John Bryden

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, you did indicate that the member only had a minute left to speak. I believe you may have lost track of time in his particular instance.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his remarks. I listened very carefully. Incidentally, I am very fond of his province. I have been down there a number of times. It is probably one of the most beautiful corners in the country or, for that matter, anywhere in the world.

I do sympathize with him on this problem of the migration out that occurs in Newfoundland, because of lack of job opportunities, I suppose. In that context, I would ask the member, then, if it would not be better to allow the rich corporations in central Canada to continue to pay relatively high premiums into the EI fund? With that surplus the federal government can invest in infrastructure in Newfoundland that creates jobs. Is that not a better solution for Newfoundland than reducing premiums?

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say I am sorry to the member opposite. He will have to make do with me in response to his speech.

As we know, both the employer and the employee pay employment insurance premiums. Is it not true that if we cut the EI premiums to the auto giants, one of the major employers in the country, it will be a windfall profit worth millions of dollars to them?

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to draw to your attention that about a year ago I toured the Gaspé. I talked to a lot of people. Those people said to me that they had no interest in the government of Quebec under Mr. Bouchard because Mr. Bouchard's government had no interest in the Gaspé.

As Mr. Bouchard is so closely associated with the Bloc Quebecois, they had no interest in the Bloc Quebecois either. I suggest it is no wonder that the Liberals were elected in the Gaspé in the last election.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

It is wrong.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his remarks. I was particularly struck by the figure he cited with respect to what was lost in employment insurance payouts. It was $20.8 million in his riding alone, which works out, if he has about 80,000 people in his riding, to $260 a person. That is just what is lost as a result of the changes, so I would understand from him that there is a very major and systemic problem in his riding in Winnipeg. I have great sympathy, and I can see where he comes from when he has a situation like that in an urban community.

I would like to ask him one question that has always bothered me, both with respect to this legislation and the legislation as we originally changed it. One of the things that it did not properly address and still does not properly address now is the fact that in Manitoba, I believe it was, people working with school boards in clerical jobs and that kind of thing would work for 10 months, quit, collect employment insurance or unemployment insurance, call it what you will, for two months, and then be re-hired.

One of the things that always distressed me about the system as it existed before we changed it, and as it still exists, is that this seemed to me to be an abuse of the system, because it was a classic case where the employer was taking advantage of employment insurance to pay the workers less for 10 months rather than paying the workers fully for 12 months. Could the member opposite comment on that?

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, there are many of us on this side of the House who have great sympathy with the comment of the member for Winnipeg—Transcona when he said that the fuel rebate should not be tied to the GST.

I too am receiving many calls in my riding and it is a very divisive issue. The finance minister would do well to listen to the words of the member opposite and perhaps reconsider how that program is administered.

I would like to pose a question to the member opposite. He was referring to the problem of security at the upcoming summit in Quebec and how that sends a wrong message to young people who want to legitimately protest. All of us on this side agree that young people should protest. There are things to protest about the world trade agreements, and it is good that young people should be involved.

I well remember about a year and a half ago that there was a rally for the homeless just outside the House on the lawn in front of the Centre Block put on by the Coalition Against Poverty. The police were deployed in great numbers and cautioned us in the House to leave by a side door. We went out by a side door, but I was interested and I went and looked at the rally. There were hundreds of people there, mostly burly guys in boots. There were no homeless people there.

When the leader of the Conservative Party tried to walk into that crowd in order to speak to them, they swore at him and roughed him up. There was a similar protest with the Quebec Federation of Labour in which a hired protester tried to get through the security cordon of the Prime Minister.

Is it not true that this type of protest gangsterism spoils it for the young people who do want to legitimately protest? We have to put on security. Is it not true that the people who should really be condemned are groups like the Coalition Against Poverty?

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Madam Speaker, first I congratulate the member opposite for taking on the post of aboriginal affairs critic. It is one of the most difficult portfolios on either side of the House. I am sure he will do a very fine and sincere job.

I have one question. In his speech the Leader of the Opposition mentioned that the Canadian Alliance felt there should be home and property ownership on reserves and that individuals should be able to buy and sell property.

Could the hon. member elaborate on that a little? Would that include only residents on reserves? Would it allow newcomers to reserves to buy property? Would it enable property owners to sell to people off reserve?

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, what an opportunity was lost yesterday. I came into the House and sat through the entire speech by the Leader of the Opposition. I did so because I was anxious to hear whether there were really any new ideas that the opposition might be considering approaching in this new parliament.

When I say new ideas, I am talking about the kind of things that we hear from our constituents that we know are major problems, that the government perhaps has been slow or reluctant to act upon and that we as backbench MPs might like to press the government to act upon, and certainly that we might like the opposition to put the government's feet to the fire on important issues affecting the nation. I was disappointed.

I heard 54 uses of the word empowerment as a noun, an adjective or a participle. It takes about a minute to say empowerment 54 times, but other than that there was very little of substance that I, as someone who likes to think of myself as someone who is always trying to find new approaches to the issues of the day, could not find very much. In fact, it was the opposite.

The Leader of the Opposition stated in his speech that charities needed more financial support from the federal government and not federal invasiveness.

The Leader of the Opposition is going entirely in the wrong direction in that statement. He obviously little realizes that the charitable sector, the not for profit sector, is one of the most important economic sectors in the land. It is a sector, Mr. Speaker, I should tell you, that runs almost completely without regulation, without legislation, without transparency and without accountability.

I will give some figures. There are 178,000 non-profit organizations in the country of which 78,000 are charities. Of those 78,000 charities, they receive more than $90 billion in revenue a year. They employ 1.3 million Canadians. That is 9% of the entire workforce in the country. Yet there is not a regime that demands of those organizations the same kinds of standards of corporate governance or standards of transparency and accountability that we expect of the private sector.

The Leader of the Opposition really should reconsider what he said because what is wrong with the charitable sector is that for too long it has operated without government involvement. The consequence, as every Canadian knows, is that we have everything in the charitable sector, from scam charities using telemarketers to charities involved in financing ethnic conflicts abroad, but most of all, we have very expensive charities using the taxpayer dollars but not using them effectively.

For example, half of the $90 billion is used by charities that are either hospitals or teaching institutions. That is $45 billion. Yet we do not see the kind of transparency that we need to know that the money has been spent on our health care system in effective and efficient ways.

One might ask how I would know that. I can give an excellent example of the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation in my riding, which is a very large teaching hospital. In 1996 it fired its chief executive officer and gave her a golden handshake of $818,000. This year the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation has fired another chief executive officer and the institution has given that chief executive officer a $500,000 golden handshake.

What the institution has now done is it has hired a new chief executive officer from the Vancouver Hospital & Health Services Centre. That person was fired in October with a $540,000 golden handshake and was hired by the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation for $346,000. That is $1.8 million in golden handshakes alone between these two institutions. How many beds will that buy? How many nurses can be paid out of $1.8 million? How many research scientists would like to have that kind of money? If those are only two hospitals, what is occurring across the country?

Mr. Speaker, I think you would find that politicians in this room can cite examples of where there is a lack of transparency and lack of proper management standards in the hospital and medical institutions within their own ridings.

It is very typical that the boards of directors have no guarantee that their chief executive officers will even report properly to them. The reason is that charities and non-profit organizations are not governed by the Canada Corporations Act. The only thing the Canada Corporations Act states is that charities and non-profit organizations will subscribe to guidelines of transparency and corporate governance but not to actual requirements, as are required of for profit corporations.

This goes on. If we extend the envelope and look at all the other charities and non-profit organizations out there, the 100,000 non-profit organizations, there is no public accountability whatsoever. We cannot obtain their financial statements or be guaranteed that their financial statements have the signature of government to say that they are indeed honest and complete. These organizations do not have shareholders, so they can report what they want.

The unfortunate thing about this is that I have been on this problem since 1996. I prepared a report in which I examined the financial information returns of some 500 charities. I found all kinds of problems. In my report I recommended the government bring down legislation to actually define what a charity is, to set standards of corporate governance and so on.

I paid the price for that report. In the 1997 election I was the most attacked backbench MP by third party advertising. The charitable institutions took out full page ads during the election against me. The headlines read “Do you have no sense of decency, Mr. Bryden?” They had radio jingles depicting me as someone who obviously wanted to destroy the charitable sector: I wanted to destroy the charitable sector because I wanted to see transparency and accountability. Does that figure? That is why I say what an opportunity was lost.

When a backbench MP gets an initiative, he would like to think that he can get the support from his opposition colleagues; but, no, what I hear from the Leader of the Opposition is that he takes the side of these charitable institutions that are pressuring government to reform in some ways but not have mandatory reporting requirements.

The Leader of the Opposition alluded to the Prime Minister's task force on the voluntary sector. That report was released just last year. It is true that as a result of the reports that I did there was a response both in the voluntary sector and here in government. That response was to do a study of the problem.

I do not doubt that some legislative changes or some changes will be coming in this mandate. I am terrified that the enormous lobby that is represented by the not for profit sector will persuade the government to set voluntary standards for transparency and voluntary standards for corporate governance.

I am hoping against hope that I can put pressure as a backbench MP on the government to really force this important sector of the economy, the $90 billion sector of the economy, to be properly accountable.

I would hope that I would have the support of the opposition when we move forward in that direction. However, I do realize that often the initiatives of the backbench are really the initiatives of the backbench on one side of the House. They can be guaranteed of no support from the other side. I will press forward and I am sure that one way or another we will get the reforms that we need.