Bill Blaikie

[Canadian National Railway, February 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Immigration and it has to do with the rail strike that is going on and the extent to which the Canadian National Railway is importing Americans to do the work of striking Canadian railroaders. They are otherwise known as scabs.

Is the minister's department investigating the number of Americans who are coming across the border to do the work of striking Canadian railroaders? Is she willing to call CNR and ask for a list of these thugs who are coming in to do Canadian work? Is she going to call the CAW in and ask for the information that it has about Americans coming in? What is the government doing about this outrage?

[CN Rail, February 20th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the strike at Canadian National Railway has the potential to be an ugly one. The government needs to take an aggressive, hands-on approach to this major national labour dispute.

The reason for this is quite simple. CN top management is now primarily American and cares not what it does to Canadian workers, communities, values or traditions. Replacement workers, or scabs, are not something that was ever contemplated in the context of past rail strikes.

This time CN is actively training scabs, or as in Toronto already, bringing in American workers from Illinois to help break the strike. This is outrageous. If this Liberal government, which privatized CN in the first place, allows this to happen, then the Prime Minister might as well run up the American flag and admit that our largest railway is owned and operated by interests and values that come from somewhere else.

Asking railroaders to accept minimal increases while profits soar and bonuses for management proliferate is unacceptable. I urge the Minister of Labour to use the Canada Labour Code and the full extent of her powers to prevent this attack on Canadian workers from succeeding.

[National Defence, February 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, what we all want and what the Prime Minister says he wants is for the Canadian people to know everything they need to know before they have to render a judgment on the government. That is what we should all be interested in.

I want to switch from Liberal wars to star wars. I want to go beyond the lover's quarrel between the Tories and the Liberals on the scandals and get to where they are really of one mind when it comes to star wars.

Today the Russians successfully tested a new anti-missile defence technology, thus contributing to the argument that this will all lead to a new arms race.

Will the Prime Minister stand up in the House today and say that Canada will not contribute in any way--

[Sponsorship Program, February 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, at the risk of being a bit anti-climactic, I have a question for the Prime Minister, who yesterday accused me of attacking public servants. The person I mentioned actually was a political staffer and the Prime Minister should know the difference. Public servants are the ones who got their salaries frozen and political staffers are the ones who got the 30% increase.

I would like to ask the Prime Minister a question about the inquiry, because in an answer he just gave, it seemed like he was not concerned about the open-ended nature of the inquiry. Is he not concerned that the inquiry may be so open-ended that it would go past the election that he intends to call?

[Sponsorship Program, February 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I believe I said worked with Mr. Gagliano, not for.

The fact of the matter is that this is a person right in the Prime Minister's Office who should have known what was going on. The Prime Minister is telling us he has never had a conversation with this person who said he did not know that people were actually stealing money. He might have thought that maybe they were stealing money, but not actually.

I mean, how much more does the Prime Minister have to ask us to believe?

[Sponsorship Program, February 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister, whom I would like to welcome back from his recent political road show. I am sure the Prime Minister never realized that his first disaster relief tour would be his own.

The Prime Minister says that things are getting better, but I can tell him that a lack of phone calls at the constituency office does not always mean anything. Sometimes silence is scarier.

Given that one of his senior advisors worked with Mr. Gagliano at one point, could he tell me who else is in his office that was imported from that office, presumably for their ability not to notice what was going on.

[Sponsorship Program, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is starting to look like another Bre-X story of Canadian politics and even today some Liberal MPs are beginning to jump from the helicopters. There will probably be more of them.

I want to ask the Deputy Prime Minister this. We know what they have already done. We want to know why they will not pay the money back, the money that the Liberal Party got in donations from the ad agencies in question. They should pay it back.

[Sponsorship Program, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I would refer to the Prime Minister's unwillingness to be here to face the music, but I do not want to be as unparliamentary as the member for Saint John, so I will not.

I do have a question for the Deputy Prime Minister. The government seems anxious to redeem itself and to show us that it is dealing in good faith with this issue, so I say to the Deputy Prime Minister, one of the things that could be done is that the government could take steps to make sure that the money that was given to the Liberal Party by the ad agencies in question is given back to the Canadian public for the work that was done on behalf of the Liberal Party.

[Lobbyists, February 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, we do not know what those standards are because there are no standards with respect to how corporate lobbyists ought to relate to the Prime Minister's Office. They go in and out on a regular basis. It is like a revolving door. This is a cause for concern. The rules that apply to former civil servants do not seem to apply to corporate lobbyists.

I am asking the Minister of Finance, is he not concerned about this? Because if he is not, he should be. Will the government provide some rules for how these people should conduct themselves? Just telling us they are a bunch of great guys is not enough.

[Lobbyists, February 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, they say that breaking up is hard to do. It has been an emotional week for everyone: Paul and Jean, Ken and Barbie. And I think that Ken and Barbie managed to break up with more dignity than the Prime Minister and the former prime minister.

I am more concerned, as we all should be, with the future to some degree. I want to ask the Minister of Finance about the possibility of future scandals as a result of the increasingly incestuous relationship between corporate lobbyists and the Prime Minister's Office.

I wonder if the Minister of Finance could tell us what the government is going to do about all the corporate lobbyists in the Prime Minister's Office. Is it not time that they hit the road, so to speak, so we do not have to worry about them being paid off in the future?