Jim Gouk

[Anti-Terrorism Act, October 16th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, as others have said 10 minutes is a very short time. I can assure everyone that I wish I had an hour or two because there are so many aspects of the bill I would like to speak on. What I will do is limit myself to one part of the bill about which my colleagues have not spoken. They have covered some very important areas in other parts of the bill, but I would rather talk about some of the things that are missing from the bill, and one in particular.

There is a conundrum that opposition MPs find themselves in when the government comes out with a bill that has perhaps 60% of or 40% or even 20% of what it should have in it. Do we vote against because it does not have everything it is supposed to have or do we accept that it has some good in it and pass it because anything is better than nothing? That is something that I will need to look at.

The government says this is critically important. We have even negotiated a swift passage of this bill to committee. That is why we are in tonight at a late hour. If the government really were sincere about that, I would remind it that we brought forward a supply day motion almost a month ago that was essentially the same, in fact different only in the respect that the government has left some things out that should be in it and which were addressed in our supply bill.

I hope that the ministers present will pay particular attention to what I have to say in the hope that they might convince their colleague, the Minister of Transport, when they meet in committee to reconsider some of the things he is doing or rather fails to be doing.

The area I want to talk about, and which needs to be addressed to seriously deal with terrorism or the threat of terrorism in the country and the safety of Canadians, is airport and aircraft security. I want to talk about a single example because that is unfortunately all that time will permit. It is a very serious breach in airport security.

The minister is talking about spending a very large portion of the money in the transport sector on enhanced new equipment that will go into the big airports, such as Pearson, Montreal and Vancouver International. The problem is, as the old saying goes, a chain is only as good as its weakest link. There are dozens of small airports around the country that feed into the big airport locations and have almost no security at all. They do not have basic x-ray equipment.

Bags are checked by very conscientious people using nothing but their eyes and hands. As people might well figure, particularly with hard shell luggage, it is not very hard to put false compartments or false bottoms in certain types of suitcases. They can run them through and check them, but we know already from the minister's own testimony in the House that, just as bureaucrats attempted to take fake guns through security, one in five make it through. That is in airports that have the fancier equipment now.

What happens when a sincere terrorist, who will use any method available to him, tries to do this at some low key location? The minister is putting all his eggs in the high traffic airports and is in fact doing nothing. I asked him in committee and he confirmed that the government had no plans whatsoever for these small airports.

People will go through security in these low key airports and then fly to places like Vancouver, Calgary, Pearson or Montreal. They will land in those airports and disembark into the terminal, not outside but inside. Then they will pass this fancy new enhanced equipment, which the minister has said he intends to purchase. What have we done? We have bypassed all the safeguards the minister has claimed he will put in place. Those people are now between the security system and the aircraft.

I can assure everyone there are a lot of other ways. I have worked in the industry for most of my life and I could go on for an hour describing the various ways that a serious terrorist could breach security and get weapons onto an aircraft. That means that the aircraft itself is the last line of defence in terms of thwarting the plans of a hijacker or terrorist, particularly one that is plotting some horrific action like what was done in the United States on September 11.

Those three things that must be done are these. The cockpit crew must be secured. The crew must be informed of what is going on. There has to be a method to subdue a hijacker if one should try to take over the plane.

The flight crew is secured inside the cockpit by having a substantive locked door with the necessary structure so that it cannot easily be broken down, never mind just opened. Once the crew is secured inside the cockpit, it does little good if they do not know exactly what is going on inside the main cabin. That can be done by installing a very inexpensive closed circuit television that will give a view of what is occurring in the cabin.

Now we have the crew inside a secured cockpit and we have them informed as to what is going on. What happens if one or more hijackers or terrorists try to take over that aircraft? What do they do if terroriste hold a young flight attendant and threaten to cut her throat if the crew does not open the door? What if they proceed to do it, then say they will do it to one passenger every minute until they open the door, or conversely if they start to break down the door?

Air marshals are one possibility, provided it happens to be a flight on which there is an air marshal and provided there are not enough terrorists on board that they actually outnumber the air marshals.

Another thing that has been suggested is to arm the crew. I personally do not think that is a great idea because before the flight crew can use a firearm, if that is what they have been provided with, or stun guns like British Airways has talked about, they first have to breach the secure mechanism between them and the hijackers. They have to put themselves in harm's way in order to have the possibility of using this. Depending upon what the terrorists are armed with that may not be a very good idea.

I will suggest something that is very drastic but I am suggesting it under drastic circumstances. It is serious when passengers or crew on board the aircraft are harmed seriously or killed or when there is an attempt to break the door down. That suggests there is a good possibility the aircraft could be used as a missile and flown into a building, as was the case in New York City on September 11.

Under those circumstances, we should have a serious talk about the concept of having a cannister whereby the pilots could go on an oxygen system and release the contents of that cannister into a main cabin and put out the people who are in there. That is drastic, but so are CF-18s flying in our airspace armed with missiles with the knowledge that they may be called upon to shoot down that aircraft with its passengers. I fly a lot and if I had my druthers I would far sooner be knocked out with a knockout gas than shot down by one of our CF-18s.

It certainly matters that we have a terrorism bill. There definitely is some good in the bill, but there are some gaping holes in it as well. Until we fill those, we are still putting at risk Canadians who are depending on us to look after their safety.

Maybe I will close with the facet of the costs associated with this. I would suggest that there are no costs on a net basis. One of the solutions for small airports, which has been discussed before, is to do away with security at these airports. We are talking about Beach 200 twin engine turbo props. We are talking about Dash 8s. No one will to hijack them. They can be rented or leased without any security at all. If the aircraft are flown to Vancouver, the passengers could be released not on the secure side but into the main terminal building. If they wish to go onto the main aircraft, they would then have to go through that enhanced security.

The government got rid of the cost of putting the gas system on board the airplane, building up the door and putting on a closed circuit system. If the airlines did this they would create confidence in the travelling public. If one passenger flew on each aircraft once at full fare across Canada it would cover the entire cost. We can do a lot better than we are doing with this bill. I hope the government will be amenable to improving it when we reach committee.

[Privilege, October 16th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you consider that there are certain pieces of evidence, not arguments or disputes, but very specific two single points of evidence, that should be considered before you render that final decision on this question of privilege.

[Privilege, October 16th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, on October 4 the Minister of Transport appeared before the transport committee. In the course of his opening presentation he referred to a ministerial directive he had written requesting that cockpit doors of Canadian aircraft be locked for the duration of the flight.

I advised him I had flown on Canadian aircraft since the time the directive had apparently been written and had seen cockpit doors open on several occasions. The minister's response to that was that “On the question of cockpit doors, I have to say that if you have been on flights where this is the case, you have an obligation as a member of parliament to report that to me or my officials, the date, the time”.

I further asked the minister if he would be willing to table any ministerial directives issued to the department on airport security since September 11. His response to this request was as follows, that “Most government documents are available under access to information. If we can make them available to you, we will”.

That is not acceptable. On one hand the minister is stating that I have an obligation as a member of parliament to report any observations I make that contravene his directives. On the other hand he is advising me that I would have to rely on access to information to find out what that directive is. This is not unlike the situation that occurred in the case of Bill C-36 which is now before the House. The government provided information to the media before providing that same information to MPs.

In the case of the minister's departmental directives, he states that we need to report observed breaches of his directives without ever having been informed by the government of their existence. In such cases we are to rely on material acquired from access to information, and if we are, how are we to know that the material even exists to ask for or what we are supposed to ask for? Does the minister expect us to rely on reports in the media, which is how we got our initial information on Bill C-36?

I submit that the minister, by creating directives which he then claims MPs have an obligation to be in compliance with and by not providing those directives to MPs, has caused a breach of parliamentary privilege in that he has created an obligation for specific performance by MPs and then prevented MPs from fulfilling that obligation.

I ask that this be remedied by requiring the Minister of Transport to table all ministerial directives issued to his department on airport security since September 11.

[Salmon Fishery, October 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the fruit growing town of Oliver has endured attacks by weather, insects and U.S. apple dumping policies with little help from the federal government. Now it is under attack by the government itself.

Oliver provides farm irrigation through the operation of a canal. It has been in use since the 1920s. Now the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has decided to enhance the salmon fishery in the Okanagan River by having an elaborate fish screen placed over the mouth of the canal and is demanding that Oliver pay the $400,000 cost, this despite the fact that the canal has operated and presumably the fishery has survived for over 80 years without one. The cost may not be much for a government that squanders more than that per day on subsidizing VIA Rail, but it is devastating to a small community.

When I spoke to the minister about this, I mentioned that it was not fair that DFO decided to enhance the salmon fishery and stick the town of Oliver for the cost. His response was “DFO makes lots of decisions. Obviously we cannot be expected to pay for all those decisions, we would be broke”.

If DFO wants it, it should be prepared to pay for it instead of downloading it on a small British Columbia town.

[Canadian Airline Industry, October 1st, 2001]

Madam Chairman, I am pleased to participate in this debate tonight to provide a few ideas, I hope, which the minister said he was looking for when he spoke earlier this evening. I trust he is paying careful attention to the ideas that have been brought up.

It has been said that many industries are affected by this, not just the airlines. There are the aircraft manufacturers, hotels and tourism outfits. It is all true. Of course, people ask how can we provide money when so many industries are affected and how do we deal with it? The reality is that it all evolves from the airline industry.

When the airlines do not take passengers and do not travel, they downsize which affects aircraft manufacturers and all their various suppliers. It affects hotels because there are no passengers travelling, and it goes on and on.

We can address a lot of the industry wide problems that have been created by this terrorist attack in September by dealing first and foremost and decisively with the problems in the airline industry.

The first thing we need to do to try to get airlines back on their feet is to regain the confidence of passengers that it is safe to travel and that we are taking prudent measures to ensure their flying safety.

I remember years ago when I flew out of Castlegar, there used to be scrambled seating on the 737s. I happened to like to fly in the front seat because I found it much more comfortable. However everybody scrambled on ahead of me and those seats were always taken until somewhere in the world there was an airline accident. Then invariably the investigators talked about how it was so much safer at the back of the plane. For the next several weeks or perhaps months, I had no problem getting my front seat.

We have the same thing happening right now. People have heard about this and they envision it occurring even in the smallest little communities from which they may fly out. They suddenly have this fear that flying is very dangerous. That is the first step the government needs to take. It needs to look at airport security. We have heard tales already tonight of how one in five attempts to smuggle fake weapons of one type or another through security have been successful. That is pretty scary in light of what happened and in light of passenger confidence. That needs to be cracked down on.

We have also heard some people, particularly on the government side, talk about reforming a crown corporation with Air Canada. For heaven's sake, if we have learned anything in the past, we should have learned that the airlines cannot be run by a government agency. The minister squanders enough money on VIA Rail, and that is small potatoes beside Air Canada. We do not need him dabbling in ongoing and permanent subsidies to Air Canada as well.

He might consider taking airport security back under the wing of the federal government, instead of having all the various airlines provide the security with minimum priced help, with unsupervised training and obviously not very good training. If one in five attempts to smuggle fake weapons through are successful, then obviously a much better job needs to be done.

If we could regain the confidence of the flying public and get the passenger count up, that helps not only the airlines, but it helps many of the other industries and of course their employees. We have heard quite a bit spoken tonight about the tremendous number of people who are becoming unemployed as a result of this.

The government has made a lot of mistakes in the past and not necessarily this government, because I do not want to pin everything on it. However governments in the past, this one and others, have made a lot of mistakes. When Air Canada was privatized, most of its debt was written off by the government.

I congratulate the Liberal government. When it privatized CN, it did not make that same mistake. I was on the transport committee at the time and I argued very loudly against doing that. The government to its credit listened and got a much better result in the privatization of CN than it did with the privatization of Air Canada.

I do not blame Air Canada. It was a private corporation now responsible for making money. It suddenly found itself out in the marketplace with a competitor, CP Air that had a heavy debt load. It did not have any debt load so it could go after CP and become the carrier of Canada. That is where the problems of the airline industry in the country really started.

The foreign ownership rules that restricted the amount of shares that could be held by non-Canadians ultimately was part of the downfall of Canadian Airlines. Canadian Airlines had partners outside Canada willing to make further investment and they were not allowed to. That was one of the roadblocks that ultimately brought Canadian Airlines to its end.

Another one was the foreign ownership rule for Air Canada. Air Canada, unlike the Onex deal, used its own internal funds and financing abilities to take over a troubled airline. There was no new capital. It was all just Air Canada taking on a lot of the debt of Canadian Airlines.

The Onex deal involved bringing a lot of new capital to the table. If it had been allowed to go through, in the end it would have been a much better operation for all those employees and for the travelling public. What finally brought down Canadian Airlines was the government's unwillingness to change the 10% ownership rule that any one shareholder could not own more than 10% of Air Canada. That was the final bring down of Canadian Airlines.

Air Canada was operating with tremendous debt structure and in severe financial problems before the September 11 crisis. There have been some changes since then. There have been changes to the layoff rules. In all honesty, the structure with regard to job guarantees that Air Canada went in with, while reassuring, was hardly practical. In my own home airport the employees of both airlines all stand behind the counter now and unfortunately, they did not see fit to get expanded counter space. There are so many of them they have to take turns standing up at the counter. It is very frustrating for the manager of the company in Castlegar to deal with that and still try to be responsible in terms of the bottom line.

Then there is the big issue of fuel taxes. I trust the minister is paying close attention to this one because this is one very fast way he could bring some relief to the air industry in Canada. When the GST was brought in by another government, the airlines were promised in return for imposing on their passengers this tremendous cost of an extra 7% on all tickets, that the government would get rid of all the other taxes that they had to pay. The airlines were promised that.

Madam Chairman, because it was not the government that is here now, I think can say that that government lied to the airlines. They did not take away all those taxes. They left a fuel tax. For this year alone Air Canada budgeted $46.7 million for excise tax on jet fuel, taxes that are largely not paid by its foreign competitors. That puts Air Canada at a severe disadvantage.

There has been talk of loan guarantees. For the record I would say that if loan guarantees are being considered, they should be only that amount that is necessary to ensure that Air Canada maintains the credit rating it had prior to this occurring. Those loan guarantees should be available to its competitors as well.

There should be no discount airline startups until all those guaranteed loans are paid. Then if it still wishes to go ahead with that discount airline, there should be an audit provided by the government that ensures there is no cross-subsidization of that discount airline from Air Canada. Otherwise all it is is a fancy name to do predatory action against the other airlines in Canada without having any accountability for it.

There should be, as some people have suggested, although not tonight, but I hear it brought up quite frequently, no unilateral action toward cabotage in Canada. Cabotage is where a foreign carrier can fly from point to point inside the country. There should be no unilateral declaration of that. If the United States wants to allow Air Canada to fly freely from point to point inside the United States, that is fine. However, it should not be done unilaterally in Canada. In the end that would kill Air Canada and it would not help the flying public in this country.

The government needs to move fairly quickly, but it needs to do it with prudence, if it has a good plan which it has brought to the House and which has been approved by the House. The government should not confuse prudence with vacillation. This problem cannot go on for a long period of time.

Sky marshals have also been mentioned. That is something the government needs to look at. In the United States people are being hired from the street, but they are soundly screened for both psychological profile and ability to do the job.

Perhaps the government might even consider asking some high frequency travellers if they would be interested in going through the screening and training process. Those people travel anyway. They would be authorized under the same provisions of a hired sky marshal. It might be a way to bring the numbers up without cost.

As far as reimbursing Air Canada, it should only be for the exact cost that it can prove occurred as a direct result of the September 11 events. I have many more ideas but I realize other members wish to speak.

[Patent Act, June 7th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am not on the rolls, having abstained in the last vote, so I would like to be recorded as voting yea to the motion.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 7th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, there are four points to this bill. In the course of debate a couple of others have been brought in.

I would like to deal with those others first, one of those being the opt in clause. In my opinion the opt in clause is really not part of the bill. It has nothing to do with the legislation, the salary, the pension, the transparency or anything else. It is nothing more than the pure gamesmanship that is displayed in the House from time to time, not only by the government but by many people in the House. It should basically be discarded as if it were not there. The second thing I have a problem with is not the legislation itself, but rather the speed with which the legislation was brought in.

I have difficulty with one the four parts of the bill that deals with pensions. I have been fighting for years for pension reform. I attempted to bring in a private member's bill for genuine consideration by all members. I also attempted to bring in an amendment, but because of the short timeline and its complexity it was impossible to put into an acceptable form. Consequently my amendment, as drafted with the help of legislative counsel, was ruled out of order. Even if it had been in order, because of the speed the bill went through committee of the whole consideration we would not have reached my amendment in any case.

The bill has four distinctive parts and that is what we need to look at. The first one deals with transparency, the elimination of the non-taxable portion of an MP's pay. That is something we have been fighting for years.

After the 1997 election the government virtually ignored the recommendations of the Blais commission. It is nice to see this time, with a couple of exceptions or modifications, it is following what the report said. It would have been better had it done that in 1997.

The bill is to eliminate the non-taxable amount and gross it up so that we would end up with what is supposed to be the same pay. I will get to that point in a moment because it is not.

It also provides outside linkage for increases in the future so that MPs never again get into what is tantamount to a conflict of interest in trying to deal with their own remuneration, pensions and other benefits inside the House. It takes it out of our hands and hopefully it will remain out of our hands.

We could argue all day on what it should have been linked to, whether it should have been linked to judges as it was or whether it should have been linked to the federal service at large. That is an amendment I certainly would have supported. At least it was not linked to something that has no relevance to the House whatsoever, such as airline pilots, doctors or something of that nature, because it happened to suit somebody's notion of how to get a raise.

Then we get to the raise itself. Here is an area where no one was doing their homework. According to the Debates and the newspapers we are talking about a 20% increase. That is based on the assumption that $109,500 is the direct grossed up equivalent of what we were getting before the bill comes into effect. That is not the case.

I do not know who came up with that figure or how they arrived at it, but it does not take a whole lot of homework to check it out. I phoned a tax accountant in my province of British Columbia who went through the tax tables and worked it out. The balanced amount is not $109,500 but $115,100. That means that the raise is not 20% but about 14%.

It will vary a little bit from province to province. The raise is a bit more in Alberta, a bit less in Saskatchewan, and in Quebec taxes are higher still so the raise is even less than 14%.

During the parts of the debate that I heard no one seemed to raise a fact that appeared in one of the papers I was reading today which said that we have had a 2% raise every year for the past many years. The truth of the matter is that over the past 10 years we have had an aggregate total of a 6% increase, which is far behind any other sector including the public sector.

I do not believe personally that the pay raise is out line. Backdating it to January is a little inflammatory, kind of like when the postal strike was settled by legislating a settlement that was less than the employer had offered. It was one of those unnecessary movements on the part of the government that only caused to inflame feelings unnecessarily.

That brings me to the fourth and the only part of the bill to which I object dealing with the pension. The pension amount would simply go up because the pay goes up. The intent of the recommendations made by the commission was that it should go up exactly in line with the amount we were already getting. Other than the raise there would be no gain or no loss. Keeping it at 3% gives us a tremendous gain.

The amendment I wished to put forward and my private member's bill presently before the House at first reading say that after getting rid of the non-taxable grossing up, as the bill has done, the pension of members of Parliament should be eliminated in its entirety. Instead all members should be placed in the federal public superannuation program, the same as all other public servants.

That would provide a lot of benefits for MPs without it being a cost factor to Canadians. It would allow newly elected MPs who previously worked in government at either the federal, provincial or municipal level, crown corporations, the RCMP, the military and many private corporations that have transfer agreements with the federal program, to transfer their pension and carry on. It would also allow members who left this place and then worked for one of those areas to take their pension with them.

When we leave this place our pension is on hold until we turn 55. If someone ends up out of service in their early forties their pension is based on their salary. By the time they reach 55, it is possibly based on a salary from as much as 15 years before. It is better to carry the pension with them.

I do not know what I will do when it comes time to vote on the bill tonight because part of our policy and our principles is that MPs should not be voting on their pay. Notwithstanding the fact that the party's policy states that, I have a greater problem with the fact that voting on this bill places my colleagues and I in a clear conflict of interest.

I voted for the bill at second reading because I wanted to get it to committee of the whole stage where it could be amended. It has gone through that stage without any amendment. I did not vote on it at committee of the whole stage. I may very well not vote on it intentionally when it comes up for a vote tonight.

I say for the record so there is no misunderstanding that I do not intend to opt out of the pay. I earn what I earn in this place and I work as hard as other members. Any member who takes an arbitrary stand to turn it down is being foolish. He or she would be trying to make a point that I guarantee will be lost on the public.

Bill C-28 is a controversial bill. At least we will be able to put it to rest. Hopefully we are now balanced and never again will this type of legislation come to the House.

[Petitions, June 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition is from a number of citizens in different parts of the country and is in addition to many petitions that have already been presented.

The petitioners call upon government to implement a national strategy for end of life care in accordance with that put forward by the Carstairs report in the Senate of Canada.

[Petitions, June 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is from rural mail couriers. The petitioners point out that subsection 13(5) of the Canada Post Corporation Act was put into place to deal with conditions that have long since ceased to exist.

They therefore call upon the Government of Canada to abolish subsection 13(5) because it is very discriminatory against its employees.

[Petitions, June 6th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions to present today. The first is from a group concerned about the divorce and child custody laws at this time.

The petitioners call upon parliament to implement a national strategy to create a non-adversarial marital separation code, the object of which would be to reduce tension and acrimony within divorce for the sake of the children.