Ted White

[Species at Risk Act, February 20th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it must be fairly obvious to anyone watching the proceedings today that it is only opposition members who are getting up to speak on the bill. The reason is that we are the only ones in the House who are concerned about private property rights and the fact that the government wants to confiscate property without any compensation.

It is a shame that there are no media people here to record this and tell the public what is going on. I realize they are very busy with the Warren Kinsella affair and do not have the opportunity to be here right now. Actually, I will bet that the Liberals opposite wish that Warren Kinsella had stayed in North Vancouver the way he promised to when he ran against me in 1997. He said that he had made his new home there and he was staying there. I can tell the House that I am glad he went over to those folks over there.

I think it is incredible that we have a situation here where, at the discretion of the minister, there will be compensation or no compensation for the confiscation of people's land. There are no standards by which a landowner will be able to judge whether or not he will get compensation. There will not be any guarantee, because if the players change, the people making the discretionary decisions change. There will be no certainty for those landowners. I believe the end result will be similar to what has happened in the United States: kill it and bury it if there is the slightest chance that there is something on your land that will cause the government to confiscate your property. This will not work in the interest of species at risk. It will work against them.

I have a constituent in my riding who owns property in the Kamloops area. He has a known species at risk on his land. He has deliberately produced a roadway that goes right around and well out of the way of this species so that he can protect it. However, he has told me that if he gets wind that the government is coming in and will not allow him to have that road to the other part of his land he will just make sure that this species disappears before the government finds out.

This is a really key thing that the government does not seem to be realizing. It has not given it enough thought. I think that is typical of a lot that the government does. It simply does not give legislation sufficient thought.

For example, I see the Minister of Justice sitting opposite. Obviously there was never enough thought given to that ridiculous gun registry that has blown away $700 million. There was never enough thought given to that stupid DNA registry that allows convicted criminals to escape giving DNA samples.

There is simply not enough thought given to the legislation that comes from that side of the House, but the Liberals had no trouble today blowing away $115 million on a ridiculous humanities research project. As if there was not already enough money wasted in that Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, they will blow away another $115 million.

I well remember being at a cocktail party with Pierre Trudeau and a former member of the House, Ian McClelland, one night. Ian McClelland said to Pierre Trudeau “Great group of social programs that you introduced there, Pierre. It's a shame you never thought of how we would pay for them”. Does anyone know what Pierre Trudeau said? He said “Yes, when I think about it we should have given it more thought at the time”.

That is my point. Still today the government is not giving enough thought to the legislation it rams through the House. That is why opposition members, one after the other, are getting up on the bill to try to defend the property rights of Canadians who will have their property taken away from them.

I think the problem comes down to what I call the politics of envy. It is the politics of left wingers who hate free enterprise, hate success, hate people who have managed to accumulate a bit of wealth and hate people who have private property. They think the government should give them everything and that it should own everything. It is that type of people who have no sympathy for homeowners and landowners who run the risk of having their property confiscated as a result of the bill. It is the people who have worked hard and who have made a success of themselves whom the opposition members are trying to defend today.

It makes me think again of Pierre Trudeau and his disdain for private property rights, the refusal of the Liberals to put private property rights in our constitution and the ongoing desire to waste taxpayers' money. There is $115 million that will be thrown away on this humanities research thing. I suppose it will spend money like the social sciences humanities research council already does on things like $125,000 for the Tell Madaba archeological project and its investigations of urban life in the semi-arid highlands of central Jordan. Or there is $40,222 for a project called understanding rural household, farm and village: reconceptualizing the dynamics of gender relations in Iran.

Are these good uses of taxpayers' money? The Liberals blow away the money on this stuff, but they will not compensate landowners for confiscation of their land.

There is $78,000 for isotopic studies of infant feeding practices in archaeology. This is the type of thing this Pierre Trudeau humanities council will waste our money on. It is an absolute waste of money that should be dedicated to looking after the Canadian people when their land is confiscated. There is $77,000 for behaviour and biology of early southern African populations and $65,200 for visual representation and social practice in classic Maya households.

I have pages and pages of this stuff. We try to get some sense out of the social sciences humanities research council. We ask why it is giving this money away. It says that is private. It cannot give us the files. It cannot explain why the grants were made.

The money that is blown away is a disgrace, such as $38,600 for history and aesthetics of television medical dramas in North America. Are they studying Dr. Kildare? Who cares? There is $23,740 for a study of mass media pornography. Are they spending their time on the Internet surfing and signing up? There is $86,726 for the use of time by teenagers and young adults, an international comparison. It goes on and on. There is not enough thought given to it.

Before the members opposite blew away $115 million today on a useless Pierre Trudeau foundation, they should have looked at what they are already wasting in the social sciences humanities research council, just like they should have looked more closely at this bill and what they are doing with their confiscation of private property without compensation. It is a disgrace. They should be ashamed of themselves. It is not only the Minister of Justice sitting there with a smile on her face, acting like everything is fine. She is not even the Minister of Justice any more. They should be ashamed of themselves and we should vote down the bill when it comes to a vote.

[Species at Risk Act, February 20th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I do not see a quorum in the House at this time.

And the count having been taken:

[Fisheries, February 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite has not done any research at all. In fact this issue was raised in March 1997, almost five years ago.

The scrutiny of regulations committee advised the government that its regulations were illegal, but the government has deliberately and irresponsibly ignored its obligations to fix the problem and has put a bunch of fishermen's livelihoods at risk because of that.

I would like to know, when is the minister going to abandon his repugnant race based fishery and stop awarding fisheries on the basis of the colour of a person's skin?

[Fisheries, February 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans has been called before the Standing Joint Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations because Canada's aboriginal fishing regulations have been declared illegal.

It is now clear that the minister has never had the right or the authority to establish a fishery based on race.

I would like the minister to tell the people of Canada why he has not announced an end to this illegal race based fishery.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2001, February 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal member who spoke before my colleague mentioned a couple of issues related to the budget. One was infrastructure and one was rural Canada becoming wired. I would like comment on a couple of those things.

The problem with the infrastructure programs that the Liberals have instituted in the past is that they have quite often ended up being boondoggles, handouts to friends and to special interest groups. They have not actually contributed to renewal of real infrastructure, like roads and bridges.

I do not disagree with the member that there is a need for some infrastructure investment, but not of the type that was done in the past in the $6 billion infrastructure programs that were introduced in 1994. Everyone knew that was a joke. They were handouts to all sorts of special interest groups. The degree to which I can support the member is; I would say yes, provided we really invest in real infrastructure.

As to rural Canada becoming wired, I think most people in the country would agree that that was a complete waste of money. The private sector was doing very well getting Canadians wired. Frankly, in areas where it was not economic to do so, people were coping by getting onto the Internet over the regular phone lines. This can be done on cell phones and satellite phones so I do not see any reason why taxpayers should have to pour huge amounts of money into that system. It is just ridiculous when the money could have been used in more worthwhile areas.

When I look at the budget as a whole, the finance minister has failed to put a stop to billions of dollars that flow out the door of the treasury every year by discretionary grants and contribution programs. Every year billions of dollars of taxpayer money is handed out by virtually every department of government in discretionary grants programs. It is fairly shocking when we look at where that money goes. I will give some examples of that in just a moment.

It is interesting to note that for three years now there have been generous federal surpluses, but instead of aggressively paying down our national debt, the Liberals use most of the surplus to significantly increase spending for their pet projects. As a result, it is still spending about 25% of the entire budget, $40 billion a year, on interest payments on the debt.

That is totally unacceptable because $40 billion a year could build 200 brand new Lion's Gate Bridges in Vancouver every year for what is being spent on interest payments on our debt. Instead of ramping up the spending to special interest groups, if the government had instead taken an aggressive approach to pay down of the debt, it would have freed up more money to spend on our important programs.

The problem is we have these terrible grants and contribution programs, and I want to give some examples.

The first example would be grants to political friends. The human resources development department has been atrociously handled over the past few years. We know that it wasted billions of dollars. It keeps sinking money into businesses that go bankrupt. The latest one is that more than $618,000 that was sunk into Celebrity Boats Corporation in the Prime Minister's riding before it went bankrupt.

Taxpayers have also backed loans to Air Wisconsin, Northwest Airlines, which is the fourth largest airline in the United States, to help them buy jets from Bombardier. Estimates of the cost of these loans to taxpayers exceed $1.6 billion. Frankly, the finance minister should be vetoing this corporate welfare and taking away the Prime Minister's credit card because it is just unacceptable to be blowing away this kind of money.

Then we have cultural nonsense. Quite apart from the almost $1 billion in subsidies to the CBC, there are numerous smaller amounts spent on questionable cultural grants that add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, even though the previous foreign affairs minister skipped the world conference against racism in South Africa, his substitute, the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism at the time, blew about $2 million on everything from child care expenses and bottled water to Starbucks coffee mugs, cookies and wall hangings.

Also, in this year's budget was around $25 million for provincial cultural events, 84% of which went to Quebec while the entire west, Atlantic Canada and Ontario received a paltry $3.8 million. The finance minister needs to put a stop to this sort of nonsensical and irrelevant spending.

The minister of heritage has a $2.2 billion Canadian heritage ministry. It has been identified by the auditor general as having no clear objectives, no criteria for measuring the success of its programs, yet the minister asked for a $26 million increase this year.

The example set by the minister herself leaves a lot to be desired. For the third year in a row, she topped the list for the most expensive travel budget in the Liberal cabinet. She racked up $159,000 in travel expenses last year, well above the travel budget for the previous minister of industry, Brian Tobin, who spent $105,438. Brian's bill though was for just six months of travel, so I would guess that if he was still here he would easily have toppled the heritage minister's record for the current year. It is time the finance minister called in their travel cards and cut them off as well.

What an example of misguided Liberal social engineering the gun registry has turned out to be. Just as predicted by Reform MPs back in 1994, the cost of the registry has spiraled completely out of control, yet the police commissioner to date has been completely unable to provide a single example of a crime either solved or prevented because of the registry.

We do know though of one murder which was apparently committed as a result of the so-called gun control legislation. A man in Nain, Newfoundland and Labrador, who was prohibited from owning firearms incidentally, went to the RCMP and picked up a rifle that had been held in storage for him. He has now been charged with killing a 15 year old boy, but it has been reported that the aboriginal exemptions and adaptations of Bill C-68 forced the RCMP to give this man his rifle.

When the former minister of justice introduced the gun control bill in 1994, he promised us in the House that it would not cost more than $85 million over five years, yet the registry has already consumed more than half a billion dollars. By 2003 it is expected to reach a billion dollars.

Are Canadians really getting value from the $750 million already spent and several hundred civil servants employed by the registry? The minister should abandon this waste of money and transfer the funding to the RCMP, CSIS and immigration enforcement budgets where we could start to get on top of the criminal refugee problem that we have in the country. That is what we should be spending the half billion dollars on, getting rid of the thieves and cheats who come here because of our inability to control our borders.

The millennium bureau is another example of waste. It is unbelievable and amazing that the Liberals are still pouring money into the millennium bureau almost two years after the celebrations. This year they want another $9.7 million. Are they planning for the next millennium? I hate to think what the size of the budget will be 98 years from now. It is time for the finance minister to sell off its furniture and close the office down.

One of my favourites is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. More than $100 million disappears into this unaccountable pit of government waste every single year. I have tried for years to get someone, anyone, to provide me with a logical reason why this sinkhole for taxpayer money should even exist, but the entire organization seems to be shielded from scrutiny. It is about time the minister pulled the plug on this one and made a payment on our debt with the saved money.

I have pages of examples here, but I know that my time is running short so I think what I will do is change the tone of the debate for a moment.

I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following therefor: “Bill C-49, an Act to Implement Certain Provisions of the Budget, be not now read a second time but that it be read a second time, this day, six months hence”.

[Public Works and Government Services Canada, February 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, we all know that Alfonso made the best cappuccino on the Hill, but that is not a good enough reason to ignore the overwhelming evidence that he played fast and loose with taxpayer money.

Why not have an inquiry and put the issue to rest? Did Alfonso use his position to hand out taxpayer money inappropriately? If not, why have so many public servants claimed that he did?

The public has a right to know and I want to know. Why will the government not order an inquiry if its committee lapdogs will not?

[Public Works and Government Services Canada, February 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it simply is not credible to expect us to believe that nobody on the government side is the least bit concerned about Alfonso's activities pre-Denmark. Yet yesterday every Liberal on the public works committee voted against any inquiry into the Alfonso affair.

Why exactly were the Liberal members whipped into voting against an inquiry that would have cleared the air for the public of Canada?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I have thought about that quite often. I am certain that for a lot of members of the government it is very well-meaning. I do not think they have thought it through. It is a little like the refugee determination system, where people arrive at our doorstep every day claiming refugee status and we let them in while we ignore five million refugee claimants in refugee camps around the world.

The attitude of the government should be that queue jumpers should not be allowed in. We should send them to the refugee camps and take people from the refugee camps who have already been waiting for three years. It is distorted logic. The Liberals definitely have good intentions but they are misplaced intentions.

The only other explanation I have is they are not willing to face the political fallout that would come from chiefs and the native communities across Canada. The chiefs and the power brokers on reserves will just have an uproar if or when the government tries to change things to bring democracy to the reserves. That may be the reason why they do nothing to change it.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it would be difficult for me to disagree with the suggestion that he has made. In fact, some members of the Squamish reserve made that same suggestion to me at least two years ago because they had been trying unsuccessfully for years to trace how the money was being spent on their reserve.

It appears that the reserve in total receives something like $35 million a year from its Park Royal investments, from other business investments and from taxpayer transfers. That $35 million virtually disappears, with an inability of individual band members to really track where it is going. They bring anecdotal evidence to me in my office of chiefs who get brand new cars every few years. Out of the 16 chiefs on reserve, at least 14 do not live on the reserve. They live in the upper middle class North Vancouver or West Vancouver area, in very classy homes, with brand new cars, while the majority of the people on the reserve live in appalling conditions.

The city of North Vancouver, which has an annual budget of about $35 million, has an excellent quality of life, high standard of living, paved streets and good services. In that community is this native reserve with 1,100 residents and it gets approximately the same amount of money for its administration, but they live in almost third world conditions.

We have to ask the question why can the people of North Vancouver, with $35 million, have a wonderful city with high prosperity, good education, wonderful services. However in the middle of Canada's fourth largest city is this reserve with the same amount of money, yet the streets are unpaved, houses are falling down, people are living in trailers and the illiteracy is appalling.

People come to my office from that reserve to meet with me because they cannot write a letter because they are illiterate. It shocks me how appalling the conditions are. Some responsibility has to be taken by the chiefs on those reserves.

I agree with the member. There has to be access to information so we can find out where that money goes and help better the conditions for the people there. A key to the whole issue is getting democracy on those reserves, something the chiefs are resisting. Until those chiefs are democratically elected and accountable to the band members, I do not think we will go very far.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to intervene in terms of the Senate amendments to Bill C-7 presently before the House.

In his speech yesterday, the member for Provencher said that the new youth justice legislation contained little, if anything, that would address the ineffectiveness of the Young Offenders Act. In some ways it is indeed less desirable than the old act and is more cumbersome and more administratively complex.

The problems with the Young Offenders Act have been around since the days when I was still running as a candidate for nomination to this place. Before the 1990s the Canadian public was expressing dissatisfaction with the Young Offenders Act. Young people today still express dissatisfaction with the Young Offenders Act because they tend to be the victims of most youth crimes. There is still public pressure to get this fixed and yet the government brings us little tinkerings around the edges. The Senate amendment really complicates the situation by bringing in a race based element to the whole formula.

As was also mentioned by my colleague from Provencher yesterday, the second part of the amendment requires youth court judges to pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal youth at the time of their sentencing. That is similar to subsection 718.2( e ) of the criminal code. Like my colleague, I cannot support legislation that is based on race. My colleague said that it was government sponsored racism, and I tend to agree with him.

We recently gave honours to Mr. Mandela for his work against apartheid in South Africa, and yet the government constantly introduces legislation in this place that is race based. An example that is worth mentioning is the employment equity bill that was brought in by this government in 1994. At the time that bill was brought into the House we warned this place that the race based provisions in that employment equity legislation would cause distortions and problems in the future. In fact the pigeons came home to roost.

I want to read into the record a statement I made in the House in the year 2000.

In 1995 the government passed its so-called employment equity bill which Reform MPs warned would result in employers being forced to unfairly discriminate against job applicants based entirely on their race. The chickens are coming home to roost. The Public Service Commission has admitted that it rejected a job application from one of my constituents because she was a white woman.

In addition to legislating exactly the type of discrimination it was supposed to prevent, the bill was badly flawed because compliance could only be accurately measured if minorities were willing to voluntarily self-identify. Therefore a department could be 100% composed of visible minorities but if the employees identified themselves as Canadian, the department would be registered as non-compliant and would have to hire more visible minorities.

The government should put a stop to this appalling program of state sponsored discrimination based on race yet it is continually popping up in government legislation.

There was a time when some members opposite claimed that we had racist tendencies. We have always fought against racism and have demanded that there be equality in legislation. We have the example again here where built into the amendment to Bill C-7 is special discrimination. This discrimination will not fix the underlying problems of youth crime. All it does is attempt to disguise the real problems.

I just mentioned the employment equity bill. I can give some examples of how that bill has distorted employment based on race. For example, in 2000 the Government of Canada placed some ads in newspapers across the country for job openings. A $45,900 per year job was advertised for an advisor on Canadian identity for Heritage Canada.

The advertisement was almost amusing in that it asked for an adviser on Canadian identity to be based in Montreal and was open only to persons identifying themselves as being members of a visible minority employment equity group.

Common sense makes one ask what qualifications someone identified as being a member of a visible minority employment equity group would have to make them authoritative in terms of Canadian heritage.

Another advertisement was for a regional director in the B.C. and Yukon region. Health Canada was offering from $74,300 to $87,400 for a person to manage a group of about 30 highly dedicated professional staff in the innovative delivery of the full range of branch programs and services in B.C. and Yukon. However the job was open only to applicants who were self-identified as a member of a visible minority group. This is another example of discrimination based upon race. If people did not fit a particular racial profile, they were not entitled to a government job. How is that different from anything happening in South Africa? It is government sponsored racism.

Another advertisement was for a service delivery representative. Under the heading “who can apply”, Human Resources Canada was offering a salary of $34,200 to persons who self-identified as visible minorities living or residing in the greater Vancouver regional district. The job involved handling EI applications over the telephone. The main qualification for handling EI applications over the telephone was to be able to say that one belonged to a particular racial group. This is appalling, disgusting behaviour by the government.

Another advertisement was for an income tax, excise tax auditor. It was open only to visible minority persons, aboriginal peoples and persons with disabilities working or residing in Nova Scotia and surrounding areas. This job was offering $38,900 with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. An interesting sentence appeared in a lengthy paragraph under the heading of “who can apply”. It read

Individuals who consider themselves to be a Member of the Visible Minority Persons of Canada, Aboriginal Peoples of Canada and Persons with Disabilities are invited to apply...

The interesting words in there are “consider themselves to be”. It illustrates a folly in the employment and equity legislation because it is illegal in Canada to ask people what their race is. Everything depends upon self-identification.

I know the government and the Senate are well-intentioned in bringing forward these types of provisions where they make special rules to apply to aboriginals or visible minorities, but it is not the way to fix the problem. The way to fix the problem is to apply equal rules to everyone. There is a difference between equal outcome and equal opportunity, and that is a key difference that the government is unwilling to recognize.

While we are talking about native issues, in my riding of North Vancouver there are two native reserves, the Squamish reserve and the Burrard reserve. Over my period as a MP, I have received numerous letters and petitions, and have had meetings in my office with people from those reserves demanding and pleading that I do something about the lack of democracy on the reserves and the way that people on reserves are treated by their own unelected, unaccountable chiefs.

All the government does is perpetuate the problems on those reserve with the types of legislation that it constantly passes in this place.

I am holding in my hand an article from the North Shore News with a picture of one of the band members from North Vancouver on the front page. The headline reads “Meeting leaves Band questions unanswered, upset Squamish seek information on Band spending”. The entire article deals with another problem of racial discrimination whereby the band leaders are not required to disclose the way they spend money from the taxpayers of Canada.

The taxpayers of Canada provide the reserve in North Vancouver with at least $20 million a year, yet we have no accountability for that spending either to the taxpayers of Canada or even to the band members themselves.

As long as we continue to pass in this place legislation which provides special rules based on race, there will be no equality and that is wrong. We must vote against the Senate amendment, if only for the reason that it provides special rules based on race.