Joe Jordan

[Committees of the House, February 28th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, there have been consultations between the parties and I think, if you seek, it you would find there is consent in the House for the following motion. I move:

That, in relation to its study on environment and sustainable development, six members and the clerk of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development be authorized to travel to London, England from March 24 to 27, 2003 to meet with the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development in England and the House of Commons Committee of England on Environment and Sustainable Development.

(Motion agreed to)

[Question No. 105, February 28th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I think if you seek it you would find consent in the House to further defer the recorded division to Tuesday, March 18 at the end of government orders.

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am confused by the reaction. I am just trying to participate in the discussion.

If we can get money out of the way as a hurdle, then what is a legitimate debate is how we do that. I have no problem with the discussion about how we do that, but I think that the goal is worth pursuing and the goal is worth legitimate debate and informed debate.

One of the things that drove me away from my shepherd's pie to come in here was that I was picking up a sort of partisan element that I would hope we could water down a little bit. I am a border MP. I have a colleague, a congressman, I work very closely with in northern New York and let me say, based on discussions with that member's office, that the amount of time and staff and the machinery required to raise the money to even be in the game should disturb us all. If members want to do something interesting, they can get a copy of an American publication called Campaigns & Elections and take a look at what drives the political industry in the United States, and it is Uncle Sam's pocket liner. It is money.

Now, let us debate the how, but for goodness' sake, let us not get bogged down in a partisan discussion of the why, because I do not think that is serving the people who sent us here.

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I hope all these interruptions are not coming off my time.

One of the issues that came up yesterday is third party spending. I am not saying I am right. I am just saying let us talk about it. I am not rubbing salt in anybody's wound. I am trying to discuss the issue.

Let us say that there are third parties like the National Citizens' Coalition, although as my hon. colleague yesterday pointed out, it certainly is not made up of citizens and it is a strange name for this group. If they have unlimited spending power to target, then the political side, the politicians, has to be able to defend itself. That is not democracy. That is the politics of money. Let us just de-escalate it. Let us take money out of the system. Let us make sure that for anybody in any town who decides they are not happy with the way things are going, then let us get them get into politics. Money should not be a barrier.

What the member talked about in terms of corporate donations is that the party in power seems to be able to raise more money than--

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, through you to Canadians, you understand now that when I present the issue as black and white, they freak out, saying, oh, no, it is more complicated than I am presenting it.

They campaigned against the pension. They took the pension. Black. White.

They can answer to Canadians. I am not going to go on with that point anymore.

The only reason I stood up was to talk about the level of debate that I heard. The member talks about truth. I think that what we are trying to do with this legislation is bring the political process back down to where it is accessible by people. In my riding, for example, I can spend $73,000, I think, and I think that is too much. I do not think I need to spend $73,000 to run a campaign for a federal election, but let me say that if we do not de-escalate the role of money in the system, we are going to price ourselves so that there is only going to be a certain kind or class of Canadian who will be available to run, and I think that the system is less if we go that route.

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, in a former life I was a teacher. I just hope Canadians understand that I am presenting what I think are some reasonable facts and I am being confronted with behaviour from the Alliance that I would not tolerate in a grade two class.

The problem the Alliance members have, I think, is that they have a three second solution to every problem. Every problem is black and white. If they repeat it enough they seem to think they are right.

We are balancing interests and I think that it is at least a legitimate debate that we are trying to have.

To get back to the point of image, I can remember my 1997 campaign and going into debates. There was the Reform candidate talking about the pension. This was the most horrible thing on the planet, this gold plated pension, and MPs were just at the trough. Let us just follow this through to its natural conclusion, because every single Alliance MP or Reform MP is now collecting that pension. That issue seems to have gone away.

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

That is all well and good, but let us remember something. Let us remember that during the Kyoto debate the Alliance critic for the environment said that the Alliance stand on Kyoto was going to help its fundraising.

So thanks very much. Thanks very much for pulling the curtain aside and admitting the worst fears of Canadians: that the legitimate interests of public policy, and we can hear that the silence here is deafening now, should not be influenced by money. Maybe those members should look up democracy in the dictionary.

The other issue is that we had an MP stand up and say that the image the public now has of politicians is just horrible. Let me say that no party has done more to destroy the public perception of politicians than the Reform-Alliance, when its candidate in a debate--

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I want to make a few comments on what I have heard in the last hour. The member who spoke before me talked about the sort of indicting nature of this correlation between corporate donations and the Liberal Party. I guess this is the danger with statistics.

If we were to look at the funding in political processes in modern democracies, what we would find is that the party in government receives more corporate donations. It is not getting money because the party is of any particular stripe but because it is perceived to have its levers on the power mechanisms of the machine. I do not think it is necessarily a fair comment to say that the Liberals are getting this corporate money simply because they are Liberals. In the brief periods in the history of this country when the Liberals have not been in government, the governments of the day received equivalent shares of this corporate money.

I think this underscores what the bill is trying to do. The bill is trying to take that element out of the equation because, real or perceived, I think it has no value being there.

I am going to speak a little about the concept of what we are trying to accomplish. Certainly this piece of legislation needs to be vigorously debated. I am glad to see that it is.

I was fortunate enough to attend business school in the United States. One of the courses I had to take in the United States in business school was a course on government relations, or lobbying. Let me say that the relationship between business and government in the United States is a much more sophisticated and complex arrangement than what we have here. I honestly say that we have something worth preserving here. We do not have public policy influenced to the same extent by political action committees and by funding through what is called the black money or the dark money or the grey money in the American political system. I think we can agree that what we are trying to accomplish is to take that out of there.

The thing that seems to be sticking in the teeth of the Alliance is that we are going to transfer this to the taxpayer. I do not see the problem in that because we are representing the taxpayers.

[Prime Minister Göran Persson, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I ask the House to join me today in welcoming to Canada the Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson. This morning the Prime Minister met with Mr. Persson to discuss the shared values between our two countries.

Canada and Sweden have a very positive bilateral relationship based on our shared commitments to international peacekeeping, democratic development, human rights and a strong support for multilateralism in the United Nations.

Canada and Sweden have worked closely together on a number of issues, including protection for war affected children, alleviating the international trade and small arms and arctic and circumpolar research.

This morning Mr. Persson reaffirmed our close ties by referring to our countries as like-minded and calling the Prime Minister a distinguished leading politician.

I ask the House to join me in wishing Mr. Persson an enjoyable and productive visit to Canada.

[Office of the Ethics Counsellor, November 20th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table, in both official languages, the first annual report of the ethics counsellor, as prepared by the ethics counsellor, on the activities of his office since it was established by the Prime Minister, pursuant to the Prime Minister's commitment earlier this year that the office of the ethics counsellor will provide an annual report to parliament beginning in 2002.