Jim Gouk

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Liar.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the hon. member's speech, in particular toward the end when he got into fiscal policies. The only thing that is even more incredible in the outrageous claims that he has made on behalf of the Liberals is the fact that he actually seems to believe all this stuff.

He talked of how the Liberal government wants to find creative ways of raising new highway funds. He talked about either paying for it from the public purse, coming from the taxpayer by way of government payment or collecting it directly from the taxpayer. If anybody knows of creative ways to extract money from the taxpayer it is the Liberals.

He does not seem to recognize or accept that there is only one taxpayer. When the Liberals talk about making payments it does not matter where they get it from, it is coming out of the taxpayers' pockets. He talked in terms of user pay and that the user should be paying for this highway system, not the government. Obviously in the end it will be the taxpayer one way or the other.

Let us go directly to the user. He suggested in the course of his speech that the highways are primarily a provincial responsibility. I do not disagree with that.

I have actually two questions for the hon. member. First, what is his reaction to the concept of making the provincial government responsible for 100 per cent of the highways? The federal government will bow out. But before it does, let us also recognize that the federal government extracts from the taxpayers, the driving public, a 10 cent a litre federal fuel tax originally which it brought in and called a highway tax. The tax amounts to $5 billion a year but in the entire country the government spends about 5 per cent of that back.

User pay? The user is paying 2,000 per cent of the cost of the federal government to maintain the national highway infrastructure. What about turning controls of highways 100 per cent back to provincial governments? But first tell them: "If you accept this responsibility we will give you at least half" and that is being generous. That is allowing the federal government to continue to extract from the Canadian driving public $2.5 billion a year and not put anything back. However, it would turn the other five cents over to the provinces with the explicit requirement that it is spent on highway infrastructure within their provinces.

If he is prepared to do that, I would suggest that the provinces are prepared to accept. British Columbia spends $1 billion on federal fuel taxes and the government spends $200 million for the entire country. If it wants user pay, great. But first account for the money that the user is already paying.

Second, he talked about highway transportation here in Ontario, his province and how necessary it is for his area.

Let us look at bus transportation in the province. VIA Rail officials came before the transportation committee and in response to my question of how VIA could possibly justify taking an already hugely subsidized passenger rail fare and cut it in half, the response was: "We want to increase our ridership and have a greater business volume so we are cutting our fares in half to take business away from the bus companies". Those bus companies are tax paying, non-subsidized, private sector operators trying to make a living, trying to transport tourists to the hon. member's area, that he talked about being so necessary for his local economy. How can we possibly justify VIA Rail taking a fare that is already hugely subsidized and cutting it in half to take passengers away from the private sector?

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Do not forget to answer the VIA question.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

The right to pay more.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, every time I hear the hon. member who just spoke I am more impressed with his talent. He just stood and gave 20 minutes of the biggest bunch of drivel I have ever heard yet he kept a straight face through the whole thing. Perhaps it is explained by his suggestion that he has a background in radio and television. I guess that is where he got his training.

A couple of quick points. He said that the CN share sale was a huge success, and it was. In fact it was such a success that many Canadian purchasers wanted to buy shares. However they were not allowed to because the Liberal government in its document designated a large portion of them to be sold only outside the country. This was in spite of the fact that the Reform Party put in an amendment to say that for the first 60 or 30 days allow it for Canadians only and then open it up. The government refused to do that and many Canadian purchasers who wanted to keep the rail company ownership in Canada were refused because of Liberal policy.

The hon. member says that the Pearson deal was signed in the dying days. I do not know, maybe the hon. member lives in the publishing office of the Toronto Star instead of a house because if he has ever bought or sold a house he knows that once you make a commitment to buy a house, the signing, the final completion of the contract, the conveyance comes further down the road. Once the commitment is made, both sides are locked in. To do otherwise would be a breach of contract like the one the government has now found itself in as ruled by the Supreme Court of Ontario.

The hon. member said that government is oversized and oversubsidized and that the Liberals intend to cut it down. He also said that the government ought to get out of the business of running business. Why then would the government even consider for a moment allowing this huge subsidized VIA Rail currently being subsidized by an amount of $600,000 a day to compete against the private sector, the private sector that it in fact asked to take over VIA Rail operations? They not only did it, they were good. They made it one of the best successful businesses in British Columbia and now they want to destroy it.

If the hon. member is so worried about the papers, tell the papers in Kamloops and through them all the people in Kamloops, why this Liberal government wants to destroy 42,000 hotel nights a year in Kamloops by letting VIA Rail get back into the very business it sold. I would specifically like to hear an answer to the question as to why, given his own words-unless he is prepared to go back on them-they would even consider allowing VIA to now go into competition against the Rocky Mountaineer?

Finally, with regard to Pearson, he mentioned $2 billion in expenditures at Pearson airport. I have heard that amount too. The new head of the GTAA has said: "We have this great plan. We are going to spend $2 billion". Never mind the $800 million the private sector was going to spend without it costing the taxpayer a dime. Where is that money coming from? The Pearson contract specifically banned the private sector from introducing passenger user fees except under exceptional circumstances. Where is the money going to come from? Who are they going to stick for the bill for rebuilding the terminal now that the private sector which was going to do it at no cost to the taxpayer has been kicked out?

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I hope I have enough time left to respond to the comments made by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport.

First, I will deal with the last part of his tirade on the Pearson airport. He refers to the Toronto Star as his constituency. We know the Liberals play to the newspapers and we now have proof, right out of the mouth of the parliamentary secretary.

He keeps talking about the fact that this is a pay-off for the Tory supporters, but in fact, by his own admission, the principal group involved at the time of signing is the Claridge group which is made up of Liberals.

As far as the settlement is concerned, we do not want a specific settlement, we want the rule of law to apply like anyone else. The Liberals cannot screw up, which is what they did with the Pearson cancellation, and then write legislation to protect their own hides.

With respect to the highway study that he mentioned, he is the person who continually says that the committee is the master of its own destiny. I believe the chair of the committee is an honourable person, but he got orders from on high to disregard the commitments he made to me.

The suggestion was made by the hon. member that I would rather be in my riding than down here doing my work. There is a parliamentary schedule. There is a schedule to be here; there is a schedule to be in the constituency. While he was dithering around doing who knows what, I was in my riding conferring with my real constituents, the taxpayers of this country, not the Toronto Star . I held 18 town hall meetings during the January recess period and the parliamentary secretary knows that.

He says that they pulled in all these wonderful people. The principal leader was Moya Greene, who came right out of the transport department. He made a mistake. I asked for a certain report and they faxed it to me. In the report which they faxed to me were handwritten notes made by Moya Greene. They goofed again.

The more the Liberals try to twist the facts, the more trouble they get into. They heard four months of testimony from witnesses and on a one day, by invitation only, round table, they brought in their own special people to manipulate this thing. They overruled four months of testimony and wrote a report based on one day.

If that is what they intended to do, why did they waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' dollars travelling from one end of the country to the other? Time, money and effort were expended by all those witnesses who thought they were getting democracy, when the Liberals intended to hold a one day meeting and override the whole thing.

Honour and democracy are alien words to that side of the House. Instead of buying a new red book they should buy a dictionary.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

Liberals.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

It is an option for Liberals. Only Reformers actually work in their constituencies.

"I really want your approval for this and I am willing to make some kind of a deal with you. What do you want?" I said:

"What I need is a statement from the committee that it is the wrong signal from the government to allow VIA Rail to get back into competition with the company it sold to the private sector and that it is sending that signal out at a time when you are counting in the private sector to bail you out". He agreed to that in writing. He then proceeded to hold the round table which is being used to override four months of testimony. Then they reneged on the written commitment that was made.

There is no honour on that side of the House. There is no honour in the Liberal Party. There is no reason for the private sector to trust the government as it now goes around saying: "Help us, we have made a mess of the national highway system and now we need you to bail us out". The private sector is capable of bailing out the Liberals, but it had better be awfully careful when it enters into a deal with the current Government of Canada, the Liberal Party.

[Supply, February 13th, 1997]

moved:

That this House condemn the government for its approach to federal transportation policies, and in particular, the cancellation of the Pearson Airport deal, the continued neglect of Canada's national highway system, costly inefficiencies in the grain transportation system, and the on-going subsidization of VIA Rail at the expense of taxpayers and private-sector passenger rail and bus operators.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on the Reform supply day motion. There are four specific items named in the motion but of course others may choose to expand beyond them. I will speak on three of the four items highlighted in the motion, leaving the grain question to be handled by my colleagues from the agricultural sector.

I open with a few comments on the Pearson airport contract. Yesterday Reform exposed some of the myths projected by the Liberal Party dealing with its finances. It seems unfair that the finance department alone should be singled out.

Let us take a look at the Pearson airport deal. It is a myth that this is a payoff for Tory businessmen. The fact is that there are more known ties to the Liberal Party in the make-up of the Pearson contract holders.

Another myth is: "We had to cancel the deal because it was too rich". The fact is that secret government documents have revealed it was a good deal for the government. What is more, the government is now in court arguing that the contract holders would not have made any money at all.

The true facts of this scandalous, mishandled political blunder are as follows. During the election campaign the Liberals stated that they thought the Pearson deal was bad and that a Liberal government would investigate and would cancel the contract if it found wrongdoing.

I have no problem with that. To be honest, I felt the same way. At this point the public was ready to believe anything about Mulroney's old party. The problem was that when they got elected and investigated the contract, the Liberals could not find anything wrong with it. Further, studies in the possession of the Liberals clearly indicated that it was a good deal for the government and thus for the Canadian taxpayer.

Without one shred of real evidence the Liberal government slanderously attacked the Pearson contract holders using no evidence whatsoever and using only political rhetoric. To protect themselves the Liberals then introduced the most undemocratic piece of legislation the House has ever seen, Bill C-28.

What should they have done? After the investigation did not actually turn up any evidence of wrongdoing and armed with studies that pointed out the value of the contract of the government, the Liberals should have stated that the contract was not quite as bad as they thought it might have been and that they would try to make some changes that would make it acceptable. I am sure if they had gone to the contract holders they could have arranged a few face saving changes to the contract and then pronounced it okay to proceed with the changes that the Liberal Party had made.

What did members of the public get instead? Right now they have a legal bill that is over $13 million to date and still growing. They have a lawsuit with a potential settlement of hundreds of millions of dollars, a lawsuit that the Liberals had been warned about in those same secret documents in their position before they proceeded.

Terminals 1 and 2 at Pearson airport would have been substantially rebuilt instead of being in the deplorable condition they are in to this day. They have no plans for the needed rebuilding of those terminals and they have no money in the bank. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming budget addresses that particular problem.

Finally, there were enormous job and tax revenue losses for metro Toronto. The loss of direct and indirect jobs from the cancellation of the contract has cost the Toronto area tens of thousands of jobs and business activity. If there is any honour among the Liberals they would pay the cost of their politically motivated mistake from their own party account. We know this will not happen because that honour is not there.

With regard to the recently released report on the national highway system renewal, there is nothing in it that deals with a solution to our deteriorating national highway. There is nothing there to get excited about. It is again filled with Liberal rhetoric.

I should mention that the press release put out by the chair of the Standing Committee on Transport has a neat little trick in it. It says: "Not only are we excited about this but the official opposition has signed on and we are all singing together". Maybe the official opposition did but the national opposition party certainly did not.

The report is full of Liberal rhetoric and when it comes to real solutions there are not any there. There are three fundamental problems. A huge majority of the witnesses who came before the committee asked for some portion of the federal fuel tax revenues to be dedicated specifically to dealing with the national highway system. It should be noted that the government collects about $5 billion a year in highway fuel taxes and spends a mere $200 million.

In a highly manipulated move the chair decided to hold a one-day invitation only round table discussion which he used to override the testimony of four months of witnesses. Virtually all the recommendations in the report arise out of that one-day meeting instead of the four months of testimony.

The report states that the government should commit long term stable funding for highway rebuilding but refuses to do this through a dedicated account because then it would have to live up to that commitment, which is something it will not likely do.

The second area where the report errs is by suggesting that shadow tolling is a funding source. Shadow tolling involves the checking of traffic and making a payment based on the traffic to the operator of the highway. It is a method used to repay a private contractor for building or rebuilding a bridge, highway or some other portion of highway infrastructure, but the payment still has to be made by the government. Shadow tolling and public-private partnerships are valid cost saving efficiencies but they are not funding sources. Unless the government is planning to rebuild our national highway system by the introduction of massive vehicle tolls, this section of the report is deliberately misleading.

The final and most important area of the report is relying on the private sector through public private partnerships to deal with much of the highway problem.

This in itself has much potential but only if there is confidence in the private sector that the government is honourable in its dealings, and there is much evidence that this honour does not exist. The government handling of the Pearson contract was only the smallest tip of the iceberg.

In 1989 the government went to the private sector and asked it to take over the money losing VIA Rail Rocky Mountaineer. The

private sector responded. The Rocky Mountaineer was purchased by a company known as the Great Canadian Railtour Company.

Although it was losing money at the time of its purchase, the Great Canadian Railtour Company spent millions of dollars building and advertising the Rocky Mountaineer. Today it is an overwhelming success story. It has increased its business by 30 per cent per year on an ongoing and constant basis.

When it was taken over there were 5,000 passengers utilizing that system. In 1996, 42,000 people travelled on the Rocky Mountaineer. Also in 1996 they announced their expansion plans for 1997. They then went to VIA Rail and purchased the coaches necessary for this expanded service and sent them to Kamloops in British Columbia to be refurbished and to bring them up to the high standard Rocky Mountaineer insists on. Three months later VIA Rail, knowing the expansion plans of the Rocky Mountaineer and having sold it the cars that Rocky Mountaineer was using for this expansion, announced that it wanted back in. That is unacceptable.

What is even more unacceptable is that the Minister of Transport is actually considering allowing it. He is not only considering it but actually we believe he is at the point of announcing it. This is not only unacceptable to me but it is unacceptable to a great list of other people.

I have a copy of a letter that was delivered to the Minister of Transport from the organization the government is now relying on to bail it out of the highway system problem it has got itself into. The letter is from the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships. It states:

In the case of VIA Rail's Rocky Mountaineer service the government correctly got out of a money losing activity. If the government wants to re-enter the business now that an entrepreneurial private sector operator has made it profitable, this will deter future private sector companies from bidding on future government privatization opportunities. The example of the government exiting and re-entering a business will send a bad signal to entrepreneurs who are looking to establish these types of public-private partnerships.

So much for the government's great plan to rebuild our national highway system. It first has to get the private sector's trust. Even as the government says it wants it, it is throwing this in the private sector's face.

If the minister thinks that allowing VIA to proceed is good for tourism, why have the Council on Tourism Associations of British Columbia and the Tourism Alliance of Western and Northern Canada emphatically stated their opposition to it?

How can the minister think allowing VIA to proceed is good for B.C. when every passenger VIA takes from the Great Canadian Railtour Company means another person staying and eating on a subsidized VIA Rail train instead of staying in B.C. hotels and eating in B.C. restaurants?

If the minister raises the support of the Canadian Tourism Commission, is the minister not aware that his crown corporation has been subsidized to the tune of over $7 billion through VIA that it gives in terms of CTC dollars every year? Should he not reconsider that its input is biased? This is especially true if we consider that the vice-president of the Canadian Tourism Commission is a former VIA employee who was unsuccessful in his bid to acquire the Rocky Mountaineer and who ended up in litigation with the Great Canadian Railtour Company.

The chair of the Canadian Tourism Commission marketing committee is vice-president of marketing at VIA Rail and was also involved in the unsuccessful bid for the Rocky Mountaineer. According to the Liberal government there is no bias I am sure.

What public need is served by allowing a crown corporation that is subsidized hundreds of millions of dollars to compete against a private sector taxpaying company that has done everything the government asked it to do when it sold the route in the first place?

I have a few interesting quotes: "If the government does not need to run something, it should not, and in the future it will not". That was said by the Liberal Minister of Finance. The mayor of Kamloops said: "VIA Rail's plan to increase passenger traffic would have a devastating impact on the Great Canadian Railtour Company and the Kamloops economy".

Here is another dandy. I trust the parliamentary secretary is taking this one in: "I cannot emphasize too much that we are not in the business of putting at risk anyone who has taken on risk in the private sector trying to help us out in the railway industry". Who is that one from? The then Minister of Transport who is now the defence minister for that same Liberal government.

What did the public have to say through organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation? "Forget the Vancouver-Jasper decision, Mr. Anderson. Put VIA Rail on the selling block, a 1990s version of the Last Spike that is long overdue".

What is even more disturbing to me is the matter of honour with the Liberal government. In December the chair of the Standing Committee on Transport announced to me that he wanted to hold a round table discussion in Ottawa during the recess of Parliament in January. I told him I was not in favour of this because there was no possible way I could attend. This is not a break, as it is euphemistically called, but is in fact a required time to work in our constituencies.

[Canadian Airlines, December 4th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, we are looking at provincial taxation. However, I was sent here to represent people at the federal level and not slough it off to the provincial governments.

I would point out that the Minister of Finance certainly started out very correctly when he gave a long list of the taxes that the government levies against companies like Canadian Airlines.

Rather than tell us what we already know, that Canadian pays a lot of taxes in a lot of categories, will the minister re-examine the

tax on aviation fuel and go for an across the board reduction in the name of fairness to all Canadian aviation?