Bill Blaikie

[Privilege, December 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I was not sure whether I wanted to rise in this debate, but having listened to the Conservative House leader, I feel I have to. With respect, if he checks the blues he will find that all the leader of the NDP was able to say before the noise that we are objecting to happened was “yesterday Colin Powell told me”. That was it.

Now, I ask if that is inflammatory; maybe if he had gotten as far as “yesterday Colin Powell told me that he favoured the NDP” or “yesterday Colin Powell told me that the moon is made of green cheese” or whatever, but all he got to say was “yesterday Colin Powell told me”. There is nothing inflammatory about that. The fact of the matter is that the House erupted, not just once but twice, after the leader of the NDP got those four or five words out.

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that you have a problem here, and actually, we all have a problem. I know, Mr. Speaker, that you try to deal with things by being humourous, but this is getting to be unfunny.

It is getting to be unfunny, this systematic harassment in particular. A lot of stuff goes on here, but there is a systematic harassment and barracking and yelling at the leader of the NDP when he rises in the House to speak. I find it particularly objectionable.

It is funny, Mr. Speaker, in that we have spent two weeks with everyone walking on eggshells worrying about whether somebody would say something or say anything, or whisper, or even moan improperly, if the President of the United States was in the House of Commons here talking to us, but we can treat each other in the way that we treat each other. We are total hypocrites when it comes this, to the extent that we all so are worried about how polite we are going to be, but why can we not be polite with each other?

Why is it a problem if anybody were to express a disagreeable opinion with respect to someone else, but other members of the House feel that it is perfectly okay to shout down a person to the point where we cannot hear what is going on and the person cannot put his or her question? The duly elected member of Parliament who is the duly elected leader of a political party that over two million Canadians voted for and that person cannot ask a question in the House without being shouted down? That is not the Parliament I thought I was being elected to.

[Privilege, December 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to support my colleague from the Bloc. I will start out by saying that my length of service in the House did not stand in the way of not being able to get on the Hill yesterday because I was indeed one of the people who was prevented from accessing the Hill for a short period of time.

I just want to register my own objection. I do not understand why these police, who were not the usual RCMP that we find on the Hill, could not have been instructed, or if they were instructed, why they did not absorb it, that there would be people coming up to the Hill who were members of Parliament and who had ID showing that they were members of Parliament, or a pin, or a pin and ID.

In my case I had my identification card with my picture showing that I was a member of Parliament but the policeman said that was not good enough and that I had to have a security pass. I told him that my staff were on the Hill and asked him why I could not get up. I was with Senator Grafstein from the other place, who incidentally is co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Parliamentary Association. He also had to prove that he was a senator. Neither one of us could get passed this particular policeman and we invited him to discuss the matter with his superior officer and he went to do that.

In the meantime, we carried on the discussion with the policeman who was left and finally persuaded him that these passes were legitimate and that we should be allowed to proceed up Wellington toward the East Block. We were somewhere between the Chateau Laurier and the East Block. We got past him but then the other policeman came back and asked what we were doing. We told him that we were on our way up the Hill. He told us that we could not because we needed security passes. I told him that no one told us we needed a security pass and no one ever did tell members of Parliament and security passes were not provided for members.

It was only when we managed to talk our way close enough to the gate at the East Block that the RCMP, who normally police the Hill, were able to see myself and the senator and tell the police officer that it was okay to let us on the Hill.

When I got through the gate and up onto the lawn, there were protesters there. Did they have security clearance? Did they have the card that I did not have? They had huge signs saying that George Bush was a terrorist and everything else. They were on the lawn by the eternal flame having a fine old time but I, as a member of Parliament with picture ID, could not get on the Hill. Something is wrong with this movie.

Mr. Speaker, you need to talk to the people who were in charge of security for yesterday's events and make sure that this kind of thing does not happen again.

[Committees of the House, November 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to put a question to the hon. member who just spoke, but before I do I will preface it by saying that I was a member of the committee that produced the unanimous report that the Minister of Finance is now ignoring, refusing to sign these duty remission orders and, for that matter, to move on other aspects of what was recommended unanimously by the committee.

I wonder if the member would care to comment, if he has not already and for that matter even if he has already, on the strange position we find ourselves in today. We are in a Parliament where the new Prime Minister has made a big deal out of trying to address the democratic deficit and giving members of Parliament more say in the formulation of government policy, and here we have a perfect example of what a Prime Minister who was serious about dealing with the democratic deficit would do. A Prime Minister who was serious about this would respect the unanimous recommendation of a committee on this particular subject.

I know it is of particular importance to the member for Winnipeg Centre but also to myself as another MP from Winnipeg. Jobs are at stake in Winnipeg. It is not only an employment issue but it is also a democratic issue for this Parliament.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on how odd he may find it that we have to be doing what we are doing here today, holding up what would otherwise have happened today in the House of Commons, in order to try to get a government, that says it wants more democracy in this place and wants to extend more respect for the opinions of members of Parliament, to actually live up to its rhetoric about dealing with the democratic deficit. Why will the government not respect the unanimous recommendations in the committee's report?

[Privilege, November 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I was at the meeting in question. I want to put on the record that it is quite mistaken to suggest in any way that the rules were not followed. The rules followed were the rules that were adopted by everyone at the committee, which basically was to allow nominations to be put from the floor.

Therefore, if the hon. member for Saint John has deliberately suggested or deliberately impugned the integrity of what happened at that meeting, as the quote from the Fredericton Daily Gleaner would suggest, then I hope he would take the opportunity to apologize for making that suggestion because the rules were followed, as they were adopted at the meeting.

There was even a bit of debate about whether nominations should be allowed from the floor. After it was decided by everyone there, I do not remember the hon. member for Saint John protesting that decision. If the hon. member for Saint John did not prevail in his quest to be the co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Parliamentary Association, it probably would have been better for him to have left it at that.

However, I wanted to concur in the analysis of the hon. member who raised the question of privilege and hope that we do not have the integrity of what happened that evening impugned any longer. It is not the hon. member's fault nor anyone else's fault that there were four Liberals running. They could not get their act together and none of them won. I know they are not used to losing around here, at least over the last decade. However, that is no reason to impugn the integrity of what happened just because a Liberal lost.

[Sikh Community, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, today members of the Canadian Sikh community will be protesting at the French embassy the new French laws which prohibit the wearing of turbans, among other religious items that apply to other religions.

I want to rise to indicate the support of the NDP for this protest and to celebrate the fact that we do things differently here in Canada, most of the time. One of the things we could do which would be helpful to affirm the fact that we do things differently here in Canada would be to finally pass a motion which I introduced in a previous Parliament and which was introduced in the last Parliament by the member for Winnipeg North Centre to affirm the importance of the five Ks to the Sikh community and the contribution of the Sikh community to Canada.

This is a motion that almost passed but it was not votable under a previous private members' business regime. I understand that my House leader will be initiating discussions with other House leaders. Perhaps very soon we could have a motion affirming the five Ks in this House and show that we are indeed a different country.

[Housing, November 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, we already know that it is not just on some reserves. It is in hundreds of thousands of homes across Canada. There is some evidence to this effect.

I remember a previous Liberal government that helped Canadians with UFFI in their homes. It helped them to test for it and then helped them to get rid of it.

All the government has to say today is that it is planning the same kind of program for people who have Zonolite in their homes. We can work out the details later; make the commitment in principle today.

[Housing, November 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Labour and Housing. The minister has had some time to think about Zonolite since we asked him a question about it some time ago. This asbestos-containing deadly material has been found in homes on reserves but is also contained throughout many homes in the rest of Canada.

The minister has had some time to think about it. Can he report to the House what the government intends to do now to help identify where this Zonolite is across the country and to help people in whose homes it is to get rid of the stuff?

[Supply, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Chair, it seems to me that the minister or the federal government would have a lot more control and a lot more influence over many issues having to do with drugs if in fact the government had proceeded with its own election promise and responded to the proposal by the premiers for a national pharmacare program.

Earlier the minister raised questions about Internet pharmacies. If the federal government was in charge of pharmacare in this country and if that Liberal promise had been kept, or if the premiers' proposal had been responded to, does the minister not think he would be in a much better position to deal with this than he is now, having to deal at several arms' lengths with this issue?

[Supply, November 23rd, 2004]

Again with respect to drugs, Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could tell us about it. There has been a lot of controversy of late about it, and I heard the minister say earlier that part of the plan that the federal government and the provinces are looking at is a national formulary and bulk buying and this sort of thing and also speedier approval of new drugs.

I understand the reason for that, yet at the same time we are in a context now where we see that many drugs have been approved--I do not know whether they have been approved speedily or not but they were approved--and then we find out sometime down the road that they are not all they are cracked up to be or they have side effects that are quite serious. Vioxx comes to mind, as do certain anti-depressants that have been identified with suicide. Just today Depo-Provera was identified as causing osteoporosis, I think.

I recall actually raising the issue of Depo-Provera in the early 1980s in the House when I was the NDP health critic, in another century, and at that time I raised it because they were experimenting with Depo-Provera on women in third world countries. We asked the Canadian government to oppose that at the WHO.

We did not succeed and of course after the experiment on third world women we have now had the experiment on first world women, and now we finally have the results of that experiment.

Could the minister tell us what is the government's intention with the drug approval process? There are obviously some problems. What is the government's plan to deal with the inadequacies in that particular process?

[Supply, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Chair, we have had some discussion tonight about the cost of drugs in Canada. It came up in earlier questions. I have a couple of questions related to drug policy.

The first has to do with the practice of evergreening. I do not know if the minister is aware there is a private member's bill, Bill C-274 in the name of my colleague from Windsor West, which, if it were to come to a vote and then be passed, would eliminate this practice that has the effect of increasing the price of drugs, unnecessarily in our view. I know it is a private member's bill, but does the minister look favourably upon this proposed legislation or not?