Jim Gouk

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

Maybe a drunken defence would be good. That might explain some of it.

The justice department went into court and said: "Your Honour, we should not be paying any compensation to the contract holders because they are mainly looking for compensation for lost profit and the actual fact is this was a terrible contract. They would have gone broke, lost their shirts and would not have made any profits so why should we compensate them for any?"

Is it not interesting that the government talks out of both sides of its mouth at the same time. That is quite a trick. Mind you, the Liberals have had decades and decades to practise with many years in opposition. I do not know how well they could practise it on this side of the House because when they go to the other side they say everything differently. Perhaps they got confused and thought half the time they were on this side of the House and the other half they were on that side and that is why they have two different stories on the same thing.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly misinformed the public on the matter of lease revenues. He said that we are giving up all these revenues that we currently get. That is a-well, I cannot say what I was going to say; I almost let it slip out. That is wholly inaccurate. I think that term is acceptable. It is wholly inaccurate because we have public government documents which clearly show that the lease payments are deferred during the construction period but they are repaid with interest. That is hardly what the Prime Minister has been telling everyone.

The Prime Minister also deliberately disregarded government reports. Again these were stamped as secret all over them. These government reports clearly pointed out that cancellation of the contract would leave the government open to damages ranging from $500 million to $2 billion of taxpayers' money. Right now it is in court defending an action for over $600 million plus the cost of defence.

The manner in which the Prime Minister cancelled the contract brings into question the value of a contract signed by the government in the event that the government changes. The Prime Minister again deliberately disregarded secret government documentation which pointed out that the legislation limiting the government's liability left the crown open to many problems, including severe capacity and congestion problems at Pearson, increased construction costs and the danger of undermining the government's future leasing and contracting process. This is in a report that went to the government before it brought forward this odious piece of legislation.

The Prime Minister has spent $2 billion on false government job creation, the infamous infrastructure program. Call it infrastructure, fine. If we need some money to kickstart the infrastructure repairs in this country that is one thing, but to call it job creation is an absolute farce. The government spent $2 billion on this and it has virtually no permanent jobs. It is something like 4,500 permanent jobs.

The cancelled Pearson contract would have created 14,000 person years of construction employment with 1,200 new jobs at absolutely no cost to the Canadian taxpayer whatsoever. Now the government, in addition to this $600 million or $700 million worth of compensation that it could lose in court, in addition to all the legal costs that it is incurring, still has to do something about terminals 1 and 2. The consortium was going to spend $850 million of private investors' money in that.

The costs have gone up so we are now looking at $1 billion, or $1.2 billion which was the last estimate I heard. Where is the government going to get this money? It is not in its wonderful budget. Maybe it is going to spend the surplus money, but gee, it cannot. That is the money it is giving to Atlantic Canada to try to buy away the GST. I do not know where the government is going to get it.

The Prime Minister's mishandling of the Pearson contract has jeopardized 1,140 airport jobs, 560 direct off airport jobs and over 3,000 indirect jobs in the metro Toronto area. It also results in a tri-level government tax loss of $72 million a year.

Bill C-22 works against the interests of metro Toronto and all Canadians because after introducing open skies, things that have been long awaited for in the aviation industry, it has now jeopardized the future potential of Pearson airport as Canada's primary hub.

The final point I would like to raise is an allegation. I stress it is only an allegation that has come from many sources. The allegation is that the Prime Minister solicited a $25,000 contribution from one of the principals in the Pearson consortium for his leadership campaign fund.

There have been lots of allegations of this. The Prime Minister had the opportunity to at least partially dispel this. Part of the reason we cannot prove this one way or another is that his law partners refused to disclose documents because they are confidential. They are covered by the Privacy Act of lawyer-client confidentiality. The Prime Minister could have released all those documents to the public but he did not choose to do so. I think we should have a full and proper investigation to determine what these are.

I will close by making the same offer to the new Minister of Transport which I made to the old Minister of Transport. It can be the Prime Minister, I do not care who it is, who stands. If he is going to defend this then he had better be prepared to defend it publicly. I offered to publicly debate this with the previous Minister of Transport anywhere, anytime. One of the nation's television networks was prepared to cover it. I pointed out to him then as I point out to the new minister now, that the balance should be in their favour.

The Minister of Transport can go armed with all his assistants, the deputy minister, the assistant deputy ministers, all his special assistants, executive assistants, all the justice department lawyers, and I will come armed only with the truth. The venue for the new minister, if he wishes, can be the University of Victoria in his riding or it can be one of the lighthouses he vowed to save after they pulled his bacon out of the straits when he was about to go under.

The offer is open and it stands but there needs to be full public disclosure on this. It has not happened and I suspect with the Liberal government it never will.

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

moved:

That in the opinion of this House, the government should strike an impartial public judicial inquiry into the total process of awarding and cancelling the 1993 Pearson airport redevelopment contract, leading up to and including the allegations that the Prime Minister of Canada solicited a $25,000 campaign contribution from Paxport Inc. just prior to the last Liberal Party leadership race and the awarding of the Pearson airport contract to Paxport.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that the only way we are ever going to clear the air on this whole odour of the Pearson development contract is to have a full, genuine, public judicial inquiry. I have called for that for over two years.

I am going to do a little bit of crystal balling. I suspect that in responding to this today the government will say that there has been an investigation, that the Senate held a full hearing.

Let us see how impartial the Senate investigation is. On one side the Liberal senators are justifying what the government did. On the other side the Conservative senators are trying to justify what the Conservative government did just before its defeat in 1993. But who is really interested in Pearson airport? That is the real question. Somebody needs to be concerned about Pearson airport, about the right of law, about the people in metro Toronto, about the flying public and about the Canadian taxpayer. Who was there representing them? Nobody.

Before I leave the subject of the Senate inquiry, I might add that at the inquiry the senators on both sides were able to call any and as many witnesses as they wanted to call. Despite having that ability, the Liberals only managed to pull in two or three people out of all the witnesses who came forward who supported their position, and they were on the Liberal payroll. I do not think that was a particularly good defence for the Liberals.

There was another investigation. Perhaps this one was more impartial. There was an investigation when the government first took office. The government said it was going to investigate this deal and if it found it was not a good deal for the Canadian taxpayer, it was going to cancel it. Was it an impartial investigation? Let us see. The investigation was done by one person, Mr. Robert Nixon. Mr. Nixon had 30 days to investigate this deal but he actually took a little less time. He received $80,000 for doing it.

Who is this Mr. Nixon, this impartial investigator? It seems he is a long time Liberal supporter, party fundraiser, treasurer for the Liberals in Ontario, father of a sitting Liberal member of Parliament in the current Liberal government. What did he get for doing this? He got $80,000, but the government will argue there were a lot of costs so he really did not make a huge amount of money.

Did he get anything else? Immediately after he put in his report with no substantiating evidence whatsoever, which said that it looked like a bad deal which he thought the government should cancel, the government responded by saying: "Good enough, Mr. Nixon. For that we are now making you the chair of Atomic Energy of Canada". That is really impartial.

How did we get into this mess in the first place? During the 1993 election the Liberals needed an issue. They needed a few issues. Everybody needs issues at election time. The Tories were really on the outs. They were accused of anything and everything and I suspect they were guilty of most of what they were accused of.

One of the things the present government accused the Tories of was having a corrupt deal in the Pearson development contract. The Liberals accused them that it was a pay off for their Tory friends and supporters and said that they were going to investigate it. I do not argue with the premise to look at it.

We started to investigate the contract in the House under the guise of Bill C-22, probably the most undemocratic piece of legislation this government has brought forward since 1993. I wanted to see if there was justification for the $30 million these very generous Liberals on the other side were going to give the consortium. I questioned whether those in the consortium should even get that, given all the things they were accused of. When I began to investigate this to decide if I should be arguing against giving them that much, to my surprise I could not find one single solitary piece of evidence to justify cancelling the contract in the first place.

I have never questioned the government's right to cancel the contract, only the relative wisdom of it. I certainly questioned the passing of a piece of legislation that enabled the government to cancel the contract retroactively which in effect would say that it never existed, that would set the compensation by legislation and that would ban the consortium from seeking redress from the court. The Minister of Transport then proceeded to call them corrupt and a great number of other names. He then took away their ability to defend themselves in court. We have found absolutely no justification for this.

However secret government documents came to me. When I say secret I mean documents that came to me stamped "secret". They

cannot get more secret than that. When we finally got our hands on these documents they did not support the government's position. They in fact clearly instructed the government beforehand that it was making a bad move.

After two years the Prime Minister, who has not produced one single piece of supporting evidence to justify the legislation dealing with the Pearson airport, has not been able to get royal assent. When the government brings forward legislation and it is defeated, that is a motion of non-confidence. After two years the government cannot get the bill through the Senate. It has never passed. After two years it has failed. That is as close to a message of non-confidence we can give to this government as it is likely going to get in this session.

I am using the Prime Minister primarily because the then Minister of Transport and the now Minister of Transport, who no doubt are going to end up trying to support the Prime Minister on this sad piece of legislation, it is not their bill. It was the Prime Minister's bill all the way and there should not be any misunderstanding about that.

The Prime Minister and his lackeys have repeatedly attempted to justify the cancellation of the Pearson contract by saying it is far too rich a deal, that it is taking far too much taxpayers' money and shoving it into the pockets of Tory supporters, that it is just too great a return on their investment to justify letting it proceed.

A few things have turned up. When we investigate this we find that there are more Liberals than Tories in this. Now it has gone to court. A lot of people are not aware because the bill never passed, which amounts to a non-confidence motion on the government, that it went to court in Ontario.

The contract holder sued the government for breach of contract and the court said: "Guilty. The federal government is in breach of contract". Of course the federal government has tons and tons of taxpayers' money and it just trots down to the justice department and says: "Start preparing our appeal". When the government has unlimited funds it can prepare the best appeals in the world and it did. The courts again said: "Guilty. You are wrong. It is a breach of contract and you are going to have to pay". The matter is now in court to decide on the damages. The government is being sued for $600 million to $650 million.

The government has a defence. Members opposite should have some patience because we are going to defend the government. We are going to tell everybody what the government is using for this wonderful defence. Again, the government has all the justice resources in the world available to it. Keep in mind what I mentioned earlier about how the Prime Minister and his lackeys said the reason to cancel this deal was because it was far too rich and gave those Tory hacks far too much money, that the rate of return was way too high for the investment. What did the justice department come up with for a defence?

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

moved:

Motion No. 19

That Bill C-14, in Clause 101, be amended by adding after line 19, on page 44, the following:

"(5) The Agency may make regulations requiring railway companies to include in agreements relating to the construction or maintenance of a utility or infrastructure crossing prescribed terms and conditions specified or referred to in the regulations or to make such agreements subject to these prescribed terms and conditions."

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, a point of order. Since there are about three minutes left for debate, would it be in order to suspend debate now rather than having about a sentence and a half said by the first intervening member, only to resume later? Would it not be better to end it now?

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the Reform Party will be opposing all four motions. We are opposing motion No. 10 simply because we cannot find any rational justification for this amendment whatsoever.

In the case of motion No. 11, the authority being asked for already exists through the agency and that is where it belongs. The minister does not need to have the lever of power on everything which is what this motion asks for.

Motions Nos. 12 and 13 relate to previously insupportable motions by the member.

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

moved:

Motion No. 8

That Bill C-14, in Clause 27, be amended by replacing lines 9 and 10, on page 11, with the following:

"native means of transporting the goods; f ) the nature of the goods being transported; g ) the number of markets served by the applicant shipper; h ) the number of other potential carriers available to the applicant shipper; i ) the rate differential between potential carriers; j ) the competitive effects of a rate increase on the destination market, whether domestic or export; k ) whether a rate increase would impair the ability of the applicant shipper to penetrate or to expand into domestic and export markets; l ) the financial and competitive impact of the rate increase upon the short-term and the long-term viability of the applicant shipper; m ) any other matters that appear to the''.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to deal first with motion No. 6 which amends clause 27(2). Members of Parliament debate legislation in the House, they vote on it in the House and then the legislation is referred to a committee.

I have to accept that they do this for some reason other than the exercise of carrying the paperwork out of the House up to another committee room and then back down to the House. I have to assume that they have some rationalization for doing this.

Subject to being corrected by the Minister of Transport, who is no doubt going to speak to this, I assume that in committee, when this is opened up for discussion and when witnesses have been

invited to come forward, they are going to listen to what those witnesses have to say.

If 100 witnesses come in and five want this and seven want something else, then the committee has to make a decision.

If 100 people come in and a significant majority of those people tell you there is something in that bill that is catastrophically harmful to them, you have to listen to them.

If you do not, why did we go through the cost of transportation, costs of the meetings, the interpreters, the technical people, the research people, the clerk and tying up the time of the House and its members? Why do we bother to go through that exercise if we are not going to listen to the people who come before that committee?

The strong majority of people who came before the committee said section 27(2) is a disaster. We cannot have it. It will cause us a tremendous amount of harm. They talk now of significant harm. It started as significant prejudice and now it is significant harm.

They do not need to show significant harm later on by the actions of a rail contract, they are getting it from the government if section 27(2) goes through. I believe that section 27(2) is very divisive on the government side. There are many members who have said they are rethinking this and who have some problems with it.

That is why I tried this morning to find a face saving way for the government to take this off the table, take it back to committee in an all-party jurisdiction and agree to make these changes the majority of the witnesses who came before that committee asked for and then bring it back to the House. No holding their feet to the coals. No saying you were wrong, I was right, I forced you to do something.

That was not my intent. I made it very clear I will try to find the most palatable way for them to make this change in the interest of democracy and in the interests of the shippers right across the country. They rejected that offer.

I said I am not here to make political points. I am here to pass a bill that will satisfy the majority of Canadians affected by it. They did not avail themselves to that offer.

When Bill C-101 was taken from the Order Paper because of prorogation Moya Greene, an assistant deputy ministers in the transport department, one I have a measure of respect for, called me in British Columbia and asked whether I would agree to unanimous consent to bring Bill C-101 back on the floor. I asked if section 27(2) had been taken away. She said: "No. Why would you want it taken away?" I said it is not acceptable to the majority of people who came before the committee. She said: "But we fixed it. We made amendments to it and we fixed it".

I made her perhaps the most generous offer she has ever had as a member of Parliament: "If you believe you have fixed it, of all the numbers of people on record as objecting to section 27(2), if you can get me two or three who say they now accept it I will reconsider my position". Her response to me was: "I do not think I can do that". To which I said: "Then you have not fixed it". The government has not fixed section 27(2).

The new Minister of Transport has listened to people. They have come out of that meeting telling me they have some cause for hope that the government is to redress what is an intolerable clause in an otherwise generally good bill.

I hope members will take this opportunity not to make a partisan decision, not just to support the Reform Party, because we are not here to bring our agenda forward. We are here to represent the people who came before that committee, as I hope the hon. members on the other side are. If they are intent to do that I congratulate them. I hope they support the removal of section 27(2).

With regard to Motion No. 7, the Minister of Transport's motion, and Motion No. 8 which is mine, both dealing with section 27(3), in essence supplements to section 27(2), section 27(2) should be taken away but if it is not we should at least try to make it as palatable as possible keeping in mind these changes are not satisfactory to those witnesses who came before the committee and asked that section 27(2) be removed.

We will support in sequence each of these motions. The most important way is to remove section 27(2). Knowing the government can pass anything it wants, knowing that even if we vote against the entire bill because of section 27(2) it can still pass it, we will at least try to disguise the bad tasting medicine a little.

During the committee meeting one of the witnesses who came forward was from the National Transportation Agency. At that time section 27(2) was still called significant prejudice. It was the same thing but by a different name. I asked him to define significant prejudice. His response was that it would be argued by lawyers for years to come. One of the primary reasons section 27(2) must be removed from this legislation is to make it a better piece of legislation.

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

moved:

Motion No. 6

That Bill C-14, in Clause 27, be amended by deleting lines 34 to 42, on page 10.

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I will quickly touch on some of these grouped motions so it is very clear to everyone exactly where we stand.

The hon. member for Mackenzie put a substantial number of amendments together. While we rejected the majority of them, we have carefully examined each one and will support those that are supportable. This is the same in the case of the Bloc Quebecois' amendments.

We do not support Motion No. 4. This motion might be an aid in trying to prevent government patronage. We certainly are not in favour of supporting government patronage but unfortunately this motion would create such a stalemate that there would be a total lack of consensus within the CPA, which would basically grind it to a halt.

We are also opposed to Motion No. 9. It is very vague and cumbersome in how the consultation would take place and would bog the entire thing down.

We also oppose Motions Nos. 14 and 15. They are not necessary amendments.

We support Motion No. 17 because it is very compatible with the Reform Party's constitutional proposals. These are changes that should take place on a much broader basis and certainly are within the scope of Bill C-17.

Motion No. 27 deals primarily with running rights. As I explained, under the old problem of rail line abandonment, the railroads had to prove financial hardship. Therefore before they applied for abandonment they ensured they had financial hardship. This was contrary to the creation of short lines, an objective which we all wanted to see accomplished.

If it is not feasible for a main federal railway to continue to operate a line we want to try to ensure whenever possible that a

short line operation would take it over and continue rail services to the various communities on that line. If running rights are given to these short lines, they would take the customers of the former main line operator.

The main line operator that sold this line could then be forced to carry the goods of its formers clients over its rail line. These new short line operators could connect with the main company's competitors and it would simply revert to the old process. The main line operator would demarket and reduce the maintenance on these lines so that they would be shut down rather than having a new short line operator running over its tracks, carrying its former client's goods to its competitors, interfering with its operating schedules and many other problems.

I consulted with many of the short line operators in this country. With the exception of one I did not find any other operator that was interested in having these running rights. Therefore, we will not be supporting this motion.

We support Motion No. 68. It clarifies jurisdiction.

We oppose Motions Nos. 72 and 73 because certain things should be within federal jurisdiction, notwithstanding that we would like to see a lot of things taken from the federal government and given back to the provinces where they belong. The items covered under these two sections are not in that category. We should not be involving the provinces in something which is the clear responsibility of the federal government.

[Canada Transportation Act, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I will make it extremely brief. I have actually finished except to comment on the intervention by the hon. member from the NDP.

When I spoke, I spoke not of branch lines or specifically of main lines, I spoke of railway lines. It does not matter if it is main lines, branch lines or the line that the hon. member gave you, his motion subverts the whole intent of this bill.

[Petitions, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I have five petitions but they will be presented as one.

The petitioners call to the attention of the House of Commons that the mining industry is the mainstay of 150 communities across Canada, an important contributor to Canada's gross domestic product and a cornerstone of our economic future. Canada's investment climate is now forcing many mineral industry people to look for opportunities elsewhere in the world.

The petitioners therefore call on Parliament to take action that will encourage employment growth in this sector, promote exploration, rebuild Canada's mining and mineral reserves, sustain the mining communities and keep mining in Canada.