Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak about Bill C-4, which is an act to implement the agreement among the Government of Canada, the governments of member states of the European Space Agency, the Government of Japan, the Government of the Russian federation and the Government of the United States of America concerning co-operation on the civil international space station.
The first thing that strikes me about this bill is that it concerns an agreement between many nations. The order paper says that on the bill before us today there will be speeches of 20 minutes which are subject to a period for questions and comments of 10 minutes for the first five hours of debate. I am wondering if we will actually get five hours of debate. Most bills in this House do not, as everyone is probably aware. Usually closure is brought to bear long before we ever get to that period.
I think back to the last bill that was discussed in this House, the Nisga'a land claim, that was supposed to be the final deal with the Nisga'a. That is a very erroneous title. It certainly will not be the final deal. I do see some similarities between what we are discussing today and the whole idea of the Nisga'a.
The similarity is that there was a government to government discussion with the Nisga'a. There is a government to government discussion with the international space agency. In the case of the international space agency, I believe it is quite appropriate. In the other instance, I think it was totally inappropriate.
The Nisga'a land settlement claim that is supposed to be the final claim was never discussed at the grassroots level. Thank heaven for the pressure applied by the Reform Party because the committee will now travel to some parts of British Columbia during the week of November 14 to have hearings and perhaps get a little local and grassroots input on the bill.
I see some similarities between these two pieces of legislation. Both of them, as I have already touched on, were part of multiparty negotiations. I am not too sure about the space agency negotiations, but I am pretty sure that most of the Nisga'a negotiations took place behind closed doors. Perhaps some of the negotiations for the space station took place behind closed doors as well.
I would also draw a similarity in the projected cost of these agreements. It is suggested that $1.5 billion or thereabouts, over $1 billion at least, will be needed to support the international space station. We are also going to have to come up with another $1 billion to support the Nisga'a treaty. In the people's republic of British Columbia it was suggested that it is not going to cost the taxpayers of British Columbia much money, that federal taxpayer money would be used to seal the deal.
We all know there is only one taxpayer. It is impossible to line people up and say, “You people pay strictly provincial taxes and you people over here pay strictly federal taxes”. You know this, Mr. Speaker, because you pay a lot of taxes. It is one of the hazards of people in your income category. There is no differentiation between whether you pay provincial or federal taxes. You pay taxes. There is only one taxpayer and that taxpayer is hit with all different levels of taxation.
The international space station, as some of my colleagues have pointed out, has great potential. One thing we look forward to is getting some information on climate change; whether civilization is having a tremendous impact on the climate, or whether the climate is having an impact on civilization. I for one would be very interested in observations made by that international body as to which is the case. A great controversy is raging as to which is the case.
Some people say that we have depleted our ozone layer through our activities here on Earth to the point where it is no longer safe to go out in the sunshine. I wonder if we have come to the point where we can measure the thickness or the intensity of the ozone layer, and now having the method in which to measure those layers, if we are not just observing a natural phenomenon and leaping to the conclusion that civilization is to blame for what is happening.
I am under the impression that this is a done deal, that the Government of Canada is now saying, “Oh, by the way, we need $1.5 billion”. That is entirely consistent with the way the Liberals do things. It was the same with the Nisga'a deal. The deal was cut. It was passed through the provincial house in British Columbia and it was done so with closure.
There must be something about that bill which carries the desire to invoke closure on it because it certainly has had that effect on the House. After four hours of debate, we have something that is going to create another level of government in the country and it is going to be entrenched in the constitution.
Changing the constitution in this country is a very onerous task, as it should be. It takes a great amount of consultation and agreement. There is the 7-50 rule, seven provinces with better than 50% of the population voting in favour of changes to the constitution. That was never done.
The Nisga'a deal has made changes to the constitution. That treaty has been entrenched in the constitution of Canada without ever having asked the citizens of Canada whether they wanted to have those changes made.
I know the position that we as a party are taking on this certainly is not the mainstream sentiment. The position this party took on the Charlottetown accord was not the accepted position. The establishment across Canada felt that the Charlottetown accord was the best invention since penicillin. The Reform Party and some other groups took the position that it was not. It was fraught with flaws. When the Charlottetown accord went to a referendum, we were vindicated in that 70% of Canadians who voted in that referendum voted against it. It was a resounding defeat.
The architects said that they would not be worried about that at all. They said they had other ways of amending the constitution and that they would set about doing it through the back door. Apparently the back door is wide open. Now we have a treaty that is entrenched in the constitution of Canada. The laws of the people that this treaty covers now supersede those of the province and of the dominion, and if Canadians do not like it, too bad. The Liberals know best. It is no longer father knows best; it is the Liberals know best.
We hear time and time again from the members of the government that it is just a matter that they have to educate Canadians, that it is being done in Canadians' best interests. We will see about that. I am quite confident that history will bear us out that we have taken the proper position.
My information on the civil international space station agreement is that it more or less has been a done deal since January 29, 1998. We are closing in on a year since the deal was signed. Of course the government comes to us now and says, “Oh, by the way, we forgot one minor detail. We need $1 billion or maybe $1.5 billion to finance this project”. It is not that I begrudge the financing of the international space station, but it is the way it was done, and $1 billion or $1.5 billion is a pile of money.
I am invited to talk to school children from time to time. They ask me questions about the difference between the deficit and the debt. I try my best to put $1 billion into perspective. We bandy that word around like it was nothing, a billion here, a billion there. Mr. Speaker, pretty soon it runs into real money. It could even deplete your bank account in time.
I try to explain it to the students. I think everybody can put $100 in perspective. Even primary school children can put $100 in perspective. Ten $10 bills make $100. One hundred $100 bills make $1,000. They are all with me so far, even the primary students. Then if we have a thousand $1,000 bills, we have $1 million. If we have one thousand million, we have $1 billion. Of course, as I do this I just keep adding zeros to the $10 bill. That puts $1 billion in perspective.
If that does not register with them, I try this story. If we had $1 million and it was on the table and we decided to spend that at $1,000 a day, in about three years or a little less, it would be gone. Let us assume that it does not attract any interest rate. It is just laying there on the table in thousand dollar bills. If I spent one a day, in about three years it would all be gone. If there were $1 billion dollars on the table, I would have to live about 3,000 years to spend it at $1,000 a day. I think that puts $1 billion in perspective. It is a lot of money.
At the present time we have a debt of about $580 billion. We are paying out between $40 billion and $50 billion a year in interest. That money has to come out of the pockets of families across the nation. We have a duty to spend that money wisely and frugally. Just because government has the ability to reach into people's pockets and extract their hard earned wages does not give it that right. There is a huge difference between the ability and the right. The government has given itself the ability to reach into the pockets of Canadians and take out any given amount.
When we look at the history of the country we realize that taxes have consistently risen. They have never decreased and I think it is about time they did. We were told in 1991 that the GST would replace the manufacturers sales tax, a 12% tax that applied to some items. The items the manufacturers sales tax applied to were to be less expensive because the tax that would be applied to them would be a very reasonable 7% tax rather than the rather onerous 12% manufacturers sales tax. That has not happened. As a result about $15 billion a year comes into the federal coffers through the GST, and still the country was running $42 billion deficits as late as 1993.
On the subject at hand, we want to ensure that intellectual property rights are protected. If a company or an individual working on some aspect of the space station were to come up with some leading edge technology, some kind of ground breaking work discovery, how would that intellectual property be protected? Are we talking about a communal effort, the same aspect as the Hutterite colony where nobody owns anything and everything is owned collectively? Is that the way this process works, or will individual intellectual rights be protected? I am not at all sure of that.
While we are talking about collective rights versus individual rights, I am again reminded of the bill we were discussing, the Nisga'a so-called final agreement. Collective rights in the Nisga'a agreement supersede individual rights. I do not think that is the Canadian way of doing things. Individual rights in the country are of paramount importance and should always take precedence over collective rights.
One year my wife and I took a holiday to enjoy the beaches of Cuba. One thing which was extremely apparent there was that individuals had no rights. They might have a form of security but they had no rights. A policeman can stand on the street corner. When people are driving by in their dilapidated old cars, he simply blows his whistle and points to whomever he wants to stop, and they bloody well stop right away. They know that if they do not they could have their old car all shot to pieces, and themselves besides.
That is an ultimate example of where collective rights supersede individual rights. I talked to the people in Cuba and discovered there were two kinds of people: those involved in the regime and great supporters of it, and those who were governed by the regime and did not support it at all.
