Peter Adams

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Scarborough East.

I am pleased to join the discussion on gun control. My view is that it is good public policy that has been handled badly from a financial point of view. I deplore that, as I tried to express to my colleague. The fact of the matter is that we do have a system which although it is incomplete, is up and running and is already producing and has been producing valuable results for some years. Those results will be even more valuable once the program is complete.

Like all good public policy, this policy was designed to address a very serious problem, one which is still with us. It can be quite simply expressed.

During the 25 years beginning in 1974, which is the most recent quarter century, 40,030 people died from gun injuries in Canada. During the same time, roughly 1,000 a year were injured. To give a sense of that, in 1997-98, 767 people were injured by guns in Canada.

If we add the injured and the dead together over the 25 years, it amounts to more 66,000 people, more than the population of the city of Peterborough which I very proudly represent with the county of Peterborough. That represents three dead and two injured today as we speak. I am assuming today is an average day. Three will die and two will be wounded from guns today. That applies seven days a week, 365 days a year.

That is the public policy. These were not people who were shot or wounded in variety store or bank holdups. This is a matter of domestic violence across the country. That is the problem which this particular legislation addresses.

To do it, under gun control, there is a two part system. There is the licensing of the gun owners and the registration of the guns. My colleague opposite, even though he is the chair of the public accounts committee and knows better, tried to suggest that all the cost involved in the program goes to the registration. That is not the case.

The opposition, it seems to me, all support the licensing of gun owners and $2 out of every $3 that we are talking about is in fact to do with the licensing and $1 out of every $3, and I agree it has been too high, in the first 10 years of the cost of the program, is projected to be for registration.

Let us think about the licensing which it seems to me the members support. Licensing is like licensing people to drive cars. It is a program that screens people who, because of mental instability, a criminal record or something of the sort should not own guns. It also trains people in the use of guns, the same way that we train people to drive cars. It is working. The opposition loves it and seems to think it is worth $2 out of the $3 being spent on the program.

Almost two million gun owners are now licensed. Between them they own well over five million guns. Under screening, 7,000 firearms licences have been revoked. That was over a period of five years only. That is 50 times more than were revoked through screening in the previous five years. Also as a result of licensing, 29,000 people are now prohibited from owning firearms as compared with only 15,000 just a few years ago. Licensing works.

To summarize, rigorously screening and licensing firearms owners reduces the risk for those who pose a threat to themselves and others. As I mentioned, already there is evidence that the system has been effective in preventing people who should not have them from having guns. Licensing of firearms owners also discourages casual gun ownership. Owning a firearm is a big responsibility and licensing is a reasonable requirement. While not penalizing responsible firearms owners, licensing encourages people to get rid of unwanted weapons and the like. That is one side of the program.

The analogy is between having a chain with a padlock and a key. With a chain and a padlock, one can close a farm gate without locking it. In this case the key to locking the farm gate is registration. There are two things. The licensing is ineffective without the registration and the registration is ineffective without the licensing.

In terms of the registration, let me give some sense of this because some colleagues keep saying that it is the gun registration program that they are against, not gun control.

Registration increases the accountability of firearms owners by linking the firearm to the owner. This encourages owners to abide by safe storage laws and compels owners to report firearms thefts where storage may not have been a contributing factor. Safe storage of firearms reduces firearms in the black market, break-ins and so on. It reduces unauthorized use of firearms, heat of the moment use of firearms and accidents, particularly involving children. Registration changes the behaviour of the owners.

Registration provides valuable ownership information for law enforcements, the police, for example, approaching a home for any circumstance. There have been many concrete examples of police officers finding registration to be valuable already. They use it because it is tied in with CPIC, 2,000 times a day, .7 second response time. They find it very valuable and they support it.

Now the police never rely entirely on information contained in the registry, partly because it is still incomplete; it is working but it is incomplete. It is helpful to know whether firearms may be present when they receive a call for domestic violence or something of that type.

Registration facilitates proof of possession of stolen and smuggled firearms and aids in prosecution of those matters. Previously, it was very difficult to prove possession of illegal rifles and shotguns. Before this legislation came in, if I was a licensed owner, driving down the 401 in my pickup and I had 100 shotguns in the back, the police could stop me and ask whose guns they were. If I said they were mine, they would ask if I was a licensed gun owner. If I said yes, the police would say, “Very good. Carry on with this pickup full of shotguns”.

Now if the police had caught me coming over the border to the 401, they would have thrown me in jail for life. However, as long as I was licensed, before this legislation came into effect, I could have piles of shotguns in the back of my pickup. Therefore registration is extremely valuable in tying the owner to the gun. Registration allows police officers to follow up on thefts and things like that and to track the guns back to the registered owner.

Registration is critical in enforcing licensing. Without registration, believe it or not, there would be nothing to prevent a licensed gun owner from selling an unregistered weapon to an unlicensed individual. I could own, as a licensed gun owner, 1,000 guns. I could give 30 of them to my neighbour who had been turned down for a licence and no one would ever know that those 30 guns belonged to me.

Illegal guns start off as legal guns. Registration helps to prevent the transition from legal to illegal ownership and helps to identify where the transition to illegal ownership occurs.

My general point is that we do have a good program, which has been too expensive I do admit. However it is one which is already clearly producing results.

If we look at the gun crime figures of all sorts in the last 25 or 30 years, we will discover that in Canada there has been a steady decline in most of them throughout that time. However there are only two periods in that time when there was a marked rapid reduction. One was in the middle and late 1970s, following the last major gun control legislation, which most people appeared to think was very good. The second was, extraordinarily enough because it is still incomplete, in the late 1990s and the first part of this century. In that time there has been a marked decline in virtually all gun crimes, in gun thefts, in gun injuries and in gun murders and gun deaths of all sorts.

Colleagues should listen carefully to this. For the first time in the last years of that decade, handgun murders exceeded long gun murders in Canada. This had never occurred before in history. This legislation is aimed at long guns. It is not aimed at taking guns away from legitimate owners. It is aimed--

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am a little confused by my colleague's remarks. I am someone who supported the legislation in the first place. I believe it addresses a very serious problem. I believe it is addressing that problem remarkably effectively, despite the obstruction from the other side and the deliberate encouragement by the other side to block up the system which will increase the expense.

As a supporter of it, I was particularly embarrassed by the Auditor General's report which the member has just been reading from. I was saddened by the fact that additional moneys have been obtained for this program without proper attention to the House of Commons and that I did not know.

I will confess that I should have been more vigilant. I should have watched the supplementary estimates. I should have known. I would have encouraged the further expenditures but I would have watched them more closely.

I must regret that I did not do that partly because I rely on the official opposition members to do that kind of thing. I really do. I think it is their job. In previous Parliaments they have held the government to account.

We, the people on this side, commissioned the Auditor General to report four times a year instead of once a year. My colleague is the chair of the public accounts committee. He has access to all the books of the government. He and his colleagues missed this completely until our Auditor General came forward with it.

I believe the member for St. Albert is particularly at fault in this respect as chair of the committee. He is the only opposition member who is chair of a committee and that is deliberate, so that he can keep his eye on the public accounts and he missed it.

I have confessed my share of the blame in this program which I support. Will the member confess his own as chair of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, as a member of the official opposition which is supposed to hold the government to account, as a member of the official opposition which encouraged through false information and so on the clogging up of the system and therefore increased its expense? He had to rely on the Auditor General whom we commissioned to report every three months instead of once a year to get this information.

Where was he during this time? Can I rely on him more in the future to keep his eye on these things so that I will know when these valuable programs are being mishandled?

[Committees of the House, March 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present the 23rd report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, in both official languages, regarding the membership of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. If the House gives its consent, I move that the 23rd report be concurred in.

[Health, March 20th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, if there is an outbreak of disease among animals, the federal government has a system for working with local authorities to contain and deal with the outbreak. Such tragedies are inevitably local.

My question is for the Minister of Health. In the case of an outbreak of an infectious disease among humans, do we have a similar plan for working with local authorities?

[Committees of the House, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present the 22nd report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs regarding the report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission for Prince Edward Island.

The report informs the House that no objections to the report were received from members.

[Points of Order, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to what my colleague in the NDP had to say and to the remarks of our former clerk.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask you, in considering the point that he makes, to look at the sitting record for the last 10 or 12 years of the legislature of Ontario. I think you will find that this is only the latest sign of disrespect of the authority of a parliament in Canada.

For example, Mr. Speaker, you will discover that last year that legislature, which represents the largest province in Canada, sat for only 67 days, I believe. The previous year, I believe it sat for 61 days. There was a time not long ago when that legislature sat for as many days as we do, but gradually the premier of that province has been taking away the powers of that legislature, and he now feels that he does not need to consult the legislature on the budget.

I urge you, Mr. Speaker, to look at the sitting statistics of the Ontario legislature.

[Health, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my question is also for the Minister of Health.

Canadians are concerned with the recent diagnosis of severe acute respiratory syndrome in some recent travellers from Asia. This appears to be a form of pneumonia.

Can the minister inform the House what measures Health Canada is taking to fight the virus producing this pneumonia, if it is a virus?

[Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans on the establishment of Canada's first marine protected area, the endeavour hydrothermal vents area, southwest of Vancouver Island.

Canada is responsible for a submarine area equal to 50% of our huge land mass. This newly protected area, the first of 13, is an important step in the protection of the three oceans which surround us.

In protecting the endeavour hydrothermal vents, the minister is identifying a unique biological area where new species have been discovered recently. This is a part of the ocean which is of very special interest to scientists around the world.

I congratulate the minister as he sets in motion a system of marine protection areas which will one day rival Canada's very special system of national parks on land.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my colleague. The first part of his speech had to do with tuition fees and the role of the federal government in that field. The second part had to do with agriculture.

On the tuition fees, it is a fact by the way that it is provincial jurisdiction but it is also a fact that the government has done its very best to deal with the matter of access to universities and colleges across the country. The extraordinary thing is that in the province of Quebec, the Cegep, going to college is actually free. Here is one jurisdiction, with whatever changes the federal government has made, has been able to cope with it by making it free. I think is a very attractive thing to go to college, and post-secondary education is a necessity nowadays.

I think he has forgotten the improvements to the Canada student loan which are in the budget. He has forgotten the million students who will receive millennium scholarships. He has forgotten the funding of indirect cost of research which helps professors employ students and provide them with a meaningful living. He has forgotten the 4,000 graduate scholarships in the budget. He has forgotten 2,000 Canada research chairs through which the federal government directly funds the universities, going around the province. He has forgotten the large fund for aboriginal student education. He has forgotten the RESPs tax exemptions with grants for families planning to send their kids to school.

However, the remarkable thing is that he goes on to agriculture and then seems to forget his interest in post-secondary education. He forgets that in the budget, for example, the veterinary colleges receive direct support which is important for training young people in a key profession nowadays with global trade.

He mentioned one part of the agricultural policy framework. However he forgot that a substantial part of the APF is going to research which is a very traditional federal government function, and research is well accepted by farmers. Farmers know they need a strong research base to be competitive. I would like the member's comments on those things. Is he interested, by the way, in post-secondary education in agriculture?

[Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in the debate on the budget. I listened with great interest to what colleagues on both sides have said today.

I would like to talk about the education, training and research parts of the budget. However before I do that I would like to make it clear that I do understand that the budget is a very remarkable whole, that the different parts of it fit together in a very unusual way.

Strengthening the economy is contained in the budget. My colleague just mentioned one aspect of it. For example, small business has been greatly strengthened by the reduction in the capital tax and by the changing definition of small business from $200,000 to $300,000. Small business people in my riding have complimented me on that. That is one example of the way the economy is strengthened through this budget.

The paying down of the debt has also been mentioned today. This is not something that I often talk about but I am pleased that we are approaching the paying down of almost 10% of this enormous national debt that we inherited from many decades of spending. I am glad the government is chipping away at that. I was particularly pleased to see in the budget that we have now patriated 82% of the debt. We only owe 18% of it overseas and we owe 82% of it to ourselves. If we are going to be in debt, it seems to me that the best way to be in debt is to be in debt to ourselves or to members of our family. That is a great improvement.

The economy is strengthened by those fiscal actions. It is that fiscal soundness that has allowed us, at last, as a federal government, to start doing some of the things that a national government should do, and that is to make investments in the important aspects of Canadian society.

Many people speak of this budget as a health care budget, not only because of the huge sums of money which are now being recommitted to health care after very difficult times, but also because of the vision that has accompanied that reinvestment, the vision that was generated by the Romanow report, which captured the views of the country and which this budget put into place.

For example, emphasis on supporting primary care is included in the budget, and that is extremely important. Also important is the emphasis on home care and the emphasis on the catastrophic cost of drugs where a family is simply overwhelmed by the cost of one drug that a family member has to have. I am not against investing money in the health care system but it is the way investments have been made. I think this is fine.

Improving the lot of aboriginal people is also in the budget. Despite the international situation, our economy is doing extraordinarily well and yet here is this identifiable group, the aboriginal peoples, who have been in Canada for 10,000 years and in some cases more, identifiable by their poverty, by the levels of certain types of illness that exist in their communities, by the low levels of education and the high dropout rate from high school and so on. I am pleased to see that we are investing in that area.

Improving the lot of children is also included in this budget. We have worked in recent years toward improving the lot of seniors and, goodness knows, we have a way to go in that area. Last year for the first time in Canada there was a tiny improvement in the index of child poverty. I believe that tiny improvement came from our establishment of the child tax benefit. In this budget we have increased the child tax benefit to $3,200 for the eldest child with less for further children, plus $1,800 in the case where a child is disabled. I hope that as that investment flows through we will see further improvements in the measures to combat child poverty across Canada. In a country as rich as this we should not have children in poverty.

The budget also moves toward improving child care. The federal government has put its money on the table and has asked the provinces to join it in developing quality child care across the country. I like that.

My colleague mentioned the EI and said that it was a tax of some sort. We tend to forget that the EI was used in previous budgets to develop our system of parental leave, where the parents of a newborn child, between them, can take extensive leave so that in those critical years of life the child can be properly looked after. I am glad the EI funds are being used for that.

This time, the further addition, a modest first step I would say, is the palliative leave under the EI program. Under the budget people who are taking care of relatives who are dying can take up to four weeks of leave under this program. They can take, for example, a week now, a week in a month's time or different weeks at intervals but they can also take the whole month. I am delighted with that.

We have the investments in the environment, Kyoto and climate change, and the extraordinary investments in the parks. I noticed last week that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced Canada's first real under-ocean park. People tend not to realize that we are responsible for 50% more of the huge land area we are very conscious of. In three oceans we are responsible for the under-ocean areas. In this budget provision is being made for marine parks, as well as an expansion of our wonderful system of national parks.

We also have the investment in foreign aid. I was so pleased to see us at this time, when people are viewing Iraq and thinking in terms of war, that we would once again, at last, increase our contribution to foreign aid, particularly to Africa, and to countries which have been devastated by AIDS.

As I said, my main purpose this afternoon is to talk about education, training and research in the budget. It is interesting that measures in this area of education and training and of research pervades most parts of the budget. It is interesting and perhaps surprising to some people but if, for example, we think of health care, it is important right now to deliver health care to the sick. However if we do not have research and we do not have proper education and training, in the end the system will founder. We have to keep training.

We have a shortage of physicians. One of the ways to solve that is to train more physicians. We have a shortage of nurses, particularly nurses of certain types. The way to solve that is through education and training. If we do not have research the diseases that face us will always face us.

One of the highlights of my life was a short conversation I had with Terry Fox in 1980 when I was involved with the Cancer Society in Peterborough. I asked him why he was so insistent that the money he raised go to research. He had no idea of the amounts that would be raised in his name following his sad death. He told me that he had good care when he had cancer in his leg and that he knew people would support everyone receiving good care. “However”, Terry Fox said, “money has to go into research because there will always be people with cancer like mine”.

We have been fortunate in Canada. We have been able to improve the health care system looking after people but at the same time we have had the Terry Fox fund putting money into cancer research.

It is education and research that puts sustainability in our system. The system depends on having educated Canadians. We are already the most educated country in the world by many measures, and that is the way to maintain our health care system, to improve our environment, to have the best agriculture and the best economy in the world. I am going to speak about education, training and research in the budget.

In one of the budget documents--I know, Mr. Speaker, you have read it from cover to cover--there is table 5.1. This is quite a remarkable table. I know we do not have visual aids here but I wish we did. In the place where I used to work we always used them but I know it is not allowed in the House.

Table 5.1 is very interesting. It lays out the years 1998 to 2005. For each of those years it shows what has been spent and what will be spent in various areas of research and innovation. Down the side it lists some of the examples of spending in that six-year period.

It shows what has already been spent and what will be spent by the Canada Foundation for Innovation which funds equipment particularly in research hospitals, colleges and universities.

It lists Genome Canada, which supports genetics research. Canada is in the top three in genetics research in the world.

There is also the Canada research chairs, 2,000 fully funded research chairs. There was a time when there were only 169 fully funded research chairs in Canada and then overnight, because of this government, that number became 2,169.

The funding for what used to be called the Medical Research Council, now the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has been doubled in recent years.

The table lists the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which funds most of the heavy science research; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which funds the invaluable social science work that we do; the networks of centres of excellence, something created by this government; the Atlantic innovation fund, which supports fundamental and applied research in the Atlantic provinces; biotechnology research; government online; and connectedness, which includes that wonderful program that puts every elementary school and high school in the country on the Internet.

That list is down one side of the table. Across the top are the years and the amounts of funding. During those years that I mentioned, the funding in those areas alone has gone from $400 million to $11 billion. This truly is an investment in the future of our country.

I see the members of the opposition sitting, waiting to ask me questions. This truly is an area that the Prime Minister himself has said there are no votes. In the crass sense, there are no votes in this. Even the professors across the country we give the Canada research chairs to will not vote for us for this reason, although they may well vote for us. This is something that a government should do. This is a far seeing thing, just like Terry Fox saying, “We need to look after the people who have cancer now, but we have to invest in cancer research for the future so people will no longer have it”. This is what the government has done, and table 5.1 is an extraordinary illustration of that.

I want to go through some of the areas, some which I have mentioned already and some which I have not. There are other investments in education, research and training which are not mentioned in that table.

First would be the granting councils and I summarized them before. I mentioned the former Medical Research Council. Funding in medical research has doubled in the last several years. Total funding for those councils is now around $1.5 billion. It is going into basic research in colleges, universities and institutes across the country. I am glad to see that gradually the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which does social science research which has often been neglected, is beginning to get more of its share.

One of my colleagues mentioned something which is not in that table but which was mentioned so clearly in the budget, the special announcement of the Canada graduate scholarships.

I mentioned the 2,000 Canada research chairs, which are extraordinary things. Trent University in my riding has eight of them. The federal government is funding eight full professors with their research at a tiny university, Trent University.

To follow through with that, if we think about research professors and highly qualified researchers in laboratories and hospitals across the country, they are at the top of the pyramid. It is true we could import people to take their places but if in the end we do not have a pyramid starting with prenatal, going on to early childhood development, going on to quality elementary schools, quality child care, quality high school and then quality undergraduate and graduate schools, if we do not have all of those in all the many areas concerned, in the future we will not have the system that we have now. It will not be sustainable.

With regard to the Canada graduate scholarships, a group of MPs with whom I am associated, the government caucus on post-secondary education and research, asked that the federal government consider scholarships for undergraduate students in addition to the millennium scholarships we now provide.

When we think about it, if the federal government is to intervene in the system, the quickest way to get results is near the top of the undergraduate program for research and for new positions and things of that type at the bottom of the graduate schools. Of the Canada graduate scholarships, 4,000 of them fully funded, 2,000 are for masters students and 2,000 are for doctoral students. Immediately as this money flows we will be strengthening the graduate schools and strengthening Canada's capacity to produce researchers and professionals, for example, veterinarians, medical doctors and the like.

I was delighted to see that 60% of those scholarships are going to the social sciences and will be administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I am pleased about that. It is my hope that in future we will fund more undergraduate scholarships.

The indirect costs of research, which is not mentioned in the table, is something that is very critical for universities and colleges conducting research across the country. The indirect costs of research sounds a bit obscure but it particularly affects small institutions.

When a small institution has a wonderful, highly qualified, world class researcher and he or she receives a $1 million grant to conduct a project, the small institution has to find some rooms for the assistants and for the equipment for this person. The small institution receives the $1 million. It is kind of a white elephant because it costs so much to support that person. Indirect costs of research address that problem.

I am delighted that having tried it as an experiment last year, the federal government is now committed to three years with a good review at the end of the three years to cover the indirect costs of research. The allocation system that will be used for distributing those funds has a bias not toward the larger institutions which already benefit well from many of our programs, but to the smaller institutions. I am delighted to see it in there. It is a substantial amount of money.

Northern science is mentioned in the budget but not in the table. There is a considerable increase, $16 million, to northern science. My colleagues in our caucus and I are very pleased about that, but there are two things. One is it is not enough. The second is we believe there should be a more coordinated and focused approach to northern science, the way we are trying to be more accountable for example in health care and in our allocations to the provinces.

We believe the federal government has a special responsibility in the north, not interfering with the jurisdiction of the territories at all, but that it has a special responsibility for research and higher education there, and we should be more focused in our efforts. We hope the government this time in its increased funding to northern research gave additional moneys to the polar continental shelf research project, which is the aircraft support system for research in the Arctic islands. In particular, we are glad of that.

Next time the government should give consideration to the national scientific training program, NSTP. It is the program that supports undergraduates and graduates learning about how to do northern research. That goes back to my point about sustainability of the system.

I mentioned the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It is extraordinary. That foundation, set up by the government and as shown in the table, has given away over $3 billion to hospitals, colleges and universities. I am particularly pleased that from its inception it decided to deal with colleges and Cegeps. In the past the federal government has not done that.

The remarkable thing about Genome Canada is that it operates regionally. My regret is that we have supported Genome Canada and its various projects and it is my hope that in the future we will support animal genetics as much as we have supported research into plants and human genetics.

I mentioned SchoolNet. I mentioned aboriginal students. I am very pleased about that support.

Even though I look to our having a sustainable system of education, training and research, I am glad that the government is investing money in the more rapid and effective assessment and recognition of foreign credentials. Many immigrants come to our shores. They do not expect to walk into a highly qualified workplace and function straight away. However they find too many barriers and the budget is dealing with that.

Last, with regard to access to education, I am delighted with the improvements to the Canada student loans program.