Ted White

[Borrowing Authority Act, 1995-96, March 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member opposite for pointing out once again that a successful budget receiving praise from many areas is not a Liberal budget. This confirms what I have been saying time after time this afternoon. People wanted a budget that was not a Liberal budget. They were very pleasantly surprised by the general direction, although not quite far enough. The international markets seem to be telling us that.

Everybody out there wanted a budget that was nothing like a Liberal budget. All the member has done is confirm yet again that people do not want Liberal policies. They do not want Liberal financial answers. They want real reforming budgets, reforming policies and a Reform government.

[Borrowing Authority Act, 1995-96, March 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to the day when I will not have to rise to speak about a borrowing bill.

Liberal members of course, have spent the last few days claiming that the finance minister's budget is the greatest thing to ever bless Canada. They claim that the world financial markets love it and that their constituents love it and all is well. In fact, I would like to thank the member for Broadview-Greenwood for confirming that the budget that the people like so well is not Liberal policy. It simply confirms that people do not want Liberal policies.

Members opposite for the last two days have been claiming the dollar is going up and interest rates are coming down. They say: "Don't worry. Be happy". I think the decline in interest rates has a lot more to do with the amount of money people have put into GICs in the last few days for their RRSPs. It has given the banks a surplus of money that they have to get rid of.

Today the dollar did not continue to go up the way members opposite had hoped. It continued to slump, down to 70.92 today, which is more than a cent and a quarter below the high the day after the budget.

Perhaps this means that the international markets have had time to look a little more closely at the budget and they can see that most of the cuts are deferred until next year while all of the big tax increases occur this year. However, I do think we really have to wait a few weeks before either side decides they have the answer to whether the dollar is going up or down. We need to give the markets time to really continue to study this document.

There are tax increases in the budget that are really going to hurt the average Canadian very much. Liberal MPs must be the only people in the country who think that a penalty tax on banks is not going to affect the loan rates or the service fees or something else that people use at banks.

Liberal MPs must be the only people in the country who think that a 1 per cent increase on the surcharge tax for corporations will not trickle down to price increases or service charge increases.

Liberal MPs must be the only people in the country who think that a 1.5 cent a litre increase in the tax on gasoline will not mean higher prices at the pumps.

Despite all of these deceptive increases in taxes that will hit the average Canadian, the ship is still going down, albeit a little more slowly and with a few less crew on board. In three years the interest payments on the debt will have consumed every single cent the finance minister has saved in his latest budget.

The minister was quoted in the Vancouver Province as saying: ``The light at the end of the tunnel is much closer than any of us might think''. That light is getting larger because there is a locomotive bearing down on us. The finance minister may be going in the right direction but he is on the wrong track. Increased taxes will not bring confidence to the job creators of the country, that is businesses.

I know members opposite think the government creates jobs but it is actually business that creates meaningful and real, long lasting jobs. If businesses do not feel good about the economy they will not expand and create jobs.

Let me compare the finance minister's performance with that of some of the governors in the United States. A constituent in my riding, Mr. John Dickenson, provided me with a tape of a speech made by Governor Carol Whitman of the U.S.A. She is the governor of New Jersey.

Governor Whitman cut business and income taxes three times over a two-year period, a 30 per cent cut in taxes at the same time as she slashed spending to comply with a balanced budget amendment. Opponents, for which we can read Liberals, said: "The sky is falling. The economy will be destroyed". Instead, 60,000 new private sector jobs were created by the private sector and tax revenues actually increased.

The same pattern is evident in state after state. Governor Bill Weld of Massachusetts cut spending by $1.7 billion in his first month in office. He also cut taxes five times and now has the lowest unemployment levels in the United States.

The same month that President Clinton signed the biggest tax increase in history for the American people, Governor John Ingler signed the biggest decrease in Michigan history, bringing the lowest unemployment rate to Michigan in 20 years.

New Zealand has also had similar results from its program of massive cuts to government spending at the same time that the tax system was revised and taxes were reduced.

The proof is there. Zero in three actually works. These examples show that the very best way to put more money into the hands of the poor, of families, of businesses and of everyone is to cut spending and taxes. Tax cuts and spending cuts make it easier for people to buy a home and to improve their standard of living. Things work better when people make their own spending decisions instead of having their spending decisions made by good, old Uncle Liberal government back here in Ottawa.

There is nothing moral, compassionate or virtuous about increasing taxes. I will say that again in case any members opposite were sleeping. There is nothing compassionate, virtuous or moral about increasing taxes. High taxes punish those people who are the most productive in our society. High taxes are a symptom of a government's failure, incompetence and inability to recognize the damage that those high taxes are doing to society.

Even some Liberals have come to realize something is wrong. They realize there is too much crime, too much family violence, too much poverty and too high a debt. Some are even starting to realize that the biggest single social program is the transfer of all that interest payment to the creditors of Canada's debt every year. That is one social program that is still growing.

The government has not realized yet that Liberal policies have caused these problems and these problems will not be solved by throwing even more government money, especially borrowed money, at those problems.

I heard another member talking about compassion earlier. Compassion is something one cannot buy. It is something that comes from within. One does not buy it by throwing dollars at a problem.

I would like to change tack a little and relate a little more about my experience in New Zealand over the Christmas break. I was in New Zealand visiting relatives and I had the opportunity to meet for an hour and a half with the Right Hon. David Lange, who was Prime Minister of New Zealand at the time of the debt crisis in 1984.

I would have laughed if anyone had told me a decade ago I would one day sit with a Labour minister of finance and actually enjoy speaking to him. I came away from the meeting with a great deal of respect for a man who has faced the debt monster, came to grips with it and realized that a free market economy is the best way to deliver healthy social programs.

Mr. Lange said: "We have passed through the age of left and right wing governments to a time where we have maintenance and reforming style governments". Those are the terms we should be using today. This new set of labels put into words a concept I have been struggling with for some time because I knew despite the accusations of the other side of the House, the Reform Party is not a crazy right wing party. We are not either right or left wing.

I will use an example. The members opposite can jeer. I use the example of the 1992 referendum on the Charlottetown accord when all three traditional parties; the NDP, the PCs and the Liberals lined up on the yes side and Reform on the no side. Does that make us left or right? Which one? Neither. It made the three traditional old line parties maintenance style parties. They did not want to change the status quo. We were the reformers, the ones that wanted to change the status quo, make the necessary changes.

Mr. Lange's Labour left wing government became a reforming style government when it had to face the debt monster. During the period following that debt crisis from 1984 to 1994 the National and Labour parties took turns in office, but they were all reforming governments. They continued the program of government spending cuts and tax decreases to generate the necessary stimulus to the economy.

Today New Zealand has a maintenance style of government, National by name, which has projected a $2.5 billion surplus for this year. Last year they had a $900 million surplus and put $800 million more into social programs because of it.

Mr. Lange predicts that New Zealand will have a maintenance style government for the next decade. Unemployment is down to 6.5 per cent and the economy is growing at an annual rate of 6 per cent.

I can see the puzzled looks on the faces of the Liberals. "Please tell me it is not so", they are saying. "Please do not say that the private sector actually creates jobs. Please do not tell us it is better if government is smaller and that it makes spending cuts". Mr. Lange told me that the Canadian Liberal Party is a maintenance style of government. It is just used to keeping things running when things are good and if Canada had to face its problems it needs a reforming style of government to do it.

Mr. Lange also told me in retrospect he wished he had moved faster on the cuts because it was so stimulating to the economy. A decade later, New Zealand has a diversified, free market economy competing in the global marketplace. Exports now include plastic bottles to Japan; wooden boxes to the U.S.A., mozzarella cheese and hamburger beef to Canada; furniture to Singapore; metal castings to Taiwan; aircraft parts to Boeing in Seattle. The free market economy will solve our problems. We should not be borrowing more money. We should be cutting spending.

[Borrowing Authority Act, 1995-96, March 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I was interested to hear the hon. member saying his constituents have been very pleased with the budget, especially when the Prime Minister and a number of other Liberal MPs have been saying how this is not a budget they wanted to bring in, that it is an anti-Liberal budget.

I wonder if this actually means the people in central and eastern Canada voted Liberal because they had no other choice and that they actually do not want traditional Liberal budgets or traditional Liberal policies. Polls taken on things like justice and the budget show that Canadians actually want Reform style policies and budgets.

I ask the hon. member whether the fact that he is getting compliments about the budget actually means people do not support Liberal policies.

[Property Rights, February 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, members of this House will know that I often use New Zealand as an example in some of my speeches on economic affairs.

I do so not because I believe that everything that New Zealand has done is right but because I believe that we have a lot to learn from looking at the experience of others who have also faced similar problems.

There are lessons to be learned from history about property rights. We need to take a look at the experiences of others in assessing whether property rights should be in our charter.

We have plenty of recorded history at our disposal. For example, we know the histories of ancient Rome, Greece, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. We know what happened in classical times, medieval times, the industrial revolution and even modern times. Everything is documented. We know plenty about Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the United States and Cambodia. By studying the historical records of these places and times we can quickly see which government did not respect property rights and which did. We can see that those that did not respect property rights ended up with their people living in misery and poverty.

Perhaps it starts innocently enough. A government promises to regulate the economy for the common good, to redistribute the wealth more fairly, to make the rich pay their fair share and to close the loopholes. I have the feeling that I have heard these words before, a naive assumption that the government knows best and the average citizen needs to be protected from himself.

History is full of examples. Whether headed by a madman like Stalin or Hitler or by well meaning dreamers like Nehru and Nyerere, they always fail. Along the way they produce conflicts instead of peace, famine instead of plenty, poverty instead of prosperity. Instead of more and better rights than those we hold in a line from the Magna Carta, they deliver fewer and worse rights. Instead of delivering the gilded cage they deliver only the cage.

I challenge members to name one society that respected property rights where the people are not better off. I also challenge them to name one society where the government did not respect property rights where they are not worse off. The more protected the right to property, the better the living conditions and the better the societal order.

History also teaches us that when property rights are protected so are personal rights. Along with the loss of property rights comes the loss of personal rights, loss of freedom of speech and loss of decency in society. Property rights are the foundation of a decent society. They are the most important human right.

It amazes me that we have a Constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantee the lengthy avoidance of deportation by known criminals who have come into Canada as bogus refugees but do not guarantee property rights to law-abiding citizens.

It amazes me that we have a Constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that permit crimes to be committed under a defence of drunkenness but do not protect the property rights of law-abiding citizens. Canadians are supposed to feel good about their Constitution. No wonder they are disgusted with it.

The motion put forward by the Reform Party member for Skeena is an excellent one which the government would do well to acknowledge and act upon.

In addition to all of that, the Deputy Prime Minister said she would resign if the GST had not gone in one year and she still has not done it.

[Young Offenders Act, February 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bill. I have had a lot of feedback from my riding that people are very dissatisfied with the way the Young Offenders Act works at present. I know from the feedback I am getting that they are also dissatisfied that the provisions of the bill do not go nearly far enough.

I conducted an electronic referendum on the Young Offenders Act, the first of its type, certainly in North America, during last year. I would like to cover a few of its results which fortify the belief that this bill does not go far enough.

I would like to cover a bit of the background on the Young Offenders Act so we know what we are talking about. The Young Offenders Act, Bill C-61 at the time, was passed in 1984, replacing the 76-year old Juvenile Deliquents Act of 1908. It had been around for a long time and it was generally recognized to be out of date and overly rigid.

Shortly after its passage the Young Offenders Act was also found to be somewhat rigid in certain aspects. Therefore, in 1986 Bill C-106 was passed, making changes to the sections of the Young Offenders Act dealing with the short term incarceration of juveniles awaiting preliminary hearings, the compilation and disclosure of criminal records of young offenders, and some other aspects of the law. Sentencing rules for first and second degree murder were toughened in 1992 by Bill C-12.

The government of the day carried out a poll in 1991 when it had made some changes to the Young Offenders Act in early 1990. The poll question asked: "The federal government has recently introduced legislation which would increase the sentences received by young offenders, 18 years or younger who commit crimes like murder. Do you approve or disagree with this legislation?" The results were remarkable. Eighty-eight to 90 per cent of the people polled felt that the sentences were not nearly tough enough.

I still see the same sort of result coming today from the referendum that I held in my riding. In answer to the question of whether there should be automatic transfer to adult court for serious crimes such as murder, over 95 per cent of the 5,500 people who responded said yes. To the question of whether there

should be a special category in the Young Offenders Act for repeat and dangerous offenders, 97 per cent answered yes. There is a sense in the community that people are not safe under the present Young Offenders Act.

My office is in a building that has a McDonald's on the bottom floor, and often a crowd of young people gather there on the weekends. Sometimes graffiti, urine and other things appear over the weekend. I have spoken to the RCMP about it, as have many people who live in the area. The police seem to be very limited in their ability to deal with the situation.

The residents who live in the area are very upset that nothing gets done. They see the police arrive to try to break up minor fights and so on and they hear these young offenders telling the police to f-off and get out of there. It has reached the stage that if the average person on the street witnesses a youth crime and tries to do something about it by calling the police, the whole exercise will turn out to be totally unsatisfactory for everyone involved; for the person who reported it, for the police, and for the people who had the damage done to their property. The only person who seems to get off scot free is this young offender who gets released right away and does not seem to have to pay any penalty for what he or she did.

In a semi-famous case that was printed in our local newspaper, I recently had the mother of a young offender come to my office. Shortly after arriving she burst into tears. She could hardly tell me the story. She had a son who was a young offender. He was a repeat offender. She had pleaded with judges. She had pleaded with people to get tough on this young guy and give him a sentence.

Unfortunately it seemed this kid was constantly given another chance. His crimes progressively got worse. Finally he was picked up on a series of break and enter charges and minor assault. The mother decided this time she would not bail him out; she would not do anything to get him out. She begged that he be put in jail. Of course a lawyer was engaged to defend the young man when he appeared in the courts. He was let out right away.

The first thing he did was to set fire to his family home. That same evening he burned down the family home because his mother had stood up and said something has to be done about this young man. The next day he was back in our local area serving pizzas as usual.

It is a pretty bad situation to have that going on in our society. The people in my riding certainly feel this bill is not going to address those sorts of problems.

I go back to the referendum that was held in my riding. It was one of the biggest samples ever taken on this issue. Over 7,000 votes were cast. We provided a very comprehensive householder. I know I cannot use props in the House so I cannot hold it up for everyone to see.

We set out the background of the Young Offenders Act in the householder and gave both sides of the argument. We quoted from a speech that the Minister of Justice made in a debate on March 17, 1994:

-the act substantially has been a success and that in principle it is the right approach. I am certain improvements are needed but I am equally certain this process will result in a confirmation of the enlightened approach which the Young Offenders Act contemplates.

That is not what the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police think. In its 1994 response to the Department of Justice report "Toward Safer Communities" we get the quote: "It is our view that the Young Offenders Act requires amendment in many areas and a piecemeal approach will prove ineffective. A comprehensive approach, which includes not only legislative change but also functional changes, is fundamental to addressing the problems of troubled youth".

I have a quotation from the working paper on the victims of violence with respect to the Young Offenders Act. It was also included in my householder: "Instead of becoming more responsible for their behaviour, young offenders are hiding behind the act. Society's right to protection from illegal behaviour has been eroded to the point that nothing short of a major shake-up of the Young Offenders Act will regain its confidence". That is absolutely true.

I have mentioned before in the House that I have gone into the schools in my area and we have discussed the Young Offenders Act. I have asked the young people there what they think of the Young Offenders Act. They think it is a sham. Many of the young people in the schools are afraid of it because it does not protect them from the gang violence that occurs in society.

I said to one young class: "Are you sure you are not just making this judgment that the Young Offenders Act is not working based on the hysteria in the community, that really you do not know what is in it and you are just making an emotional judgment?" Those hands went up again. About 35 out of 37 students in the class said: "No, it is not an emotional decision. We know what happens with the Young Offenders Act. We know how these gang members get off. We want something done about it".

Within the referendum that was held in my riding we had a separate electronic referendum for students. They too confirmed by over 95 per cent that they wanted the Young Offenders Act dramatically revised.

I do not think there is any question that the rate of youths charged with violent crimes per 100,000 population has increased dramatically since 1986. The rate of youths charged

with violent crimes has increased by an average of 14 per cent annually.

During this time the rate of adults charged with violent crimes increased only an average of 7 per cent. Therefore youth crime of a violent nature has really accelerated away from those that are happening at the adult level. This has to be because there is no deterrent in the present Young Offenders Act. Young people can do practically anything they want.

I am extremely disappointed that this bill does not give us what we really need to make a difference. I hope that eventually the minister will see the light, change his mind and bring in some tough provisions.

Besides all that, the Deputy Prime Minister promised to resign if the GST was not gone in one year and she still has not done it.

[Petitions, February 22nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition has 198 signatures, starting with Ronald Wells of Burnaby, and most of the others also live in Burnaby, asking that the government not increase taxes but reduce government spending and implement a taxpayer protection act to limit federal spending.

Furthermore, the Deputy Prime Minister promised to resign if the GST had not been abolished within one year and she has not yet done so.

[Petitions, February 22nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the fourth petition is signed by Sheila Thompson of North Vancouver and 25 others asking that Parliament amend the Human Rights Act to protect individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The fifth petition is signed by Margaret Dale of North Vancouver and 60 others requesting that Parliament not pass Bill C-41 with section 718.2 as presently written and in any event not to include the undefined phrase sexual orientation, as the behaviour people engage in does not warrant special considerations in Canadian law.

[Petitions, February 22nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have a few petitions to present today. The first one is from Helene Windship of North Vancouver and 115 others requesting that Parliament reduce government spending instead of increasing taxes and implement a taxpayer protection act.

The second petition is signed by Rene Kosak of North Vancouver and 25 others asking that Parliament reduce government spending instead of increasing taxes and limit federal spending with a taxpayer protection act.

The third petition is signed by D. A. Reece of North Vancouver and 30 others requesting that the government reduce spending instead of increasing taxes.

[Petitions, February 10th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is signed by 46 petitioners requesting that Parliament of Canada amend the human rights act to include

sexual orientation as a basis for protection against discrimination and to include recognition of relationships based on financial and emotional interdependence.

The third petition signed by 40 people in North Vancouver humbly prays and requests Parliament to enact legislation to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against persons based on their sexual orientation. It further calls upon the Liberal government to pass Bill C-41 which gives tougher sentences to those who commit crimes of hate against others on the basis of sexual orientation.

[Petitions, February 10th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions to present.

The first one is signed by Charles Kingston and 30 others from North Vancouver praying and requesting that Parliament reduce government spending instead of increasing taxes and implement a taxpayer protection act to limit federal spending.