Ted White

[Nisga'A Final Agreement Act, December 6th, 1999]

moved:

Motion No. 96

That Bill C-9, in Clause 12, be amended by deleting lines 39 to 44 on page 4.

[Nisga'A Final Agreement Act, December 6th, 1999]

moved:

Motion No. 31

That Bill C-9 be amended by deleting Clause 2.

[Nisga'A Final Agreement Act, December 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, in listening to the interventions by members from the Liberal Party the PC Party and the Bloc this morning, they talked about this agreement bringing certainty.

Listening to evidence from a Queen's counsel in Vancouver at one of the meetings on Friday, he said that the only certainty it would bring was certainty for the lawyers because he could make a living for the rest of his days off this treaty either by challenging it because it was wrong or defending it because he thought it was right. He said that either side would produce certainty of income for the lawyers.

Some of the members here, who are not from B.C. and, frankly, do not have the faintest idea of what they are talking about, said that it has been in negotiations for 25 years, as if that justifies signing it. Sure, it has been 25 years in negotiations but that does not automatically make it right.

The fact that it was supported by the politically correct Liberals and the politically correct provincial NDP in B.C., neither having more than 39% of the popular vote, is enough to show that it was negotiated by the elite not by the grassroots, neither by the grassroots non-natives or the grassroots natives themselves. It was negotiated by elites using formulas that have never worked and have no hope of working in the future either.

When I stood in the House on November 1 to speak on this bill, I specifically asked the minister to name a single Indian reserve anywhere in the country governed by a treaty where the standard of living is equal to or higher than off reserve. That minister stood and completely avoided the question. The reason is that he cannot answer it because there is not a single Indian reserve that has a higher standard of living.

I can use the example of the Samson Cree reserve, probably the wealthiest reserve in the entire country in terms of income: $100 million a year. Yet 85% of the members live in poverty and I believe 85% of them are on welfare.

Only time will tell who is correct about the Nisga'a treaty, but I do not see any way that the Nisga'a Tribal Council can pull off something that no other tribal council has been able to pull off, and that is a success in a treaty. All of the evidence is stacked solidly against it, and that 10 years from now we will have the same levels of poverty and the same repression of the women on reserve. These were exactly the same problems before the treaty existed. There is absolutely no justification to have it passed.

Not a single Liberal member from British Columbia has had the the gumption to stand in the House and say what needs to be said. They know what needs to be said. Every one of them has heard the message from British Columbians that this is such an important deal for British Columbia that it should be subjected to a referendum of the people, not just the Nisga'a but the non-natives as well.

As Noel Wright, a columnist in the Vancouver area said last weekend in his column:

As the model for all future treaties with B.C. natives, it stands to result eventually in a province pockmarked with 50 or more tiny, apartheid-type independent “nations” wielding powers in some 14 areas that would supersede those of the provincial and federal governments.

That is the theme of many of the letters that I get from my constituents. They do not see the treaty as bringing Canadians together. It is separating Canadians based on race. It is creating these apartheid-type or segregated-type communities that we will pay a heavy price for promoting in the future.

I have also heard some of the members over there criticizing Reformers. They make implications about our motives. I will put a few things on the record here that may not be known by the people opposite, and I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

For example, the leader of the party worked for many years as a consultant for native bands helping them to set up native businesses and deal with the government. The member for Nanaimo—Cowichan has adopted native children into his family. The member for Vancouver Island North is married to a Métis. The member for Edmonton North lived and worked on a reserve for many years teaching native children. The member for Yorkton—Melville also worked and lived on a native reserve. The member for Wild Rose introduced a private member's bill in the House to cause an ombudsman to be established to help native Indians with the problems they have with getting help from Indian affairs to investigate corruption in the bands.

While I do not have any direct connection with native bands, in my riding more than 200 members of the Squamish band have approached me by writing, coming directly to my office, via petition and via telephone with their concerns about Bill C-49.

For anybody on the other side to say that we do not understand the issue, that we do not have connections with natives and do not understand where the problems lie in things like the treaty or Bill C-9, is poppycock. We probably understand it a lot better than the politically correct who sit on the other side of the House and refuse to see that for every treaty that has ever been passed in the country evidence shows that they do not work. They create poverty. They continue with the process of repression because they are styled in a socialist manner. They set up a socialist style of community with collective rights that are rife with corruption. It does not work.

I have just been corrected. I apologize to the member for Vancouver Island North. His wife is a status Indian not a Métis.

When the Liberal government introduced enabling legislation for the Nisga'a treaty to parliament on October 21, the minister made it clear that there would be no committee hearings, there would be no travel to the provinces, there would be no amendments to the bill and the time for debate would be severely curtailed. What sort of democracy does that represent?

It does not help us, who are elected to represent the concerns of our constituents, to know that the outcome of every vote is predetermined, that we do not have a hope of making a single amendment no matter how many flaws we point out in the bill. It contains 252 pages. How can there possibly not be one single mistake in the 252 page bill? It is impossible. It is bullet-headed. It is arrogant for the government to assume that it is perfect in every respect. As I mentioned earlier, it is nothing more than certainty of income for the lawyers.

The auditor general himself has said that the longer the treaty, the more likely there will be legal challenges. At the moment we already have more than $9 billion worth of legal challenges under way to existing treaties. The Nisga'a treaty, which is not even law yet, is under challenge from five different groups.

The Liberal Party of British Columbia, the bedfellows of the federal Liberals, is challenging the treaty as unconstitutional. The Gitanyow first nation, as a number of other members on this side have mentioned, consider it an act of aggression. They are challenging it in court. The fisheries survival coalition and a group of Nisga'a people are taking this treaty to court. Where is the certainty? The agreement has not even gone through the House and there are five legal challenges against it.

How can members on the other side of the House have the nerve to stand and tell us that there is certainty? How do they have the nerve to tell us that it is a good agreement because it took 25 years, when every other treaty that has ever been negotiated in the country has been a failure? They have no logic to defend their position.

In my previous speech on November 1, I did bring up the issue of the treaty producing apartheid-like or segregated-type of communities. One of the Liberal members noticed my comment and brought it up in a committee hearing to the chiefs of the Nisga'a band. The answer from the chiefs was that they did not consider the deal to be apartheid-like because those affected freely voted for the system of government themselves.

Is apartheid not apartheid just because people voted for it? It is a totally ludicrous position to take. If we are separating people based on race, that is separation based on race whether we vote for it or not. This is creating segregated communities in British Columbia, not only non-native from native but there will be one native band segregated from another native band segregated from another native band. They will all have their own bylaws and rules.

What is British Columbia going to look like? We have more than 90% of all the Indian bands in the entire country. Nobody outside of British Columbia understands the impact of this treaty on British Columbia. The people of British Columbia should have been involved in the preparation of the treaty. The people of British Columbia should have had the right to vote on the basic components of that treaty making process.

The only way that the treaty would have had the support of the people of British Columbia is if they had genuine input into the basics for that treaty. Then, if necessary, the government could have negotiated a treaty that had public support and, if necessary, use the notwithstanding clause to silence the lawyers because it would have had the support of the people.

As it stands at the moment, we have a lot of big problems on our plate. When this thing gets rammed through the House next week, the law courts will open for business and we will see years and years of expensive legal challenges.

[Nisga'A Final Agreement Act, December 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Oxford has a son who lives in my riding. He is depriving his son of a referendum on the Nisga'a deal.

[Nisga'A Final Agreement Act, December 2nd, 1999]

moved:

Motion No. 20

That Bill C-9, in the preamble, be amended by replacing lines 14 and 15 on page 1 with the following:

“achieve this reconciliation and to establish an improved relationship among them;”

[Canada Elections Act, November 29th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, any minister found guilty of improperly reporting campaign expenses automatically loses his seat in the House and cannot accept any patronage appointment from the Prime Minister for seven years. That is a tough situation for a Liberal.

Will the government do the right thing and arrange for the release of the taped telephone conversations between the minister and his Parole Board appointee so that the air can be cleared and we can find out the minister's involvement in this case?

[Canada Elections Act, November 29th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister for International Trade denies having received an unreported $10,000 in cash along with transportation services for his election campaign in return for appointing a supporter to the parole board. However, his official agent has already admitted that transportation services were received from a company in Montreal and not reported.

The House leader for the government knows that a complaint cannot be launched with the commissioner 18 months after the election. So who is going to take the fall for contravening the elections act, the minister or his official agent?

[Canadian Institutes Of Health Research Act, November 29th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak today to Bill C-13, an act to establish the Canadian institutes of health research and to repeal the Medical Research Council Act. I have to first say that I always have a concern when I look at these new government bodies that they are actually being set up as creations of the government for the purpose of providing jobs for the Prime Minister's friends.

I am well aware a consultation process is built into the bill that will supposedly base grants upon the information from leading experts in every conceivable field. I certainly hope that is effective. Otherwise the bureaucrats appointed there by the Prime Minister, presumably for life, will have control of the system and the process will break down just the way it has in the previous organization.

In having high hopes for some rational decisions by the peers reviewing the various applications, I hope that they provide some priority to prostate cancer research as they begin to look at the grants that come across their desks.

Many members of the House will know my interest in prostate cancer research and my work with prostate cancer information groups across the country. Unfortunately it is one of those diseases that has been overlooked for a long time. Men, for one reason or another, did not talk about it or did not even know that it was a common disease that they should be talking about.

It has been left now in a situation where although it is as common as breast cancer is in women it receives one-eighth to one-tenth of the research funding that breast cancer receives. That is certainly not to detract from the money that breast cancer gets. Nobody would want to deprive that worthy cause of getting research funds, but it is certainly time to bring prostate cancer up so that it is more in line with what is being spent on a similar type of hormonally driven disease.

In addition, prostate cancer receives only about one-fiftieth of the research funding that AIDS research receives. Yet it kills about 10 times as many men. It is completely out of proportion and needs to be rectified fairly quickly. If there is one thing I would hope this new body does, it would be to correct the imbalance out there right now.

One of the other aims of the legislation according to the drafters is to take care of the brain drain of researchers and qualified people down to the United States, which of course the Prime Minister claimed does not exist but which this act recognizes.

I would argue that most of that is actually caused by the tax regime in this country. If we talk with anybody who has moved to the United States, it is very clear that the salaries and the amount of disposable income after taxation are so much more attractive in the United States that it is no wonder people move down there.

Certainly it would be nice if some of the research funding draws some of those people back, but I think we have to address the taxation issue as well. If we do not address the taxation issue, I am afraid we will end up giving grants every year to people who are not actually very competent. We will be left with the people in Canada who do not want to move to the United States or are incapable of getting a position in the United States. I would not want that to happen.

Certainly passage of the bill and implementing its provisions would have to be done in conjunction with some sort of meaningful income tax reduction to help researchers and scientists who need to be spending their time in Canada.

As I mentioned, for prostate cancer certainly Vancouver is a centre of excellence in this research. There are many skilled people there who are well recognized. In fact, the Vancouver Island Prostate Cancer Network recently produced two videotapes on early stage prostate cancer and late stage prostate cancer which won an international award in New York about two months ago. Those educational tapes are recognized world wide as being some of the best in the whole world.

I have some copies of those tapes in my office. I will shortly be notifying all members that those are available for loan from my office, because I would truly like them to become well aware of the effects of the disease.

When I look at the bill I see that there is peer review of the applications for grants. I certainly feel it is a shame that we did not have some peer review of the Nisga'a agreement when it was introduced. If the government had bothered to do a little peer review it would have found, for example, the Gitkanyow calling it an act of aggression. Lawyers all over the country are rubbing their hands together in glee at the thought of all the cases that will brought before the courts as a result of that agreement.

A Queen's counsel, Mr. Bill Irving, in Vancouver on Friday said it would not matter to him whether he was on the side that supported the Nisga'a bill or on the side that was against it. He could live for the rest of his days off the court cases that will be started on constitutional grounds against the bill. The only certainty that the Nisga'a bill will bring is certainty of income for the lawyers.

What worries me about Bill C-13 is that it will slip gradually into certainty of income for researchers who produce maybe questionable or indifferent results. I can think of an example in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Professor Tremblay has managed to extract about $18,000 a year since 1983 out of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to send questionnaires to members of parliament every year.

My rough calculation is that she has managed to extract about $270,000 out of taxpayers for this exercise. She sends out the questionnaires every year to members of parliament asking us to suggest ways that there might be more women represented in the House of Commons. They are questions that completely ignore the fact that it is voters who elect members of parliament and not members of parliament who elect members of parliament.

After doing this since 1983 it seems that nothing useful has come out the other end of that exercise at all. I questioned Professor Tremblay about the issue and pointed out that having a proportional system of electing people to the House would do a lot more to help women get in here than just about anything else. She was unwilling to admit that would be the case. She would rather stick to her surveys and collect her $18,000 a year.

That is what worries me about this bill which sets up another quasi-government body that has a bunch of the same people, these peers, every year reviewing applications that are identical to the year before. If we look at Professor Tremblay's applications they are identical every year. They have the same wording. They are renewed every year, over and over again. It becomes like an old boys club or an old girls club where they just keep giving the same grants to the same people over and over.

I certainly have professors in my riding who have never had grants from places like the Medical Research Council or the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. They approach with stories about some of their colleagues who use these grants to travel all over the world. They treat them like vacations.

There was a very well publicized one recently from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council where a researcher received a grant of $60,000 for three years to go to Vanuatu, a small island in the Pacific which is a tax haven. I think there was an unfortunate earthquake there over the weekend. The researcher was going to this tax haven for three years to study tax havens and how people lived, the housing in Vanuatu. What a complete waste of Canadian taxpayer money for that sort of thing to be going on.

These examples are just pouring out the doors of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council one after another. I saw another one from someone in my riding who managed to extract a grant to study English poetry from the 1400s, or something along those lines. I really have to ask what value my constituents got from that extraction of their tax dollars to support somebody's hobby.

When I look at Bill C-13 and the provisions in it for peer review and increasing budgets year after year, I worry about where that money will go. One can bet that I will be watching very carefully to see where the money goes.

There is another example of foolish giveaways under these programs. The millennium fund has been widely touted by the government. They are celebrating the millennium. It is even in the wrong year. The new millennium does not start until January 1, 2001. Even the Canadian Mint, which is selling 1999 quarters and claiming they are millennium quarters, admits on its own website under frequently asked questions that it is not even the last year of the millennium. They are actually selling them falsely, but it says in the frequently asked questions that we are not to worry, that it will be issuing year 2000 quarters which will be the correct quarters for the last year of the millennium.

We waste tremendous amounts of money doing foolish things. The millennium fund gave $278,000 to a group in my riding to produce a program called “Visions of the North Shore”. What a waste. I certainly hope that medical research institutes do not turn out like that.

[Canada Elections Act, November 25th, 1999]

Mr Speaker, I can tell from the expression on the face of the solicitor general that he does not have a clue about the new elections act. It was very nice of the government House leader to try to help him out.

The fact is the minister's 24 hour publication of polls amendment was just tinkering around the edges of the act. Why did he not do something meaningful like get rid of the gag law, or get rid of the 50 candidate rule, or get rid of the patronage that is riddled throughout the act?

[Canada Elections Act, November 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday a constitutional lawyer told the government House leader exactly how easy it will be for the courts to strike down the gag law and the illogical 50 candidate rule in the new elections act. He urged members not to dump problems on the shoulders of our already overworked solicitor general by passing those parts of the bill.

I ask the solicitor general, is he aware of the fatal flaws in the new elections act and has he recommended to cabinet the removal of the offending parts?