Dick Proctor

[Petitions, April 23rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions which I will present very briefly. Two concern free trade but no freedom of information.

The petitioners are demanding that the Canadian government publish the integral versions of the free trade area of the Americas. They are very concerned about the environment and the impact on all peoples in the Americas.

[Access To Information Act, April 23rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, on the first day back after the Easter break it is a pleasure to speak in the House on this private member's motion, which requests that there be a new definition of government institution to open up financial administration and which includes the Canadian Wheat Board.

Although I have not been here for a long time, this is for me a bit of déja vu because we debated this issue in 1997 and 1998 when we were dealing with Bill C-4, the act to amend the Canadian Wheat Board. Certainly the New Democratic Party had a lot of difficulty with parts of that bill at that time and we subsequently voted against it.

However, we think there is some justification for lack of disclosure on this particular piece of legislation and in this particular area. The reason I say this is that the Canadian Wheat Board goes head to head with some of the largest multinational corporations in the world and we certainly do not see companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill making available in minute detail all of the access to information that would be required should this motion ever be adopted.

At first blush, obviously, when we think of transparency and access to information we might wonder why anyone would be opposed to this. However, if we think beyond this a little bit and realize that we are dealing with some very large multinationals that the Canadian Wheat Board is in direct competition with, we can understand why the board has not made this available at this time. I find myself in support of that rationale.

It goes without saying that all directors will be entitled to the complete disclosure of all Canadian Wheat Board facts and figures, including but not limited to fully audited financial statements, so they will be able to examine the price at which grain is sold, the price premiums achieved, the operating costs, and whether or not the Canadian Wheat Board is being run efficiently. That is a result of one of the changes in the 1997-98 legislation, which opened up the Canadian Wheat Board by allowing an elected board of directors of farmers. It is a 15 member board, 10 of whom are elected and 5 of whom are appointed by the government. With the full knowledge these 15 directors have of the Canadian Wheat Board and its global competition, the directors would be, will be, and are in the best position to assess what information should be made public and what, for commercial reasons, should remain confidential.

Therefore, the New Democratic Party finds itself in opposition to the motion before the House. It is important to point out at the same time that not only the Canadian Wheat Board but the Export Development Corporation and Canada Post do not fall under the Access to Information Act. There are reasons for that situation and, as I have tried to point out, they are logical and well founded.

I will note as an aside that at the moment under chapter 11 of NAFTA there is currently a very major dispute going on behind closed doors involving United Parcel Service and whether or not the Canadian government is going to be required to pay several hundreds of millions of dollars. UPS is arguing that Canada Post-Purolator is competing unfairly against it.

This is exactly the point that the Canadian Wheat Board finds itself at: by publishing that data we would put ourselves at a commercial disadvantage to the Cargills, the ADMs and the other multinational giants engaged in the wheat industry.

I know there are others who wish to take part in the debate and there is time allocation, so I will conclude by making three brief points. First, the Canadian Wheat Board is a commercial organization and information pertaining to sales and prices is restricted, as it would be in any private organization.

Second, a board of directors heads the Canadian Wheat Board. Ten of those fifteen directors, the majority on the board, are elected farmers. They and they alone are responsible for the performance of the organization and the information it releases to its farmer constituents.

Third, the Canadian Wheat Board is not responsible to the public at large as it is not a government department. It is paid for by the producers in western Canada. The corporation submits its annual report to parliament each year and, may I add, they do have an auditor. I believe Deloitte and Touche is the company that audits the books every year and presents those facts. I an also given to understand that the Auditor General of Canada, as part of the wheat board bill of 1997-98, the old Bill C-4, will be examining the books of the Canadian Wheat Board.

I hope I have satisfied the House as to why the New Democratic Party would not be in support of this motion.

[Alcoholic Beverage Labelling, April 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I rise as a result of an exchange I had with the minister responsible for human resources back on March 23, during which I indicated concern about the system on CPP disability payments that was stacked against Canadians to the point where advocates were increasingly coming in to the system to give a hand on a very uneven playing field.

I had indicated to the minister that some of the advocates had been harassed in the past and, in her response, she kindly said that I should provide information on the allegations I had made. This turned out not to be necessary because the office of the commissioner of review tribunals wrote a letter almost immediately saying that in his two and a half years in that job, there had never been an advocate excluded.

However, he went on to say that one witness was excluded last fall in a situation in Alberta where a person who had multiple sclerosis and serious cognitive disabilities repeatedly asked for her representative. There was some confusion that the representative was actually an advocate. It took six months. There has been no response yet from the office of the commissioner to that individual. Obviously the case needs to be reheard immediately.

In the few minutes that I have I want to talk about the bigger picture of CPP disability benefits and why there are advocates entering the system. My contention is that it is because the system is clearly working against ordinary Canadians.

Two hundred thousand Canadians have been rejected over the last five years because either their forms were incomplete, their medical evidence was lacking or there was a misunderstanding of the basic criteria of a very complex form.

The guidelines were changed as well in 1995. They were made much more restrictive. I will give one example. It was assumed that people over age 55 prior to 1995 who were found to be disabled to do their own jobs were also disabled to do any other job. That has now been rescinded and that opportunity no longer exists.

People who may have contributed to CPP for their entire working life may all of a sudden need it but when they do it is not available. The rationale is that this saves money. It is estimated that there will be a $1 billion savings in this account alone by 2005.

In a contest between the bottom line versus compassion and social justice for Canadians, the bottom line wins every time. This is a national concern.

Older Canadians are often very proud. They are very reluctant to talk about infirmities they may have acquired. We have poorly versed medical professionals who simply do not understand all the facts. We lack finances for the professional testing that would help to sort this out.

There are no government provisions for appeals, forms or kits. Most people who are denied can rarely speak with an adjudicator as there is no money available for them. The CPP disability plan is a bewildering, non-transparent maze. I am sure every member of parliament has problems with this in their constituencies. It is a totally unacceptable situation.

The caucus I represent will fight for progressive changes to this. We will win, not on behalf of ourselves but on behalf of disabled Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

[Canada Elections Act, April 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I too should like to participate very briefly in the debate today on Bill C-9. I support the modest proposal put forward by the Bloc to restrict the power of the unelected Senate to have a veto over elections. It is impossible to escape the irony of an unelected Senate somehow having a veto over what we do to further democracy in the land.

I have listened to some of the previous speakers. I agree with the speaker who immediately preceded me regarding the almost absolute power of the Prime Minister's Office. It has far more power than that of the president of the United States where there is a system of checks and balances.

We are aware that many attempts have been made over the years to reform the Senate and that all attempts to date have met with abject failure. I see this proposal as a very modest one to limit the power of the Senate. It proposes to consult the Senate on issues rather than give it a veto.

The Bloc has made a reasonable suggestion. I listened with care as well to the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough who cautioned against doing anything in a piecemeal fashion.

The concern of a number of us in this party is that past attempts to make broad changes and to have an elected Senate, as we have seen in Charlottetown, Meech Lake and other attempts, have all ultimately met with failure. We are grappling with the need to do something.

Members get up from time to time to talk about an elected Senate and they ask the Prime Minister, when a vacancy occurs, whether he would allow an election in the province where the vacancy has arisen. The answer is always no, with some qualifiers about Meech Lake and about Charlottetown.

What is proposed here is simply a modest way to curtail the power of the Senate. As I said, it is totally ironic that unelected senators should have a veto.

A previous speaker from the government side questioned whether a conjunction existed in English or whether the bill was lacking a conjunction. If that is his only problem why does he not move a friendly amendment and let us get on with it?

Earlier this week I had occasion to meet with someone from Bolivia, which we would normally consider a third world country. He was very interested in our political system. He wanted to know about elections to the House of Commons and then he innocently asked how our senators were elected and for what term of office.

It is embarrassing for most parliamentarians, and probably for many Canadians, to have to say that we appoint senators rather than elect them. We do not do the appointing. The Prime Minister appoints the Senate and each member therein.

He looked at me in a strange way, as do a lot of guests to our country when we reveal that we have one of the few bicameral systems in the world where one House is elected and the other is appointed. The upper chamber is appointed by one individual and has no checks and balances. There is no opportunity for a committee to decide whether a Senate candidate is suitable.

The Prime Minister can simply wake up one morning and say it is time to appoint so-and-so. That is why people like Gordon Robertson and Donald Savoie are concerned about the absolute power of the Prime Minister's Office and the almost total absence of checks and balances.

To come back to the amendment, it is a very modest one. It is trying to address the difficulty we have in dealing with electoral reform and whether we should have a Senate. The member for Regina—Qu'Appelle makes a very good point. He has come full circle on this issue and now believes that the way to go is to abolish the Senate.

In answer to the previous speaker, that would only give more power. If we were to have a system of proportional representation where we would perhaps have a first past the post system for some members and then proportional representation for some others, we could achieve the best of both worlds. However, we would do it in one institution, in the House of Commons, as opposed to having a House of Commons and a Senate.

I very much support this modest amendment made by the Bloc this morning and I encourage other members to do so as well.

[Foot And Mouth Disease, April 3rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate tonight. I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member for Winnipeg North Centre. From the number of my colleagues in the NDP caucus here tonight we can see how seriously we feel about the issue. Some of them will be taking part in the debate later on.

It is good that we are having this debate because I believe many Canadians genuinely feel the issue is of more concern to them than it appears to be to us as politicians, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and the government.

I am not saying that is the case but from the faxes, phone calls, letters and e-mails some of us have been receiving Canadians are extremely concerned about the possibility of a foot and mouth outbreak in North America, and specifically in our country.

They know from the farming community that potentially billions of dollars are at stake. Some of them from Saskatchewan and Alberta who are familiar with what we call feedlot alley in the Lethbridge area know of the hundreds of thousands of cattle that are there and of the damage that would ravage that sector if indeed this virus were to spread to our country.

Canadians from whom I have heard would like more detail from the government. I listened carefully to the two ministers who spoke this evening and welcomed the commitments they made and contributed to the debate. Canadians would like reassurances. They would like to know when travellers are returning from international trips that without exception they are using the disinfectants supposedly at airports. I will have a little more to say about that in a few minutes.

Overall they would like to know what are the rules of the game. What is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency doing in this regard? What is requested by customs and immigration of their employees? Canadians are saying that they will let us know from a firsthand basis if those instructions are being followed.

Yesterday I received a call from a constituent in the Moose Jaw area who hauls a lot of cattle throughout western Canada and into the States. He reported a conversation he recently had with an American border guard. She asked him how he thought the vigilance against the potential for foot and mouth disease was going. He said that he did not think it was going all that well and she assured him that it was not.

I am reassured by the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Minister of National Defence, but I can tell the House that Canadians are very concerned about a potential outbreak. We know that students in western Canada have cancelled trips to Europe, specifically to the U.K. They may be out some money as a result, but they have done it because they do not want to be in any way responsible for bringing home this contagious disease.

Just as an aside, we know that Air Canada is reviewing on a case by case basis that some individuals have initially been told they will not get their entire refunds back. My office has been in touch with Air Canada today, which told us that it would look at it on a case by case basis. In a situation like that of the students from the Edmonton area and from Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, I think they will get full reimbursement at the end of the day.

Our office was in touch with someone else today who reported that he had landed in Vancouver about a week ago from Belgium and Holland. He was pulled out of the line when he said that he had been on a farm in the past 14 days and was going to a farm because that was his job. He said that he was asked a lot of very good questions, but he was never asked to use disinfectant.

In this case the gentleman in question had taken precautions before he left Holland. He had dry cleaned his clothing, sanitized his footwear, showered and did all the necessary things. However the fact of the matter was that he was not requested to walk on the disinfectant pad when he landed at Vancouver airport.

Was this just an isolated case or not? I quote from a reporter or a writer named Morris W. Dorosh who wrote in an Agriweek article dated yesterday the following:

The other day I came off an airplane from an international flight at the Toronto airport. It was the end of the spring school break and the place was even more crowded than usual. People were coming through Canada Customs four or five abreast. An official of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency stood beside this human river meekly inquiring whether anyone had any meat products from abroad. Not one passenger in five even noticed him. Diseases and infections of all kinds are ultimately spread by people. It is now believed that foot and mouth disease was brought into the United Kingdom in the luggage of an airline traveller from China who passed through the customs inspection process without detection and subsequently provided the meat to a Chinese restaurant in northeast England. The infection may have been active for 10 or 15 days before the first diagnosis.

It is not just an isolated case. Canadians want to be assured that there are rules out there and that they are being adhered to religiously.

In my riding I am privileged to represent the air base in Moose Jaw. Last week concerns over foot and mouth disease in Europe had inspectors scouring British made jets that were arriving. This is the NATO flight training centre that has been converted to a 15 wing base. They have taken delivery of several training jets coming from England aboard Russian cargo planes. Precautions were taken to ensure that there was no soil on the crew members' shoes. Their inflight garbage stayed on board and the wooden crates used to carry the wings of the jets were in fact burned.

I know that the member for Brandon—Souris has said that this would be an non-partisan debate. I certainly intend to abide by those Marquess of Queensberry rules, but I will refer to a call that the NDP caucus initially received and which my office returned. It was from a veterinarian in Ontario who expressed a great deal of concern about the fact that the provincial government seemed to be shifting responsibility from veterinarians to what they call lay inspectors.

There is a cost factor involved. They are alleging that it is too expensive to have vets. This is particularly prevalent at community auction sales during pre-sale screenings of livestock where they segregate the animals that appear to be less than sound. They are then quarantined or set aside for a vet to examine at a later time.

The veterinarian is extremely concerned. He is working in this area himself, but he notes that there is basically no formal training going on for so-called lay inspectors. There are very serious implications for food and animal safety in the opinion of this veterinarian. He is urging that the government of Ontario seriously look at reassessing what is being done in terms of the lay inspectors who are replacing the vets at these auction sales.

The Canadian cattle industry and particularly the Canadian Animal Health Coalition have been in the forefront of facilitating discussions among the industry and the CFIA to plan in case the disease does get here. They deserve a lot of credit because they have come up with a plan for a voluntary cease movement which has been approved by the Animal Health Coalition for immediate development. They have also worked in conjunction with the Mexicans and the Americans.

I see that my time is up so I cannot go into the details on the Canadian Animal Health Coalition, but it deserves a lot of credit for the work it has done.

[Financial Consumer Agency Of Canada Act, March 30th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I will go on with my speech. This legislation will help credit unions, designate a financial services ombudsman, something the NDP has been asking for for a long time, and create a consumer protection agency, that is called the financial consumer agency. It will launch a consultation process whereby the banks could legally be forced to provide a low fee retail deposit account. This is a position we have held for a long time in the NDP; however, nothing will happen in the short term. The bill will formalize a process of collecting data on small business lending but will not expand the banks' business powers into the areas of auto leasing.

These are some of the positive things in the bill. There are also in the 900 pages many things with which we disagree. Among those negatives is the wide ownership rules which lead to the concentration of banking powers in the hands of very few individuals.

This provides too much power to the Minister of Finance. Unlike parliament, the minister would then have the final say in virtually every major change that dealt with financial institutions, including mergers, acquisitions, regulations and ownership levels. It also fails to provide a real framework of accountability between large financial institutions and their local communities.

There is no community reinvestment act similar to the one in the U.S. which works very well. There is no effective improvement in accessing basic banking services, especially in rural areas. There is no right to lifeline, no cost accounting and no effective way to stop bank branch closures. Banks are only required to provide a four to six month window of notice to close under the legislation.

There are no teeth for the independent banking ombudsman and it reduces requirements for small banks. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has been given more powers to deal with the potential for increased risk in the system, but there is no guarantee that the OSFI would be able to use these powers effectively because of the complex structures introduced in the bill, for example bank holdings and new ownership regimes.

There is nothing on the control and regulation of high risk derivative products and off balance sheet liabilities or on new monetary policy tools for the Bank of Canada.

We have dealt with some of the positives and the negatives. We note as well that it is a highly complex 900 page omnibus bill which changes eight major financial industry acts and is probably the largest bill ever to come before a Canadian parliament. Its main thrust is to increase competition, foreign and domestic, and flexibility through deregulation and re-regulation.

The Minister of Finance is easing entry requirements in the financial services market. He is purporting to broaden the powers of financial institutions including credit unions, increasing the flexibility and the complexity of ownership regimes, and allowing access to the payment system by non-bank entities, for example insurance companies. The legislation also creates a financial consumer agency, an independent financial ombudsman.

Bill C-38, its predecessor, included cosmetic measures to improve access to basic banking services and guidelines for a bank merger review process which were made available with the bill but are not included in the current version of the legislation.

The New Democratic Party opposes the bill. We emphasize that there is some support, as I have indicated in my remarks. We support parts of the bill, including the modernization of financial services, expansion of powers to credit unions, a potentially better deal for consumers, a better competitive position for insurance companies, and status quo on the distribution of insurance and leasing.

We would support the bill at third reading stage if changes to the wide ownership rules were rescinded, if it provided for more power to the House of Commons to review megabank mergers and if the government adopted an effective framework of accountability among banks, their communities and fully regulated bank holding groups.

In conclusion, there is quasi-unanimity among major financial industry players to speed up the passage of the bill which has incorporated the majority of the MacKay recommendations and has virtually gone through an invisible committee of backroom lobbyists. Bill C-8 is a done deal which the government is selling as a progressive financial consumer package.

[Financial Consumer Agency Of Canada Act, March 30th, 2001]

I was not aware of that, but I am now. What you are saying, Madam Speaker, is that I will not be able to share my time. Just for the record, I stood to speak because nobody from any other party stood at that time. I thank you for the clarification.

[Financial Consumer Agency Of Canada Act, March 30th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate in the House today on financial sector reform. I want to indicate to the House that I have a time sharing arrangement with my colleague, the hon. member for Windsor—St. Clair.

Bill C-8 is really a reincarnation of a bill that was introduced in the last parliament and died on the order paper following second reading. It purports to implement 57 measures contained in the June 1999 finance policy paper entitled “Reforming Canada's Financial Services Sector—A Framework for the Future”.

The paper was the finance minister's response to an extensive and expensive two year consultation by the MacKay task force on reforming Canada's financial services sector. The consultation culminated in the fall of 1998 with a report entitled “Change, Challenge and Opportunity”. There was a subsequent response by the Standing Committee on Finance.

One of the positive aspects of this bill is that it expands the access to the payments system, which is one of our long held positions in the NDP. This is a measure that increases competition by allowing insurance companies to offer chequing and saving accounts and helps credit unions compete by allowing the creation of a single national entity—

[Heating Fuel Rebate, March 30th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians know that the $1.5 billion home heating rebate had many difficulties, not the least of which was the sending of cheques to prison inmates and the deceased. What is less well known is the manner in which the government accessed this money.

The government did it through the issue of special warrants, which, according to long established House of Commons procedure and practice, are only to be used in very special circumstances. Indeed, the questionable practice does not escape the watchful eye of Canada's auditor general, who leaves office tomorrow.

Mr. Desautels has suggested that upon assuming office his successor should investigate how the government accessed the money without parliamentary approval and whether there is a precedent for using special warrants to approve new programs.

Clearly the government's haste to implement the program resulted in a significant waste of taxpayer money. It appears that not only were Canadians duped with their own money in last November's election but it was accomplished in a highly questionable and perhaps unauthorized manner.

[Human Resources Development, March 23rd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, CPP disability benefits are now so stacked against disabled Canadians that advocates are stepping forward to help appellants and to restore some measure of balance, but HRDC officials stand accused of using extreme intimidation tactics against some of these advocates.

An Alberta advocate was denied access to accompany an appellant into a hearing, while in Saskatchewan an anonymous complaint to the law society that an advocate was impersonating a lawyer turned out to originate in HRDC itself.

Would the minister confirm that these incidents have occurred and tell the House what steps she has taken to ensure there will be no repetition?