Dave Chatters

[Supply, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's speech and I certainly would agree with much of what he said.

I was particularly struck by the comments in the NDP speech a little while ago. Certainly one of the most reprehensible comments made around this issue came from a member of the NDP during the leadership campaign, suggesting that President George W. Bush spent his nights awake, trying to figure out how to kill more Iraqi babies. Those comments came from a Christian man, a former minister, and were made about another Christian man. It was hard to believe how he could do that.

What struck me as even more peculiar was the NDP position here, demanding that the United States and the allied coalition stop the war and pull out of Iraq immediately. I do not think the member put a lot of thought into expressing that position, given the history of what happened back in 1991 when the United States did pull out of Iraq and what the result was.

Perhaps the member could comment on what he thinks the result would be if the U.S. pulled out of Iraq now and went back home. What would be the results for Iraqi women and children if the U.S. did that?

[Points of Order, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was in attendance at the meeting last night, and was there for some days before, and in spite of the vigorous bluster of the House leader of the government, I think he is clouding the issue.

Certainly in the reference given to you from Marleau and Montpetit, Mr. Speaker, it suggests that the Speaker can and should rule on these matters of committee only in extraordinary circumstances. I would suggest that from what I heard and saw in committee last night the circumstances certainly have become extraordinary. Mr. Speaker, I would urge you to consider that.

The issue is not whether it was a legitimate move to cut off debate after 31 hours. The issue of using closure in committee is a big issue and sets a big precedent in this place. We have operated for some 130 years without closure in committee and I would hesitate to support starting to do that now.

However, that is not the issue. The issue is that a member of the Liberal side of the committee moved a motion to put the question and the chairman of the committee at the time ruled that the motion was out of order because the member for the NDP had the floor. The chairman ruled correctly. That motion was out of order at the time. Then the committee itself challenged the chair and voted down the ruling of the chair. That is the part I would like a ruling on. Was the ruling of the chair correct or incorrect? If the ruling of the chair was correct, then the members of the committee were incorrect in challenging him, voting him down and forcing us to debate what essentially was an illegal motion.

[Privilege, April 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that at page 128 of Marleau and Montpetit on the Speaker ruling on such matters at committee it states:

Speakers have consistently ruled that, except in the most extreme situations, they will only hear questions of privilege arising from committee proceedings upon presentation of a report from the committee which directly deals with the matter and not as a question of privilege raised by an individual Member.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in the budget implementation act debate. Not having had a chance to participate in the budget debate itself, it is good to have an opportunity to participate in this.

I have listened to the debate over the last number of weeks on this issue and have watched the chest pounding from the government side of the House about what a tremendous budget this is and how it is a major step toward, in their words, building the kind of Canada we want. It always shocks me when members of the Liberal government use that kind of rhetoric. The kind of Canada they appear to be building is not really the kind of Canada I want. I do not know how they feel they speak for Canada when they make those kind of statements.

If the government were a corporation and the cost of servicing the debt of that corporation was the single largest expenditure, it would probably make Air Canada's financial situation right now look pretty attractive. Essentially the government in the last number of years seems to have abandoned the whole focus on the debt and debt servicing and has turned to increased spending.

As some of my colleagues said earlier, I do not how the government could possibly justify, given the economic times we face today, bringing in a budget with a 20% increase in government spending. To me that seems to be absolutely irresponsible combined with the fact that the debt is still hanging over our heads like a black cloud. If inflation were to increase or we were to move into a recessionary period, that debt could once again threaten the very viability of the country.

I really have concerns about the whole direction of the budget and the return to the old style Liberal spending with no regard for future generations or for the consequences of that spending.

Specifically to deal with the budget issue, I would like to focus a little on the areas for which I as the critic for natural resources for the Canadian Alliance am responsible. There are a number of areas of the budget that are very relevant to my critic area.

The issue that seems to prevail in this debate, and the debate in the last couple of weeks in the House, is our relationship to the United States and the harm to that relationship. It is not so much the decision not to send troops in support of the coalition to Iraq but rather the anti-Americanism and the remarks flying around in and outside the House about the Americans, and the Liberal attitude toward the Americans.

On the issue of natural resources and energy, our economy depends on our relationship with the United States and must continue to depend on it. I can understand why there is not much regard for that issue by the Liberal government. Energy exports to the United States are primarily from western Canada, although there are electrical energy exports in central Canada. Primarily fossil fuel energy in western Canada would not really be of a concern to the Liberal government, and I think that is a given.

Considering how important the auto industry in Ontario is to its economy, I am amazed the Ontario members of Parliament are jeopardizing that industry and the survival and viability of it by those kind of comments. That is certainly relevant to this debate and needs repeating over and over again. Hopefully the government will see the light on that issue.

There were a couple of other areas that were relevant. One of them, which was addressed in the budget, was the issue of how the resource industries were treated on corporate taxation and the bringing in line of the rate of that taxation with other industries in Canada. For whatever reason, and I have never quite been able to understand why, the government decided to reduce the corporate tax rate from 28% to 21% for all industries in Canada, exempting the natural resource industries.

There was some reference to other programs and treatments of the resource industries that compensated for the tax reduction other industries got. I do not think it is a valid argument at all. The resource industries have long had what they refer to as the resource depletion allowance, which is simply a compensation program for the costs of provincial resource royalties that resource industries pay to the provinces. That is not a giveaway or a subsidy. It is simply a recognition of the impact on a resource company's bottom line of paying provincial royalties. The cost of provincial royalties comes right off the bottom line of any company and therefore hardly can be considered a subsidy or a giveaway to that industry. I do not accept that argument as being valid.

We have heard much criticism, particularly from the greener members across the way, about accelerated depreciation allowance and some of those other programs that apply in the resource industries. While those programs are designed to encourage growth in those industries, for example in the tar sands or in the mining industry, programs like flow-through shares and those kinds of treatments are specifically designed as tax incentives to encourage that growth. They hardly can be considered to replace the resource industries receiving that tax reduction program to 21%. We have to look at each industry that receives those benefits and judge whether that industry continues to need the incentive, or if the industry has matured to the point where that incentive is no longer valid and should be reviewed. However it has nothing to do with the overall tax rate.

I was very disappointed in this budget to see that the government decided to allow the resource industries the corporate tax reduction to 21%, but at the same time it took away the resource depletion allowance and proposed to somehow replace it with some another form of taxation.

I was very disappointed with the government's failure in any way to address the issue of the sale of federal government shares in Petro-Canada and Hibernia. The government, as any government, has no business of being in the business of business and retaining that. We could have garnered some substantial benefit to help some of these other issues like the climate change initiative and all the rest of it.

The other area, which continues to be a thorn in our side, is the issue of Kyoto and another $1.5 billion on top of the almost $2 billion already announced for the Kyoto protocol. We still have no substantive plan in place to deal with it, other than millions of dollars of national television advertising to convince Canadians it is the right thing to do.

Overall this is a pretty sad effort and a pretty pathetic budget in terms of benefits to Canadians. The government could have done much better.

[Yukon, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the minister's statement. Certainly in principle, at least, we would support this initiative although I find it somewhat curious that the minister introduces this statement and this initiative to devolve his responsibility in Yukon for natural resource management and environmental management. In reviewing the recently passed Yukon Act, let me say that the act does not appear to give the minister responsibility to devolve that power so it is pretty hard to assess the impact of the statement just made by the minister without more information on exactly how this power will be devolved to Yukon.

However, our party has always been supportive of initiatives of the government to bring the territories toward provincial status and more control over their own affairs and the management of their resources and their environment. I think that is good, but rather than being in sync with the Yukon Act, it appears to do quite the opposite. In fact, the Yukon Act sets up a management board that is entirely accountable to the minister. Then the minister turns around and devolves the power that he has to the Yukon government. That does not make a lot of sense.

Of course there is no mention, no insight at all, in the minister's statement or the Yukon Act on how the fiscal arrangement between the federal government and the Yukon Territory will in fact be affected by this initiative of the minister. Really all we can say is that we support the initiative in principle and that we look forward to more detail on how the fiscal arrangement between the two bodies will be adjusted in consideration of this initiative.

[Canada Pension Plan, January 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the member's comments and certainly would not argue with any of those criticisms of the bill and what the government is proposing to do with the program.

However I would like to remind the member that the chief actuary of the CPP, long before the government took action, had been a voice in the dark telling us that the CPP was not sustainable. For years private sector actuaries were saying the same thing.

In fact, during the years of the Mulroney Progressive Conservative government I wrote a letter to my member of Parliament, then a Progressive Conservative member of Parliament, pointing out those things to him and pleading for his government do something to make that plan actuarially sound for myself, my children and my grandchildren.

I would like to ask the member if the Progressive Conservative Party, when it was in government, examined the issue of the unsustainability of the Canada pension plan and, if it did, why did it not do something to fix it and to address the criticisms that he is making of the current government in the way it fixed the plan. Why did the Conservatives not do it right when they had the chance?

[Petitions, January 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I too would like to table a petition today adding more names to the hundreds of thousands of names already tabled in the House urging the government to take steps to outlaw the possession or production of pornographic material involving children, to which we have all received totally inadequate answers from the government.

[Kyoto Protocol, December 9th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the government would have us believe that no one region or industry sector in Canada would be unduly burdened by its made in Japan Kyoto scheme. In spite of the minister's promises to use taxpayers' dollars to lighten the burden of industry, here are the facts. In Alberta, TrueNorth, Petro-Canada, Husky Oil, EnCana, Nexen, ConocoPhillips and Canadian Natural Resources Limited have either limited or cancelled plans for new development and expansion because of Kyoto.

Petro-Canada's chief executive officer, Ron Brenneman, has stated that “Canada must provide opportunities” to keep Canadian investment from heading south. I will quote him: “It is so easy to screw up and the Kyoto protocol is an example of how Canada could screw it up”. He has also stated that the Kyoto protocol is clearly discouraging investment in Canada. In light of the devastation that Kyoto is already having on investment in Alberta, what specific steps is the government going to take, starting today, to keep investment, energy investment in particular, in Canada?

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, December 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member is very genuine in her position and certainly in line with her party's policies and positions. Its distrust of big industry and big banks is certainly well known. I do not think there is any question about that.

Just before the hon. member finished her speech she said that there was this mentality in Canada about, “protect my 40 acres and to heck with yours”, and that we have to get over that.

The government of Alberta and the government of Saskatchewan share Lake Athabasca. Actually, it straddles the border there. The government of Saskatchewan, through a crown corporation, owns the uranium mines in Uranium City that have been abandoned and are polluting the lakes, killing fish and causing all kinds of havoc in the environment in northern Saskatchewan. The damage of course is migrating to my 40 acres across the border.

I would like to ask the member why the NDP government in Saskatchewan is not cleaning up its own mess, and yet this NDP member is blaming the negligence of the mining industry and others for those kinds of situations.

Finally, if the member bought a car and the bank loaned her the money, should the bank be liable if she were negligent and killed someone with the car? If so, I suggest she would never get that car.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, December 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think that is really a valid argument, simply because the I think that strides in technology, particularly in nuclear medicine, nuclear power and the development of safer, smaller, more powerful reactors, have been quite amazing.

Certainly we have been looking for cures for all kinds of diseases for many years. We also have been looking for a clean and cheap way to produce hydrogen power for many years. We will get there and we will produce it.