Gurmant Grewal

[Electoral System, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to participate in the debate on Motion No. 398. This motion, brought forward by the member for Peterborough, calls upon the House to direct the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada to further their efforts to facilitate youth voting initiatives. Mr. Speaker, we had consultations and I will be moving a friendly amendment at the end of my speech.

Let me address some of the issues. Recent election results explain why we are so concerned about engaging youth in politics. In the 2000 federal election, voter turnout declined to its lowest level in over 40 years when 61% of eligible voters cast their ballots. That is significantly lower than the norm of 70% to 75% turnout.

This is a direct result of the Liberal style of pork barrel politics. In 1988 the federal election voter turnout was 75%. A quick look at some of the world's other major democracies make the situation look no better, but we are far behind countries like France, Germany and Sweden that all have turnouts in the 80% range. In some countries, voting is a must. People do not have a second choice.

When we look at our Canadian numbers more closely, the situation becomes even more troubling. While voter turnout has declined for all age groups, the most significant drop has been among the young people, particularly those 18 to 24 years of age. In fact more than 75% of young people who had the right to vote in 2000 did not do so.

This trend is not unique to Canada but is common to many advanced democracies. A 1999 study by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found youth voter turnout in 15 western European countries was 10% lower than the overall turnout.

An Elections Canada study in 2000 found that 78% of people 18 to 20 years old failed to vote; 73% of people 21 to 24 years old did not vote; and 62% of people 25 to 29 years old did not vote. On the other hand, 83% of those 68 years of age and over voted; 80% of people 58 to 67 years of age voted; and 76% of people 48 to 57 years of age voted.

Obviously if we want to increase the number of Canadians who vote in the federal election or any other election for that matter, we have to look at younger Canadians and consider why they are not participating in the electoral process.

Studies show that younger Canadians are not as interested as older citizens in politics. While 40% of all Canadians are under age 30, only 5% of the membership of political parties is drawn from this group which is 40% of the population in Canada. This is despite the fact that political parties open membership to people as young as 14 years of age.

A study by the Institute for Research on Public Policy found only 13% of those 18 to 29 years of age could name the prime minister, the finance minister or the leader of the opposition. In a similar 1990 survey, 20% of youth respondents were able to name all three politicians. This lack of knowledge often deters young voters from casting a ballot. They feel they would rather not vote than make an uninformed choice.

Young Canadians are less likely than their older compatriots to follow public affairs. Only 41% of respondents between 18 to 24 years of age follow political issues very closely or somewhat closely.

Teens and people in their early twenties use less social services than older people and they do not pay as many taxes. They are in good health and do not pay much attention to health issues other than going to the gym. The Canada pension plan is the furthest thing from their minds.

Simply put, people who have more of a stake in the community and have homes in the community pay more attention to the activities of the government.

What can we do? Should we just give up on young voters by concluding that they will become involved when they are ready? I do not think so. It is their future that is at stake.

By increasing the involvement of younger Canadians in the political process, we can hope they will become less cynical, develop a civic consciousness, feel closer to their neighbourhoods and take pride in their communities.

From my experience, visiting schools and meeting with teens and students, when they have the opportunity to discuss political issues, I found out that they have strong opinions. They are equally interested. When young people are informed, they want to vote. We should therefore seek to involve people in political activity at younger ages. I encourage students during their summer breaks to volunteer in my member of Parliament office. Many students come and are very happy at the end of their volunteer experience. They learn a lot and I benefit from their new ideas as well.

I was eight years old when I had the opportunity to meet the vice-president of the U.S.A. That meeting left a mark on my whole life. That is probably one of the reasons I am in this chamber today. The meeting with the vice-president of the United States in India means something. The VIPs are treated differently in Asia, as we know. In fact the vice-president invited me to visit the vice-president's gallery in the United States senate chamber. I did not know what that invitation meant. When I was old enough, I went to the United States embassy and asked officials there what the invitation was good for and they explained it to me.

One of our youngest MPs in the House, the hon. member for Calgary West, told me that when he was young his dad would ask him to watch the news before he was allowed to go to bed. He did that for quite some time. That is probably one of the reasons he is here in this chamber.

I will give another example. Mr. Speaker, I know you have met my younger son Livjot. When I was first elected I brought him to the House after a month or two. I knew he was a very curious kid. I told him to please wait in my office while I went to the House and that when I came back I would show him around. This kid could not wait in the office. He took the directory of the members of Parliament from my staff. I asked Dee where my son was and was told that he was okay, that he was just going around and that he would be back.

At 3:15, after question period, I went to my office to take my son to lunch and was surprised to find that he was not there. I had a phone call from the Prime Minister's Office. He went to the Prime Minister's Office and the offices of many other members of Parliament to talk with them. He became interested in the issues after that.

When I am abroad on parliamentary business, I now get all my updates from my younger son. He keeps all the important newspaper clippings for me and I have never had to throw any out or search for any in the waste basket.

What I have been saying is that if we get our kids involved and keep them in the political and electoral circles, it builds some interest in them.

Coming back to the point, when youth are involved in mock elections or a mock parliament, it is a good opportunity for them to experience firsthand what politics is about and it makes them interested in voting.

I applaud the work already being done by Elections Canada. I would encourage the Chief Electoral Officer to consider other ways to expand his efforts in this area.

At one time, it was very worthwhile for people to get involved in politics. People use to show up at any community event but they are now losing interest. We in this House should try too restore the integrity in and credibility of politics.

Mr. Speaker, I have had discussions with the hon. member for Peterborough and I hope there will be unanimous consent for the following amendment. I move:

That the House direct the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada to expand its initiatives to promote the participation of young Canadians in the electoral process, and that these initiatives include making available educational material to schools and other organizations, and supporting parallel voting opportunities for prospective electors during federal elections, including making available polling materials and the publication of results of such parallel voting, and that Elections Canada work creatively with such groups as Kids Voting Canada, Scouts Canada, Guides Canada, teachers and others, and provide regular reports on these matters to the House of Commons through the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

I hope, Mr. Speaker, you find unanimous consent among all party members to accept this amendment for the sake of the future of our youth in the country.

[Supply, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I think sometimes it is the government's intent to fool Canadians by diverting their attention into something which will not produce anything, or trying to shove everything under the carpet for the time being, under an excuse, so it can hide and not answer the tough questions that the opposition and media are going to ask it.

I agree with the member that the previous record of the Liberal government on the Krever, Somalia, APEC and many other inquiries indicates that the government is not serious about it.

If the Prime Minister were serious about it, he would have done something right away and would have taken some serious action.

[Supply, February 17th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question from my hon. colleague. He always asks very intelligent questions.

In this situation, with the former finance minister, now the current Prime Minister, we see a pattern. Look at how Canadians have valued the finance minister. Some people used to say that he balanced the budget and gave him credit for that.

However, let us see how he balanced the budget. He stole $45 million from the EI fund, which did not belong to him or his government, and put it into the government revenues. This money belonged to the employers and employees.

If we look at a different example, the Prime Minister once promised to eliminate all tax havens. When he acted on that promise, he conveniently forgot to include Barbados, which permitted CSL to register its ships there and save, by one estimate, about $103 million in Canadian taxes. Convenient indeed. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's companies received millions of dollars from the government in contracts.

There are many examples that can be related to the pattern that has developed where the former finance minister, now the Prime Minister, has demonstrated that his character, his personality, his thinking, his actions and his talk do not match the ethical leader to which Canadians were looking forward.

I am sure Canadians will be careful not to vote for a corrupt, weak and arrogant Liberal government and its leader.

[Supply, February 17th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to participate in the supply day motion debate, as well as to congratulate you formally on your appointment as Deputy Speaker of the chamber. I wish you good luck and I am quite confident that with your personality and abilities you will do a wonderful job in the House.

Canadians are disgusted with the ethically bankrupt Liberal government and its miserable record of corruption, frauds and scandals. For years we have been witness to one boondoggle after another. Hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, have been misspent in one manner or another, often on questionable grants to Liberal held ridings.

This grates on the nerves of all taxpayers, especially when those accountable dismiss the losses. “So what if a few million dollars were stolen”, said the former prime minister, Mr. Jean Chrétien. A few million may look small when contrasted with a $180 billion federal budget and the huge amount that has been pocketed by the Liberal Party out of that money.

When we start talking about a quarter of a billion dollars in the sponsorship scandal, much of which appears to have ended up in the hands of Liberal cronies and eventually in the pocket of the Liberal Party, it becomes a nightmare for all Canadians.

It appears from the Auditor General's report that the government has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through the public works department and five crown corporations to a number of Quebec advertising agencies, all with ties to the federal Liberal Party of Canada.

In some cases all the advertising agencies were doing was transferring money from one government department to a government agency and charging a hefty commission. For example, for one transaction, the transferring of a cheque for $900 million to one of the crown corporations, an advertising agency charged $112,000 as a commission for picking up and delivering the cheque.

As the Auditor General pointed out, there was no need for a middleman in those transactions. It certainly was not a service worth thousands or millions of dollars.

It has been suggested in the media that the money was paid for services performed for the Liberal Party during the 1997 and 2000 elections. There seems little other explanation for why the Liberals would be rewarding these firms with millions of dollars.

The Prime Minister claims that he did not know what was going on. This program began in 1997 when the Prime Minister was finance minister, the custodian of the public purse and vice-chair of the Treasury Board committee. How could a finance minister, vice-chair of the Treasury Board committee and senior Quebec minister not know what was going on? Does the Prime Minister want Canadians to believe that he is incompetent? That will be reassuring to Canadian voters come election time.

According to the Prime Minister's latest spin on the scandal, it is no longer the work of a few rogue bureaucrats but rather a political operation. While at first claiming complete ignorance to what was going on, as further information has come to light he now admits to having been aware of rumours surrounding the sponsorship program, but thinking it merely a matter of some administrative failures until the Auditor General's report confirmed how corrupt it really was.

This is the same Prime Minister who for the past 13 years has been busy back-stabbing and manipulating to take over the Liberal Party's leadership.

His hold over the party was so complete that by 2002 that he was able to force Mr. Jean Chrétien into retirement. When he submitted his nomination papers for the contest to become Liberal leader, he had the support of 259 out of 301 riding presidents. Can members imagine that?

However the Prime Minister now wants us to believe that despite all his ground work securing the support of the party, he had no idea what was going on inside the party. Frankly I find that to be unbelievable. I do not care how strained the relationship was between the Prime Minister and his successor, the current leader of the Liberal Party could not have been oblivious to the political corruption that was taking place right under his nose.

He was aware of the scandals surrounding Shawinigan, the HRDC boondoggles, the transitional jobs fund, the $2 billion gun registry and the long history of mismanagement in the regional development agencies. It should have been more surprising to him if the sponsorship program had not been corrupt.

The Prime Minister, in just the last year, has proven that he has a bad memory. He seems to forget important details until reminded by the official opposition or by the media. Let us take, for instance, the Prime Minister's multi-million dollar family business, Canada Steamship Lines.

All the while he was finance minister, CSL was supposedly held in a blind trust. According to the Prime Minister, he was held completely in the dark, but, alas, that was not completely true. The blind trust actually had at least a dozen holes in it.

The Prime Minister has finally admitted that he did have briefings on at least a dozen occasions by company executives on important issues affecting CSL. However the ethics counsellor was always present so that everything was okay, so much so that the ethics councillor charged the government purse for lunch expenses for his meetings with the Prime Minister and his staff.

His family business received contracts worth $161 million from the government instead of the original figure indicated of $137,000.

Last fall it was revealed that five Liberal cabinet ministers had received free flights or vacations from Canada's corporate elite. The former finance minister, however, remained quiet at that time. It was only later, after his objective of being elected Liberal leader was accomplished, did he come clean and admit that he too had benefited from the generosity of corporate Canada.

When asked about the rule that ministers have to publicly declare gifts valued at more than $200, the soon to be Prime Minister replied that everyone else was breaking the rules too. He was hiding behind everyone else. On that day the Prime Minister proved that while he may be a political leader, he certainly was not a moral leader.

While other parties receive significant donations from everyday Canadians, the Liberals have always relied upon the generous support of the corporate elite, usually the same corporations that receive lucrative government contracts.

Let me give one example. Over the course of four years, Geratec Inc., which later became Tecsult Inc., received $136 million worth of contracts from CIDA. However, in return, it gave $137,000 to the Liberal government.

I would like to say to the Prime Minister that whether it is $12 million of funds raised for his campaign from the same business elite who might at one time be looking forward to getting some benefit from the Prime Minister, or whether it is the tax havens where the Prime Minister's family's company has registered the ships, it raises difficult questions.

Since coming to power in 1993, the Liberals have been actively eroding the confidence Canadians have in their government. Noted Canadian historian, the author of Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney , Michael Bliss, refers to the latest sponsorship scandal as the mother of all Canadian political scandals.

Michael Bliss goes on to write that it is without precedent in our country's history and that the previous scandals pale by comparison.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question of the Liberal member across who was just speaking. He talked about democratic reform and the democratic deficit. How democratic is the Liberals' record when they invoked time allocation and closure 85 times in their record? How democratic are they? How democratic is the new Prime Minister's government when it invokes closure within six days after Parliament is in session? The former Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, waited for one and a half years before first invoking closure.

I also would like to know if the member can tell me this. If the Liberal government is reinstating the same old bills from the previous session, can anyone with general common sense tell me why it would prorogue Parliament in the first place? If it is reinstating the same bills and the same motions in the same state they were left without any changes, why did the Liberals prorogue Parliament in the first place?

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the speech by the member for Glengarry--Prescott--Russell was more a lecture on the democratic deficit, but I would like to ask three quick questions of the former government House leader.

First, the member talked about denying democracy. Democracy has been constantly denied in the House by two means: by restricting free votes and by invoking closure or time allocation. How many times, in his records, has he invoked closure or time allocation? Probably 85 times, which is a record in parliamentary history.

It has been emphasized that a precedent is set by reinstating the motion to reinstate the previous bills from the previous government. It is an unprecedented move in parliamentary history for a new Prime Minister to reinstate the bills from the previous government or previous prime minister. Moreover, the current Prime Minister has stated, and I quote, “my position on parliamentary reform is that closure should be the exception, not the rule”.

It was not on December 10, 2002, but this is what the Prime Minister stated. Now, in the first six days, he has invoked closure. We just got a notice of closure on this reinstatement motion. The former prime minister, Jean Chrétien, waited for a year and half to invoke closure on any bill, so I would say that the current Prime Minister has broken all the records and has contributed to the democratic deficit more than anyone else has done, and he has done it faster than anyone else has done.

So that was the first question: how many times has the former government House leader invoked closure or time allocation?

Second, why was the House closed in the first place? Could the member answer that for me? It is a mystery. I cannot comprehend why the House was closed in the first place other than the Liberals' partisan reasons or their infighting that led to the new Prime Minister's takeover from the former prime minister so that then Parliament was prorogued.

Finally, the member has talked about a few bills. He wanted us to support some of the bills and he asked for reasons. Here is what I would like to ask the former government House leader about. I had a private member's motion to ask for tougher penalties for those criminals who were setting booby traps to kill or injure the firefighters who went to put out fires at marijuana grow ops or methamphetamine labs. Why was the motion denied but then brought into Bill C-32? It was the same content.

Similarly, I had another motion about developing a national standard on academic credentials and then using that national standard to recognize foreign academic credentials. The motion was put down by the government, but then it included the same contents in the throne speech. If this is not partisanship, what is it? How can we think of supporting those bills which do not serve a purpose for Canadians while on the other hand the government puts down an opposition member's bill and then tries to steal the contents and include them in government legislation? There are no other words for it.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it does not matter whether or not I like those bills. It is a matter of principle that when the House prorogued, there was a change of guard in the Liberal government.

The message coming from the Liberal government is that there is a new leader, a new message and a new promise, that everything is new, that there is a new vision. However, that is not the case. If that is not the case, then why was the House prorogued in the first place?

What we see is that the government is simply concerned about one bill, the early election bill, and everything else is only window dressing.

Every member in the House, probably including you, Mr. Speaker, knows that nothing will be accomplished until April to put these bills through. Nothing significant will be accomplished. Their passage has not been accomplished; since 1993 those bills have been recycled again and again. Those bills did not go through and did not become law in this country, the endangered species act and many others.

In a nutshell, as a matter of principle, why would the government recycle the same bills, redo the work that was done in the past? Why we did it in the first place is beyond my comprehension.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, that is further evidence of a lot of hot air coming from the other side. The government is making the same kinds of promises that it has made for the last 10 years. However it has not been keeping those promises. What good are promises if they cannot be kept?

This is further evidence that the Prime Minister talks the talk but does not walk the walk. The Liberals have been saying many things to please voters in order to have them vote for them and retain them as the government but I warn the old, tired, weak Liberal government that Canadians are smarter. They will understand and they will judge them by their actions and not by their promises.

We all know about the red book promises, whether it was in 1993, 1997 or 2000. Those promises were not worth the paper they were printed on.

We know about the closures. On the one hand the government talks about a democratic deficit but the first thing we need is a free and open debate. When the government puts closure on a free and open debate, it does not know what the left hand or the right hand is doing. There is no coordination.

As soon as the debate began the government put forward a closure motion. For the sake of those who are watching this debate in the House, the government now has the record of bringing in closure on a debate. The democratic deficit has been ballooning but it began with the current government. How will the government eliminate the deficit when it is already accumulating?

I have no faith in the government when it says that it will eliminate a democratic deficit. I could count 20 things that it should do to eliminate the democratic deficit but it will not happen. It talks the talk but will not do the walk.

In fact, what we will see is an early election bill. I do not call it a redistribution bill. I call it an early election bill to suit the Liberals' primary purpose of calling an early election. Rather than waiting until August when the redistribution would have automatically taken place, they want to call the election in April because they are afraid Canadians will know that the promises they are making they will not be able to keep.

The government wants to call an election before the Prime Minister slides in the polls. Maybe the government would like to do another undemocratic thing. Maybe after the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race is held it could call an election before the new leader is prepared or has a chance to get out and talk to Canadians.

The government is probably the most undemocratic government I have seen. I would call it an elected dictatorship.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to debate the motion regarding the reinstatement of past bills in the House.

This is a very serious issue. The government is to be a new government with a new vision. It is supposed to be coming up with new ideas; however, it is asking the House to reintroduce bills from the previous session. As we know, the government has been recycling these bills.

Before I begin my arguments, I would like to say that there have been precedents in the past where previous governments have introduced bills at their previous stage. In 1970, 1972, 1979 and many times before, bills were re-introduced. Motions have been introduced in the House to reinstate previous bills into a new session of Parliament after prorogation.

What was the need to prorogue the House? It was because of mismanagement by the Liberals of their own affairs. They had the leadership contest in the previous session. They mistimed their own leadership contest. When the new leader came into power, he was supposed to have a new vision and new ideas for Parliament.

I accept that it is the practice for the government to reinstate bills in a new session. Marleau and Montpetit cite a number of precedents that have happened in the past. In 1970, 1972, 1974 and 1986 the House gave unanimous consent to motions to reinstate bills. In 1977 and 1982 the House adopted amendments to the Standing Orders to carry over legislation to the next session. There were motions in the House in 1991 and 1996, and since I arrived in the House in 1997, we have had similar motions for reinstatement in 1999 and 2002.

The reinstatement of bills expedites House business at the beginning of a new session. Bills that have already been studied can be reinstated to the point they had reached in a previous session. The House and members of committees do not have to waste their time and resources on questions that have already been settled.

Having said that, I still cannot help but find it ironic that we are here today considering the reinstatement of bills from the last session. After all, it was just one week ago today that the Governor General read the Speech from the Throne. I find one sentence in the throne speech particularly interesting in light of what we are considering today. It states:

This Speech from the Throne marks the start of a new government; a new agenda--

What new agenda was she speaking of? The throne speech contained a laundry list of promises, but nearly every one can be found in previous speeches from the throne by the same Liberal government. In fact, the core of last week's throne speech can be gleaned from the Liberal's 1993 red book. Needless to say, there is not much new about decade old promises.

The same government has been talking about restoring the public's faith in the management of government ever since it took over the reins of power in 1993. In that time it has done absolutely nothing but further erode the trust that Canadians have in their government by moving from one boondoggle to the next.

Does the government honestly think that keeping details of federal contracts given to Barbados shipping conglomerates hidden from the public will restore faith in government?

Need I say anything about the renewed promises for an independent ethics commissioner? I will believe that one when I see it.

By seeking to reinstate bills from the last session the Prime Minister is undermining all claims about being new. If the government was truly new, truly different from its predecessor, the Prime Minister could have chosen from three options.

First, he could have begun this session with a clean slate, introducing his own legislation that reflects his own priorities. That would have made perfect sense. Any government that is truly new would want to set out its own course and not reach back and steal the agenda of its predecessor.

Second, if the incoming Prime Minister did not have his own priorities, then he could have at least taken the existing bills of the last session and incorporated some of the constructive changes that have been proposed by members in this chamber, both from the official opposition as well as from other backbench members of Parliament. While this choice would not reflect any new ideas on the Prime Minister's part, it would at least mesh with his stated desire to give added power to backbench MPs. However, I am not holding my breath and waiting for this to occur either.

The Prime Minister's third option is to reinstate bills from the previous session with his own amendments.

However, the Prime Minister has chosen none of these options. He has instead decided to proceed from where Mr. Chrétien left off. In doing so, he ends all pretensions of being different or new in any way and continues with Mr. Chrétien's agenda in the same direction.

The important question is, why did the Liberals prorogue Parliament and waste all the work that was done in the House? In the process, why did the government keep the House adjourned for so long?

We are dealing with a tired, weak and worn out government, bereft of new ideas. There are a number of bills that the government is now trying to bring forward that we would seriously like to see dropped. If that were done, then probably there could be some agreement reached on the reinstatement motion.

Let us pause for a few minutes to consider some of the legislation, that died on the Order Paper when the government prorogued Parliament last fall, that I would like to exclude from this reinstatement motion. Let us begin with Bill C-34 which would, among other things, fulfill the Liberals' decade old promise to put in place an ethics commissioner who reports to Parliament.

The current ethics counsellor has no independence or investigative powers. He is completely controlled by the Prime Minister and reports in private to the Prime Minister about conflicts involving ministers. Mr. Wilson rubber stamps almost everything the Liberals do as ethical. The proposed new ethics commissioner would be more independent, although not nearly as independent as he could be. We are also getting an independent ethics officer to oversee the conduct of senators. The Prime Minister would retain the power to appoint both, after consultation with the opposition leaders. However, each choice would have to be ratified by a vote in the respective chamber.

The new commissioners would not be truly independent if only a majority vote by government members is required to ratify the appointments. Opposition approval should be required. This bill is primarily a public relations exercise. The Liberals want to go into next spring's election saying that they have done something. It will not work.

Let us consider why we need an ethics commissioner in the first place. It is because we cannot trust the government to police its own members. If the Liberals had passed this bill after their election in 1993, could the scandals and corruption of the last decade been avoided?

Would it have prevented the questionable contracting activities of former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano? Would it have prevented his successor from accepting personal favours from a departmental contractor? Would it have prevented the former defence minister from giving an untendered contract to his girlfriend, or the former solicitor general from lobbying his own officials to award millions in grants to a college led by his brother? Would this bill have prevented the Liberals from ignoring the Auditor General's charge that they had misstated the government's financial position by $800 million in 1996 and by $2.5 billion in 1997? Would it have prevented the government from interfering with the Somalia inquiry, when its efforts to get to the bottom of document destruction at national defence threatened to expose people at the top? Would it have prevented the government from attempting to obstruct the Krever inquiry into the tainted blood scandal, when it threatened to expose culpability on the part of the Liberals? Would the bill have prevented the systematic misuse of taxpayers' dollars for partisan purposes in the billion dollar boondoggle at HRDC? I do not think so.

There is Bill C-38, the government's misguided attempt to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. This legislation would do nothing to save our communities from the ravages of marijuana or the violence and crime that accompanies it. Rather, the bill would take us one step closer to the legalization of marijuana.

With this bill the Liberals are sending out the wrong message to Canadians, and particularly to young Canadians. Decriminalization makes it sound like it is okay to smoke pot. However, it is not okay. Studies show marijuana is four times more deadly than tobacco, whose use the government already spends hundreds of millions of dollars to discourage.

As for the increase in penalties for grow op owners, these are long overdue, but are meaningless if not enforced by the courts. The current law is not being applied. Grow op operators are sometimes receiving seven convictions without ever seeing the inside of a jail cell. What is the good in increasing maximum penalties if the courts are unwilling to hand out even weak sentences? What is really needed is minimum sentencing that will make people think twice before breaking the law. This bill should never be reintroduced as is. It seriously needs to be reconsidered.

Then there is Bill C-22 that proposes amendments to the Divorce Act. The assumption of shared parenting should be built into the Divorce Act. Shared custody encourages the real involvement of both parents in their children's lives.

On the other hand, we have Bill C-32, an act to amend the Criminal Code and other acts. Among other things, the bill would make it a Criminal Code offence to set a deadly trap in a place used for a criminal purpose. This would protect first responders, that is, firefighters, police, et cetera, whose lives could be endangered by entering such a place in the performance of their duties. I strongly support the bill because it deals with issues I have been pursuing for a number of years.

In fact, I introduced a motion in the House that was debated but rejected by the Liberals. What happened after that was that they stole the idea and put it into their own bill, Bill C-32. I do not understand why a motion introduced by an opposition MP was not good enough for passing in the House but the contents of the motion were good enough to be stolen and put into Bill C-32. That is the partisan nature of this place. However if any idea is good it should not matter whether it comes from the opposition or the Liberals.

In 2001 I introduced that motion and the Liberals rejected it, but we need to look at the issue seriously. There were 13,724 arson fires in Canada in 2002. I was alarmed to learn that over 30% of the fires in my home community of Surrey were as a result of arson. A very high percentage of them contained booby traps. There have been arson fires in schools and fiery explosions in residential neighbourhoods that have threatened the safety of citizens.

These fires are disturbing. Some were caused purely by mischief but many were set with more sinister intentions of covering up illegal activities, such as marijuana growing or methamphetamine labs. At other times, firefighters respond to calls only to find the premises booby-trapped with crossbows, propane canisters ready to explode, cutaway floor boards or other serious but intentional hazards. These malicious devices are intended to kill or injure anyone who interferes with the drug operation, including the firefighters. Firefighters in Surrey are especially at risk considering the growing number of marijuana grow operations that plague the city.

Bill C-32 is one bill that I would be pleased to see reinstated. Firefighters and other first responders have been waiting too long for this important legislation. However the government has been dragging its heels on the bill. It should be ashamed for delaying the bill for so long.

There is a history of precedents testifying to the long-standing practice in the House of allowing the reinstatement of bills at the same stage as this motion proposes. However if the Prime Minister truly believes that he heads a new government, he cannot call upon previous precedents where in every other instance there was no change in government.

The Prime Minister tries so hard to portray the government as new. Yes, the leader has changed, as have a few of his minions. The former lieutenant is now the commander but it is still the same old government making the same old promises.

By my count, the Speech from the Throne contained 31 uses of the word “new”. There were probably more. This was part of a feeble attempt to convince Canadians that they now have a new government. However all the “new” in the speech could not hide the fact that it was an old message. The Prime Minister wants to have his cake and eat it too.

The hon. House leader on Friday spoke of how a reinstatement motion avoids wasting Parliament's time and resources. His government should have thought about that before needlessly proroguing Parliament in the first place.

The government's plan to reinstate legislation from a previous session is further evidence, as if any more were required, that nothing has changed since the Liberals changed leaders. The new Prime Minister is continuing yet another practice of his predecessors. It is cynical practice and it manipulates the rules for electoral gain. Canadians will not be impressed.

The government's plan to reinstate legislation from the previous session is further evidence that nothing has changed since the Liberals changed leaders. They have been wasting the time of the House. We know the election will be called and nothing much will be accomplished. We have before us a tired government with a tired agenda that is interested in little more than remaining in office.

[Petitions, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to present eight petitions signed by hundreds of people. The petitioners call upon Parliament to immediately hold a renewed debate on the definition of marriage and to reaffirm, as it did in 1999, its commitment to take all necessary steps to preserve the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. The petitioners urge that it should be the members of Parliament who should decide on the definition of marriage, not the courts.