Bill Blaikie

[Supply, June 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I said that I thought Canadian politics was dominated too much by party discipline. I mean that as an across the board comment.

I would point out to the member that there is a free vote in the Ontario legislature tonight sponsored by an NDP government. It is a counter example to what the member is saying. But I agree. When the McGrath committee recommended that there be a broader range of issues on which people should feel free of party discipline it meant that for all parties. When I signed that report I meant that for all parties.

With respect to the other issue the member raised-I see you rising, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps the House would just allow me to respond to the final point about what is the role of members of Parliament when we are freed up from party discipline. Are we then freed up from party discipline to vote our conscience, or to vote with the majority of our constituents, or perhaps they might overlap, or perhaps they might be in conflict.

It is a much more complicated matter than what Reform members tend to argue is the case because they argue that it is a question of respecting the majority view of their constituents.

[Supply, June 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to participate in this debate tonight and to make a few comments, a few well-researched comments I might add. I have had a lot of time to prepare.

I listened with interest to a number of members who spoke earlier this evening. I was particularly concerned and tried to respond earlier in the form of a question and comment to Reform Party members who had been talking in the context of their remarks about the confidence convention in the House. I am very glad to have this opportunity to pick up where I left off at one point earlier.

I wanted to say and had an opportunity to partially say to Reform Party members that they should be a bit more humble about the whole tradition of advocating more free votes, less party discipline and less respect for the confidence convention in this House. I ask them to be cognizant of the fact that the special committee on reform of the House of Commons which was struck after the 1984 election and which was chaired by the Hon. Jim McGrath made a number of recommendations along the very lines the Reform Party members are in the habit of getting up and suggesting to the House.

I would suggest to my Reform Party colleagues that they read the McGrath report, if they have not already. Maybe some of them have. In there they will find recommendations about the confidence convention, about party discipline, about free votes. What they will find is a recommendation that there be a wider range of issues on which members of Parliament should feel freer to vote their conscience, or that of their constituents, or whatever they want to do, but that they not be bound by party discipline.

We received a lot of advice at that time from eminent constitutional and parliamentary scholars, like the late Eugene Forsey and others, that the confidence convention is given far too much weight in the Canadian political tradition. Even in the mother of Parliaments at Westminster will be found many more examples of backbench members of Parliament on the govern-

ment side for instance, voting against government measures. It means that the cabinet and the Prime Minister have to be much more sensitive to backbench opinion and that is a good thing.

I also want to say to Reform Party members that with respect to the rules of the House there is nothing more left to be done. As a result of the McGrath committee report all the technical language of confidence was taken out of the standing orders.

Prior to 1985, the word "confidence" did appear in the standing orders with respect to allotted days, supply days, et cetera. What that committee recommended was that all the language of confidence be taken out of the standing orders so that from that day forward nothing would be technically or procedurally a matter of confidence. The only things that would be matters of confidence would be things that were declared at the political level by the government to be matters of confidence.

There is nothing in the rules of the House of Commons at this point that prevents the government or any other political party from having free votes. It is all a matter of the culture of the particular government or the political party. As members will have noticed even among themselves this is a difficult thing to overcome.

As far as I know even the Reform Party itself has tended to vote as a party. You tend to have similar positions, but when you do not there should be the freedom to express the variety of opinion that exists within the caucus, particularly on the government side. I say that because it is harder on the government. There is no reason on earth why government should regard everything as a matter of confidence.

What the McGrath committee recommended was that unless the government explicitly declares something to be a matter of confidence, it is not. It is a matter of political culture in the final analysis. It is not a matter of procedure. It is not a matter of rules. It is related to the media and how they treat division within parties, et cetera. It is a question of trying to change our attitude around here. Procedurally we can lead the horse to water but we cannot make it drink. It has to drink by itself.

The government has to drink from the river of diversity within its own ranks, just as other political parties do, and that takes courage. It takes courage on the part of political leaders and it takes courage on the part of political backbenchers no matter what party they belong to.

In the final analysis, there is not a member of Parliament here who is not free to get up and vote differently than his party or his leader, or her party or her leader, any time they want.

Therefore I think there is a mistake in approach on the part of my Reform colleagues who keep insisting there is something the government must do. There is nothing the government could do. All the government needs to do is to set its own members free. There is nothing procedurally or legislatively or anything like that that needs to be done.

It is not clear when they are speaking. I am not making this up. Their argument sounds as if there is something the government should be doing. The thing they could do best, if they are really serious about this, is to demonstrate it in their own practices.

I just wanted Reformers to know that this call for less party discipline, for more distance from the confidence convention and for less domination by parties in the House of Commons precedes their arrival. I am sure it goes back a long time. It goes back to the non-partisan movements of the 1920s and 1930s to the Progressive Party and various other things. But its most recent incarnation here happened in the 1980s as a result of the McGrath committee report. Even before that there was the Lefebvre committee which was chaired by the late Senator Tom Lefebvre when he was a member of this House. That committee made recommendations on this.

There has been progress. When you come here as a member, you think things as they are are the way they have always been, but prior to 1985 we could not even vote on private members' bills unless there was unanimous consent. There are a variety of other ways in which individual members have been given more power to express themselves as individuals, not just in private members' business but in committees.

Prior to 1985 a committee could only study what the government asked it to study. Committees had no independent power to decide to study this or that. If I had the time I could go on and list a number of other things. I just say this because there is, I would say, a certain kind of hubris on the part of my Reform colleagues that there were no parliamentary reformers before they arrived.

There have been reforms and there have been a lot of us who have been advocating these kinds of reforms partially successfully and partially without success. Let us carry on, but let us not act as if nothing happened before we got here.

[Supply, June 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have just a quick comment that has more to do with the member's remarks on the question of party discipline and the question of confidence.

I would like to say to him as a member of the Reform Party that members of the Reform caucus should be careful not to think that this kind of debate about free votes, party discipline and the confidence convention came to the House with them.

I recommend the member read the McGrath committee report on parliamentary reform tabled in the House in 1985. It was an all-party report, headed by Jim McGrath, a former long time Conservative member and then lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland. I was a member of that committee in which it was said that the Canadian parliamentary system was far too dominated by party discipline, that there needed to be a broader range of issues on which members of all parties felt free to vote as individuals rather than as party members.

I made my first speech calling for more free votes in the House in 1981. By way of advocating a little humility, I just say there were people advocating this kind of flexibility in the House of Commons before those guys came along. If the member wants to read the McGrath report, I would recommend it to him.

[Supply, June 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, while the hon. member is engaged in giving the House a history lesson he might be well advised to include in his remarks the fact that long before Claude Ryan in 1980, or long before they asked the

first question in a poll in 1944, the predecessor of the NDP, the CCF, was calling for the abolition of the Senate since 1933.

This is the longstanding position of our party with respect to the Senate and the effrontery over the decades at having an appointed body in the centre of our democratic decision making process. I have certainly found it very difficult on occasion to explain Canadian senators when I have been in other countries with them. They tend to be treated as if they are American senators. Everybody sort of oohs and ahs when they hear that someone is a senator. We have to take them aside and explain that they are not like American senators who get elected every six years, that these people are appointed for life and are thereafter untouchable except by the good Lord himself. It is something that most banana republics would not tolerate, the idea of having a body like this one appointed basically for life or until age 75.

I wanted to say that we agree with the notion that the Senate should be abolished. It is certainly something that has been on the Canadian political table for a long time, long before the Bloc Quebecois came along. We have been open in recent years as to how the Senate might be reinvented on a more democratic basis to deal with some of the political problems that the country has experienced, and we continue to be open to that.

As for the existing Senate, that appointed body, we continually take the same offence at it that we have historically taken. We therefore agree with the thrust of the motion to do away with the current Senate.

[Transportation Subsidies, June 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Transport.

I had occasion also to read the minister's speech in Thunder Bay. I was concerned about a portion of the speech where the minister talked about direct subsidies to the transportation system. Almost all of the examples he uses of direct subsidies are on the rail side.

It seems this perpetuates the myth that it is the rail sector of this country which is subsidized while other sectors like air and highways are not subsidized by the taxpayer, although it is perhaps less direct and less explicit.

Will the minister assure the House that in whatever he intends to do to our transportation system he will take into account the fact that highways and airports and sectors other than rail are heavily subsidized as well, only not explicitly? Will he keep that in mind when he analyses the rail sector?

[Young Offenders Act, June 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to pursue a question that I asked of the government a couple of weeks ago. It was actually answered by the Prime Minister.

It had to do with the testimony in committee of someone representing the tobacco industry who threatened to use the North American free trade agreement and the protection of trademark and the property rights entrenched therein to get in the way of the government's apparent intention to bring in plain packaging of cigarettes as a way of discouraging the use of tobacco and I presume particularly by way of discouraging young people who may be attracted by elegant and attractive packaging, although presumably this is something that not just young people are vulnerable to.

I say apparent intention of the government because I am not absolutely sure that the government and the Minister of Health are really intent on doing this. I hope they are because I think it is a worthwhile experiment and I hope that they will not be intimidated by these kinds of threats.

When the Prime Minister answered my question he said he had a different view of the free trade agreement. We have seen a few times when the Prime Minister thinks that if he has a different view of the free trade agreement this is enough. The fact is that the free trade agreement has a text that can be adjudicated in a dispute settlement process and in a variety of other ways. It may not matter what the Prime Minister's view is if it is the view of certain multinational corporations that regard what the government plans to do as objectionable.

If they take the view that the agreement prohibits this, they have a great deal of ability to enforce that. It would not be out of sync with what the agreement actually seeks to do, as I understand it, and that is to limit the power of government to get in the way of transnational business.

This is not the sort of idea that comes out of left field, so to speak. This is the purpose of these agreements, to limit the power of democratically elected governments to get in the way of the profit strategies of transnational corporations.

We have seen other elements of this where the same kind of property right has been entrenched in these free trade agreements or in the GATT or even more shamefully in this House before these agreements were even signed. I am thinking now of the legislation which in two different stages brought about the abandonment of the generic drug legislation that we had in this country. Again, it was one of the ways in which this new free trading regime we have as a result of the FTA and NAFTA and now as a result of the GATT has given new freedom to the corporate agenda.

I hope the government will go ahead with this experiment and not draw back. If it draws back we will never know whether the threat that was made that day, even though it was publicly sloughed off by the Prime Minister, is in fact the real reason. I would certainly encourage the government to test the agreement on this and in other ways.

[Young Offenders Act, June 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the hon. member could make clear what his objection is. If I understand him correctly he is objecting to the idea that members of Parliament should be asked to express themselves in this way because obviously we have the opportunity that other Canadians do not. We can vote here, not with a PIN number, but with our vote as a member of Parliament.

That is certainly what I intend to do. I was confused when I received a letter inviting me to cast a vote in this way because it seems to me that I have that right to do so as a member of Parliament. I will do it when it comes up.

It would be interesting to know whether this is a referendum among members of Parliament that is sort of a substitute mechanism for the votes that we take here, or whether we were simply being included in a larger referendum. I thought that is what a certain Reform Party member was up to. I received the thing today and now I am not sure exactly what is going on. Perhaps the member would want to comment on that.

Perhaps he could also say whether he objects to the whole concept. Let us assume for a minute that everyone has the kind of phone that is needed. I take it the member would still have some reservations about this kind of process. Would he? Is it simply a matter of everyone not having the right kind of phone?

[D-Day, June 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my thanks to colleagues for agreeing to my request.

I think it is only appropriate on the 50th anniversary of D-Day that we have an opportunity to reflect in the House and across the country, to gather together all those feelings and thoughts and reflections that we have had over the last few years as a number of different 50th anniversaries have come to us as a result of the 1990s.

I think of the 50th anniversary of Dieppe, the 50th anniversary of the Italy campaign, the 50th anniversary of Hong Kong, the Battle of the Atlantic, and all the other campaigns and battles in which Canadians participated with equal courage.

Today is the 50th anniversary of D-Day and something which I think brings it all together because this was the last big push; this was the beginning of the end.

I am very glad to be able to rise on behalf of my colleagues in the NDP caucus to express our appreciation for the men and women who participated in the D-Day landings and to extend our warmest wishes to all the survivors who are here today in Ottawa and overseas with the Prime Minister.

I would like to particularly mention, if I might be parochial for a minute, the two Winnipeg regiments that participated in the D-Day landing, the Fort Gary Horse and the Royal Winnipeg Rifles.

Finally, as a young person I had an opportunity to go to Europe. The people of my generation went with packsacks on their backs, Canadian flags on their backs, hitchhiking or bicycling as the case may be. I first came face to face with the sacrifice that young Canadians of a previous generation made when I was cycling through Holland in May 1971. I saw a big cross and a monument. My friend and I stopped. We had a good look. It turned out we were in a placed called Bergen-op-Zoom. There is a Canadian war cemetery with about 2,000 Canadians buried there.

We started to look around and seeing it was a Canadian war cemetery, we started to look at all the different headstones. It struck us, as we were 19 at the time, that most of the men lying there were the same age as we were. We could not leave until we had visited every grave. It took us a number of hours. We were captured by the weight of the images before us.

Ten years later as a member of Parliament I had an occasion to go to another Canadian war cemetery in Edegem. It struck me then, as it struck me when I returned again when I was 40 to Vimy, how really young these men were. I did not know how young they were the first time I was in a Canadian war cemetery because I was the same age as they were. Having looked again when I was 30 and again when I was 40, I realize what these people gave up and what they sacrificed. That is what we remember here today.

[D-Day, June 6th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. I wonder if I could have the unanimous consent of the House to speak on this occasion on behalf of the New Democratic Party caucus.

[Points Of Order, June 1st, 1994]

It is.