Charlie Penson

[Petitions, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have eight petitions to present today calling upon Parliament to recognize the institution of marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

This topic has been the number one issue in my riding this past year. Combined, there are over 700 signatures.

[Hockey, March 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, you may have noticed a lot of hockey players in town this week, out walking about enjoying the Ottawa spring.

That is because the Canadian Adult Recreation Hockey Association is hosting the 2004 World Cup of Hockey right here in Ottawa this week. There are 126 teams competing, 51 international and 75 Canadian.

In all there are over 4,500 players participating from 10 different countries. Two teams from Alberta hail from my riding. They are the Grande Prairie Pentastars and the Spirit River Oldtimers.

Hockey of course is the national game of Canada and it is certainly a hotbed in the Peace River country. I am sure that it will be a fun and exciting week for all the players.

This is an opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new friends. I am sure they are going to enjoy their week here in Ottawa. Good luck to all of them.

[The Budget, March 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, in response to my colleague from the Bloc, the best example I could use of the problems on the other side is that the Liberals seem to always look for more and more money out of the general population. I call it shaking the tree to see how much they can jar loose.

I think back to a short time ago when the RCMP uncovered some huge frauds with respect to the GST. Some of them were being run out of prisons in Kingston and other places. Hundreds of millions of dollars were missing. At the same time, if any mom and pop corner store was a week behind, the GST police were out there harassing them.

I agree with my colleague that there is very little in the budget for average Canadians. Even this year the employment insurance overcharge continues. How is it that the government has built up a $40 billion reserve in the EI account? We all know that there is no actual surplus. The government spent it long ago. It continues to overcharge Canadian workers and Canadian families to generate more money. The government has an addiction to spend more and more all the time.

As I have said, there is almost 8% more spending this year. It is simply not sustainable. Canadians are beginning to realize that they cannot trust the government. The Liberals have crossed the line on trust. People do not trust them any more because of the wasteful spending and the sort of money laundering operations that are completely out of control. This will be reflected in the next election and the present government will not be coming back as the Government of Canada.

[The Budget, March 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in debate in response to the budget that was brought down last week.

A lot of Canadians were looking forward to the new Prime Minister's vision. Since he had been campaigning for almost 15 years for the job, we had expected to see a visionary budget from the Prime Minister with new ideas on how to get the country back on track and rolling again. We have had a decline in the standard of living over the last 30 years under this regime and flat growth in the economy. In fact, the growth was down last year quite a bit over the year before. I think it was about 1.7% GDP growth and it was 3.3% the year prior to that. Exports are down and are not recovering.

In my capacity as the critic for international trade, this is a concern to me. It is a concern that Canadian companies are not able to compete on the world market, especially in the United States, in the way they should be able to. The government is a huge drag on their productivity. It is productivity that is being costed because the government taxes Canadian companies too heavily. There is too much regulation.

When I was the critic for industry, we had a series of studies on lack of competitiveness and on productivity. I am sorry to have to say it, but over the last 30 years Canada has fallen very badly. Thirty years ago the United States was number one in productivity and Canada was a very close second. That is how it should be. We have a country with tremendous potential and natural resources. We have a tremendously educated population. We should be doing far better than we are.

I am sad to say that while the United States is still number one, we have fallen to 15th in terms of productivity. We are behind countries like the Netherlands and Ireland, the southeastern United States and it goes on and on. I can only blame the government across the way for its intrusive policies that have grown the size of government in this country to about 12% higher than that of the United States.

If that was all productive growth and the government was building bridges and roads and so on, that would be one thing, but it is not. Some people would argue that the cost of health care should be reflected in that. That is about 2% of GDP, so that needs to be reflected. That still leaves a long way between the 42.5% and the 29.5% the United States has.

The reason I mention this is that trade has become a very productive engine for the Canadian economy. We rely on exports for 43% of our GDP. That is not a small number. The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food will know that a lot of that trade has been developed in the United States in the last 10 years. That is where the big growth in agriculture trade has developed.

It means that the United States is our biggest trading partner. We export something like 85% of all of our goods to the United States. That is a trend that has continually gone up. It does not make any sense to me that the government across the way in the last two years has been antagonizing our major trading partner, saying very disparaging things about the administration and the U.S. population. That has hurt us in the last couple of years.

I would expect that we would have seen tax relief in this budget in order to help Canadian companies that are trying to compete. We have seen some tinkering at the edges. There was small corporate tax relief for people depreciating computers and data network systems and the airport tax was reduced by $2, but this is just nibbling at the edges.

That is not the bold innovation we would expect from a government under a new Prime Minister. He pretends he is new and has new ideas. He has had 15 years to hone his skills in presenting this new agenda. No, I am very disappointed. There is no vision, no new ideas. It is a very tired administration.

Worse than that, the government does not seem to have a handle on the wasteful and corrupt spending that has been happening. The Prime Minister says he is in favour of getting to the bottom of it. It sure does not look that way during question period in the House. The Prime Minister is not asking his committee members to divulge information to the public accounts committee that is looking into the matter.

Some of the waste which is really hurting our productivity and which costs Canadians tax dollars are things like the billion dollar gun registry. It is fast approaching $2 billion and basically there is nothing to show for it. We only have to think back a couple of years ago to the billion dollars that was blown out by the Department of Human Resources Development.

I remember that the riding of the minister at the time got a pretty good grant. One of the businesses, a potato chip company, got something like $70 million to move from Niagara Falls to Brantford, 50 miles down the road so that it could be in the minister's riding. The company was able to update its equipment. What did that do for the Canadian economy? It cost taxpayers a lot of money.

The Auditor General has suggested that the sponsorship scandal has cost about $250 million with about $100 million of that missing or paid in commissions that we will never get back. Some of it seemed to be laundered through the Liberal Party itself. That is the kind of thing that is costing our productivity. It is hurting our ability to compete. We simply cannot afford to let that happen.

I would expect that the new administration over there, which is what they like to call themselves, would try to get to the bottom of it. We have not seen that and that is a real concern to me.

The budget has spending increases. My colleague from Lakeland talked about a 7.6% increase in discretionary or program spending. This is not really new. Since the budget was balanced in 1997 we have seen those kinds of increases each year. We believe spending has to increase but it only has to increase based on the inflation factor plus the growth in population. That is roughly 3.5%. This far exceeds the level of program spending that is required.

Even worse, we see again in this budget a kind of fancy footwork being done for projecting low surpluses. Room is always left for special spending for the government's friends. I want to take a moment to talk about that special spending.

Why would the Government of Canada be in the business of giving grants to companies like Bombardier Aerospace, international companies like Pratt & Whitney and General Electric Aerospace? These are the kinds of companies that get hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

The government says it has to have an industrial policy. If Canadians want to support these companies in their expansion endeavours, they have the ability to do that. They are publicly traded companies. Canadians could buy shares in the stock market and show their confidence. What we do not want is the Government of Canada making these investments for us. I hear it all the time from taxpayers.

That is one of the reasons we cannot get the kind of tax relief we need to make the rest of our companies competitive. The government has picked sectors that it is championing and it just happens that the aerospace sector is one of them.

We understand that Bombardier is about to develop a new wide body 100 passenger jet probably in the next year. I suppose it will be asking government for more money. That seems to be the way it is being done, to ask the taxpayers for more money.

When Canadair, a publicly owned crown corporation, was in the business of developing these jets, the Mulroney government said it wanted to get out of the business. The government of the day did not think government should be in business and it privatized Canadair. It seems a little incredulous but according to the government, the company that came forward with the best offer was Bombardier at about $170 million.

Canadians can be excused for thinking that it was going to be the end of the Canadian government's involvement but that was not to be the case. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, we are still going down that road of economic development. The government should get out of the business of being in business and lower taxes so that all Canadians can take advantage of that, and we will find out where Canadians want to spend their money.

We are being hurt by these policies. Another policy in the budget is to provide some $250 million of venture capital money, but who is going to have the ability to put that out? A crown corporation, Business Development Bank of Canada is going to be the only one disbursing the $250 million. I can just see five or 10 years from now, if the government is allowed to continue on, we will be asking questions about where that went.

There is lots of room for Canada to realize its potential. We can get back to where we were in terms of our productivity and competitiveness. We can regain our standard of living throughout the world. We can raise Canadians up by the bootstraps by allowing them some tax relief and letting them decide what to do with the money that they get to keep, rather than a tired, old administration spending their money day after day, recklessly in a lot of cases without the hope of it ever coming back. We must end the waste and corruption that we have seen in programs such as the sponsorship scandal.

Canadians were hoping for a lot better. However, considering that it is the same administration and the Prime Minister was the finance minister for almost 10 years, we were expecting too much.

[Sponsorship Program, March 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister seems to have lost his voice at very convenient times today. He needs to stand up and answer the question. There is $100 million of Canadian taxpayers' dollars missing out of the budget.

When the Prime Minister shuffled the President of the Privy Council into cabinet, was he informed of the relationship between the President of the Privy Council and Pierre Tremblay?

[Sponsorship Program, March 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is painfully obvious that the Prime Minister needs to stand in his place today and answer one question. The question is, when the Prime Minister shuffled the President of the Privy Council into cabinet, was he informed of the relationship between the President of the Privy Council and Pierre Tremblay?

[User Fees Act, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I understand the member's sense of urgency in wanting to get this passed today. We support this bill; however, I want to remind him that his government has approximately a year and a half left in its mandate. I do not see why an early election needs to be called. We need to be on record speaking to bills like this.

I am pleased today to support the bill. I have spoken to it many times in the past and have seen it evolve. I want to congratulate the member on his tenacity in championing this issue for several years.

Bill C-212 has changed quite a bit after going through the House of Commons and the Senate. Despite all of the amendments and the compromises, I believe the bill continues to embody the first steps to a fair and more responsive user pay system that better reflects Canadian democratic values. I truly hope that Bill C-212 would soon be put to a final vote, and that royal assent and proclamation would not be far behind.

User fees can be a responsible method of cost recovery for government services directed at specific clients and client groups; however, demands for fees can be and are sometimes abusive when there are weak controls. That is what this bill sets to correct.

In a democratic society, it is understood that fees charged by governments should reflect the actual cost of providing a service, which I am sorry to say has not always been the case. In addition, user fees should be set in coordination, conjunction and cooperation with all of the different groups that are subject to them, which seems to be a matter of common sense.

To say that Canadians deserve an accountable and transparent government must be more than just the chiming of the latest buzz words. It goes right to the heart of what we expect from a modern democracy. Empty rhetoric or window dressing will no longer do. Action and conviction are necessary and we must do the right thing in these kinds of cases.

Conservatives appreciate and hold in the highest regard the obligation of the state due to its vast power and authority over citizens to play fair. It is for that reason that the member for Medicine Hat introduced a similar private member's bill designed to reign in the power of the bureaucracy to charge for services in 1997, which was called Bill C-202 at the time. We are happy that the member for Etobicoke North has taken up this challenge to bring more accountability and transparency to the price charged for certain government services.

Expanded cost recovery had become a clear necessity during the early 1990s. We understand that; however, while the deficit is long gone, the user pay system still brings in over $4 billion to the federal coffers every year. Over 50 federal departments and agencies are currently levying over 500 different fees.

As responsible elected members, we must have a way to govern this mushrooming use of user fees, and respond to the serious concerns that a user pay system can and sometimes does take advantage of the users.

We agree with the member that safeguards and guarantees are needed. For example, greater parliamentary oversight should be required when user fees are introduced or changed. Increased stakeholder participation, including stakeholder impact and competitive analysis before fees, should be put in place.

Other long overdue changes would be: guaranteed performance standards for user pay services, annual reporting requirements for the government-wide user pay regime, and an independent dispute settlement process to deal with the complaints.

As I mentioned before, Bill C-212 has changed considerably from the version tabled by the member several years ago. In particular, the exclusion of crown corporations from these improvements is regrettable, which was the amended version coming back from the Senate, especially considering recent revelations that unscrupulous types can and have used the crown corporations to advance partisan political agendas and personal economic fortunes. The fact that crown corporations are no longer included makes that a bit of a problem.

Nevertheless, I believe this bill is a step in the right direction toward the struggle for increased government accountability and transparency. We may have to wait for a Conservative government to finish the job, which may not be that far away, but in the meantime we are happy to support Bill C-212.

[The Budget, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the old trick of smoke and mirrors is no longer working. Canadians do not believe the government on this issue.

The finance minister cancelled the Prime Minister's secret Liberal fund because it failed to meet sound fiscal management. The Prime Minister knew about the program for the past 10 years yet chose to hide it from the Auditor General and Canadians.

Why did it take him a decade to cancel this fund? Who really speaks for Canadians these days and the Liberal government in the House, the finance minister or the Prime Minister?

[The Budget, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Calgary Centre laid bare that lie yesterday. That just is not so. The Prime Minister is defending this secret fund. He continues to do that.

Eddie Goldenberg, the top aide to the former prime minister, said that the current Prime Minister knew about the fund all along. Even the Auditor General had no knowledge that the half a billion dollars was spent with no rules or program criteria.

Why did the Prime Minister, the former minister of finance, continue to let this fund go unchecked under his watch for 10 years?

[The Budget, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the government is out of control and the unity fund is just the latest example. The finance minister cancelled the secret fund because of all of the problems with it. Even the Prime Minister's own official called it a honey pot.

Yesterday the Prime Minister called the fund a normal operating procedure. Who represents the government's position, the Minister of Finance who rejected the fund, or the Prime Minister who is defending it?