John Bryden

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, what we understood we were agreeing to on this side, in order to support the government's Motion No. 2, was that the Speaker should put limitations on vexatious and frivolous amendments.

If the hon. member will recall, progress in the House was delayed because of hundreds of amendments of a frivolous nature pertaining to certain bills. That is fine, but unfortunately what seems to have happened, if I read Motion No. 2 correctly, it says that the Speaker will also be guided by practice in the British parliament.

Unfortunately, none of us know what is meant by being guided by practice in the British parliament. It would appear, from what the Speaker has said, and I cite it here, that he is making an allusion to Motion No. 2 and something that was endorsed by Motion No. 2, and I can only believe it was the guidelines that were cited in the original motion. He is using that, it would appear, to justify saying that only motions presented in committee will be selected.

I hope that is not the case because the reality around here is that we have to trust our leadership, on this side and on the member's side, in getting our support for legislation or a motion, that it will not introduce something into the wording of the legislation or the motion that it knows that we as backbench MPs will not have the opportunity or the expertise to check.

I make my appeal to the Speaker and tell him most emphatically that never did I understand, nor do I think the vast majority of the backbench MPs on the Liberal side understand, that the Speaker would confine amendments to be selected only to those that were proposed in committee. In other words, if we were to follow the Speaker's reasoning as we see it, what we would find is that the only committee amendments that would appear at report stage would be government amendments. If that is the case, then there would be no point in debate. The debate would have occurred at committee.

Never did I ever believe that what was proposed by Motion No. 2 would make it impossible for me to submit my amendments as a backbench MP to anything other than the committee. I need to have the right to submit my amendments at report stage in this House if I am not a member of the committee.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the debate not to argue for more opportunities for backbench MPs, but to plead with you specifically, Mr. Speaker, to help us retain as backbenchers the little opportunity that we still have.

Mr. Speaker, I was alarmed today when I sat in this House and I heard your statement pertaining to Motion No. 2 that was passed in the House on February 27. Motion No. 2 referred to the streamlining of report stage, because it was perceived by all sides of the House that report stage was sometimes utilized in an abusive manner, and Motion No. 2, which was passed by the House, was designed to correct this problem.

I will read. Motion No. 2 says:

—the Speaker will not select for debate a motion or series of motions of a repetitive, frivolous or vexatious nature or of a nature that would serve merely to prolong unnecessarily proceedings at the report stage and, in exercising this power of selection, the Speaker shall be guided by the practice followed in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Speaker, today in replying—in making your statement to that motion that was passed, as I say, already by the House—you said,

I intend to apply these four criteria to all amendments at report stage, no matter which side of the House they come from.

And by that, Mr. Speaker, we understood you to mean that you would not select those amendments for report stage that were repetitive, frivolous, abusive or would unusually prolong debate in the House. But then, Mr. Speaker, you went on. You said:

I also intend to apply those criteria in the original note whose validity has been endorsed by the adoption of government Motion No. 2. Specifically, motions in amendment that could have been presented in committee will not be selected.

Let me just repeat that: “Specifically, motions in amendment that could have been presented in committee will not be selected” by you.

In supporting Motion No. 2 I never felt that I was supporting that proposition because, if I understand that proposition broadly, what it means is that any amendment that a member could have put in committee will not be selected by you. But, Mr. Speaker, that happens all the time. I am not at all committees. Sometimes I want to submit amendments at report stage and I am not a member of the committee. This would suggest that any report stage amendment that I submitted, if I could have put it in committee—and of course, as MPs we can always put an amendment in a committee—you would not select it.

Mr. Speaker, you go on and you seem to add to this proposition because what you say, you make a recommendation to MPs like myself, backbench MPs, and you say:

—I would strongly urge all members and all parties to avail themselves fully of the opportunity to propose amendments during committee stage so that the report stage can return to the purpose for which it was created, namely for the House to consider the committee report and the work the committee has done.

That is not my vision of report stage at all. Report stage, I always understood, existed to give members an opportunity who were not on committee, who had a differing opinion of what was going on in committee, our opportunity to propose an amendment in the House and to stimulate debate. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, in your own speech you make allusion to the 1968 special committee on procedure which said that it considered that report stage to be:

essential in order to provide all members of the House, and not merely members of the committee, with an opportunity to express their views on the bills under consideration—

While I can only believe, Mr. Speaker, that you will interpret, or I should interpret your words very narrowly because I can assure you on this side of the House, the government House leader and the leadership of my party assured we backbenchers that the Motion No. 2 would in no way restrict our opportunity to express ourselves at report stage, Mr. Speaker, and with good reason.

The reality, particularly as a government backbencher, is that in committee the government dominates. If we as backbench MPs want to move some kind of amendment that is not in keeping with what may be the government's direction of things, then we are not given an opportunity to push our amendment forward.

I can give you a classic example. In 1995 I was on the lobbyist registration committee—or the committee of industry studying the lobbyist registration act—and I made it known to the whip that I was interested in supporting an amendment that was being proposed by my opposition colleagues on the committee.

What happened was that when it came to clause by clause, the whip withdrew my voting privileges on that committee and substituted someone else. So the only way under those circumstances for me to advance the amendment I believed in would have been to submit it as a report stage amendment.

Furthermore, sometimes one wishes as a backbench government MP to utilize report stage to submit one's own amendment because one knows full well that the government will not support it. You know full well that the amendment will not pass. However, report stage gives a backbench MP an opportunity to present his thoughts, his concerns shall we say, before the entire House and before the entire nation.

The reality is that if we make a speech in front of committee, sadly even the Hansard of that committee is not available to the public until sometimes many weeks after the statement has been made, and indeed the media normally does not follow the debates in committee unless there is some incredibly important thing that is occurring which is of great media interest.

It becomes absolutely, dreadfully important to have this opportunity at report stage to draw the attention of the public to one's deep concerns as a backbench MP to some aspect of legislation.

For example, in the citizenship bill last year I proposed at report stage an amendment to the oath of citizenship. The committee and the minister made it very clear that they were not prepared to entertain a change in the oath of citizenship as it was in the legislation. I had to use report stage to actually get what I deeply, deeply believed in before the public.

I would like to believe, Mr. Speaker, that you are going to interpret the need to submit an amendment to committee very, very narrowly. I would assume that if you do want to give backbench MPs like myself as much opportunity for debate as possible, what you may choose to do is interpret what you said in your own words, perhaps interpret it as referring only to those members of committee.

If members of the committee do not propose amendments then perhaps there is a reasonable argument that they should not be allowed to then do it in report stage separately, but backbench MPs cannot be in more than one place at the same time.

I track the work of a number of committees and I can tell you for instance, Mr. Speaker, I have a possible report stage amendment for Bill C-9, the Canada Elections Act amendments, that I know the government will not like. If I put it in committee it will die instantly. If I put it in report stage then I put it for all the House to see and consider. I have not decided yet whether I want to do it but it is an essential privilege as a backbench MP. And if, in your interpretation of Motion No. 2, you deprive me of the opportunity to move report stage amendments as a backbench MP—if you confine me only to moving those amendments in committee—Mr. Speaker, you will have absolutely eroded the very essence of my role here as a backbench MP.

Quite frankly I do not know what I would do if that is the way you rule but, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to the next time we go to report stage. I will be looking closely at how you do select amendments for report stage. I hope, Mr. Speaker, you will remember my words that I said when I spoke to Motion No. 2. If I may read them, these were my concluding words before we passed the motion. I said, “But I end with one caution, because I remind you, Mr. Speaker, that whatever you do, you must protect the rights of the backbench MPs and the opposition MPs to have their say in debate on legislation at report stage”.

Mr. Speaker, it is not the government House leader. It is not an opposition leader. It is your responsibility to protect my opportunities and my rights as a backbench MP.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her excellent dissertation. I wonder if she could comment a little further on the political culture, that is the context in which we seek parliamentary reform, the relationship between the backbench on the government side, for example, and the sometimes lack of opportunity of expression because they are government backbenchers.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member opposite on his comments. I was particularly interested in his support for making private members' bills votable.

There is a technical problem to that. There are an awful lot of private members' bills that are always on the roster at any given time and there is a whole problem with respect to how they should be selected by lottery or whatever.

I would like to make a suggestion to him for his comment that was raised by the member for London North Centre. That was the possibility of every member of parliament during a session, from the time of an election to the next time the writ is dropped, being entitled to have one bill made votable. The actual lottery or the selection of the bill would be based simply on the order that the members' bills would come up. Every member would have at least one bill during a session that was votable. I wonder what the member thinks of that idea.

[Supply, March 19th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, as you know, I have for some time had an interest in charities and the transparency and accountability of non-profit organizations.

Some years ago, I did an examination of the T3010 tax returns of all kinds of charities to see how vigilant Revenue Canada was in examining these returns. These returns require charities to identify the revenues, how much they are paying individuals, how much in donations and so forth. They are quite elaborate.

I got returns from all kinds of charities: ethnic groups, churches, service organizations and, I should say, aboriginal friendship societies. In surveying these returns, I did find mistakes and errors. I compared these returns with the financial reports of the charities themselves and found all kinds of inconsistencies.

With the aboriginal friendship groups, what I found is that these T-3010 returns to Revenue Canada were completely blank. They were sent in and properly addressed to Revenue Canada, but there was not a single line filled out. Obviously this had been going on for some time and I had to ask myself the question: is the fact that these official returns to Revenue Canada, the fact that they are blank and not checked, is it because they are being sent in by aboriginals and are they blank because the aboriginals know when they send them in that they will not be checked?

It raises a very serious question about whether Revenue Canada, on the one side, and the aboriginals who are responsible for sending these returns in for these friendship societies, on the other, whether they had both decided that because we were dealing with aboriginals, a less high standard of accountability was expected of them. In fact it was ludicrous because, as I say, these returns were completely blank so no accountability was required at all.

Later I became a member of the aboriginal affairs committee and I spent several years as a committee member hearing of the problems on the various reserves around the country. Then it became very apparent that in regard to many of the reserves that were in trouble, the trouble revolved around the fact that government money was going into these reserves and was not being spent on the programs. It also became very clear that for years earlier, decades earlier, governments had not expected or required of aboriginal groups to meet the same standards of transparency and accountability in their financial management as they would require of just about any other group.

This was a clear example in my mind of the kind of evil paternalism—and I really mean that—it is an evil paternalism that sets people aside by race and lowers the expectations of them. I see no distinction between what has happened to our aboriginal communities because we as a parliament have required less of them than what has happened with the residential schools.

We have before us a motion which I believe is going to be matched by legislation from the Indian and northern affairs minister that is long, long overdue. On all sides of the House we should support the legislation because at last we are saying to our aboriginal brothers, shall we say, “You are just like us. You are one of us”. But, Mr. Speaker, what we have been doing for so long is we have been willing to give them self-government. We have been willing to give them the benefit of control over large tracts of land, but we have not given them the same responsibility that we expect of everyone else. This has to end.

I would say that this motion which simply requires of aboriginal communities to meet the same standards of financial transparency, to submit to audit, that we would expect of any municipality, that we would expect of any corporation, of any charity—what we certainly should expect of a charity—we should expect of aboriginal groups.

I really do believe that this is one time in which we are very much all on the same wavelength in the House. I do not know whether the motion will be supported unanimously, but, Mr. Speaker, you can be darn certain that I will be voting for it.

[Supply, March 19th, 2001]

I must say, Mr. Speaker, that I felt the speech by the member for Winnipeg Centre was one of the more ugly speeches that I have heard in my time here. I did not enjoy the slinging of tar that went on here.

I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, that I know many members of the Canadian Alliance, the former Reform Party, and while I may disagree very vehemently with them on some issues, including aboriginal issues, every one of them, as far as I know, have acted and argued with the best motivation.

The real reason I am standing is that the member for Winnipeg Centre attacked a member who is not in the House, Herb Grubel, who was a member of the Reform Party. He was one of the finest MPs in the House, even though he sat in the opposition.

What I have to say is that if we throw tar in a small room, it is bound to splash back on ourselves. I do not think the member for Winnipeg Centre will gain many points at home.

[Supreme Court Act, March 19th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, let me sound a warning. There is a myth that exists here in this place, and perhaps in the bureaucracy as well, that our supreme court is mandated in the same way as the U.S. supreme court under the constitution.

I just heard the parliamentary secretary's remarks and I must have missed something, but in fact I do not see anything in our constitution that describes the role of the supreme court and judicial independence. It only gets a passing reference. The role of the supreme court is in fact defined under the Supreme Court Act rather than our constitution.

The warning I would like to sound is this: in fact, our supreme court has no protection from parliament. In fact, we can change the role of the supreme court. We can do whatever we want with the supreme court by changing the Supreme Court Act.

Moreover, we can basically nullify the impact of the supreme court by the use of the notwithstanding provision. We do not want to do that, but I am afraid that if the supreme court's decisions continue to be interpreted in a way that is out of sync with Canadian society the supreme court will lose its credibility. It only exists in the parliamentary system because we believe in it. I believe in it here in this legislature, but it has no protection.

If we do not do something as parliamentarians to ensure that public confidence, instead of being eroded as is the case now, is enhanced in the supreme court, then maybe another justice minister 10 years from now will act in the public interest, or as a result of public sentiment, and fall down upon the supreme court and reign it in, in ways in which we on all sides of the House would not want to see. Once public confidence in the supreme court is lost it can never be recovered.

The problem is that the supreme court, when it comes to legislation, can only make a decision based on the information presented before it. If the government lawyer or the government side, for example, does not present a full case, the justices will come to a decision that is in error because they have not heard the full case.

In Marshall, the justices said that there was no representation made by the government on whether the 1760 treaty rights had been extinguished. Had the government made that representation the court would have considered it. It did not make that representation because the government was convinced that it would win just basically because the treaty itself was not applicable.

In Singh it was a similar situation. The justices there said that had the government made an argument under the reasonable clause or the reasonable provision in section 1 of the charter of rights, that might have changed its decision with respect to the seven convention refugees, but because it was not presented it was not considered.

This is why we have to come up with some sort of plan whereby if it is a unanimous decision, it is acceptable, and that is fine. If it is unanimous, then obviously there has been sufficient evidence before the court that we as the Canadian public—not just members of parliament but the Canadian public at large, if there is unanimity—can believe or have reasonable reason to believe that the court has sufficiently considered the issue and that should be the last word.

When it is a split decision, when some of the justices in their wisdom have gone on the other side of the case, as in Marshall—if we read the two decisions they are like black and white—I would say the majority of Canadians would agree with the minority decision. So we have this terrible situation arising in which there is a split decision that has been applied to all Canadians forever and the government has interpreted it to apply to all aboriginals across the country, all natural resources.

This is an intolerable situation. The answer is not just to debate. I realize the government can never accept a change such as I was proposing. Never in a month of Sundays would it have ever accepted some radical change like that, but as the members opposite have suggested, there has to be debate. I suggest that if a debate cannot be had in the House of Commons, then this is a subject matter that should be sent to the Senate and the senators should consider this for as long as it takes.

[Supreme Court Act, March 19th, 2001]

moved that Bill C-234, an act to amend the Supreme Court Act be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the bill today. I am only going to address one-half of the bill because the motion is not votable and there is only one hour of debate. So in the interests of time I am going to only look at the second clause of the bill that would limit the application of charter decisions by the supreme court. If a decision is not unanimous on the part of the supreme court judges, then the case at hand would apply only to the case at hand and would not be broadly applied as is the usual case now.

The bill arises from the fact that so often when an appeal is brought before the supreme court that has charter implications, when the supreme court rules, whether it is a unanimous decision or a majority decision, the government, Mr. Speaker, usually applies its decision universally. It takes it as a direction in law and a charter direction, and it usually has enormous impact on Canadian society.

My concern for this issue arises out of the Marshall case about two years ago. In that case, Donald Marshall and several other aboriginals were caught by fisheries officials with 464 pounds of eels that they had taken out of season and were selling. They had even used an illegal net. In other words, these individuals were poaching.

They were brought before the courts and would have been subject to a considerable fine but their defence before the lower courts was that they had a right to take the eels under a treaty of 1760 between the British crown and the Mi'kmaq. That went through two levels of courts, the provincial court and then it was appealed. Finally, it came before the supreme court.

Members must bear in mind that the convictions were upheld by the two lower courts. However, when it came before the supreme court, seven justices sat, five ruled in favour of the accused. In other words, they overturned the decisions of the lower courts. Two ruled in favour of the lower courts and upheld the conviction.

Members have to see how it works. The appeal process that goes to the supreme court chiefly consists of bringing before the court, and the court accepts the particular case at hand. The supreme court reviews all the evidence of the lower court and allows one hour for each side to present its case. There is a certain provision in time for interveners who the supreme court can decide to allow to intervene or not. All in all the entire decision making process takes less than three hours in open court and for the most part the deliberations are done in camera with the justices using their law clerks to prepare a digest of the evidence. They make their decisions based on that.

Where in this place it may take many days and many levels of debate in order to pass legislation; first reading, second reading, report stage, third reading and the Senate. In the case of the supreme court, it is a matter of only a few hours of open court and the rest by law clerks and individual justices themselves.

In the case of Marshall, this decision to uphold the rights of Mr. Marshall and others to gather the eels out of season, it is not really the problem of how the justices came to that decision which concerns us here today. If we put 100 people in a room and asked them whether they would agree with the decision in the Marshall case, I think we would probably find only 3 or 4 would.

The implications of the Marshall case were that it allowed aboriginals to not only fish out of season but to fish for commercial reasons, for sale. The five supreme court justices who upheld the appeal cited reasons that we find difficulty following. They said it was the honour of the crown. They had to read into the treaty of 1760 that which was not there because they had to put it in an historical context. They admitted that they were doing something historians were expected to do. They were at odds with historians but they took it upon themselves to be the historians and set the expert testimony aside.

The justices also admitted that while they did not hear all the particular testimony, they still felt that they could come to this conclusion regardless.

They even made a political decision. They said in their conclusion that the aboriginals were entitled to make a moderate livelihood and they said that regulations could certainly be made to make this work. Where we in the House would spend days to devise a policy with respect to the fisheries, just to devise a policy, and have extensive debate to establish the rules pertaining to the fisheries, the five judges in the Marshall case determined that it could be done just like that.

I do not want to get into questioning the decisions of the justices. The point is, Mr. Speaker, is they came down with their decision with the two judges dissenting and the two judges who were dissenting simply said that the treaty of 1760 applied to 1760 and we could not apply it to the present. We would agree with that. So they rejected it and five accepted it.

That is not the issue. What happened right after that, which concerns us here and is the reason for this legislation, is immediately the Department of Fisheries and Oceans issued an internal memo. One of the clauses of the memo about the implications of the Marshall decision, which I remind members was a split decision, said:

While the immediate focus is on access to the fishery, the judgement will have application to other resources. Development of a comprehensive response will involve many departments of the federal government, and provincial governments as Treaty beneficiaries pursue harvest of wildlife and timber.

In other words, Mr. Speaker, the federal government immediately saw in Marshall a broad application to aboriginal rights to all resources to not only gather it for sustenance, but to gather it for a moderate livelihood, in other words, for sale. It is no wonder that a few days later the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs came out publicly and said that this was a decision that was going to entitle aboriginals across the country to have special rights to natural resources, to not only exploit natural resources but to sell them.

We know what happened. There was a terrible conflict around Burnt Church in Nova Scotia. That conflict continues. There has been a tremendous unease across the country with the thought that there could be a situation where aboriginals have rights to natural resources and rights to the exploitation of natural resources based on race alone.

It did not need to be that way. In fact, there is nothing in Canadian law anywhere that says that a decision of the supreme court, any decision for that matter, has broad application when it is a charter decision. It just does not exist. What has happened is that a myth has been created since the charter was passed in 1982 that somehow the supreme court in Canada has the same context in the interpretation of laws and the application of laws as in the United States.

In fact this is not so at all. For the supreme court, or high courts as we have, interpreting constitutional law, is basically something that has evolved since the second world war. For the most part, most countries prior to the second world war functioned on a parliamentary democracy system. What has happened since the second world war, and probably as a result of the second world war, is many countries, including Canada, felt there should be some restriction on the opportunities of the executive. Thus high courts were implemented, including our own.

Nothing in the constitution that was brought back in 1982 actually defines the role of the supreme court. There are a few passing references only, but nothing dictates that the federal government should interpret split decisions of the supreme court as being broadly applicable across the country. We do not need to go down that route. One of the sad things about this entire situation is that there has never been a serious parliamentary debate examining the role of the supreme court's decisions and its application to charter law and how charter law should be applied to Canadians. I think it is high time that this situation was brought forward.

The other classic case involving the supreme court, just to give another example of what has happened, is the charter was passed in 1982 and in 1986 a challenge was brought before the charter that led to the Singh decision. It involved seven convention refugees who were all in Canada illegally. One in fact had come in on a visa with a forged passport. The refugees were caught and the court ruled, after various levels had suggested that they should be expelled without a full hearing and according to the legislation at the time, that they were entitled to a full hearing and upset the lower courts' rulings.

What a lot of people do not realize is the Singh decision was not a unanimous decision. Three judges only found evidence in the charter that suggested that the existing immigration law was not charter compliant and was unfair to the accused. The other three justices came to their decision based on the Canadian Bill of Rights.

It is very important to understand that the Singh decision was a split decision. Indeed, the three justices who chose the Canadian Bill of Rights to argue that the seven should have a full hearing specifically said that they were not considering the charter in their decision. There we have a classic example where a split decision of the court has had manifest impact on Canadian society.

Not only has it made it very difficult for Canada to control aliens coming into the country who perhaps have criminal connections or whatever, but every one of us in the House has a problem with people seeking visas to come to visit their loved ones and relatives in the country. Every office has this problem. What we need to do is turn those people back because according to the Singh decision there is every possibility that if they decide not to return according to their visa then they have recourse to due process. Tens of thousands of people are denied entry into Canada because of the Singh decision.

It is very important to realize that the Singh decision was confusing. The three justices decided on the basis of the charter that the seven accused were entitled to an oral hearing. However it was the other three, in terms of the Canadian Bill of Rights, who cited section 2(e), which said that no law should “deprive a person of the right to a fair hearing in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice for the determination of the rights and obligations”. It was that section which led to the problem where we are turning back all these visa applications. It is not a charter problem at all. It is the problem of the interpretation of the Canadian Bill of Rights in the Singh decision.

The irony is that at the beginning of that section it says that there is a notwithstanding provision in the Canadian Bill of Rights, that the government has the choice under the Canadian Bill of Rights to suspend 2(e) in special circumstances, and yet the government has never done it.

The problem is simply that it is not the supreme court with which we have difficulty. It is not the charter with which we have difficulty. The problem is we have difficulty with successive governments that have interpreted the decisions of the courts more broadly than anything in law requires them to do, and indeed more broadly than anything in parliamentary tradition that Canada, the United States or Europe requires them to do.

We need to review the situation with respect to how government interprets the decisions of the supreme court. It is high time that parliament, both the House of Commons and the Senate, took a look at what the government is doing and set rules whereby, in my view, it should be only unanimous decisions of the supreme court that should be broadly applied, not split decisions.

[Parliamentarians' Code Of Conduct, March 15th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I would begin by expressing my sadness that private members' hour has been turned into a partisan debate and an attack on the governing party, and the Prime Minister in particular.

I mention that because in the last parliament it was understood by both sides of the House, by all parties and all backbenchers, that private members' business would be dedicated to private members' issues and bills in a non-partisan way. I am very distressed that this rule has been broken.

I would observe first that the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough began his remarks by saying that his motion was made non-votable because of the Liberal dominated subcommittee on private members' business. Liberal dominated were the exact words he used.

Well, Madam Speaker, I will tell you that there is only one Liberal on that subcommittee and four opposition members. If he has a problem in making his motion votable, it is a problem on the opposition side, not on the Liberal side.

Having said that, what disappoints me is the issue of a code of conduct for MPs, which is an important issue. The report of the senate joint committee was an excellent report. It dealt with gifts. It set a ceiling on gifts which was very important because not every member comes from communities where they realize that it is not right to take expensive gifts from other people in the context of their duties. The ceiling was set at $250, and I thought that was a little high actually.

There were provisions for travel by corporations and companies that were offering what is known in the newspaper trade as freebies. All of this was very good but it was not something that had to be in legislation. It not only could have been dealt with by resolution, but I say to the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, that if he really believes in the principles expressed by the senate joint committee, then he should get his leader to stand and say that he supports those principles and that they should serve as guidelines in his own caucus.

It could be done. It does not require legislation. All it requires is the various leaders of the parties simply saying that they agree in principle and then individual MPs could act according to their consciences. It would be an enormous step forward.

I would hope that the leader of the fifth party would actually address that, not only in spirit but in the practical sense. Maybe he would be required to disclose not only his assets and his salaries but the salaries of his wife. I wonder whether his wife would even agree with it. I do not know. It would be a very interesting test.

[Canada Shipping Act, 2001, March 14th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the member said in his speech that the bill does not demonstrate the responses. He said that the bill is not tough enough. Let me take him through a couple of passages in the bill.

Let me just take him through a couple of passages in the bill very quickly. I know he is a lawyer and I know the bill is 200 pages long, but in fact, were he to look at section 172, just looking at pollution, he would see that a pollution officer can board any vessel. If he looked at section 176 he would find that a pollution officer can demand to enter the premises on any vessel, can demand that equipment be seized and can demand to make photographs. He will see in section 176, subsection (4), that with a warrant he can arrest people on board. He can demand to come aboard and use force.

The minister can seize the vessel and destroy the vessel. That is section 180. The minister can remove and actually destroy the vessel if it is deemed to be polluting.

Finally, subsection 183(2) reads:

Every person who—commits an offence under subsection (1) is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not more than $1,000,000 or to imprisonment for a term of not more than eighteen months—

That is punishment. Did he not read those sections before he prepared his speech?