Bill Blaikie

[Mexico, March 23rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, as the House will know the Prime Minister is in Mexico City today. I recently returned from Mexico City having accompanied a CAW delegation there.

One of the recommendations we made to the ambassador on our departure was that when the Prime Minister was in Mexico he should meet with human rights activists. He should not just satisfy himself with attending the trade fair and meeting with business people, as important as that may be.

I hope when the Prime Minister returns he will be able to report to this House that he has met with human rights activists. The situation in Chiapas is still very delicate. The demands of the Zapatistas have not yet been met, demands which are shared by a great many of the Mexican people.

I hope the Prime Minister will show enough interest in the welfare of the Mexican people and not just Canadian trade opportunities and meet with human rights activists while he is in Mexico City.

[Excise Act, February 22nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to presume to mediate between the government and the Reform Party on this but the point that is trying to be made by the hon. member is that what the government has done has in some way subverted the rule of law by changing the tax structure in order to deal with a problem which is essentially criminal in nature and that is smuggling.

If we believe in the rule of law, it is not a question of how hard we are on criminals, it is a question of whether we are hard on them at all. In fact what we have done here is simply changed the law in order to accommodate a circumstance that could have been dealt with in other ways.

That is the point I certainly want to make and have the member comment on. There are times when people break the law and we change it because it reflects changing values and changing circumstances, but I am not aware of changing values and changing circumstances that say smuggling is all right and we should therefore not try to deal with that simply by changing taxes.

There is the fundamental question here that the government has avoided. I can understand some of the reasons why it did what it did, but it is fair to say that the rule of law has been subverted by what the government has done. The government has chosen not to enforce law. It has chosen rather to change it.

[Business Of Supply, February 16th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I want to make a brief comment and perhaps ask the member a question.

First I want to make it absolutely clear that the New Democratic Party supports the notion that more rather than less needs to be spent on social housing, not just in Quebec but across the country. It is something we have always supported. In the past we have pressed previous governments to make a greater commitment to social housing and were disturbed by the cuts in social housing made by the previous Conservative government.

I listened earlier to a Reform member of Parliament who asked a question of the Bloc Quebecois member about what they would be prepared to give up and what would they be prepared to not spend money on in return for spending more money on social housing.

I do not want to presume to answer the question for the hon. member, however it seems to me that if we were looking for more money for social housing and for other social priorities one thing we could look at is the tax system.

I am reading an extensive article by Neil Brooks called "The Changing Structure of the Canadian Tax System, Accommodating the Rich". It is a very lengthy article in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal in the spring of 1992 and outlines the way in which the tax system has been changed over the last 10 years to accommodate the rich.

One of the ways we could find that kind of money for social housing and for other things is to look at changing the tax system. One of the things that has been floated around in the last little while is trying to bring down the amount of money that people are able to put away to avoid taxation on through the use of RRSPs. I wonder what the position of the Bloc is on that.

It would seem to me that people who have $13,000 left over to put into RRSPs and therefore avoid paying taxes on it are not the people who need social housing. Obviously a big gap exists between the people who benefit from this particular tax policy and the people who are in need of social housing.

It certainly would seem to me that some amelioration or a reduction of the amount that people are able to hide in this way might help to provide money on the other side for social purposes.

[Business Of Supply, February 16th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I want to make one brief comment.

The hon. member raised a good point when she talked about the changes made to the way the estimates were dealt with in 1969. It seems to me it is at that point that Parliament and the House of Commons began to lose control if not necessarily over spending, it lost its ability to affect spending, to have a committee actually have an effect on estimates. Therefore we got into the situation in which estimates are deemed to be passed by a certain period of time whether a committee has looked at them or not.

When I first came here there was at least an effort to question the minister and to spend some time on that. However even that atrophied after a while because members came to notice that it did not really matter what they said and these things got to be passed anyway. The minister simply took up the necessary time. When it was over it was over and the estimates were passed. The point is well taken. No amount of parliamentary reform in the last little while has been able to overcome that dilemma.

Just for the record much parliamentary reform happened here in the 1980s by unanimous consent or with the agreement of all parties, although not the reforms in April 1991. However, those particular reforms in 1969 were not the result of all-party agreement; they were brought in by the use of closure at that time by the then Liberal government.

[Prince Edward Island Fixed Link, February 15th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake but first of all I have a comment.

One of the ironies, given the environmental dimensions of this question, is that in the throne speech we heard from the government about its intention to build a green infrastructure. I wonder whether this is what it had in mind when it was talking about green infrastructure. It is certainly not incontestable. In fact it is quite debatable and arguable whether this motion and the megaproject it will bring about is in fact green infrastructure.

I would have thought it would have been much more wise on the part of the government if it is serious about green infrastructure, and this is a point I make over and over again, to invest money in rebuilding our rail system rather than allowing CN and the CP to collaborate in ways to continue the dismantling and downsizing of our rail system. That is the real green infrastructure as far as I am concerned.

It pains me to hear talk about green infrastructure at the same time as we allow projects such as this to go ahead and as we allow our railways to deteriorate.

If we are serious about greenhouse gas emissions, if we are serious about putting less hydrocarbons into the air then we should be serious about reregulating our transportation system so as to give a bias to rail. Right now there is a bias against rail. At the very least we could make it neutral.

I would prefer a bias for rail because to me that would be a bias for the environment. The government has got to stop letting the railways react to the effects of deregulation. It has to start saying that deregulation has not worked, let us reregulate. I do not care what you call it. The former Conservative Minister of Transport did not want to reregulate. He wanted to recalibrate. That is fine. I do not care whether it is called calibration, regulation, ostentation, you name it, as long as we get back to a system where we are creating more rail traffic and we are taking these trucks that look more and more like trains all the time off the road. There are trucks on the road that look more and more like trains all the time. They will probably want to go over this causeway once it is built, just to get back to the motion.

The time has come for us to build real green infrastructure. I would love to hear the member for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake comment on all of this.

[Points Of Order, February 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to raise a procedural point with respect to my statement.

As far as I am concerned the matter regarding the member for Okanagan Centre is settled. I took particular care in my statement- and I know members of the Reform Party did not like it-to refer to the Reform Party of Canada and not to the individual member.

I have been in the House for many years and the NDP has been attacked repeatedly. It has always been in order to criticize political parties. In my opinion I should not have been ruled out of order.

[Okanagan Centre Constituency Association, February 10th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, this year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Last month many Canadians watched the new film about the Dieppe raid.

Next year we will celebrate 50 years since the end of the Second World War and the defeat of Adolf Hitler at the hands of whose armies tens of thousands of Canadians died in a successful effort to rid the planet of this anti-Semitic madman.

Why then do some who work for the Reform Party of Canada stay up nights pouring over the collected works of Adolf Hitler looking for quotable-

[West Coast Ports Operations Act, 1994, February 8th, 1994]

Mr. Chairman, I have just a brief comment. The question of fines was mentioned earlier by the hon. member for Burnaby-Kingsway and I would like to reiterate the point on the clause in which we find this particular issue.

I think the fines which are impossible by virtue of this particular clause, clause 15, may well be in keeping with the tradition of back to work legislation-I remember other legislation on which we had occasion to protest the stiffness of the fines-but I would just like to say that we find these fines particularly onerous.

I find it somewhat passing strange that we can have legislation which comes down at least potentially very hard on people who may choose to disobey this particular legislation or may be seen to be counselling others to do it. I just wish we could come down this hard on a lot of other people who are doing a whole lot more damage to the environment, to society and everything else. Whenever it comes to labour relations and somebody might go out a day more than the strike called for or counselled somebody for a wildcat or to stay out one more day, the power of society is brought to bear with great force.

I just wish we had the will to be as tough on polluters, criminals and all kinds of other people, tax evaders and everyone else as we do on strikers when they sometimes do out of anger things that are contrary to the law.

(Clause agreed to.)

(Clauses 16 to 19 inclusive agreed to.)

On Clause 20:

[West Coast Ports Operations Act, 1994, February 8th, 1994]

We need to move to the clause where the amendment can properly be made and the House can properly divide on it and we can proceed from there.

[West Coast Ports Operations Act, 1994, February 8th, 1994]

Could I have clarification on the process, Mr. Chairman. I understand we are still on clause 8 and we have not proceeded from there.