Jim Gouk

[Canadian National Railways, November 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the government spoke with pride about what a great price it is getting for CN Rail shares and how selling them in foreign countries helped to increase that price. What really helped to increase the share price was the amount by which the government reduced CN's debt.

In committee the government talked about reducing CN's debt by approximately $1 billion and that very little if any would actually come from the Canadian taxpayer. In reality, the government reduced CN's debt by $1.4 billion, and all of it came from the taxpayer except for what can be realized from the sale of non-rail real estate assets with a book value of $235 million and no appraisal to the contrary.

This pay-down may well have contributed to the enhanced share price. However, if the government is going to use Canadians' tax dollars to enhance the value of shares, should it not have offered the first chance of those shares to Canadians? As it now stands, 40 per cent of those shares are being sold outside of Canada, despite the fact there appears to be sufficient interest inside Canada. If this government is going to continue to run huge deficits, at least let Canadians be the beneficiary of that debt.

[Cn Rail, November 23rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, indeed there does seem to be great interest in the stock offering. Many potential Canadian purchasers have been unable to buy shares because of the large percentage offered outside of Canada.

Will the parliamentary secretary please explain to the House and to Canadians why the government rejected the Reform amendment to Bill C-89 which would have seen the share offering to Canadians and Canadian companies only for the first 60 days and would result in Canadian National Railway's remaining in Canadian hands, instead of intentionally selling 40 per cent to 50 per cent to foreign investors.

[Cn Rail, November 23rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the government has indicated some concern in the past about the marketability of the CN shares. It even went so far as to suggest it may sell part now and then the rest of them later on when things improve.

Can the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport please tell the House if he anticipates a total sale of the government's shares in CN Rail?

[Gun Control, November 23rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the Senate has now passed the infamous firearms legislation. For some it may be considered a victory but it is a very hollow victory at best.

The government has made some vague promises of safer streets and safer homes by introducing mandatory registration of rifles and shotguns. The Minister of Justice has never explained how cracking down on law-abiding citizens is going to prevent the criminal misuse of firearms. Obviously, criminals are not going to register anything they own.

I believe the legislation is nothing more than a very thin smoke screen to offer a false sense of safety to Canadians who are

concerned about the growing crime problem in this country and to take pressure off a government that seems unwilling to do anything meaningful about it.

There is a tremendous cost involved in the legislation. The set-up cost is $118.9 million by the minister's own figures, and registration itself will cost hundreds of millions more.

At a time when we are seeing federal cutbacks in transfer payments for health care, post-secondary education and various social programs, should the government not be reconsidering its priorities and refocusing the spending of what money it has in areas more meaningful than the registration of firearms belonging to law-abiding taxpayers in this country?

[Railway Companies, November 6th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, as I prepared to speak on the motion it seemed the hon. member from the Bloc must not have realized what was in Bill C-101, because it is exactly what he is asking for.

However I listened to the content and the direction of his speech and obviously he was aware of it. It seems as though he went around in a circle and fell out the middle. I am not really sure what its purpose was unless it was simply to take another 20-minute opportunity to bash Canada and promote Quebec's separation.

The member is looking for a particular provision that is contained in Bill C-101, specifically in clauses 143 and 145. On the one hand he says this is an urgent matter and that he wants to get it done very quickly. At one point he used the word retroactively. There are a couple of things with the Bloc Quebecois that I would like to do retroactively.

There is a bit of a paradox here. While the hon. member stood to say this was an urgent matter that needed to be taken of quickly, Bill C-101 is scheduled to go for clause by clause consideration and to come back to the House for final passage the week following next week's break. He also said that Bill C-101 needed to be extended, that there has not been enough time and that they want to stretch it out.

I do not know why he needs more time. We have heard dozens and dozens of witnesses, intervenors in committee. The hon. member, as the transport critic for the official opposition, is a member of the committee. Perhaps he needs more time because he has not been at many of the committee meetings. He showed up once or twice.

I am the national transport critic for the national opposition party and I have been at those meetings. Any time I have not been able to attend my colleagues have been there in my support and in support of people across Canada. People can approach the government and make application to the government. They can also approach a creditable, viable opposition party when they do not happen to agree with what the government is doing or they want to ensure there is more pressure and support.

The hon. member has shown up at committee meetings on occasion. I cite one of those occasions to show how his interest has nothing to do with national transportation or with the act. It only has to do with his own sovereignty, separatist agenda. Last week one or two witnesses had already spoken and then we heard from a group of representatives of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities representing municipalities across the country, including in Quebec.

Toward the end of the intervenors' presentation the hon. member joined the committee for a brief period of time. As questions to the delegation opened he immediately tore into them, in a very vicious and embarrassing manner, because the brief was not presented in French as well as in English. Had he been there at the beginning he would have heard the explanation and apology for the fact that it was not available in French, that it would be available the following day, that the delegates had only completed the brief that morning, that they would have normally done this, that they always do but on this occasion they did not have the time to do it. It was

quite an embarrassing outburst from someone who claims to be a member of the national official opposition. It may be official by name, but it is certainly not national.

The hon. member stayed for the next presentation, which happened to be by a delegation from the province of Quebec, and then left before any further presentations were made.

I do not know what his real bottom line is. If his real bottom line is to have the amendments made that have been outlined in his motion, they are contained in Bill C-101. He can come to the committee and aid us in completing that bill. I am sure amendments will be offered. I shudder to think what will come from his party, but I am sure amendments will be proposed. I can guarantee that there will be amendments proposed by the Reform Party. Amendments have been proposed by the Liberal Party. The bill is there to be examined. The committee will hear presentations and will react to the needs of the Canadian people.

If the hon. member comes to the committee for the purpose of aiding it and seeing the bill completed, then he will get the very things he asked for this morning. However, if he comes to the committee to delay and extend the proceedings, after having not been to any of them, then he is fighting not against Bill C-101, not against the Liberal government, but against his own motion. That will be a very interesting aspect for him to take up.

I would close by pointing out one item for clarification. From time to time, prior to the referendum and since the referendum, the Reform Party has raised the question of who rightly should be the official opposition in the House. By past precedent it falls to the Bloc Quebecois because it has a superior number of one. Some people, both those sitting opposite and some misinformed people in the media, have claimed that the Reform Party has done this by way of opportunism. It was not opportunism; it was our duty to the Canadian people and our obligation as members of the House to represent all of Canada on all bills, including national transportation bills, rather than the narrow views of one separatist group within one province.

If the hon. member co-operates he will get his wish.

[Senate, October 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have a few notes to keep me on track, but after some of the unbelievable rhetoric I heard coming from the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands I feel like throwing it out and straightening the record on all the things I would probably make unparliamentary reference to if I were not under complete control.

The one comment I will make is about how the hon. member said that former Premier Peterson of Ontario was thrown out of office because he agreed to reduce some of the seats for Ontario in the Charlottetown accord. I suggest he was thrown out of office because he was a Liberal. We will soon see that happening on the other side here as well.

I will deal with other parts that he erroneously brought forward in the content of my comments today.

The Senate is something about which I hear a lot of complaints. It is an ongoing complaint within my riding. I have a tremendous number of people who communicate with me in one form or another asking why the Senate is even there and calling for its abolition.

One of the things I have suggested to them is that the Senate in its current form does not provide much of a benefit to Canadians. It is in essence a rubber stamp most assuredly for the balance of this term of government, now that the Liberals have functional control of it, and carrying on for as long as it takes the balance to shift again once we have managed to send the Liberals to the other side of the House, chasing after Mr. Peterson. There is no need for it to be a rubber stamp, but that is the way the system works currently. We are saying rather than abolish it, change it into something that is far more democratic.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands, the Prime Minister, and many others who occasionally sound out on the other side of the House keep talking about the Charlottetown accord and how we rejected not the Charlottetown accord, but the triple E Senate. The Charlottetown accord was not about a triple E Senate. That was a little carrot put in there, which was kind of like putting a bad tasting pill in something sweet to try to attract us.

The Reform Party gave full credit to any part of the Charlottetown accord that was worthwhile. We said there were some good parts. At any place I went to address the Charlottetown accord, the first thing I commented on were the goods parts, not all the garbage that was in there. Believe me, there was plenty. Some of the parts were actually good.

It is absolutely ludicrous that the Liberals, every time we try to bring up something that has some linkage to the old Charlottetown accord, say it was offered to us on a platter and we turned it down.

The are three parts to a triple E Senate. First is the elected Senate. We could have that part now without any constitutional amendment. It takes absolutely no change. It takes the co-operation of the Prime Minister and his Liberal cronies to agree to do what the majority of Canadians would like to see.

We have already seen it. We have seen the democratic election of Senator Stan Waters in Alberta. As other vacancies have occurred, we have called on the Prime Minister to allow that province to designate who it would like him to appoint by allowing it to hold a democratic election, as Alberta did, instead of appointing some Liberal hack he had some obligation to look after for one reason or another. The majority of Albertans said we want Stan Waters.

Why not start this now? The reason is that the Liberals would not have any place to pay off all the people they have obligations to and to put future obligations on people who they place in the Senate.

Many senators not only could get elected but would be willing to stand for election. It would give them the credibility they may be due but have lost because most people look on the Senate simply as being loaded up with friends and people who have special ties to the party in power, whatever that party might be.

What does electing senators provide? It provides regional representation from people who do not owe their allegiance to their patron but instead can represent the people of the region they come from.

The second part of a triple E Senate is equality, the equalness of the Senate. It calls for an equal number of senators from each province. We live in a country that goes by the concept in

government of representation by population, the ultimate definition of democracy which should not be changed.

There are problems with almost every system and rep by pop has its problems, particularly in a country where 90 per cent of the population lives within 50 miles of the American border in a huge geographic area. Further, a large portion of them live in the central part of the country because that is where the original development started before moving westward. There is an imbalance in the distribution and the needs of the people in the different regions.

What we need in the Senate is some kind of regional balance to provide control over the problems created by rep by pop. This might be a difficult concept for centralists but there is a growing number of regional concerns that the government and others do not address.

The Quebec referendum is a direct result of what happens when these regional concerns are not addressed by Parliament. The number of senators does have to be large. Two people represent states in the United States that have population bases as large or larger than this entire country. They do it quite happily with two people. I do not hear complaints from California, from Texas or from New York that they have the same number of senators as Rhode Island. I refute what the previous member from the Bloc Quebecois had to say.

Finally, we get to the third part, the effective part of triple E. The Senate must have sufficient powers to be able to provide a regional perspective and address regional problems created by legislation without being beholden to their patron.

A majority of the House, as was referred to by the member for Kingston and the Islands, is not necessarily a majority. A majority from the Liberal Party is the word of the Prime Minister. We have seen that with several bills already where some members in the Liberal Party had the audacity to vote according to the direction of their constituents and were thrown out of their committees for it. That is not a majority. It is not democracy. That is autocratic rule. That is what a Senate has to be able to overcome. A triple E Senate gives them the tools and the power to do that.

This does create a dilemma for members of the Liberal Party. I can understand that because they would lose this tremendous source of patronage appointments, a place to shove their friends and other people to whom they have obligations.

There was a vacancy for the chair on the board of referees in my riding. I heard through very good sources that the former assistant campaign manager of the Liberal candidate was being appointed to that position. In fact, he came to us and told us not to bother putting any names forward because he was getting it.

I raised the matter in the House and eventually it became a big issue. I certainly was talking about patronage. The individual was interviewed by the Vancouver Sun and was asked whether it was a patronage appointment. When asked how he would respond to that, he said: ``What is wrong with patronage? How else are we going to get anyone to join our party?'' How else indeed.

I am not suggesting that all senators or not good. There are some good people in the Senate, but that is more from good luck than good management. I am simply pointing out that the Senate does not do the job most Canadians need and want it to do. There is an opportunity for us to start now with that triple E part by having elected people going to the Senate.

Let us start with an idea that does not need any constitutional change and then branch out from there. Before we know it, the place may even become fully democratic.

[Senate, October 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, there were some very interesting comments made by the hon. member from the Bloc-

[Employment Equity Act, October 5th, 1995]

People have the right to run as candidates. A number of women ran for election and were not elected. I ran against two women in my riding. People have the choice to make that selection. Women have the vote the same as men and they make a choice.

The air traffic control system started talking about affirmative action because there were not enough women air traffic controllers. At the time I happened to work with a very competent female air traffic controller who was asked to participate in the affirmative action program to get more women into the air traffic control system. She agreed that she would take part in a program to attract more women to apply and to learn about the system. But nobody in the system, male or female, was prepared to alter the practices so that a woman who was less qualified than a male candidate would be chosen.

Would the hon. member see a system where for the sake of balancing quotas, and there is no other way to put it, that the system has to take someone other than best qualified candidate because there is an imbalance in the precious quota system?

[Employment Equity Act, October 5th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the last speaker and it sounds as if he has a valid concern. However, it seems to me that the legislation he is addressing is discriminatory and the government is trying to resolve that with a concept called employment equity.

I could be corrected on this, but I believe it was last year when we had recognition of women's day in the House, a women Liberal MP suggested that the House had a long way to go because over 51 per cent of the voters in the country are women but only 18 per cent of MPs are women. Where lies the problem? Women have the vote. Women have the intelligence to vote.

[Via Rail, October 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, once again the government is competing against the private sector and using taxpayers' dollars to do so. There is only one way to deal with the situation: privatize VIA Rail and end the squandering of public funds.

When will the Minister of Transport make the logical and ethical decision and introduce legislation that will commence the privatization of VIA Rail?