Bill Blaikie

[National Co-Operative Week, October 18th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join with other colleagues in the House who spoke on behalf of their parties in congratulating the credit union movement and the co-op movement on the occasion of National Co-Operative Week and International Credit Union Day.

Needless to say, the New Democratic Party has political roots in the co-op movement, of which all members of the House will be aware. We are very pleased to be able to join in marking this week and this day.

It is important at a time when the language of competition is prevalent to remind ourselves that there is another way of looking at the world. It is a way of looking at the world that is rooted in a very Canadian way of doing things in the co-op movement.

Co-operation is also a good word. Whatever benefits may come from competition, and I would be the first to debate some of them, we ought to realize that co-operation is another way of doing things and one that has been represented very well in the country over the decades by the credit union movement and the co-op movement.

I call upon members of the House and the government to protect this tradition in everything they do. Various things are under attack from various places, whether it is the budget for co-op housing, the attack on the wheat board or various other things, all of which represent manifestations of this co-operative spirit in our political, social and economic history.

I am pleased to join with other colleagues on behalf of the NDP in marking this occasion. I hope we will keep in mind at all times the value of this tradition and the value of advancing it in every way we can.

[National Co-Operative Week, October 18th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I seek unanimous consent of the House to speak on behalf of the NDP on this matter.

[Point Of Order, October 18th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, first of all I want to apologize to my colleagues for not having given more notice and for that matter any notice. I would hope that some of the comments that have been made might change when people have an opportunity to think about it.

The very fact the member gets up and says that I disagree with something in the report is the point I am trying to make. The report should be of such a factual nature that there is nothing in it to disagree with. It should be a report on various facts of a technical nature. The fact that I can find something to agree with or somebody else can find something to disagree with is the point I am trying to make about the report.

Nobody elects the auditor general to make these kinds of judgments. I think we have a situation here that-

[Point Of Order, October 18th, 1995]

A point of order, I said.

[Point Of Order, October 18th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order concerning the auditor general's report tabled on October 5, 1995 and referred to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

I contend that the tabling and referral to the committee of this report is out of order because the report in question contravenes the Auditor General Act and the conventions and prerogatives of the House.

I draw attention to section 5 of the Auditor General Act which defines the position as the "auditor of the accounts of Canada" and section 7(2) which sets out the parameters of the auditor general's reports. This paragraph empowers the auditor general to report that the records of the public accounts were faithfully kept, that expenditures have been made only as authorized by Parliament and with due regard for efficiency, and that due measures are taken to measure the effectiveness of programs.

In his latest report the auditor general has clearly overstepped the legal and customary boundaries of his duties as a servant of the House and in my judgment has interfered with the rights of the House by making politically biased statements. Let me illustrate

this claim with some direct quotations from the auditor general's report in question.

In paragraph 9.84 the report states: "We think that Parliament and the public need to focus on debt issues, particularly the amount of debt we carry". The auditor general exists to help Parliament hold the government to account and not to hold Parliament to account for failing to adopt a particular policy. No company of shareholders in the private sector would accept an auditor's report that expressed an opinion about how the shareholders conducted themselves at meetings, rather than help the shareholders assess the management of the company. I contend that neither can we in the House.

The auditor general further infringes on the rights of the House when he writes in paragraph 9.107 concerning the level of public debt:

Determining a strategy to achieve that vision is something the government and Parliament need to debate and develop a consensus on.

I do not need to remind you, Mr. Speaker, that the House does not necessarily exist to create a consensus around a particular economic theory. There are different and differing political theories and different political stances in the House. Therefore I contend that the House exists to hold the government of the day accountable in a way that reflects the diversity of political opinion in the country and that this is not recognized in the auditor general's report.

The duty of the auditor general as set out in law is to aid Parliament in that task by providing technical information about the state of the public accounts to assist members of the House in their debates. It is not to preach to Parliament about what the conclusion of that debate should be.

The same criticism can be applied to paragraph 9.52 of the report which states:

The reality is that (interest rates) are not lower, and had it been a simple matter of making them lower in the 1980s and 1990s as they were in the previous 20 years, governments would have undoubtedly done so.

I would happily debate this point with anybody in the House, for it is common knowledge that the Bank of Canada under John Crow deliberately chose to dramatically increase interest rates in quest of a zero inflation rate.

My procedural point is that I cannot argue this point with the auditor general because this statement comes in the form of an ex cathedra pronouncement of an auditor who is presumed to provide objective assessments of the public accounts. Yet I can think of no principle of accounting that would allow an auditor to offer such a tendentious historical verdict on the motives of past governments, a verdict which supports a particular political position on what caused our fiscal problems and what should be done about them.

Because the auditor general like yourself, Mr. Speaker, is a servant of Parliament, he should not use the authority of his position to advance political arguments as if they were uncontested accounting principles. His reports must demonstrate the highest degree of political neutrality. He cannot perform the role of auditor as set out clearly in the Auditor General Act if he uses his position to take sides in debates that properly take place in the House. The auditor general has therefore overstepped his legal and customary duties in his latest report.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to consider two measures to defend the rights of the House to have access to an objective auditing of the public accounts. First, I ask you to rule the tabling of the October 5 report to be out of order and to have you ask that the auditor general submit an amended report that conforms to his duties as set out in the Auditor General Act. Second, I ask you to refer the matter of the terms of reference for auditor general's reports to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

[Health Care, October 17th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, as NDP health critic on April 2, 1994 in third reading debate on the Canada Health Act, I welcomed the move to eliminate extra billing and user fees. But I also asked the Liberal government of the day, which was the first federal government to unilaterally cut back on federal transfers, "to sit down with the provinces and renegotiate that funding relationship so we can have a full-fledged financial partnership with respect to medicare".

The Liberal government's new Canada health and social transfer with its $7 billion cut is just another Liberal unilateral cut and a further erosion of the partnership that was medicare.

Dealing with private clinics is one thing, but it is a form of straining out gnats while swallowing camels if the federal government continues to set up medicare for destruction by starving it to death.

When it comes to medicare the Liberals are into a form of passive euthanasia that plays into the hands of those who would like to actively destroy it by what I would call right wing assisted suicide.

[The Hon. Audrey McLaughlin, October 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, this weekend the NDP elected a new leader. My caucus colleagues and I were pleased to have our new leader, Alexa McDonough, recognized in the gallery today.

The NDP caucus looks forward to working with Alexa. It also looks forward to the day when she and many others join us in this House to put forward our vision of the country and the world.

For the last six years, that vision has been put forward on our behalf in this House and across Canada by the member for Yukon, the Hon. Audrey McLaughlin. As chair of the federal NDP caucus I am honoured to be able today to pay tribute to Audrey on behalf of my colleagues and I am sure on behalf of Hill staff, party members and many other Canadians, all of whom I believe came to very much appreciate the member for Yukon and her way of doing politics.

Audrey, like some of her predecessors, had some moments here in Parliament that will be recorded in the minds and hearts of New Democrats forever as richly symbolic of the dissent which we express in this place about what is regarded by the conventional wisdom as unacceptable or unavoidable, whether it is on matters like NAFTA, privatization, deregulation, a whole list of things. Your leadership in our opposition to the gulf war was such a defining moment for many New Democrats.

And if I may say so while I am talking about courage, I remember your support of the Charlottetown accord when you put what you thought was best for your country ahead of what you knew might be politically risky for your party.

As the first woman leader of a federal party, you made history and you made it in such a way that our party was able to elect another woman as leader without gender being an issue. Thanks to your history-making leadership bid, the time when gender is an issue in Canadian political leadership contests may well be history. This is as it should be and for this all Canadians who value the equality of the sexes are indebted to you.

The member for Yukon is no longer our leader, but we are delighted that she continues to be our colleague, having put behind her the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that sometimes come with the leadership of political parties. We know that the people of Yukon will be the real beneficiaries as Audrey will now be able to give her undivided attention to a part of Canada that she so clearly loves, and whose reality she brought home to us in the NDP caucus and elsewhere.

I venture to say that the phrase coast to coast to coast, which Audrey always insisted on, by way of recognizing northern Canada and the northern coast it represents, has changed the lexicon of Canadian politics in a way that brings recognition to northern Canada and the constituency which you so ably represent.

On a personal note I remember as well the joy which you took in having caucus go to the Yukon for a retreat. I remember even better the experience of mushing on the back of a dog sled, thanks to the care which Audrey took to make sure that we all had a taste of this great northern tradition. The dogs were a little bit tired after pulling me.

Since the election of 1993 and her announcement of her intention to step down as our leader, the member for Yukon has given much of herself and her energies to the renewal process in our party, a process which she gave impetus to originally and which has helped to invigorate the NDP.

In this, as in all things, Audrey has earned the affection of many New Democrats with her warm smile, her kind words and her ability to remember so many of the countless faces and names she encountered as a political party leader.

Finally, there is one word that seems to come to everyone's mouth when we speak of the member for Yukon and that is dignity: dignity in the day to day demands of politics. I remember Audrey patiently putting on my son Daniel's rubber boots in order to personally view the flooded yards and homes of south Transcona in my riding. But most of all dignity in the face of difficult circumstances, dignity in the face of electoral defeat, dignity in the face of criticism and dignity in the passing of the torch to a new leader.

For all these things and more, Audrey, we say thank you.

[Canada Transportation Act, October 2nd, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I might say just by way of beginning that it is interesting to notice how the members of the Bloc Quebecois are using every opportunity in the House of Commons to make the point about why they think their fellow citizens in Quebec should vote yes in the coming referendum. I was interested in question period today when they were going on and on about alleged injustices to Quebec. It struck me that if the people of Quebec vote yes they are going to have a heck of a lot less of what the Bloc Quebecois were complaining they were not getting enough of.

The same of course is true with respect to transportation matters. I heard people in the Bloc refer today to the privatization of CN. I think I can say with some certainty that if there is a yes vote in Quebec the provision in Bill C-89 guaranteeing that the headquarters of this new privatized CN will be in Montreal will not continue very long past a yes vote. At least if I have anything to do with it, it will not. I would imagine that would be true for a lot of western Canadians, particularly people I represent, who from the very beginning felt that if CN was to be restructured in such a radical way, the headquarters of CN should be in western Canada, in particular in Winnipeg, because most of the traffic this new privatized CN will be directing will be in western Canada. This is just by way of making that point to the Bloc.

There are two things I want to get on the record with respect to Bill C-101. First, I do not think I have to tell anyone in the House that I am in general opposed to the overall agenda of the government with respect to Bill C-101, the privatization of CN, the deregulation of the transportation system in this country, going back to fights we had in this House against the former transport minister, Don Mazankowski, and going back before that.

Sometimes people tend to forget, in particular people in Winnipeg, that this deregulation business really started under a former Liberal Minister of Transport, who is now the Minister of Human Resources Development. There is a tendency to blame the origins of this agenda on the Conservatives when in fact it goes back beyond that to this fascination the then Minister of Transport, the member for Winnipeg South Centre, had with deregulation at that time, prior to the defeat of the Trudeau government.

I was interested to hear some of the things members said. The point I want to make here, and I do not think it has been made to this point, at least not to my satisfaction, is the process by which we are doing this, if I understand the origins of this procedure by which we refer matters to committee before second reading.

I had a lot to do with parliamentary reform in previous Parliaments and we considered this at one point. The goal of that procedure as it was first imagined was that this would be something that would be applied to bills that were held to be of a non-partisan nature. It would not be something that was available to the government alone. It would be something that could only be done with some kind of agreement in the House and therefore it would be a mechanism whereby parties could say this is a bill we do not really have much to fight about in, so we want to take it into committee and we want to go over the details.

I have noticed something that may be related to the fact that this procedure was adopted, I believe, after the beginning of this new Parliament, when the government only had to deal with rookies on the opposition side in committee. This has now become a procedure that is available to the government whenever it wants to use it, not something that requires a certain amount of co-operation on the part of the opposition. In my judgment, this goes against the spirit of the reform intent. When I say reform I do not mean Reform Party, but reform in the best sense of the word, reform of the House of Commons. This procedure has become a kind of a fast track

procedure. In my judgment, it is not being used for the intention for which it was originally designed.

We have here a massive bill, which represents a major reorientation of the way transportation decisions are made with respect to rail line abandonment, the creation of short line railways, relationships between shippers and the railway companies, a whole host of things, all of which deserve a major second reading debate. We are reconceptualizing the transportation system of the country. We should be having a debate about that, in which I would want to argue very strongly and at length, hopefully being open to questions from colleagues in the House.

Instead we have this very prescribed, circumscribed three-hour debate in which people have only ten-minute speeches, after which the whole thing is whisked off to committee. There is never really any significant debate on the principle of the bill. That is fine if there is agreement to do so and if it is the kind of legislation that lends itself to that procedure.

With respect to my Bloc and Reform colleagues, I think they let the government get away with something when they agreed to move ahead with this kind of procedure. They allowed it to go into the standing orders without the kinds of safeguards that should have been required. That is, there should have been some provision that there had to be opposition agreement in order for this procedure to be followed. I believe their inexperience did not stand them in very good stead in that respect.

I want to register once more my opposition to this bill. My opposition has been longstanding to an agenda of which this bill is the latest stage. I know my Reform colleagues were saying earlier that it does not go far enough, that it should be absolute, utter I suppose, comprehensive, total deregulation. However, I think deregulation has not served this country particularly well. It certainly has not served the transportation system very well. It certainly has not served my constituents very well, those who work at the railway and others, and the economic spin-off that used to exist in Winnipeg as a result of the presence of railway jobs there.

A couple of weeks ago another 266 people were laid off in the CN shops in Transcona. This is a far cry from the kinds of promises that were made during the 1993 election campaign by members opposite about how the many terrible things that were happening under the Tories were going to cease if only a Liberal government were elected: NAFTA would not go through, Winnipeg would be returned to its former glory as a transportation centre, rail jobs would return from Montreal and Edmonton, and no one would ever be laid off again. Well, that is not the way it has turned out. In fact we have a Liberal government doing what no Conservative government ever contemplated in public: privatizing CN Rail and devastating the community I come from.

We see here an intention on the part of the government and the railway together to basically dismantle CN Rail as we have known it and to have basically tracks and trains, that is it. Maintenance, repair, stores, and all kinds of other things the railway used to do for itself will all be contracted out, pieced off here, there, and everywhere. As a result, a lot more good-paying jobs will be lost. In the end, this is also about good-paying jobs. It is not just about railways.

I listened earlier to the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, the government whip, talking about the impediment to short line railways. One of the reasons for successor rights was to make sure that short line railways are not used as a way of union busting, are not used as a way of laying people off and then hiring them back at half of what they used to make. I do not think that is such a bad sentiment. I do not think that is something for which the NDP government in Ontario or anywhere else should have to apologize.

Those good paying jobs are disappearing. I do not think that is good for Canada. It is not good for the middle class, which is being eroded at both ends. It is not good for the revenues of the government. It is part of the reason we have a deficit in this country, because a lot of the good paying jobs are going, and with them is going the ability to pay the kind of income tax that would help pay off the deficit.

[Nuclear Testing, October 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Foreign Affairs. It has to do with the fact that the Government of France has proceeded with another nuclear test in the Pacific.

Given the government's oft-stated desire to have Canada be more of a part of the Pacific rim, I wonder if the government is prepared to show solidarity with the opinions of the governments and the peoples of the Pacific rim and call in the French ambassador and tell him just how objectionable the Canadian people and the Canadian government find this continued nuclear testing.

Will the minister tell the House today not just what he is going to say but what the government is going to do about France continually flouting the opinion of the international community on this and the future of the planet?

[Supreme Court, October 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn legislation passed by the House regarding the advertising of tobacco products is the latest evidence of a shifting balance of power away from Parliament toward the unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court.

In this and other decisions the court has extended the rights of individual citizens to business corporations as presumed legal individuals. This presumption has transformed the charter from a guarantor of individual rights to a political lever that allows corporations to evade the legitimate regulatory actions of a democratically elected government and House of Commons.

In addition, the court has also in some cases interpreted laws or extended them in ways deliberately not articulated by Parliament at the time the law was passed. This growing shift in power toward the court requires new measures to improve the accountability of the court.

I call on the government to consider a royal commission to propose measures that would add transparency to and wider participation in the process of selecting Supreme Court judges in a manner consistent with our parliamentary system of government.