Ted White

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have to mention yet again, as some of my colleagues have already mentioned, that making the gun registry retroactive was no problem at all for the government. It did not bother those members that they blew away $1 billion on it. That side of the House is quite happy to vote the gun registry even more money, and the darn thing is not even working. This has given the privacy commissioner great concern. This may be open to charter challenges.

It does not bother the Liberals when they have one of their philosophical issues to force it through. It does not matter when they have social engineering on their agenda. The government will do anything to get its social engineering through the system. I was in this place when the government pushed through its affirmative action bill. That type of legislation is being struck down in the United States now. Another case is being dealt with tomorrow, dealing with the University of Michigan. The Liberals have no problem doing all sorts of outrageous stuff like that. When it comes to common sense, they do not care.

The member said that the government could not do anything because it had a meeting with provincial and territorial governments and there was consensus that this had to be made charter proof. The word consensus implies that there was some disagreement as to whether it was necessary to make this into such a mediocre bill. We should err on the side of the kids. We should have tried harder.

The member did not say exactly which provinces or territories took what side in the debate. That would be an interesting figure to have, even if it had been just one or two of the provinces or the territories that felt some retroactivity could have been put into this. However we do not know that because we did not get enough information during the time that the question was posed. Even if the number was one, two or zero, it would have been worth trying.

I already gave an example in my speech of a way this could be done by using the notwithstanding clause with the permission of the Canadian people. I recognize that to use the notwithstanding clause is a tremendously serious issue. When using such a clause, a government has to be very careful and ensure that it is not trampling on the rights of minorities or disadvantaged groups. This has to be done with great deliberation and care. This would be an ideal situation to test a procedure using the permission of the Canadian public.

If there were even the slightest chance that we could have done something with the bill to make it more effective, then we should have tried. Any one of us who has ever dealt with lawyers knows that for every lawyer who tells us something can be done, there is another lawyer who is quite happy to go to court to argue that it cannot be done.

Let us play the game. We should have at least tried to make it happen and then waited to see if it could happen.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

One of the members opposite says to stop talking and get on with it. We do not have the power to get on with it. They are the ones who are dragging their feet.

In 1988 after the murder of an 11-year-old boy by a convicted pedophile on statutory release, a coroner's jury recommended the creation of a national sex offender registry. That was in 1988, 25 years ago. It is not entirely the fault of the government opposite. I would love to blame the Liberals for the whole thing, but actually they picked up a dead file from the previous government.

Why the reluctance to do anything? We could have had 25 years of information in that registry, but we still have nothing. The Liberals are a disgrace. We look at the people sitting on the opposite side today, getting on with other work, not particularly taking any notice of the debate, doing their duty in the House instead of considering what we could be doing together in a non-partisan way to make the registry really work. As my colleague from Red Deer said, we should be working in a non-partisan manner instead of trying to find ways to make the bill mediocre, which is really what it is right now.

Our recommendation when we discussed this in caucus was that even though the bill contains a half measure, it goes partway toward establishing an effective registry. Over time it will become worthwhile. We decided that we really had to put on the record in this place the objection of the majority of the public to the mediocre nature of the registry, the way it is being set up, and to demand of the government even at this late stage to please show some integrity, creativity and resolve to work on the bill to make it retroactive and to get people on the registry who should be there. Let us get it done.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, there is that old saying that if something is worth doing it is worth doing well. I think Bill C-23 is probably a very good example of how that particular saying does not apply at all.

For all of the reasons that have just been discussed by my colleagues here, the government has decided that it is not going to do this well. It has decided that for reasons of legality it is not going to attempt to make a meaningful sex registry. It is going to capitulate before it even begins. It will capitulate and say, “We can never make this effective, so we won't even try”.

It is not good enough, Mr. Speaker, and I will tell you why: because we have a state of desperation among our police forces out there as they try to enforce the laws that are ineffective. They are trying to put these offenders behind bars and they cannot achieve it.

I will give members an example from just this week in Vancouver. A repeat sex offender was released back onto the street by a judge when he was in the process of being charged and appearing before the court for charges to be laid. The judge released him back onto the street again, even though the police pleaded with the judge to put him in custody. He was a repeat offender; he had gone back to exactly the same place he had been arrested at before. The police said to the judge, “He is going to go back there. He has done it before. Please keep him in custody”.

The judge released him. The police were so frustrated they went on television on the six o'clock news on BCTV in Vancouver and publicized the guy's name. They said they had no other option but to warn the public that this man was out there, and they gave the name of the park he frequented. He had done it at least twice before. The police had arrested this man and even had him in jail for a short time. He had been released and went right back to the same place.

There is one of two things happening here. Either the man is very ill and he needs a lot of treatment, and for goodness' sake we need to recognize that and do something about it, or else there is no penalty for what he is doing. In this case, that appears to be what is happening. The man receives a slap on the wrist and a few days in jail and out he goes again. This occurs even when the police in their frustration beg with a judge to keep him behind bars. The judge simply releases him back onto the street.

Frankly, there is far too much of that now. We see case after case day after day in the media. These criminals are being released back onto the street even when the police request that they not be released.

Last week I received an e-mail from a lawyer in my riding who is a very good Liberal supporter. In fact, that lawyer ran for the candidacy in the Liberal Party in my riding. He wanted to run against me in the election when Warren Kinsella actually was parachuted in by the Prime Minister to run against me. That was a wonderful achievement: getting rid of Warren Kinsella in that election.

This lawyer is actually a very nice guy. We get along really well. Obviously we have differences in our opinions on politics, but on a lot of things we agree. In fact, he has been shown in the North Shore News in the last few days agreeing with our party's position on the war with Iraq, indicating that he is embarrassed by the Prime Minister and that we really need to side with our traditional allies, but I digress.

The lawyer sent me an e-mail last Wednesday or Thursday saying that he would be in court today. He is probably there right now as I am standing in the House to speak. He is in court today on a case to do with an Iranian refugee claimant who is drug trafficking in North Vancouver. He was arrested and charged. He told the prosecutor that his refugee claim was a scam, that it was only a way of getting into Canada to deal drugs and that he had been schooled and told how to do this.

Of course my first question to this lawyer was whether he advised the immigration department about this. He has, so now the guy is targeted, but it is expected that he will be sentenced to a one year term in prison for trafficking in narcotics in North Vancouver. We all know that means he will be out in just a matter of weeks or months and will be back on the street. The problem is, says this lawyer in North Vancouver who is a Liberal supporter, that he would like to see this guy's feet not even touch the ground on his way to the airport to be deported.

It is not going to happen because the guy will be out on early release or parole. That is considered to be part of the sentence so of course the immigration department cannot deport the guy. There is nothing to stop the guy going back on the street to traffic drugs again, which then creates a new charge, which puts him back into the system again, which further prevents the immigration department from deporting him. That is how stupid these laws are.

The sex registry is much the same thing. It has been done so poorly that the information in it would be relatively useless right at the beginning. It will take an enormous number of years for it to become of any use whatsoever.

I will go back to the case I just used as an example, the failure to properly deal with criminals by the government, the immigration law business. I used to use the example of my 87-year-old mother who lives in New Zealand. If she jumped on an airplane from New Zealand, landed at Vancouver International Airport and said she was a refugee, under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms because of the Singh case way back in the 1970s, I think it was, the case that the government will not do anything about, my 87-year-old mother from New Zealand could claim to be a refugee and we would have to accept her claim.

She would be released on her own recognizance after about a one hour interview. She would be given welfare, a place to live, furnished at taxpayers' expense, medical care and dental care. On average it would take her about a year with legal aid, which of course she would get, before her case came before the Immigration and Refugee Board. The chances are that the Immigration and Refugee Board would say that she was from New Zealand and was not a refugee.

If my mother refused to identify herself, the New Zealand government would not give permission to issue travel papers and we would not be able to deport her. My 87-year-old mother could live forever in Canada on welfare as a refugee claimant. That is what is happening every day under the government's immigration laws.

My riding has the largest Iranian population in the country. At least 40% of all the Iranians living there are refugee claimants. Most of them are bogus. I just mentioned the lawyer who sent me an e-mail last Wednesday or Thursday. He actually put in his email that people in the Iranian community had told him the guy was a criminal in Iran and he is a criminal in Canada and they wanted to know why we had let him in.

I cannot say how many times that comment has been made to me by the decent Iranian immigrants in my riding who came in using the proper system. They see all these, and I am sorry to use the word, scumbags who come in using our refugee laws and claiming refugee status just so they can be criminals here.

There are so many examples of the laws that the government passes, as my colleague said, where the victims are treated with disdain and the criminals get everything they want.

In terms of the retroactivity of the bill, why not use some creativity? Instead of capitulating and giving up and saying it cannot do anything because the Supreme Court will say it is wrong to make it retroactive, for the safety of the kids of our country, let us be creative.

We have a notwithstanding clause in our charter. The government is afraid to use it, but maybe if the government were a little creative, it could use it in this case. What would be wrong, for example, if we decided to use the notwithstanding clause to make the registry retroactive? We could put it to the people of Canada in a referendum and ask them whether they approved of using the notwithstanding clause that way.

What better reason could there be to have a referendum in the country than on such an important issue? Instead of capitulating to a group of politically appointed judges, why do we not ask the people of Canada whether they would agree that this issue is worth using the notwithstanding clause and to make the registry retroactive?

There is always a way. Why would that not work? Even if the government is too afraid to use the notwithstanding clause, why does it not try a little harder?

I do not think the lawyers in the justice department are trying very hard. At the very least they could have written something into the bill and tried their darndest to make it retroactive. If eventually it was struck down, at least we could have said that we tried. We have not even tried.

If we look at some other western civilizations such as Britain or the United States, they use retroactivity. For example, in Florida the DNA bank was established a few years ago. I remember standing in the House speaking about this when we were debating the DNA bill. When the DNA bank was introduced in Florida, it was made retroactive. Criminals were forced to give blood samples, something the Liberal government would not do as it would be infringing on criminals' rights if we forced them to give a sample when they were arrested. In Florida that is what was done.

The ability to solve crimes in Florida has increased dramatically because now there is such a valuable database of genetic material from those criminals. Meanwhile we here in Canada are struggling along, trying to gradually build a DNA database one person at a time and getting people's permission instead of going into the prisons and retroactively taking blood samples from all prisoners so we can identify them. That is what we should be doing, just as we do for fingerprints. If it can be done in the U.K. and the United States, we should find a way to do it here instead of constantly sitting on the fence.

It is the same situation with the Iraq war. Everything the government does is a half measure. It sits on the fence. It will not make a decision. Instead of joining with our traditional allies to make some things retroactive, to force criminals to provide DNA samples, it capitulates to a nothingness, a failure to make a decision. It upsets people.

The intent of the bill, according to the government, is to establish a national database of sex offenders so that the police will be able to use the database to track the activities of sex offenders, their whereabouts and to be able to provide the public with the information or just to solve crimes. It is a noble intention. As I said at the beginning of my speech, if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well. We should be doing our darndest to make this bill effective and to make it work well.

Instead of that, the government has dragged its feet all the way, kicking and screaming until we have this half measure before us today. If we think about it, the government was really reluctant to even bring in this bill. Let me provide some history.

As mentioned earlier by my colleague from Red Deer, it started with the member for Langley—Abbotsford almost 10 years ago in this place. For 10 years he has been urging the government to establish a sex offender registry. Why did it take so long? If the government had brought it in the very first year that my colleague demanded it, we would already have 10 years of information, even if we had not made it retroactive at that point. We are already 10 years behind where we could have been. It should have responded on day one, instead of being more worried, as the government always is, about the rights of criminals instead of the rights of the victims. Just think how valuable that sex offender registry would be today if we had established it in 1994 instead of still talking about it in 2003.

On March 13, 2001, two years ago, the House voted in favour of a Canadian Alliance motion which read:

That the government establish a national sex offender registry by January 1, 2002.

We are 15 months further downstream from the day by which the House agreed that registry was to be established and we are still talking about it. We have not established the registry.

[Points of Order, March 25th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, during question period the government House leader suggested that those of us who are on the back row on the opposition side, like me, were banished for not following the instructions of the whip.

I would like the record to show that through two elections I have requested to be here because the view is wonderful.

[Question No. 150, March 24th, 2003]

With respect to the government's National Strategy on Community Safety and Crime Prevention, what are the results of the review or reviews, due to have been completed by November of 2002, which have been carried out in order to determine whether any of the 1,900 crime prevention projects funded since 1998 have produced the intended results, and whether certain types of programme are more effective than others, and can the government identify the programmes which have resulted in measurably different reductions in crime and improvements in community safety when compared with areas which have not used those programmes?

Return tabled.

[Terrorism, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, for at least a decade the Liberal government has known that the MEK was raising funds in Canada to support the activities of the terrorist National Liberation Army in Iraq. Yet despite all of the evidence available to the Prime Minister and the fact that the MEK has long been branded as a terrorist organization in the United States, the MEK still does not appear on the latest Canadian list of banned organizations.

Why is it that the official opposition has to continually bring these groups to the attention of the Liberal government? Whose interests are the Liberals protecting by refusing to ban the MEK from fundraising for terrorism in Canada?

It is time that the members over there gave their heads a shake. They need to abandon their naive and dangerous multicultural endorsement of terrorist fundraisers. It is time to draw up a complete listing of all terror groups active in Canada so that we can put an end to their fundraising activities once and for all.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree on the relative merits of withdrawing funding for various social programs, because there is ample evidence for anyone who cares to look. Around the world, the countries that have the highest standard of living, the best prospects for jobs and, in fact, the lowest unemployment rates are all countries that intelligently limit their social spending. They intelligently limit it so that they are not encouraging people to live off welfare or take advantage of generous handouts. They limit their social engineering. There is ample evidence to show that is the case. The provinces that are successful here in this country have in fact done that.

I remember when the minister of finance of British Columbia wanted to put a limit on the collection of welfare: that a person had to live in the province for three months first. We were getting droves of people coming into British Columbia, which had the most generous welfare collection scheme. The federal government threatened to reduce our transfers because we wanted to put some sort of intelligent limit on the abusers of the program.

There is a lot to answer for on that side of the House in terms of intelligently limiting social transfers.

In terms of the debt repayment the member mentioned, yes, the government has paid down a bit of the debt, but again, one of the most common criticisms of the budget I have received from my constituents is that the government has not paid down enough of the debt. Anybody knows that if one pays down one's debt one gets much more money to spend and does not waste it on interest. The government is still blowing away more than $35 billion a year on interest. That is enough to build 150 brand new Lions Gate bridges in Vancouver every year. It is a huge amount of money. If the government had concentrated on paying down the debt earlier, we would be in a much better position. It would still be able to blow money on social programs but would not be taking it away from highways and other important projects.

Finally, in terms of health care, if the member thinks that throwing more money at the problem is the solution, he has his head in the sand. Everybody who has studied the problem knows that is not the answer. There need to be structural reforms; that is a fact. We need to be having an intelligent debate about how to repair this. One of the things we could do is encourage the provinces to be creative and make a much greater use of the private sector in the delivery of health care as a way of reducing costs.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in rising to speak to the budget debate, I should perhaps remind the House that government budgets are about spending other people's money. It is very easy for us to forget that, especially when decisions are being made on the other side of the House about grandiose social engineering projects such as the gun registry that was mentioned by one of my colleagues earlier today.

People forget that this is about spending other people's money. Members should spend a little time thinking about the families in their ridings who are struggling to get by, to pay their mortgages, to buy their groceries and to pay all the bills while the government over there grabs so much of their paycheques to pay for things that those people do not want. It is all about spending other people's money and I will give some examples of this.

While we are busy spending other people's money, it is very easy to forget that the success that has given that side of the House so much money is not because of the Liberals' policies particularly; it is because of the governments of Ontario and Alberta, those free enterprise governments, and the initiatives they have taken to make business and the economy work well. That is who has generated the wealth for that side of the House to spend.

Not only are the Liberals spending other people's money but they are spending money that was created because of other people's efforts, not their own efforts at all.

I can give the example that as soon as politicians get into election campaigns they think it is a great idea to spend other people's money. Just yesterday or the day before, Quebec Premier Bernard Landry promised that he would force companies to make a four-day work week available to parents with young children. The pay would be commensurate with four days but he would force the companies to pay benefits equal to a five-day week.

It is so easy for politicians to stand up and pass something in a budget that dramatically affects the business community with no consideration about the hardship that it would put on companies or the people who work there.

A good example from the federal government along a similar line was increasing the maternity benefit to a year. I got lots of letters of complaint in my riding. One would think it would be the opposite but people are not stupid. They realize that if they are going to be paying for people to stay off work for a year, it will be tremendously disruptive to business and it will cost taxpayers a lot of money. But again, it is so easy to spend other people's money without giving a thought to the consequences.

I have stood in other budget speeches in this place and asked members opposite to reach into their own pockets and pay for those grandiose schemes they are so much in favour of. Why do they not ever reach into their own pockets and support these things instead of expecting the rest of us to pay for them?

Out of 10 provinces and 3 territories at the moment, only Alberta and Ontario are net contributors to the system of national transfers. I am looking at a newspaper article which mentions that the C.D. Howe Institute has repeatedly noted that for every dollar the provincial governments of these two provinces receive in Canada health and social transfer, Alberta and Ontario taxpayers pay out $1.30 in federal taxes. Where is the value for that? Meanwhile, for every dollar the Quebec government receives from Ottawa, it pays only 70¢ to Ottawa. A similar situation exists for the so-called have not province of Newfoundland and Labrador where taxpayers only pay 50¢ for every dollar they get back.

What this amounts to is the taxpayers of Alberta and Ontario, let us say families who are earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year and paying federal taxes, are actually subsidizing families in Newfoundland and Labrador who are earning $40,000 or $50,000 a year because of the massive transfers to support grandiose programs there. This is not fair.

Albertans and Ontarians, like British Columbians who until recently were also net contributors to the system, are as patriotic as anyone else but they just do not think that it is a fair system of redistributing other people's money.

At the time B.C. crossed into being a have not province, in the last couple of years, our traditional spending federal revenue status saw only about 8% of federal spending in B.C. That was despite a generation of providing 13% of the national revenue. We were providing 13% of the national revenue and, for a whole generation, we never got more than 8% of the federal spending. Now we are a have not province and we are still only receiving 86¢ for every dollar we send here. There is something terribly wrong with a system that does that.

The federal fuel taxes alone in the year 2000 in British Columbia took out $750 million from B.C. That was $750 million with not a cent spent on our highways. We can look at the terrible condition of some of the highways, including the Trans-Canada. Parts of the Trans-Canada in British Columbia are so dangerous that they are not even registered as a highway in the North American register of highways.

I was in the United States for a few days over the break. It is astounding the amount of money going into infrastructure and freeways down there. It is absolutely incredible, the freeway building that is going on. The highway system is such an important part of a country for the transport or the ease with which commerce can take place. It is just appalling to come from such a marvellously developed country into one like Canada where we see no spending on infrastructure at all, with nothing being spent on the Trans-Canada, while the federal government drags huge amounts of money out of the economies of the provinces.

Of the $5 billion-plus that the federal government drags out of fuel taxes, 100% just goes simply into general revenue. In comparison, in the United States 92% of those revenues go directly back to the states to spend on their highways and that is why they have decent highways. That is why their infrastructure has developed so well and why that country does so well.

In British Columbia, as I mentioned, we have the Trans-Canada in a terrible state. Highway 97, the major freeway in Vancouver, is not even as wide as the freeway through Ottawa because there is no money to expand it, yet we have almost four times the population. There is something wrong when this government looks after its own territory but is not interested in helping the provinces look after theirs.

Again, if that is not bad enough, as I said, the government gets into its social engineering plans using other people's money. The federal Minister of Transport right now is currently soliciting VIA Rail to reinstate its subsidized passenger rail service between Vancouver and Calgary. That was a disaster. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting that unprofitable line decades ago. Thank goodness it was finally canned when Rocky Mountaineer took over with a privately funded and run railway. It makes a profit. It attracts tourism to the provinces of Alberta and B.C. It is a spectacular success. Why on earth does the government want to spend other people's money creating another subsidized railroad to undermine the businesses that pay the taxes? It just does not make sense.

This budget is so full of examples like this that it is sickening. I could stand here for a whole day talking about things like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. One of my pet hates is its $120 million a year, pretty much unaccounted for, which is spent on all sorts of queer and strange projects. That is hundreds of millions of dollars wasted. It does not produce any wealth in the country at all. Most of what the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council hands out in grants appears to go to financing vacation time for academics to travel to other countries and take photographs. It is certainly not contributing to the running of the country.

Right now in B.C., as I mentioned, we are suffering from highway problems. We have the Minister of Transport trying to undermine our private rail service. We have the federal government refusing to talk about offshore oil exploration, which could help us tremendously in getting back on track and becoming a contributing province again. Why is it that we have to fight and battle our way for every single cent out of that budget while hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, are wasted on the gun registry? It is frustrating. It is about spending other people's money. It is a terribly bad budget. If we only could get our way, we would vote it down.

[Canada Elections Act, February 20th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to say a few words about Bill C-24. Incidentally it is a very thick bill, about half an inch thick, and I know you are a busy man, Mr. Speaker, so you probably have not had the time to glance through it yet, but I have read it from cover to cover. Whilst it is half an inch thick, a lot of it is repetitive, repeating the same clauses over and over for nomination meetings, for registration of electoral district associations or for leadership races. Much of it is repeated.

In speaking to Bill C-24, I would like to reference Bill C-2, which was the bill on the major changes to the Canada Elections Act, which took place a couple of years ago, a bill for which I was critic and moved it through the House over about a three month period.

When Bill C-2 was going through the House, I proposed on behalf of the Canadian Alliance that we put an end to the patronage appointments of Elections Canada whereby the government appoints all of the returning officers and most of the field staff for Elections Canada. The Chief Electoral Officer had begged us to allow him to select and appoint his own staff, because it is completely inappropriate for the governing party to be appointing key personnel in what is supposed to be an independent body. The minister at the time argued that this was a ridiculous suggestion because it would cost too much and increase the bureaucracy at Elections Canada, and therefore we should not waste our money on it.

However, when we look at Bill C-24, what do we find? An enormous bureaucracy being set up to register and track the reports of electoral district associations. I have already spoken with the Ontario chief electoral officer because Ontario does have exactly this type of system, and it is very intensely administrative in nature. It requires enormous amounts of paperwork. It requires elections people to follow up constantly with riding associations or electoral districts to get the paperwork done. This is going to cost much more and be much more complicated than anything that was proposed to get rid of patronage in Bill C-2, so I really think the minister was playing politics at the time.

In Bill C-24, the government is also setting up a very complicated process for nominations. The government has argued that what it is trying to do is level the playing field to make it easier for disadvantaged people to take advantage of the possibility of becoming candidates for political parties.

I am convinced that most of the government members have not bothered to read the bill. They probably took a look at the half inch thickness and decide not to attempt it. However, if we really read the bill we will see that there are at least 15 pages of requirements for people getting involved in a nomination meeting. Now if we are talking about people who are traditionally disadvantaged, for example, as they would argue, women in the community who may not have the business contacts to help them get big donations to start a nomination meeting, those same people will not have the contacts who have the accounting skills or the management skills to run the sort of paperwork that is required for a nomination race.

So I would argue that the government is very misguided in what it has done in this bill and I think again it is playing politics. What it is actually trying to do, while it pretends to be arguing in favour of the disadvantaged, is creating a situation whereby those people will be excluded. It will be restricted to people who have the business contacts, the skills and the ability to manage a very complicated nomination race procedure.

The bill also perpetuates the unfair 50 candidate rule, which requires parties, in order to be registered and to have registered riding associations, to run 50 candidates in an election. The courts have struck down that provision. They have said that it is unfair and that it is inappropriate. In discussions in this House and in committee, all of the parties except the Liberal Party agreed that number 12 would be appropriate, which is the number that is recognized in the House as being appropriate for recognition of party status. So again the government is perpetuating unfair, anti-democratic practices while it still argues out of the other side of its mouth that the bill is an improvement.

It has also continued to maintain the gag law in the bill. That is the part of the Canada Elections Act that prevents third parties from arguing their perspective during election campaigns. The gag law has been struck down three times in the courts, yet the minister, even as late as yesterday, was still arguing that it was appropriate to keep that gag law in the Elections Act.

He has wasted tens of millions of dollars fighting it in the courts. It gets struck down every time. He argues that the basis for putting the gag law back into the Elections Act is that there was a court ruling in Quebec which justified the use of a gag law and restrictions on spending of third parties.

What he fails to say every time he quotes that Quebec court judgment is that the judgment was about referenda, not elections. Referenda, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure you know, are about either a yes or a no answer. They are about one issue and the answer is either yes or no. It seems perfectly reasonable that we might put limits on who can argue for a yes and who can argue for a no in order to have a level playing field with both groups having access to the same amount of resources and money, but an election is a multi-faceted event with numerous issues, some of which are local and some of which are national, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of different issues that need to be argued.

To try to transpose a court ruling in Quebec to do with referenda into a general election status in this bill is completely inappropriate. The minister knows it. I have begged him to stop wasting taxpayers' money on these court cases and he continues to do it. In fact, he is a disgrace because he has wasted money on the gag law and he is now going to waste enormous amounts of money on a complicated process for nomination meetings. During all of that time he accuses us of trying to waste money by putting real democracy into the act, by getting rid of the patronage appointments that the Prime Minister does for Elections Canada.

Incidentally, there are returning officers who do not turn up to work at Elections Canada and the Chief Electoral Officer is unable to do anything about it. Unless he can convince the governor in council, which means the Prime Minister, to cancel the appointment of one of his cronies to the returning officer position, there is nothing that can be done. The end result is that incompetent party hacks get appointed to the positions in Elections Canada that should be filled by skilled people who are non-partisan.

I would like to urge the government to be open to considering changes in the bill. Perhaps I am being a little naive, because the bill is going to be rammed through and we all know that. We are going get this public funding whether we agree with it or not. But I would hope that the government might be open to taking a look at a fairer way of allocating the public funding. The way that it is set up at the moment, the funding is given on the basis of the number of votes that were achieved by a party in the past election. Really, that rewards past electoral success and not necessarily the popularity of the party as it stands at the present time.

I heard a very creative suggestion, for example, and I am not putting this forward as CA policy at this time, it is just a creative suggestion that I heard, which was that maybe it would be fairer to base the funding on the number of registered electoral districts that a party has.

For example, for every registered electoral district that a party could maintain across the country, it would receive a certain allocation of funds. That would make it fair because it would reward parties that were trying to become national in scope. It certainly would not be a disadvantage to the ruling Liberal Party because it maintains riding associations, or electoral districts, in every riding in the country so its allocation would be exactly the same. Parties like the Canadian Alliance, which is gradually establishing riding associations across the country, would also gain benefits as it established these, and it would really make a judgment about how serious a party was at being a national player. For parties like the Bloc that tend to be restricted to one region, it would not penalize them either, because it would be running electoral districts or associations in every riding in that province and so it would still get its allocation.

That seems to me, just on the surface of it, perhaps a fairer way of doing it. If we really must have public money put into this, I would hope the government might be open to suggestions like that from outside interests.

In closing, I will say that I think the bill is pretty badly flawed. There has not been much chance in 10 minutes to get into the real meat of it, but I will repeat my hope that the government would be open to some further suggestions in committee as to how we might improve the bill.

[Medical Marijuana Franchises, February 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, if you would like something really different to do this weekend, why not come out to Vancouver and learn how to start your own medical marijuana franchise?

If hon. members need more information, just tune to Channel 2 in Vancouver and watch for the advertisement from the Kine Smoke Shop and the Canadian Sanctuary Society. They are sponsoring two seminars on February 21 and 22 to help get grow-ops up and running.

To add to the excitement, they might get to meet Mr. Briere, who started the Sanctuary Society and who was sentenced in 2001 to four years in jail for cultivating and trafficking in marijuana, money laundering, possessing a prohibited weapon and unlawful storage of ammunition.

The only thing that is not yet clear is whether the present Minister of Industry is getting a percentage of revenues for making the business possible in the first place. I could not find any evidence of a campaign donation, but maybe a contribution in kind has long since gone up in smoke.

I wonder if they will be giving any samples this weekend. Can I count on seeing you there, Mr. Speaker?