John Bryden

[Citizenship Of Canada Act, May 29th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, the member for Waterloo—Wellington and I resonate on this issue because my concern with respect to Bill C-16 is the fact that the oath of citizenship has essentially failed to meet its obligation to describe what it is to be Canadian. I proposed as a result of input received from new Canadians to the standing committee in 1993-94 that we incorporate in a citizenship oath or a citizenship declaration the five principles of the charter of rights, one of which was to uphold basic human rights.

What do the member of Waterloo—Wellington and I have to whine about when we have a citizenship oath before the House now that simply tells us to obey the laws of Canada and to faithfully fulfil the duties of being Canadian but talks of nothing about basic human rights or upholding them? It seems to me that we are on the same wavelength because we have a situation, and it is not just government, it is parliament, where we are missing an absolute opportunity to say that as Canadians we are not about simply obeying the law, whether it is a traffic law or the criminal code, we are about upholding basic principles of human rights, which is what the member for Waterloo—Wellington is talking about.

But we do not say that. We say Canadians are simply people who obey the law. I say to the member for Waterloo—Wellington the government has decided that the law will be such and such, that it will not provide an appeal process. With the oath that is in Bill C-16, one can be a good Canadian and obey a bad law.

[Citizenship Of Canada Act, May 29th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, it would appear that we are having the real debate on this legislation when it is too late to make substantial changes, at least in the House of Commons.

I congratulate the hon. member on his speech. He pointed out some very important things with respect to the bill. He also touched very briefly on the oath of citizenship and the fact that the amended version of the oath in the legislation was created by the minister herself or some bureaucrat in her ministry. However, he made an error in his presentation. He said that there had been no public debate about the content that a new oath of citizenship could take. He is wrong about that.

The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration considered the citizenship bill in 1993 and 1994. I was part of that committee at that time. We heard extensively from citizens and new Canadians who wanted to talk about how wonderful it was to come to this country and become a Canadian, and how they felt very strongly that there should be some kind of declaration of citizenship which expressed the values of being a Canadian and the values of Canada in some manner that was more eloquent than what exists in the present oath. They talked of values like democracy, freedom of speech, equality of opportunity and the rule of law, things that do not exist their countries.

What has happened, despite all that input, is that we now have in Bill C-16 a revised oath and none of us know who wrote it or where it comes from.

Would the hon. member opposite not feel awkward, as I will feel awkward, to see new Canadians taking a new oath of citizenship for which this parliament has had no debate? There has been no debate in the standing committee about the content of the oath of citizenship that is now before the House and to which new Canadians will be required to swear.

What kind of country is it that would leave something so important and so sacred as the oath of citizenship to some unidentifiable bureaucrat and not have the courage to stand up in the House and create a version of the oath of citizenship that belongs to this House and this nation, and not to some contracted out, invisible person?

[Cfb Suffield, May 19th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, on May 5 on the 55th anniversary of the end of the fighting in Europe, an unusual ceremony took place at Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta. It was to honour the nearly 2,000 Canadian soldiers who volunteered during the second world war to take part as human guinea pigs in trials with mustard gas.

During the war the allies were convinced that Germany would soon resort to chemical weapons of which mustard gas was the most fearsome of all. It does not kill; it incapacitates by inflicting huge blisters on the skin, on the soft parts of the body, in the joints and groin areas and around the eyes.

In order quickly to develop medical and technical countermeasures, Canada opened a weapons proving ground at Suffield where these very same injuries were inflicted on our own soldiers in simulated battle conditions. They suffered in body and sometimes in mind that their comrades in arms would be spared the horrors of chemical warfare. Their story remained unknown for nearly half a century. Now it is known and at last their country has thanked them.

[Proportional Representation, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. There is a chance that there might be a minute or two left in this debate. I have some, I think, very relevant and, I would like to think, important things to say. Is it possible, rather than have my speech cut off after a minute or so, that we see the time for Private Member's Business as being completed?

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the member is right. It is always dangerous to make sweeping statements. There are a great many volunteers in all types of social and medical service delivery charities.

The problem is that hospitals have under their control enormous amounts of money. I think the thing we have to be concerned about is that people who volunteer for these boards must remember that when they volunteer for them they are shouldering a very high responsibility. I would suggest, with great respect to the many people who do volunteer for such organizations, that they should not volunteer unless they are prepared to make the commitment and to put real energy into it.

On the other side of the coin—and I think this is where there is a fundamental problem—too often people get on these boards with only the very best of intentions, but they do not bring to the job the kind of cynical rigour that is sometimes needed by the boards of directors of large corporations which are managing huge amounts of money.

We need to change the Canada Corporations Act. We need to set standards for the boards of directors to ensure that they will understand very clearly what their responsibilities are and realize that if they take on that appointment they do so with the full knowledge that they have a responsibility that is exactly equivalent to, say, running the Steel Company of Canada, or Dofasco, or any other large corporation, and perhaps even more so.

In the case of organizations that deliver our medical services—and we all need and cherish the ability to have free services for all Canadians—this is a heavy responsibility and one which people who serve on these boards of directors can never take lightly.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Oh, yes. Her salary was something like $400,000.

The point is, after a couple of years it was decided that she was not an efficient chief executive officer so the hospital let her go. It gave her a $1.8 million golden handshake. It absorbed in one fell swoop all the money that had been raised by the various hospital association charitable foundations. They are out there doing telethons raising money to try to buy x-ray machines and that kind of thing and that money goes to a golden handshake for an executive it is trying to unload. It is the same situation around the province.

In fact, in a recent article from my local newspaper it is suggesting that not only is the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation in difficulty, but other hospitals are in trouble. The London Health Sciences Centre in 1999 ran an $18 million deficit. Mount Sinai and Mississauga Trillium hospitals were in an $11 million deficit and the Cardiff Valley hospital was at a $10 million deficit.

Members may say that the problem is simply that they have a greater demand than they have the money to meet it. That is possible, but other hospitals around the country do run within their means.

So long as we cannot be sure, so long as we do not have the ability to thoroughly examine the decisions made by a corporation, made by a hospital or any kind of social services institute, so long as we do not have the opportunity to examine how they are making those decisions, we cannot be sure that they are running efficiently.

Indeed on a smaller scale, in Hamilton there was a classic instance that was the joke of all the social services providers a few years ago. If you recall, Mr. Speaker, the Harris government came in and said it was going to cut 20% off the bottom line of all the social services organizations that were receiving Ontario provincial funds. An organization in my riding absorbed that 20% cut by eliminating all the service staff and just retaining the administrators and it continued to function without delivering any services.

The reality is when we talk about cuts to health care we have to remember that we cannot do cuts to health care until we create the efficiencies. The reality is if an organization, whether it is a corporation or a non-profit organization or a charity, is running really inefficiently and we compare it against an organization that is running very efficiently and we cut 20%, the efficient organization is hurt and the inefficient organization is not touched, no problem, because it can absorb the cutback in its inefficiencies.

That is the situation. We have done nothing as the federal government and we have done nothing as the provincial government to correct problem. What we need to do is we need to have a debate here not about whether we should restore funding to health care, we should have a debate about how we can make health care delivery more transparent, how we can make it more accountable, how we can make sure that those executive officers are reporting correctly to their boards of governors.

I have known, and other members in this House will have had the experience as well, instances where politicians—oh, that word politicians—have been on the boards of directors of hospitals in their communities and they have not been able to get the salaries of their chief officers. They cannot get the information. They are told, “No, you cannot have that sort of information. That is confidential”. The difficulty as the situation sits right now is that every hospital and other charitable organizations that deliver social services are only as responsible as their letters patent that were originally formulated for them, and only as responsible as their boards of directors show due diligence.

One of the sad things about social services and charities that deliver social or medical services is that too often what happens is people get on the board of directors in order to have a credential or in order to have a place in society so that when they are at cocktail parties they can show what grand contributors they are to the community because they are on the cancer society or a hospital board or whatever you will, Mr. Speaker. But too often these people do not do the due diligence and they leave it to their executive officers and those executive officers are not of the very finest quality. We the public have no guarantee that our taxpayers' money is going to be spent efficiently.

There we have it, Mr. Speaker. It is so simple. Why can we not just do something in this legislature? I have to say I have been struggling with this issue about bringing transparency and accountability to not for profit organizations for four years no, maybe five years, and so far we have not come to grips with it. So far, although I will admit I have had some, shall we say, warmth of response from cabinet, still there has not been a commitment.

What is saddest of all is the fact that the very conservative government that we see in Ontario and elsewhere in the country but let us take Ontario as the example, is always saying that we must cut taxes, we must cut spending, we must be efficient. That is not the government that is demanding transparency of the very institutions that are absolutely swallowing up money right, left and centre and not giving us a guarantee that money is being used effectively.

In my view, it is something that we as a House should certainly address. We should try to look at the problem of bringing charitable organizations to account, particularly hospitals.

We have had a tradition, through the 1970s and especially the 1980s and early 1990s, that when we have a problem in society or a problem where people are not getting the care they deserve—and it is a serious problem, I will not argue that—we seem to think that it can be answered by simply throwing more money at it. I think the government has seen only too well, particularly in the case of the money that went to the Atlantic provinces to help the situation when the cod moratorium took effect, a clear example of where it was very difficult to simply fire money at a problem and solve it. The analogy to the health care delivery systems is apt.

If we really care about Canadians who are in need and who are not getting the services from the health system that they need, then we as a parliament should be moving as quickly as possible to create legislation that brings charities and non-profit organizations under the same level of transparency that now exists for for profit corporations.

I am sure the members opposite do not realize this, but the Canada Corporations Act, under which many hospitals and other charitable organizations are incorporated, provides standards of corporate governance only for for profit organizations. It provides standards of transparency only for for profit enterprises. It specifically excludes from those requirements non-profit organizations. We have a situation in which a large hospital, which may be spending billions of dollars, literally, does not come under the same type of minimum regulations or minimum requirements for transparency and governance that is required of a for profit corporation.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, at the very minimum, let us bring non-profit organizations and charities under the Canada Corporations Act when they incorporate so that they at least have a minimum level of transparency, accountability and standards of governance. At least let us do that. We would save billions. The federal government would not have to add to the transfers for health care, the provincial governments would save money and all Canadians would benefit.

[Supply, May 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am very delighted to rise in this debate because I have wanted to have my say about the problems with health care financing for some time. I think the debate has been skewed in the wrong direction. It is not a matter of giving more money to medicare, it is a matter of greater accountability.

I regret that my NDP colleagues are leaving the Chamber now as I begin a speech. They really ought to listen to it because it is not just a matter of throwing money at issues, it is a matter of creating the climate of transparency in corporations that deliver the health services to ensure that the money is adequately spent. What I am alluding to is the fact that hospitals around the country are some of the greatest users of taxpayers' money, something in the order of $30 billion to $40 billion a year. They are the prime deliverers of health care.

The difficulty is that hospitals are charities and charities are not governed by any meaningful legislation which requires them to meet the standards of corporate governance, standards of transparency. The result is that across the country we will find hospitals that vary in the quality of their financial administration and their ability to efficiently deliver health services. We are talking about billions of dollars of waste because we cannot see whether the hospitals are spending the money effectively.

What has happened with the cutbacks in health care, whether the cutbacks were done by the federal government or the cutbacks were done by the provincial governments during the mid-1990s, is a cutting off of the services rather than cutting back the administration. This was a phenomenon that occurred in the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom went through a similar period when it tried to rein in the high costs of medicare. The British government cut back investments in its hospitals and what happened was an enormous cutback in nurses and nursing staff and of course the administrators remained. The Tony Blair government learned its lesson and in fact it is restoring many of the service personnel and cutting back on the administrators.

Mr. Speaker, you might ask what is he really talking about? Does he have any real examples? We do not have to go very far in my community to discover a real example of waste in the delivery of hospital services.

Next to my own riding is the Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation which last year posted a $40 million deficit. This coming year it is expected to post a $90 million deficit. Mr. Speaker, it has something very much to do with the failure of the board of governors or the failure of the hospital management to adequately inform the board of governors on the needs of that hospital and the proper functioning of that hospital.

Indeed, Mr. Speaker, there was a scandal not very many years ago at the hospital. The chief director was brought in at a huge salary.

[Citizenship Of Canada Act, May 17th, 2000]

You are a separatist.

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

You know that is not true.

[Citizenship Of Canada Act, May 11th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am speaking to Motion No. 23 which would change the oath of citizenship as it is in the current bill to another version.

I have to correct the member for Lakeland. The second version that I will read presently is very much a version that was created in this parliament in answer to the fact that after extensive consultation with Canadians the government failed to listen to what Canadians were saying about their oath of citizenship and continued with an oath that is essentially the very same British oath that has been with this country since the expulsion of the Acadians in the mid-1750s.

I will read the oath that is in the bill now. Then I will read the oath that I propose. The oath that is in the bill now says:

From this day forward, I pledge my loyalty and allegiance to Canada and Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada. I promise to respect our country's rights and freedoms, to uphold our democratic values, to faithfully observe our laws and fulfil my duties and obligations as a Canadian citizen.

To repeat, this is a direct descendant of the British oath that began two centuries ago. This is in its tone and content an oath that is not born in Canada.

After all the consultation that occurred—I was on the citizenship committee in 1994-95—we received many, many Canadians and many, many ethnic groups that spoke about the current oath and made suggestions. The citizenship committee cycled through this discussion yet again just a couple of years ago and the government did extensive studies. All said that the oath containing the allegiance to the Queen was no longer something that resonated with current Canadians, much less with those new Canadians who come to our country and have to take this oath.

When the citizenship bill was first presented to parliament last year as Bill C-63, and we saw this oath that I just read, a number of us on this side were scandalized. We were absolutely scandalized. Right here the member from Brampton West on this side and the member from Dufferin—Peel—Wellington, we put our heads together and we wrote a new version of the oath based on what we believe in our heart of hearts as parliamentarians is what Canada is all about and based also on what we heard people tell the citizenship committee over three years.

What we came up with is an oath that has three components. It eliminates reference to the Queen. It restores reference to God and it attempts to summarize the principles that are contained in the charter of rights and freedoms which I believe are the principles that motivate Canadians and describe our unique identity. The oath that we came up with, and I will read it now, is this:

In pledging allegiance to Canada, I take my place among Canadians, a people united by God whose sacred trust is to uphold these five principles: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, democracy, basic human rights, and the rule of law.

I propose to deal with each of those three elements and first the Queen. One of the themes that came out of the hearings on citizenship that was absolutely consistent was that people come from all over the world to Canada and when they come to swear an oath of citizenship to Canada they cannot understand the reference to the Queen. In fact the government's own opinion polls find that most new Canadians coming to Canada cannot understand the reference to the Queen.

The Queen is a foreign monarch. It is certainly true the monarchy has a role in Canadian society in terms of our legal entity and our functions as parliament and eliminating the reference to the Queen, as the Australians did in 1993, in no way affects our parliamentary traditions or the operation of this parliament or the governor general or anything else.

The reality is, as we heard in testimony, that many people come to Canada from other lands in which they associate the British monarchy with slavery. Indeed I point out that the original oath of allegiance that was required of francophones, of French Canadians and of Acadians, was required in 1755 and when they failed to swear allegiance to the monarchy of the time the Acadians were expelled. They were taken out of Nova Scotia and scattered down the coast of the United States.

I think most Acadians would now refuse to take an oath containing a reference to the monarchy, because of this dark period in our history.

What are we doing having the Queen, the monarchy, in an oath that describes Canada when we are inviting these people to Canada? I think what I am saying here is that the Queen no longer captures the spirit of what it is to be Canadian. In fact in the context of an oath of citizenship I wonder whether the Queen ever did.

I do not think it is out of place to eliminate the Queen from the oath of citizenship. I think when we do so we repatriate the oath of citizenship, because new people coming to this land realize that it is Canada that they are coming to, not Britain, not to some foreign monarch, not to the British monarchy. They are coming to Canada. That is the first point.

The second point is the oath I propose has the words that new Canadians come and take their places among Canadians, a people united by God. I was very careful in using this reference to God. I point out first that all the other major oaths of citizenships, in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain have a reference to God. What happened in Canada was when we last went through the oath of citizenship we took the reference to God out.

In proposing to put the reference back in, all I am doing is reflecting the fact that we have the reference to God in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I am not suggesting that a new Canadian coming to Canada should feel that in taking this oath that the person is indicating he or she believes in God or the person is assigning an association with one religion or another.

The reality about the Canadian history, our life, is that every kind of Canadian has had an association with God. Whether we are a Christian, or a Muslim, or an aboriginal, actually 80% of Canadians believe that there is some sort of higher authority. We as Canadians owe our good fortune of having one of the most wonderful countries in the world to something more than just NASDAQ, the stock exchange or our mining riches.

Canadians are more than meat and potatoes. This land is more than fire and water. This land is something that is above our human intellect. Generally speaking, Canadians as a society have held that belief. What we do here is say that a new Canadian who comes to this land is going to be a part of this tradition of a faith in God. This is not an ideology. It is still open to opportunity. The person does not have to believe in God because this is a land where we accept people of all points of view. That is one of the reasons why we can have a room of such tolerance here. We can have separatists and people of different ideologies. That is the genius of this country.

Finally, there are the five principles of equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, democracy, basic human rights and the rule of law. These derive directly from our charter of rights and liberties. This is what we are as Canadians. This is the spirit of being Canadian. This is what defines our tolerance. It is not just being equal, it is having equality of opportuntiy. That is why we believe in medicare and why we believe in universal education. Freedom of speech, democracy and all these things are essential to the Canadian spirit.

I say to you, Mr. Speaker, these are what define Canadians; these are the principles that define Canadian. I urge all party leaders to allow a free vote on this issue. I heard the member for Rosemont and respect his point of view. But for heaven's sake, this opportunity to repatriate the constitution, to repatriate the oath of citizenship and to bring it back to Canada should surely be a free vote allowed by all party leaders.