Deborah Grey

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

I will do it immediately, Mr. Speaker. I am going to weave this together to show that these senators, who basically have no authority and no mandate, approve every single dime that goes through this place and through the Senate, including all HRD spending. I did that in less than 35 seconds.

Let me tell hon. members who those people are in the other place. Jean Robert-Gauthier was appointed on November 23, 1994. He was a long time Liberal member of parliament. John Bryden, a candidate for Liberal leader in New Brunswick, who managed the Prime Minister's 1990 New Brunswick Liberal leadership campaign, was appointed on November 23, 1994.

It is still relevant. Then we have Rose-Marie Losier-Cool, Céline Hervieux-Payette, Marie Paule Poulin, Doris Anderson, William Rompkey and Lorna Milne.

Let me back up to Bill Rompkey for a minute. He and I served together in the House. I saw him this morning. He is a fine fellow, again, but I bet he would have a whole lot more relevancy if he were elected to the place.

Shirley Maheu is another former member of parliament who used to sit in the chair. She has now gone over to the other place.

Nick Taylor was the Alberta Liberal leader in days gone by. Nick is a great guy. We had lots of fun together. His provincial riding took a portion of my federal riding in Beaver River. He and his wife Peg and I had some wonderful visits back and forth. He could have run in that election in Alberta and I bet he would have won.

I would like to ask the hon. member for Edmonton Southeast if he agrees with me that Nick Taylor could have won a Senate election had he run. He looks doubtful, but there we are.

Jean Forest is, again, another pleasant woman with whom I have ridden back and forth on the plane any number of times.

Eugene Whalen was a former Liberal cabinet minister under Trudeau.

Then we have Léonce Mercier, Wilfred Moore and Lucie Pépin. Catherine Callbeck is another member I sat with in the House in days gone by. Then we have Sister Peggy Butts. Fernand Robichaud is another former MP. Then we have Marisa Ferretti Barth and Serge Joyal.

Thelma Chalifoux is another great woman from Alberta with whom I travel back and forth on the plane all the time. She said to me one time “I probably could not get elected because I am a woman”. I think she said she was Metis. Surely she could have been elected. Thelma has some real abilities. She is serving in the other place. I do not disrespect her, but she would have a lot more of a powerful punch if she were elected.

The list goes on: Joan Cook, Archibald Johnston, Ross Fitzpatrick, and Tommy Banks, whom I have not yet seen on the plane. He was just appointed on April 7, 2000. He is the one who was put in Ron Ghitter's place, when we have two fine senators-elect from Alberta, Bert Brown and Ted Morton. They are the senators in waiting. They are the legitimate senators. Although Tommy Banks plays a fine tune, he has no legitimacy here because he was appointed.

The list continues: James Bernard Boudreau; Ione Christensen; Sheila Finestone, another Liberal member with whom I sat in the House; Joan Fraser, who is a great woman; George Furey; Aurélien Gill; Richard Kroft; Frank Mahovlich, the big M .

Members are concerned about this. We can see how touchy this is. It has sparked some fireworks. The problem is that these people who are appointed to political work, to get their reward and their favour in the other place, put through every single dollar of spending by this government, and that is illegitimate.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I was not paying disrespect. I was listing their names and their political connections to the Liberal party. You have said that we should refer to it as the other place. You know perfectly well that the Speaker of the House has allowed us to call it the Senate for some years now. If it would make the hon. member happy, I will call it the other place.

Let me talk about some members of the other place and their Liberal connections. I mentioned Sharon Carstairs and Landon Pearson, both of whom are very pleasant people, but they ought to have been elected to the position and then they would have a mandate and authority.

Lise Bacon, a former Liberal deputy premier of Quebec, was appointed on September 15, 1994.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I was talking about the Senate. I know my friend from Broadview—Greenwood and I have had a few discussions over the years about the Senate. Let me have a little look at some of the Senate appointments and some of the Liberal connections. Again, I know there is no theme to this. Nobody would ever think that there was political manipulation or anything like that, which I have mentioned time and again.

Who has been put into the Senate since this Prime Minister has taken office? Sharon Carstairs, the former Manitoba Liberal leader. She was appointed on September 15, 1994. Landon Pearson, who is married to the son of the former Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson, was appointed on September 15, 1994.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Well, on this particular day I guess he has nothing to brag about because it is not better.

There are some who would say that bigger is better but when it comes to time allocation and stifling debate, the Liberals are bigger today. They are at 67 rather than 66. Oh, my, how they used to rail about Mulroney and the Tories and how horrible it was that they had brought in so much time allocation. How dreadful it was—

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I will take all kinds of shots.

I just mentioned the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood and the fact that we used to visit up in the dummy corner. I am sure he remembers. I thought I was making kind remarks earlier when I talked about the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood. I said that when we used to sit up in that corner and have the odd bite of food out in the lobby, I asked him if he would promise me when his party came to government that it would be different than the Mulroney Tories. His response to me was “Absolutely, we will be different than the Mulroney Tories or better”.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

No, I am sorry.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Oh, the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood. Come and sit over here.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, you are absolutely right. I am just getting more and more impressed by the moment.

Members will recall a comment made a while ago by the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women. My own status is about 3/4 inches shorter right now than it generally is. She accused me of being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. I am barefoot but I am certainly not in the kitchen.

I will carry on. I was talking about 1998 when the courts said that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans does not have the authority to proceed with the aboriginal commercial fishery. The government replied that it was one man's opinion. It just tossed the ruling aside and ignored it. What a way to toss things off.

In 1998 the Prime Minister refused to appoint two senators elected from Alberta. Now there is a good one. Everyone knows that we had an election in Alberta. I think the hon. member for Edmonton Southeast even supports those senatorial elections because he has seen what has gone on in the Senate over the years, which might lead me to another good point. Those men, Ted Morton and Bert Brown, were elected by hundreds of thousands of people in Alberta and they were told that they could not go into the Senate.

One might ask how that could happen to people who were elected. Of course no one is elected in the Senate. Just look at who has been named to the Senate.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, let me say on the record that I am not living at Stornoway as the Leader of the Official Opposition. I have a place in Ottawa and I am staying there.

People are saying that the Prime Minister's office directed police to use pepper spray and dogs against UBC students so that a third world dictator would not be embarrassed when he visited Canada. Who should we be concerned about in terms of embarrassing?

When asked about the use of pepper spray, the Prime Minister joked “For me, pepper is something that I put on my plate”. This is a head of state. This was the Prime Minister of our country who made this joke at his little press conferences. This gave Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes great stuff to use, but it was hardly something that we would expect from the Prime Minister of our country.

I might add that a riot breaks loose every time the Prime Minister goes to Vancouver. People had a fit in front of the Hyatt Regency Hotel when the Prime Minister attended a fundraising dinner in 1998 where he continued with his joking. He said “Usually it is a rubber chicken dinner, but when we come to the west we have beef. Sometimes we have pepper steak”. Somehow there is nothing hilarious about this. He might think that it gets a great rousing laugh from the crowd but it is not very funny. He talked about the merits of using pepper spray over tear gas, baseball bats or water cannons. The point is, why were they doing that in the first place? Was it to make Mr. Suharto comfy in Canada? That is the question we need to be asking.

Let us not just look at the Prime Minister's behaviour on the APEC deal. What about the auditor general's staff, the guys who look over the books and make things so uncomfortable for a government when it messes around? In 1998 the auditor general, Denis Desautels, was reprimanded by finance department officials for presuming to criticize accounting practices of the government. What do the Liberals expect the auditor general to do? His job is to audit the books. If the government is not coming across really well he will criticize accounting practices.

Does the government use generally accepted accounting principles? It seems to me that it shoves a whole lot off to future years to be reckoned with then. The auditor general was reprimanded by the finance department for pointing out those criticisms. I guess we have to ask the Liberal members whether we even have to trifle and be inconvenienced by an auditor general, because, as I said, he often does get in the way when we talk about government financing.

In 1998 inspectors at Environment Canada were warned not to testify before a commons committee on the cutbacks in their department. There is no real freedom of speech when a government member can stand up and say “If you get up in that committee and say x , y or z you will be in big trouble and there will be repercussions”. These people should be begged for information because they are the people who are working on the front lines. They are the ones who can give us the real practical help.

I talked to someone the other day in the finance department. This was a person from whom I wanted to get information because the person knew what was going on over there. This person was warned not to testify before a committee.

In 1998 six Health Canada scientists said they were warned not to speak publicly about their concerns over a bovine growth hormone. This was another threat.

We see a government in power that is just so full of mismanagement and fear tactics that it should cause fear in all Canadians.

Health Canada Director Joseph Losos was chastized by the privacy commissioner for rummaging through the files of departmental critic Michèle Brill-Edwards. Michèle Brill-Edwards is a very bright woman. Joseph Losos was chastized by the privacy commissioner for rummaging through her files.

[Committees Of The House, May 16th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am certainly not accusing all the Tories. Of course he is not a Tory anymore. There were a few of them who did not have the nerve to stand up. I cannot name them all but I know Marcel Massé was one of them. Maybe the member could jump up and tell me who they were. He was probably intimate friends with them. Nonetheless, Lucien Bouchard was true to his word. There are others in this Chamber, I am sad to say, who perhaps were not and are not. To me, that is a pity.

When we see the Prime Minister saying one thing about free trade and then doing another, who says one thing about not being a director of a company anymore when he was, when we see the Prime Minister saying “I am just making all these excuses and I am doing a great job” and maybe he is not, then we have to say something is wrong here with the Prime Minister who says one thing and does another.

Let me give a couple of examples of that. APEC comes to mind. At the APEC meeting in Vancouver a few years ago, the meeting was to be held on the UBC campus. We know what happened there. I am not making any accusations here. I have asked probably 100 questions about it in the House of Commons over the years and have never received a straight answer. The Prime Minister likes to laugh and say that he likes pepper steak. This is not funny. People are asking these questions in coffee shops. It would be good for the Prime Minister to clear his conscience if he went to the commission to give his answers.