Dick Proctor

[Amateur Sports, February 11th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Hockey Association now allows body checking as early as age nine. The changes were made after data indicated there was no evidence of additional injuries.

However, in view of the fact that the data analysis was wrong, that the CHA's research committee resigned en masse in protest of hitting at such a tender age and that at least one province, that of Quebec, does not allow hitting before the age of 14, does the minister responsible for amateur sport not think that the Canadian Hockey Association should be assessed a game misconduct in this issue?

[Canadian International Development Agency, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, last week CIDA recognized Gildan Activewear with an international award for its excellence in social and ethical responsibility. Gildan is the same Montreal T-shirt company that began firing employees in Honduras last November for trying to bargain collectively. As a result of Gildan's union busting activities, the Quebec solidarity fund is rethinking its multimillion dollar investment in this outfit.

Will the minister responsible for CIDA rescind this award immediately and inform the House how this company ever was nominated in the first place?

[Carrie's Guardian Angel Law, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure once again to rise and discuss Bill C-6. I had an opportunity representing our caucus when the bill was before committee late in the fall session.

I listened in some disbelief as the minister talked about the legislation being on the right track and that it was a truly independent proposal that would resolve historic grievances. He stated that it would deal with claims in a fair and efficient manner. The minister presented a certain vision of Canada with regard to compromise and fairness between the Government of Canada on the one hand and first nations on the other.

As the House heard today, nobody on this side of the House shares that view. If there is any vision of Canada, it is the historical vision of father knows best which first nations have endured for several hundred years as European settlers arrived and treaties were subsequently arrived at.

The current federal government, exclusive of Bill C-6, decides if specific laws have validity. Unfortunately, those decisions tend to be made in secret and that is what we are trying to alter. My colleague from Winnipeg Centre talked about that when he pointed out that the joint task force report and the Assembly of First Nations together with the Government of Canada tried to work out a modus operandi, something fair to both sides that would resolve treaties that had not been resolved for decades but needed to be resolved.

Compensation is currently decided by negotiations. The federal government already has a high level of control over the application of the rules. In fairness it was seen that the government seemed to be in a conflict of interest. On the one hand it was the defendant and on the other it was the adjudicator. Perhaps one might say judge and jury. That is what we want to change.

My colleague and other members in the debate today talked about the fact that the joint task force report was a good initiative but was sabotaged by federal bureaucrats who wanted something different. However I will not go over that ground again.

Under Bill C-6, which is now the replacement for the joint task force report, there is no independent, impartial body to clear the existing extensive backlog. Instead, the federal government retains carte blanche to control the pace of settlement and decisions therein. Access to the tribunal is tightly limited. Appointments are at the unilateral discretion of the Government of Canada. The delay by the federal government is a financial reward to it and not a penalty.

Claims are not prioritized even after decades of no resolution. They are not recognized as legal debts. Instead, claims are a matter of discretionary spending to be tightly controlled. The end result is a conflict of interest because the government decides land claims against itself and all that is entrenched in the legislation it introduces.

My colleague talked about other legislation that seemed to be coming fast and furious. We think the bill damages the relationship because it arbitrarily imposes limitations upon first nations people regardless of their input, and in this case, even when the government knows there is massive objection to what is being proposed. This is again a father knows best approach.

Treaties are nation to nation agreements that date back several hundred years. They should be central building blocks to the creation of a fairer and more just Canada which we all want to see. They are legally protected under section 35 of the Constitution but Bill C-6 simply does not respect the spirit of treaties.

I talked about the government being in a conflict of interest by being both defendant and adjudicator. We find it insulting in the extreme that the government asked the Assembly of First Nations to take part in the joint task force report, but then ignored the model of the bill that was initially proposed.

First nations leadership desperately want changes to the Indian Act, yet Bill C-6, which would replace in part the act, has generated an unprecedented amount of animosity and disgust from first nations people. That is one of the many reasons why the New Democratic Party caucus vigorously opposes the bill.

Specifically, I want to make these points. In our opinion the bill does not create an independent and impartial committee. We say that because the minister has the final word, the last say about everything in the bill, contrary to what the government said earlier today.

Bill C-6 dismisses the role of the Assembly of First Nations when it comes to its inherent right to self-government. Not only does the bill dismiss the joint task force report, but nowhere does the legislation even reference the Assembly of First Nations.

In addition to dismissing the report, the consultation process has been farcical. Just three weeks were set aside for consultation on the bill and there was no opportunity to really hear from the witnesses who wished to appear and register their objections to Bill C-6.

There are no provisions for appointments, renewals and approvals, which was outlined in the joint task force report. All appointments, including the chief executive officer, the commission and the tribunal will be made on the recommendation of the minister and the minister alone.

Bill C-6 ignores the task force report in three ways. First, it excludes obligations arising under treaties and agreements that do not deal with land or assets. Second, it excludes unilateral federal undertakings to provide land or assets. Finally, it excludes claims based on the laws of Canada that were originally United Kingdom statutes or royal proclamations.

My colleague talked about the $7 million cap. Another part of that is that interest and costs are included in the cap of $7 million, which means, as I said before, that the government will benefit financially from delaying settlements as the real value of these settlements will obviously decline over time. Lengthy processes will mean extremely expensive legal fees for first nations and put them under pressure to settle for what they would consider to be much less than the real value for which they are looking; 10 cents on the dollar.

There are a number of difficulties with the bill. Delay is a major problem in the current system and it cannot be overestimated. There are 550 land claims outstanding. Bill C-6 will not create an independent and impartial body. The vast majority of those 550 claims are in excess of $7 million. Under the proposed legislation, the government is not even in a position to hear and consider this proposal. It will several hundred more years with Bill C-6 before we have settled all of the outstanding land claims settlements.

The spirit and substance of the joint task force report is not being embodied at all in Bill C-6. The bill is regressive even in comparison with the current system, the one that we want to fix. It seems to us that the government should recognize that Bill C-6 is entirely unfaithful to the spirit of the joint task force report. It is not consistent with the red book promises, as the previous speaker correctly pointed out.

No reasonable person would conclude that what is here before us today is in any way, shape or form a progressive step toward justice and finality. What is needed is a co-operative partnership. The government has rejected that with “it is my way or the highway” approach. Bill C-6 is not the way to go and that is why the New Democratic Party caucus is opposed to it.

[Canada Pension Plan, January 31st, 2003]

It is common sense, and there is a clause in the regulations that states it has to invest in the domestic economy within the Province of Quebec. That seems to us a sine qua non, something that we need to do in our provinces and country.

It is ironic that in the House of Commons we discuss the Kyoto protocol and talk about cleaning up the environment and reducing gases yet the pension moneys we talk about that could be invested in doing some of that good work are perhaps being invested in more high risk operations that are completely outside our economy and our country. They are being invested internationally.

On that point, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan last summer we had the finale of a Canada-Saskatchewan infrastructure program to reduce pollution and retrofit older buildings. This is something my colleague from Winnipeg knows about very well and has talked about it often in the House. It was a fairly modest program of $600,000.

A half a dozen buildings were retrofitted in Moose Jaw. We were told in the aftermath of the program by the contractors who did the work that the estimated savings in terms of heating and cooling the six buildings would amount to more than $200,000 per year. This means that in three years, as the member from Winnipeg has said in the House many times, the entire bill of $600,000 would be paid off.

The retrofit done on the six buildings probably has a shelf life of at least half a century. There will be very good returns over a long period of time. It is a job creator.

It seems to me that it is nothing but good news, those sorts of stories. For the life of me I cannot imagine why we are not taking more of those initiatives with our pension plan to make sure there is a good return, that we are cleaning up the environment and leaving a smaller imprint for our future generations.

Instead of following the model that appears to have worked so well in Quebec, the people who do not like what has happened or who are concerned or have persuaded others that the Canada pension plan is just not viable, just not sustainable over the long term, will have us perhaps invest the money who knows where because there is no public accounting of it. It could be invested in all kinds of pitfalls like Bre-X, Talisman, WorldCom and Enron.

There is no reason they would not invest in tobacco companies if it looked like they would have a good return, or invest in the third world and to heck with environmental concerns or whether or not the workers there are paid a reasonable wage. Let us not have an ethical stream; for heaven's sake, we would not want to do anything like that.

I listened to the member from Edmonton who represented the Alliance position on this issue. He was concerned about the RRSPs. He said that one of the ways we could pay less attention to public pension plans would be to elevate the amount of money that could be contributed into an RRSP. The amount now is capped at $13,500. There are persistent rumours it is going to be recommended that it go up to $19,000 per year and it could come in as soon as the budget next month.

We have a lot of difficulty with raising the RRSP limits because of the fact that the vast majority of Canadians do not even come close to making their $13,500 limit now. It is just not fair in any sense of the word. Raising the limit to $19,000 from $13,500 was one of a lot of recommendations. It is not fair. It is not right.

We have just come through a $100 billion tax cut in the past five years. The vast majority of that money has gone to the people who are in the top 1% of our tax brackets. Certainly it will exacerbate that. It does nothing more than provide a tax break for the thin upper crust of this country as it is measured by income and has absolutely nothing to do with building a stash of money to fund a life of ease when a person's working days are through.

The current RRSP contribution limit is 18% of earned income to a maximum of $13,500 minus any pension adjustment that an individual has. The limit is already scheduled to rise to $14,500 next year; it is indexed to go up, but there are those who want to up it another $5,000 above that. We cannot speak strongly enough in opposition to this. It is not fair to the people at the lower end. It is not fair to our tax system, which is increasingly disparate in terms of the growing gap between the rich and the poor. We would turn thumbs down on any notion of increasing the RRSP limits.

We need to talk about the business of why public pension plans seem to be under such vigorous attack and it is not just in Canada. Certainly worldwide there have been fights and battles about the way we consider funding our pension plans.

Critics warn, and we have heard it today, about the demographic time bomb waiting to explode and an age war over pension plans and pensions as the baby boom generation begins to retire over the next several years. Because the population is aging, we are told there will be fewer people of working age to support those who have retired and become dependent and that younger people will resent paying the cost of supporting the growing numbers of the older generation. At least that is the argument from the right wing. The answer according to some people is to eliminate the public pension programs like the CPP and force people to contribute to their own personal savings plans instead.

The fact is that public spending on income security for seniors in Canada is modest by any international standard and is expected to peak at levels well below those anticipated by other western countries in this century. Public pensions have reduced poverty and inequality among seniors in Canada. That is a truism and is very important to restate.

While the percentage of older people in the population is indeed increasing, the percentage of young people has been dropping. However by 2031, when the so-called demographic time bomb is supposed to explode, the total dependency ratio in Canada, the ratio of the young and the old, will still be lower than it was in 1951. In addition to that, as seniors form an increasing percentage of the population, they will account for an increasing percentage of all taxpayers.

The boomers, who have been described as the trillion dollar generation, will be much better off in retirement than today's generation of seniors. They will also pay an increasing share of the amounts collected by various levels of government in different kinds of taxes and user fees that will help pay for services to the elderly, such as pensions, health care and long term care. In other words, higher total amounts paid in taxes by seniors themselves will finance a significant part of the cost of the programs that older generations require.

Recent Canadian studies have also demonstrated that with relatively modest economic growth over the next few decades, Canada will be well able to afford its aging population, even taking into account increased public spending on health care and pensions as our population ages. The OECD says that if public spending on the old in Canada is to maintain its share of gross domestic product as our population ages, the average annual growth required between 1980 and 2040 is only 1.05%, just over 1%.

What is the panic? Why the panic? The answer is that there were a number of economists who received such prominence and notoriety in the United States and worldwide in the 1980s, the so-called Chicago boys, who pushed people into this notion that if it was public, it must be bad and let us privatize everything.

One of the good examples of what transpired was in Chile in South America when the Chilean economy was pushed down this free enterprise road under Pinochet with deregulation and privatization of public institutions and pro-market policies. Virtually overnight and with no fanfare, no public announcement, Chile replaced its public pension plan with a forced savings scheme that was the darling of the right wing economists and right wing governments and think-tanks around the world. It was held up by the World Bank as a model for other governments to follow.

Here the Reform Party advocated the abolition of the Canada pension plan and its replacement with a mandatory savings scheme of super RRSPs based largely on the Chilean model. Chile's system of mandatory private savings accounts can hardly be called a pension scheme since there is no risk pooling whatsoever, which is a fundamental characteristic of a true pension plan.

The entire risk of providing for retirement in Chile is borne by individuals. Workers must contribute 10% of their monthly earnings into an account with a private investment fund to cover old age pensions and an additional 3% of earnings to cover disability and survivor pension benefits. There is also a mandatory health insurance premium, which is 7% of earnings. In other words, total mandatory contributions to the private funds in Chile, most of which are run by foreign financial institutions I might add, amount to some 20% of earnings and there are no, I repeat no, matching employer contributions.

Experts who have looked at Chile's mandatory private savings scheme have raised serious concerns, including the high cost, the low coverage, the large number of vulnerable workers who are excluded, the inadequate benefits provided by the scheme and the systemic bias against women. Low income workers cannot afford the high contributions and many are in default.

It has been estimated that for the average worker, the fees, commissions and other charges consume well over one-third of contributions. By way of comparison, the cost of running the CPP, at least the cost before the recent reforms, is 1.8% of the contribution revenue. It is clearly a very manageable number.

People who are advocating this privatization have used tactics that are strikingly similar to the kinds of strategies being used by privatization advocates both in the United States and in countries like Chile. The key to having radical changes adopted, of course, is to create a crisis mentality. If people can be convinced that our public pension program is in crisis, they will be much more amenable to making major changes.

Corporate funded think-tanks and right wing commentators have put forward a number of different schemes to privatize the CPP by converting it to a system of mandatory individual savings accounts or by allowing people to opt out of the plan and have their mandatory contributions directed to their individual savings accounts. While initially most proposals seem to favour the Chilean model, in recent years we have seen other countries such as Britain opting out.

The Reform Party, in a 1998 booklet on pension reform, asserted that privatization based on individual accounts was working successfully in other countries, Chile and Australia. A closer look at these countries revealed that is not the case at all.

The Alberta government, under a treasurer who is now a member of this House, threatened to take Alberta out of CPP a few years ago unless federal and provincial finance ministers agreed to adopt several Alberta proposals, one of which was to allow individuals to opt out of the CPP plan and have some part of their contributions directed to their individual accounts. Opting out raises the same kinds of concerns as complete abolition of the Canada pension plan.

First, there would be a huge transition cost because some way would need to be found to pay for the accumulated benefits of people who have chosen to opt out of the plan.

Second, vulnerable workers would be pressured to opt out even though it may not be in their best interests to do that.

Third, the high cost of individual accounts would reduce the proportion of contributions available to generate a pension probably leaving that individual without adequate pension at retirement and therefore increasing the number of people who would have to rely on a minimum government guarantee through old age security or the guaranteed income supplement.

Opting out could seriously undermine the viability of the public plan itself. It is not much different than a publicly funded health care plan and when the private aspect of it is introduced, we risk ruining the entire system. It is no different with pensions as it is with health care. Based on other experiences, those most likely to opt out would be, surprise, higher income workers with secure jobs. If contributions from these workers were diverted to their private accounts, taken out of the public accounts, then there is less revenue to pay the people at the bottom of the system and there will be less money available for their retirement years. That is what we are getting at when we talk about intergenerational transfer and helping those who need some assistance.

Privatization through individual accounts or opting out would introduce inequalities. The Alberta proposal to withdraw surplus funds from the plan and allow individuals to invest in it privately for their own benefit would also contravene the principle of pooling risks through social insurance. It would weaken public policy levers that could be used to redistribute income and reduce inequalities.

Recent Canadian studies indicate the important contribution made by the public pension program, particularly the Canada pension, to reduce poverty and inequality among seniors. Reducing the role of government to one of simply providing social assistance for those most in need while encouraging marketplace solutions for income security and maintenance, will lead to an increase in rates of poverty and inequality among future generations of Canadian seniors.

Those are a few of the concerns that we have about pension plans and the CPP Investment Board. We are not at all persuaded that what has happened here in recent years is working to the benefit of our seniors or those who will be seniors in the next relatively short number of years.

We are very much opposed to the proposals to extend the grasp of the CPP Investment Board. We are opposed to it for entirely different reasons than our friends in the Canadian Alliance. The NDP believes in public pensions and we think a model based on what has transpired in Quebec over the last 36 or 37 years would work extremely well in the rest of Canada.

[Canada Pension Plan, January 31st, 2003]

Yes, that is right, they did double his bonus for his assertion that all was well.

The strategy to diversify from government bonds to other assets is the right one, according to Mr. MacNaughton. What he fails to say, and what the Alliance fails to say, is that it has been government bonds over the last couple of years that have helped offset some of the large losses that have occurred on the equity side of the portfolio, because the bulk of the money has been transferred into index funds, Standard & Poor and the Toronto stock exchange, and some have been allocated to the United States and the international stock indices. The equity portfolio in the CPP Investment Board fund was at $16.9 billion on September 30 of last year. That is a very large amount of money. The 20%, the $4 billion it lost, is based upon that.

If we look at this in personal terms, the fund is designed for a cash-rich investor, in this case very rich because we are investing between $6 billion and $8 billion a year in new funds. Of course the CPP argument is that with the market downturn this is a good time to invest even more money.

I want to contrast what the CPP investment board has been doing with what Quebec has been founded on since 1966 and what the Canada pension plan used to be founded on. Particularly for Quebec, less so for the Canada pension plan, there were three or four key principles. One of them was that the money from Quebec's public pension plan was going to be invested in Quebec firms, in small and medium-sized firms with less than $50 million in operating capital. This was to create, maintain and protect jobs in la belle province. It was also designed to promote the training of workers in economic matters and increase the influence on Quebec's economic development. A third goal was to promote training and to stimulate the Quebec economy.

The result has been very significant in that province. Quebec went from a region with limited sources of venture capital to one that now gathers the largest share of overall venture capital in our country. Something in excess of 52% of venture capital is directed to the Province of Quebec, largely as a result of these restrictions and stipulations on how moneys from the Quebec pension plan can be secured and invested for a better return for the people who are actually living in that province.

[Canada Pension Plan, January 31st, 2003]

Oh yes, you have.

The Canadian Alliance says not to trust the public to be able to invest in these plans, let us give it over to the private sector, to private interests.

The government, for its part, says that is just right wing rhetoric which everyone should ignore, but then it quietly goes off and slowly but surely implements these kinds of half-baked ideas that are coming out.

I think the jury is still very much out on the CPP investment board. It talks about an arm's length relationship and we respond by saying if it is at arm's length it is very soon going to be out of reach entirely.

What is forgotten is that the money from the pension plans comes from both employees and employers. We know that the employers are well represented on the CPP investment board, but we ask respectfully where the heck are the employees in all of this? Where are they represented? Where are their interests represented in what the CPP investment board is doing with these public funds?

The board was created in 1997 to invest a portion of public pension money into equities, but now the legislation that we have before us is to move all pension plan assets immediately to the board. I know that seniors are very concerned about what is going on with this proposal.

The chief actuary, according to the Alliance member who spoke before question period, warned some time ago that the CPP fund was out of control and we were going to hit a huge bulge in about 2031 if action was not taken. For his warnings he was fired from the position. I would counter by looking at the investments of the CPP investment board. I wonder if it is not going to get a whole lot worse, because based on recent returns it is not exactly managing and investing the money very wisely, which I will get into shortly.

The Alliance member asks about the younger worker. The return has been only 2% for the worker that has come into the workforce since the 1980s. Our reply to this is that there is no recognition in that argument of the intergenerational transfer, the fact that we have built schools for post-secondary education and we have done a lot of other things. Together there is a recognition in our country that people grow up, go to school, get their education and enter the workforce, and then when they have completed their life's work they have an opportunity to retire with some dignity. This whole shift out of public pensions and into private pension plans fails to recognize those kinds of realities and I think it is extremely important that they be recognized.

I also want to note in passing that there is no spokesperson in this debate for the Bloc Québécois. There is a very genuine reason why it is not participating in the debate. Quebec has its own pension plan. At the time the CPP plan came in, Quebec had its own plan. It has not gone down this highly questionable road in terms of its pension money, so I assume the Bloc feels there is no need to participate in the debate.

I mentioned that the CPP investment board has not been doing very well. Let us accept at the outset that investments over the last year or so have not been good. It has been a bear market, as others would say, and a lot of investments in mutual funds and others have had poor or negative returns.

However, just for the record, it is important to point out that over the first six months of last year the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board managed to lose $4 billion of people's pension funds. That is a fairly significant loss. It represents just over 20% of the equity in that fund, which disappeared in the first six months of last year. The $2.5 billion that it lost in the second quarter of last year was by far the largest loss since the investment fund began in 1999. The $4 billion overall that it lost was double the $1.7 billion that it lost the year before. This is hardly a success story so far.

Despite that, Mr. MacNaughton, the CPP Investment Board president and CEO says that all is well, no need to worry, that over the long run these things are just little blips in the system and this will not hurt the pension plan of Canadians.

[Canada Pension Plan, January 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate today on the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. I appreciate that we are speaking to the Alliance amendment that was moved just before we went to question period. We in this caucus would not be supporting that. We could support it except for the last couple of phrases, because we do not agree with the direction the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is taking.

As I listened to the debate earlier today and the leadoff speaker, the parliamentary secretary, it seemed to me that if I could synthesize what he was trying to tell the House in terms of why the government is moving forward, there are about five points.

The first is to permit all amounts held to the credit of the Canada pension plan account to be transferred to this relatively new CPP Investment Board by repealing the requirement to maintain in the account a three month operating balance.

Second is to establish a means by which the investment board may be required to transfer funds to the government to the credit of this plan account so that the immediate obligations of the account can be met.

Third is to transfer to the investment board over a three year period the right, title or interest in each security held by the Minister of Finance and establish the conditions on which the securities may be redeemed or replaced.

Fourth is to provide that the foreign property limit in the Income Tax Act applies to the investment board and its subsidiaries on a consolidated basis and to provide that the investment board will be considered to hold the property of its subsidiaries for the purpose of applying this foreign property limit.

The final point is to make housekeeping amendments to the investment board's reporting requirements and procedures.

The NDP position on this, and we will get into this in some detail, is that all pension trust documents must require a joint trusteeship, that all pension moneys are, after all, the deferred wages of the employees, that any pension surplus should be used only to improve benefits and that as deferred wages the funds have to be invested carefully, safely and wisely so as to show the greatest return for the beneficiaries of the plan within the investment guidelines as set out in the trust documents.

The New Democratic Party comes at pension plans with a great deal of history over many years, beginning with J.S. Woodsworth, the leader of the Canadian Co-operative Federation, the precursor of the New Democratic Party, followed by M.J. Coldwell as our leader, Tommy Douglas, and of course Stanley Knowles, the longtime member for Winnipeg North Centre. Our party has fought consistently over more than half a century for public pension plans so that our senior citizens, after a lifetime of work and service to their communities and their country, have the ability to retire with some dignity. People like Woodsworth and Douglas fought for these plans when a cradle to grave social program did not have all the negative connotations that we hear about in this day and age.

When the CPP plan first came into effect in 1966, my father was in mid-fifties. He recognized that he would be a beneficiary, that he would be able to draw that pension plan in another nine years at retirement age. He held different jobs in his life, but at that time he was farming and did not work for an organization or a company where he had a pension plan of any kind.

As it turned out, he was killed in an industrial accident and never had an opportunity to cash in on a pension plan, but I can say that he was very pleased in 1966 when the government came forward with a Canada pension plan that he would have been entitled to. As I say this, I recall that of course my mother would have been entitled to some of those benefits down the road as a survivor of my father's passing.

Just when we thought we had won these kinds of public pension plans and had some security and dignity for senior citizens, along comes the Reform Party, now the Canadian Alliance, and says we do not need public pension plans, let us tear the whole thing down.

[Political Financing, January 29th, 2003]

Okay. The minister says that it is coming and we take him at his word.

However I would just observe that we have not had terrific luck in this country in having third party limits enforced by the courts. It may be that with these changes it will make it easier for the courts to rule in favour of restricting third party but that is something that we need to get into.

The individual cap of $10,000 is a worry in this sense. It is $3,000 in Quebec and Manitoba, the other two provinces that have this legislation. As I understand this, it is $10,000 per year to different political parties. It is not $10,000 total. It is $10,000 for the Progressive Conservatives, the New Democrats and the Liberals. It seems to us that it will be very difficult to have this perception that big money is influencing politics if we can have a big money individual donating $40,000 to $60,000 to political parties. We will want to look very carefully at that.

In conclusion, I want to say that we do support it in principle. We want to look at the details. They say the devil is in the details. We want democracy to be in the details.

[Political Financing, January 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to stand and put our thoughts on this important legislation.

Before I begin, I would like to say, through you, Mr. Speaker, to the government House Leader, that the question I asked about 40 minutes ago in this Chamber dealing with the Canada Elections Act, he will note, if he looks at the transcript, had absolutely nothing to do with any technical briefing that was given earlier this day. It was all a matter of public record. Frankly, the answer was not warranted under the circumstances.

With regard to the legislation, it seems to me that the government is endeavouring to have three objectives. First, it says that we need greater transparency and enhanced disclosure. The New Democratic Party agrees with that.

Second, the government wants to promote fairness. Obviously all of us should be in agreement with that.

Third, and finally, the government wants to address the perception of big money having an undue influence in the political process. I will come back to that in just a moment.

This issue has been important for our party and for a number of voters in Canada for many years. As recently as this weekend at our leadership convention, yet another resolution was passed on the matter of donations to political parties. We said that it should be restricted only to individuals. We said that there should be third party limits in place, that public financing needs to be a part of the whole package, including an annual grant, which we note is in the legislation, and that adequate public financing needs to be in place before we can go ahead.

I think Canadians are genuinely concerned when they look at the disclosures on donations, for example, for the member for LaSalle—Émard, and they find that $10,000 have been contributed to that leadership campaign by something called the ABC Group, that 398536 Alberta Ltd. has contributed thousands of dollars, or that 90808353 Quebec Inc. has contributed money. We do not know and the Canadian public does not know.

Therefore it is accurate and proper that the government is moving forward with legislation that would prohibit this kind activity, this kind of funding to political parties and to leadership candidates or nominees for a riding association or for a nomination.

We want to look at the bill in detail. We agree with it in principle but we want to make sure that the funding is fairly allocated. We do support tightening the regulation of third party activities. I have not seen anything in here. The minister--

[Canada Elections Act, January 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we already know from the heritage minister that Kyoto was delayed because of the influence of big money. We are now reading that Liberal MPs, including cabinet ministers, are shovelling money into secret trust accounts.

My question for the government is, what assurances are there that these political pork barrels will be dismantled and disallowed under amendments to the Canada Elections Act?