Val Meredith

[Airline Industry, May 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the director general of civil aviation for Transport Canada stated that it was Air Canada that suggested WestJet should be required to do its inspections in Ottawa instead of Edmonton.

Will the minister please inform the House when he transferred his authority to oversee Canada's airline industry over to Robert Milton?

[Airline Industry, May 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Transport claims that he wants competition in Canada's airline industry but he has a funny way of showing it.

The Department of Transport recently informed Calgary based WestJet that it will no longer be able to have its flight operation inspections in Edmonton. Instead it will have to bring its airplanes and pilots to Ottawa.

Will the minister please explain how forcing WestJet to take its flight operation inspections to Ottawa is going to enhance competition?

[Canada Transportation Act, May 15th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the hon. member from the Bloc, I think that his amendment is totally unnecessary. The bill already states that the Official Languages Act would be respected. Personally, I think that is all that is required. The motion is redundant.

[Canada Transportation Act, May 15th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I will probably speak not only to Group No. 1 but also to Groups Nos. 2 and 3 so I do not take up the House's time later on.

I am not surprised that the New Democratic Party has come up with an attempt at report stage to reregulate the industry. Those attempts were made during the committee hearings. With all due respect, the committee did not support it on that.

I would like to congratulate the committee of which I was part. It did a super job of reviewing the legislation, at times under some stressful situations. It did a good job in looking at the legislation and bringing forth some amendments through the committee process which, as the minister said, have dealt with a number of issues that have identified themselves since the merger began in the spring.

I would like to address the amendments proposed by the New Democratic Party on the Air Canada public participation act.

I have great difficulty with government at any time interfering with the private entrepreneurial spirit of an individual. I do not think the government has the right to limit how many voting shares a Canadian can have in a Canadian company. Again I am not surprised the New Democratic Party has put forward an amendment to try to take that back a step rather than move forward in taking government out of the operations of and interference in a Canadian company. It will certainly not get support from us to do so.

I am a little disappointed the government also was not prepared to take the big step and remove itself from interfering in a Canadian company and the operations of such. I do not think it is the role of government to determine what kind of ownership a Canadian has in a Canadian company.

I was not surprised that the New Democratic Party challenged the foreign ownership and wanted to get rid of any suggestion that Air Canada might at some time have the foreign ownership component raised. It wanted to limit it to the 25%. It is somewhat ironic and a little hypocritical that the New Democratic Party is totally supportive of the automobile industry which is 100% owned for foreigners. It does not seem to have the same problem with the automobile industry that it does with the airline industry. It is curious that what is good for the automobile industry, the NDP does not consider to be good enough for the airline industry.

I have problems with the proposed amendments in that they want to penalize people for withdrawing a service that has proved to be uneconomical. They are putting extra burden on a company that may decide to try a new route in a smaller community. Looking down the road, that company may have some serious financial penalties addressed to it if it chooses not to continue that service because it is uneconomical. We are not going to encourage competition by laying the heavy hand on business people who are willing to take a risk and try a new route. We certainly cannot support the intentions of those amendments which the member has brought forward.

The minister mentioned the amendments to the legislation which offer the teeth to control the monopoly of Air Canada. We would suggest that the teeth which the government has put in the legislation are enough. I do not think we want to interfere any more than we have. We have given cease and desist powers to the competition commissioner, powers which are quite extreme in the entrepreneurial world.

The competition commissioner has also been given a broader predatory behaviour designation, which gives him some flexibility. That is a good move because we are not always able to identify when we are dealing with legislation what might happen in the future which is predatory in nature. We support the government in that.

We believe that more controls to re-regulate the industry certainly will not move us forward into the 21st century, but will move us backward. Therefore, the Canadian Alliance will not be supporting the amendments put before the House by the New Democratic Party, which is no surprise to my colleague. We believe that the government has a role to play only in trying to get a monopoly to understand that it has a responsibility to the travelling public. We feel that the teeth in the legislation are enough to hold that company accountable.

We look forward to the legislation passing and to controls being put on Air Canada to help it through this transitional period. There are protections to the travelling public in this legislation. The ability of the new commissioner in his position in the Canadian Transportation Agency to act as ombudsman for complaints will be an added factor. We are somewhat disappointed that there is no means for that individual to actually resolve the problems, but at least he can identify where the problems exist and through the other means that the government has can see that resolutions are fulfilled.

As I mentioned before, we will not be supporting the amendments to this legislation and we look forward to the report stage going quickly so we can get on to the third reading of the bill.

[Human Resources Development, May 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I was under the impression that the Deputy Prime Minister said the government was not hiding anything. The parliamentary secretary said:

That money was spent to hire 162 workers who did not have jobs and who are working today because of this program.

That is 100% incorrect. It is a testament to the kind of misinformation that the government has been giving all along. The government will not release the report on its own investigation, and both the minister and her loyal secretary have made a policy of toying with the facts—

[Human Resources Development, May 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, HRDC conducted its investigation more than two years ago but Canadians have yet to see the results.

The parliamentary secretary said that the investigation cleared the way for human resources to cut a cheque for three-quarters of a million dollars. Either the government cannot be trusted to investigate itself or it cannot be trusted to accept the recommendations and findings of its own investigation. Why will the government not release the report on the HRDC investigation?

[Access To Information Act, May 11th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I want to make some comments on the private member's bill, Bill C-206. I appreciate the efforts made by the hon. member for Wentworth—Burlington to look at access to information. I guess I am just a little jaded in my feelings on access to information and having any kind of legislation that allows the head of a government department or the Prime Minister to make a decision on whether information will be released.

My experience with access to information with government departments has not been a pleasant one. I find that whenever there is information that might embarrass or undermine the government's agenda, the department makes every effort to ensure that any information that is released is either highly blacked out, whited out or completely removed from the documentation that one receives.

I do not like the idea that someone can consider an access to information request to be frivolous. It may be frivolous to the people in the department or to an individual in a department but it is probably not frivolous to the person who is making the request. I cannot support the idea that a person in any government department can decide on his or her own that something seems to be frivolous, or that somebody seems to be asking for access to information more than somebody in a government department deems necessary, or that he or she personally does not think that the person requesting the information is acting on behalf of a group or organization.

Access to information should be very clear. When a citizen of Canada asks for information it should be provided to them. The gathering of the information is done using taxpayer dollars. The people who are overseeing the spending of taxpayer dollars are paid by taxpayer dollars. If an individual is concerned enough about an issue to ask the government for the information in order to do research, to support a position or for whatever reason, nothing should be blocking the flow of information.

I particularly do not want the head of some government department being able to say “I think that is frivolous. I think that may be a secret or an issue that we cannot release because of national security”.

I have found, in my research and in my position, that buying a case of toilet paper for a government department can be considered a national security. I do not want the head of any government department able to say that the request is frivolous or that it might be a danger to the welfare of the country if that information is released.

This legislation, although it is a private member's bill and it does reach into some of the corners, it is still basically protecting the government from having to release information that it does not want anybody to know.

All we have to do is look at the human resources department and the boondoggle of the waste of government money. That fact is it is through access requests that we get little tidbits of information which lead to other tidbits of information instead of getting full documents released, instead of getting audits released without access to information. A government can use any legislation that it wants to hide facts and information from embarrassing itself or from coming clean with Canadians.

With all due respect, I do not think think this legislation will make it any easier for people to get information from government departments that do not want that information released. It points out a number of areas that could be cleaned up, but on the whole it does not deal with completely opening up access to information for ordinary citizens.

What it does do is if an ordinary citizen is concerned about issues and digs deeper and deeper and asks for more and more requests, the citizen can be asked to pay more and more money for it. In other words, instead of a simple $5 fee it can be deemed that a request is frivolous, is of a personal nature or whatever and the individual will have to pay not only the cost but an extra 10%.

I do not think it is good enough. Either the government will come clean and release information or it will not. I am not convinced that this legislation will make it any better for Canadians to get access to information that the government would just as soon not share because it is trying to hide its mismanagement of government funds.

[Airline Industry, May 11th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for that, but the employees of the airline, the 2,100 employees who are waiting in limbo to know what will happen to their jobs, want to know exactly how long it will be before they know what their future holds, whether or not they will have jobs. Could you let them know how many weeks—

[Airline Industry, May 11th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, when the Competition Bureau and Air Canada reached an agreement last December, one of the conditions was that Canadian Regional Airlines was to be put up for sale.

The agreement called for Canadian Regional Airlines to be put on the block within 45 days of the transaction. We are now approaching 145 days since the transaction, and Air Canada has yet to put Canadian Regional up for sale. Could the minister please explain why this condition of agreement has yet to be honoured?

[Airline Industry, May 10th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the minister prevents serious competition by denying the increase of foreign ownership, claiming that it is anti-Canadian. However, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are three of the five largest companies in Canada and, despite being foreign owned, provide tens of thousands of Canadians high paying jobs and offer Canadian consumers a choice.

If competition works so well in the automobile industry, why will the minister not let it work in the airline industry?