive numbers and we can start paying off some of that debt, remembering that not all debt is bad. Otherwise we cannot have some of the things that all of us have taken for granted.

What target did the Liberals set? We set ourselves a realistic target for three years. Guess what? We are going to meet that target. Not only are we going to meet that target, we are going to drop from over $40 billion to about $17 billion in 1997-98.

Compare that to the bombast and the sad predictions made by the Conservative government over a period of nine years. That government also came into office promising that it would get rid of the horrendous debt which the Liberals had run up in the profligacy of their time. They had run up a debt. There is no question. Over the whole course of Confederation from 1867 until 1984, a debt of approximately $250 billion had been run up. Remember, it took our entire history to get to that point and in nine years the Conservative government doubled it. That was from a government which promised to reduce the debt.

What have we done? We have kept our promises. We have reduced the deficit from the $42.5 billion when we took office and we will keep our promise by bringing it down to $17 billion. What does that mean? It means it is decreasing. In the next mandate we will still be decreasing the deficit and we will reach zero on a rolling target basis, as our finance minister says.

The proof is in the pudding. The deficit has decreased. Hon. members opposite can heckle all they want but the deficit is decreasing. That is a fact and they cannot argue with fact. They can be rhetorical, they can make all kinds of comments, but one thing is certain: the deficit is going down. It is going down under a Liberal government. It was going up under the previous Conservative government. It will continue to go down under this government. That is the key promise of this budget. It is one of the reasons I support it.

Now I will turn to the GST. What did the red book that everybody professes to have read say? It is interesting. It is right in there.

I remember when I was campaigning. My campaign office was open to everyone. There were copies of the red book. There were copies of summaries of the red book. I had campaign literature which I distributed to the people in the riding. In fact, I told the people in the riding what we were going to do before the election was called. Nobody in Scarborough West can say they did not know what our promise was. What was our promise? It is on page 22:

In the first session of a new Parliament, a Liberal government will give the all-party Finance Committee of the House of Commons a 12-month mandate to consult fully with Canadians and provincial governments and to report on ways to achieve tax fairness, simplicity, and harmonization.

Did I see the word harmonization? There it is, right in the red book.

Did we deliver on that? Yes, we did. That is exactly what the House of Commons committee did. It continued: "In particular the committee will be mandated to report on all options for alternatives to the current GST", and it did. It continued: "A Liberal government will replace the GST"-there is the word replace-"with a system that generates equivalent revenues, is fairer to consumers and to small business, minimizes disruption to small business, and promotes federal-provincial fiscal co-operation and harmonization". There is the word again, twice in the same paragraph, in advance of anybody casting a vote.

In 1993 prior to the election, I issued a communique to the people of my riding. It was four pages long and it talked about the goods and services tax, what was wrong with it and why there were problems with it. Among other things this is what I said: "If we are given the privilege of governing, a Liberal government will, as a first priority, mandate an all-party Commons finance committee to consult Canadians and various levels of government on options to the current GST. Our objective will be to replace the GST with a system that, while generating the same revenues, will be fairer to consumers, easier to administer and will promote federal-provincial co-operation rather than tax competition".

That sounds very similar to what is in the red book, but it was issued before the red book. Why? Because it had been widely discussed and it was known when we were criticizing the Conservative government that this was going to be our approach. So even if somebody says that they did not see the red book, if they had been following the debate since the introduction of the GST, they would know that this was not some rabbit being plucked out of a hat, it was a longstanding policy of the Liberal Party. I say longstanding in the context of when the GST was brought in.

I want to talk a bit about the history of the GST because it is important to recognize the context. The Conservative government brought in the GST as a replacement for the manufacturers sales tax. It was not supposed to get the government more money. It was supposed to be revenue neutral. This was the big promise.

When the government found out it was going to collect billions upon billions of dollars more than expected, it decided to come up with the GST rebate. That is why people get cheques today for the GST. That is why they apply for GST credits on their tax returns. It is because the tax takes in more money than was expected when it replaced the manufacturers sales tax. People forget that because

now they get their nice GST rebate cheques and they want to continue receiving them.

The point of the tax was not to pay down the deficit and the debt. The point of the tax was to collect the same amount as the manufacturers sales tax but in a fairer and more open way because the manufacturers sales tax was a hidden tax. That was the whole point of the GST and it failed miserably. That was one reason we opposed it. It was not going to do the job and it was going to cost too much to administer.

That is why we are continuing to do what we can to meet our promise. We have until the end of our mandate to meet the promise. We on this side of the House are going to do the best we can to meet that promise. We have done that with the rest of the promises we set forth in the red book. I do not want people to forget the historical context of that.

Finally, I want to talk about the credibility of the finance minister. In my view, his credibility is impeccable. I was in the last Parliament and those who were here will remember that year after year Michael Wilson stood and delivered his budget address and made predictions. Year after year we could bet the mortgages on our homes that his predictions would fail, and they did.

When he moved over to international trade and Don Mazankowski became finance minister, he made predictions that failed. The finance minister was never right. For the opposition it was like shooting fish in a barrel. All the finance minister had to do was predict something would happen and we knew right away it would not happen based on his track record. We had ample time to set up our artillery and take our shots at him. It was not even a challenge for us.

We now have a finance minister who has laid out certain goals and has met them. He did not go off on some tangent and promise the undeliverable. He has said: "Here is what we are going to do in the first two years. Here is what we will do in the next two years". And guess what? He did it. Who can argue with that? It is almost inconceivable.

One can see the frustration of the opposition parties. How can they argue with success? How can they argue with a finance minister who says he will do something and then he does it? They cannot argue with that. But oh, no. The opposition parties have to say that he did not promise enough and that they wanted more promises.

Well, our finance minister is a man of cool head and reflection. He knows how to bring the deficit down to zero. The way to do that is by rolling targets, exactly as he has said.

In my view there is no question of the credibility of the finance minister, of his judgment, of his commitment to the principles in the red book. There is no question at all we will meet the commitments we made. There is no question at all that the government and the people on this side will keep their promises.

That is why today at 6.30 p.m. I will be voting in favour of the budget.

[The Budget, April 16th, 1996]

Madam Speaker, it is a privilege for me to have an opportunity to say a few words about the 1996 budget. The hour is late and we will soon be voting on the budget. Being the last speaker or very likely close to the last speaker, pretty well everything that could be said about this budget, pro and con, has likely been said.

What I want to do is concentrate on four areas which I feel are of some note. I also want to speak to my constituents about some of the concerns I heard in some of the public forums which I convened in my riding concerning the budget.

If I have a little more time I will talk about a couple of other things, but the four items I want to talk about now are: no new taxes in this budget; reducing the deficit; the goods and services tax and what is going to be done about it; and the excellent credibility of the Minister of Finance.

The first thing I want to point out, as no doubt many others have, is that this is a budget which has no new taxes. It has no personal tax increases, no corporate tax increases and no excise tax increases. This is the third budget in a row in which there have been no personal tax increases.

What that means to me as a taxpayer is very simple. If I spend more money than I earn and put it on credit cards, get a loan, borrow from Peter to pay Paul, et cetera, there are only two ways that I can end up paying back the money that I owe. Hopefully I can either get an increase in pay from my employer and assign that increase to paying off the money that I owe, or I can cut back on my expenditures, or I can do both if I am lucky enough to get an

increase in the salary that I earn from my employer and I can cut back on expenditures.

What the budget states is very simple. There is going to be no increase in my pay because the only way that the government can increase my pay is to increase taxes. Therefore, if there is no increase in my pay and I sit down and look at my family budget and see that I am spending more than I earn and I owe more than I have the capability of paying based on my salary, then I have to tell myself to cut back on something. I have to stop spending some of that money because I am not going to be earning any more money. That is what this budget has stated. The government is not increasing any taxes, therefore it is like not getting a raise in pay.

Consequently, if we are going to reduce the deficit, which we must do of course, then we have to do it in another way. The other way is cutting back on expenditures, spending wisely. This is very important because it dovetails into the second point I want to talk about which is reducing the deficit.

When people spend more than they collect they run a deficit. Debt itself is not a bad thing. For example, very few people in this country would ever be able to own a home if they were not able to go into debt to the bank for a mortgage. Just because they have a mortgage does not make it bad that they have debt, otherwise they would not be able to own a home.

The problem is when one's debt load becomes greater than one's ability to pay back the interest and hopefully some payment of principal on a monthly basis.

What has happened with the Government of Canada over a protracted period of time is that more money has been spent than is coming in for a host of reasons. When the present government took over in 1993, by almost all accounts it took over a deficit of $42 billion or something to that effect. When we talk in that magnitude of numbers it is almost impossible to comprehend what we are talking about in terms of billions of dollars. Whether it is $40 billion or $42 billion, it is still an awful lot of money to owe.

What did we say we were going to do to deal with that problem? I have the red book here and I have read it carefully. I have read it again. I have listened to some of the speeches from the members opposite. A lot of people say they have read this book. A lot of people say they have read it again but I do not believe them. They may have read a press account of what the press says is in the book, but I do not think they have read the book.

For those people, let me quote from page 20: "Any responsible government-and this is any responsible government be it Liberal, Conservative, NDP or Reform-"must have as a goal the elimination of the deficit". That is obvious. That is our goal. This was the Liberal Party speaking when we were running for election as the government of this country. Our goal is the elimination of the deficit. Let there be no doubt about it, it was plainly stated. Of course there are many ways to get to the same goal.

I am absolutely delighted that as we approach the end of this debate there is some activity on the benches opposite. I can actually hear some people listening. It means somebody is listening to what I am saying.

[Petitions, March 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is signed by hundreds of Canadians of Hungarian descent. They raise various concerns and ask the government to raise their concerns through diplomatic channels.

The petitioners are concerned about the preservation of basic human rights of the indigenous Hungarian minorities living outside the borders of present day Hungary, which include 2.5 million in Romania, 800,000 in Slovakia, 350,000 in Serbia and 160,000 in the Ukraine. They outline various human rights abuses that have occurred to the Hungarian minorities in those countries.

The petitioners pray that Parliament voice their concerns and protest toward those named governments and remind them of their duty to respect democratic principles and basic human rights as guaranteed by the United Nations charter of rights, and as signatories of the Helsinki accords respecting minority rights.

Mr. Speaker, I also have petitions signed by people in Calgary and other areas in Alberta. They call upon Parliament not to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act or the charter of rights and freedoms in any way which would tend to indicate societal approval of same sex relationships or of homosexuality, including amending the Canadian Human Rights Act to include in the prohibited grounds of discrimination the undefined phrase of sexual orientation.

[Petitions, March 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions today.

The first petition recalls the brutal murder of a constituent of mine, Louie Ambas of Scarborough. It brings to the attention of the House that Canadians from coast to coast are calling for changes to the Young Offenders Act and for heavier penalties for all those convicted of violent crime.

The petitioners therefore pray that Parliament amend the Young Offenders Act to provide that young offenders charged with murder be automatically tried in adult court and that if convicted, they be sentenced as adults and that their identities should not be hidden from the public.

[Petitions, February 29th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed primarily by residents of the city of Calgary, Alberta praying that Parliament ensure that the present provisions of the Criminal Code of Canada prohibiting assisted suicide be enforced vigorously and that Parliament make no change in the law which would sanction or allow the aiding or abetting of suicide or active or passive euthanasia.

[Canada Elections Act, February 29th, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-210, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act (review of nomination papers).

Mr. Speaker, section 82.1 of the Canada Elections Act requires that each person seeking election have their nomination papers signed by 100 electors resident in the riding in which they seek to be elected. We all know this.

In the last federal election, in my riding of Scarborough West there were eight people on the ballot. At least four of those people had not complied with section 82.1 and had not had their nomination papers signed by 100 electors resident in the riding of Scarborough West. There was absolutely no mechanism to deal with this flagrant abuse of the Canada Elections Act.

Accordingly, I have proposed a bill which would amend the Canada Elections Act. It would allow an elector of an electoral district to request the review of a nomination paper when the elector has reasonable grounds to believe that one or more persons who signed the nomination paper are not qualified electors resident in the electoral district. A nomination paper that had not been signed by the required number of electors resident in the electoral district provided for by the Canada Elections Act would be declared invalid.

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

[Consumer Packaging And Labelling Act, February 29th, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-209, an act to amend the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act (nutritional value of food).

Mr. Speaker, the purpose this bill which is being reintroduced is to amend the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act to provide that foods sold to consumers across Canada have certain nutritional information stated on the label, including the vitamin content, carbohydrate content, fat content and the caloric amount per portion. This information is very common in the United States but is voluntary in Canada. This bill would make it mandatory.

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