John Bryden

[Points Of Order, November 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I will try to give you some constructive suggestions.

The issue around Bill S-13 seems to be revolving around the definition of the word levy. I point out in the legislation that under definitions it says “Levy means the levy”. The legislation defines levy by the same word. It is a levy for industry purposes.

Mr. Speaker, there have been arguments that you should pay careful attention to what judges say, to what the supreme court says on issues like this, and to what the courts in general say. I will ask you to speak as the president of the highest court in the land. I look to you to make a decision that is above the courts because this place is above the courts.

Having said that, I do not think we need to go to the courts to define what the word levy means. All we have to do is go to the table in front of you and examine the Concise Oxford Dictionary , which is the Table dictionary. If we look up the word levy we will find that the definition is “the collecting of a contribution, tax, et cetera”.

Mr. Speaker, were you to go to the parliamentary library and look up the Oxford English Dictionary , volume 8, you would find this definition of levy: “the action of collecting an assessment, duty, tax, et cetera”. Collins English Dictionary defines levy as: a) the art of imposing and collecting a tax, tariff, et cetera; b) the money so raised”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it this way: “to impose or collect a tax”. Finally, if we look at Larousse , we will find that “prélèvement” is translated as “impôt”.

Mr. Speaker, there is no question about what the English and the French language mean by the word levy, and it is a tax. However, you have heard arguments that there have been interpretations of the word levy made by the courts as having something to do with raising money by regulation.

The member for New Brunswick Southwest drew your attention to the Ontario probate fees. He said that if you want an example of a levy you could look at the Ontario probate fees, and he cited court documents. Recently that has been the source of a court challenge and those fees have been declared a tax. As I understand it, the Ontario government is now on the hook for about a billion dollars on this levy.

I would ask you, Mr. Speaker, to consider very carefully what we really do mean by a levy. Again the dictionary before you on the table defines tax. We have seen in that dictionary that a levy is a tax and now we will look at the definition of a tax. It reads:

—a contribution to government revenue compulsorily levied on individuals, property, or businesses.

One of the arguments we have been hearing is that because this compulsory tax goes to a foundation it is not really a tax at all. I submit that because a foundation is a creature of this parliament, a creature of this government, it is indeed a recipient of a tax. We do not evade the question of whether a tax is a tax simply because it goes to an arm's length agency that has been created by the government.

The key word is the fact that money is being raised from people compulsorily. I point out that normally in our legislation we do not make a distinction between individuals who are persons like myself, single people, and corporations. They are often viewed in legislation as individuals and they are regarded as such.

I draw your attention, Mr. Speaker, to another definition in the legislation:

“sponsor of the Foundation” means a person who pays a levy.

If we transpose the word levy for tax, that definition actually is that sponsor of the foundation means a person who pays a tax. In other words, this is all about taxing somebody.

[Charitable Contributions, November 16th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I am glad of the opportunity to speak to this issue. I have been very interested in charities for some years and have done quite a study of them.

Motion No. M-318 operates on the premise that less governance is better and to devolve government social services to independent organizations is a better thing. If Motion No. M-318 were acted upon, billions of dollars would go into charities as opposed to government services. We would notice immediately the effects of changing the tax credit structure with respect to charities.

Motion No. M-318 operates on the premise that if more money is given to charities, the charities will provide the services better than government. It ignores the reality that charities operate with the least level of transparency and accountability of any organizations in Canadian society today. At least when government provides services, government bureaucracies are accountable. Various legislation controls the transparency of how government bureaucracies operate. In the case of charities, this is not so, as it applies to all non-profit organizations.

An illustration of that is the Canada Corporations Act which provides standards of corporate governance and transparency and accountability to for-profit organizations. It provides nothing for non-profit organizations. Charities and non-profit organizations can operate and have no requirement under law to be transparent and accountable.

Members opposite propose that what is necessary in society is to give more power over social services to organizations that are not accountable to the people. These organizations are accountable to their board of directors, but there is no legislation that guarantees that the executive members of the charity actually have to report the truth to the board of directors. Therefore we have a situation where many charities operate at a high level of inefficiency.

I will give a classic example. In Ontario the Harris government has been cutting back on hospitals. It is causing all kinds of problems in health care. The hospitals have been ordered to cut 20% from their total spending. Lost are the nurses, the medical care and the beds. The administrators stay on. The administrators are not hurt. The administrators actually raise their salary.

Increasingly, talking to my Ontario colleagues, I find the Ontario government is becoming aware that it is not good enough just to cut a charity. If someone cannot control how that charity actually spends its money, if there is a cut like that, the administrators of those charities are the ones who will benefit. So in Ontario we have a very severe problem. I suggest it is because hospitals are charities.

The anecdotal evidence of the directors of hospitals not being informed by their own executive, the administrators of those hospitals, of the operation of the hospital is everywhere.

Anyone who has ever served on the board of directors of a hospital realizes that as a director they cannot get good information on how that hospital operates. We are talking about charities just in the hospital sector involving billions and billions of dollars.

The Reform Party motion operates on the premise of getting government out of the supplying of social services, returning it to the community.

If we do not have rules, if we do not have legislation in place that governs how our organizations spend money, then we are abrogating our very responsibility as politicians. We are here to serve the people of Canada who pay taxes to make sure those taxes are spent efficiently and well.

If we abrogate that responsibility, if we give it down the line to organizations that are not connected to the government and we do not set rules and legislation in place that govern those organizations, we are absolutely betraying the trust of the people of Canada.

I suggest Motion No. 318 is certainly a motherhood and apple pie issue. I also suggest that it is a politically correct issue because the people putting the motion forward think across Canada people everywhere will automatically support charities. One member opposite said that all he had to do was check in his constituency and he would find that everyone supports charity.

I suggest to members opposite that they do that. They will find that in Canadian society today, for very good reason people are more and more suspicious that the charities supposed to be doing the good work are, in many instances, extremely self-serving.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the reason my speech was so short was that I did not find much of great concern in the legislation. I believe an economy of words in this House is something everyone should seek. That is what I was trying to do.

Now that the member has responded and raised some issues, I will say the reason I think the bill should go forward basically as it stands and go to committee for further deliberation is that I do not think it contains elements that cause the concerns raised by the members opposite. I do not feel that it creates mini states within Canada.

The Constitution provides special treatment for Canada's aboriginal peoples. That is in our Constitution. It is like official bilingualism. It is part of our national makeup.

However we have to be very careful—and this is where members opposite strike an appropriate chord—we do not create states along the model of apartheid in South Africa where sovereign states were created on race.

The legislation creates—and it is the theme of the government—aboriginal self-government that is more based on the municipal model. It so happens because aboriginal affairs is a federal responsibility rather than a provincial responsibility that we will not have a provincial government between the federal government and the municipality. In essence we would have the federal government and the municipality.

Unfortunately there has been a great misuse of language in the debate. For instance, we are always talking about first nations. Sometimes I find it quite deplorable when witnesses appear before the aboriginal affairs committee and talk about their first nations versus Canada. That is the kind of rhetoric I would expect from the Parti Quebecois in Quebec which actually talks about separating from Canada. I find that unacceptable.

It is a misuse of words because the vast majority of aboriginal peoples I know who appear before our committee are very much Canadian. They want a sense of management of their own affairs just in the same way as the people in my communities of Dundas, Ancaster and Hamilton, or in the province for that matter if we take another step up in the communities of communities that make up Canada, want a sense of personal identity in the immediate territory around them. We want to have some say in our lives in that context.

That is precisely what the government is trying to achieve by its aboriginal self-government programs. It is not trying to create sovereign states. It is trying to create communities that manage their own affairs in the same way as municipalities do and in another way as provinces do.

We are embarking on uncharted territory. We still do not know for certain how the experiments we have already done are working. We cannot leave it for decades and centuries to attempt to address the very legitimate need of the various communities of Canada to feel they are in control of their own destinies as individuals. We have to act.

The legislation may have flaws. What legislation that comes before the House does not have flaws? If legislation did not have flaws the opposition would not need to exist. There would be no need for debate. Legislation has problems and we have to discuss them as mature representatives of the various parts of Canada that have sent us to the House.

I have found one area of concern. While members opposite have expressed themselves sometimes eloquently, I am sure they have found other areas of concern. I read in what they say that they are not ambiguous at all with respect to the legislation. Members across the floor are saying that they believe in Bill C-49 in principle, but they do not agree with the detail and need reassurance. I urge them to support the bill, get it to committee, get those witnesses before the committee, hear those witnesses and then decide on the future of the legislation.

In order to give people who need a sense of self-identity a chance to have that self-identity as soon as possible we should move forward with this and other legislation like it.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I find myself in the odd position of having to spring to the defence of a Reform Party member, the member for Selkirk—Interlake because I feel strongly that it is the role of the opposition to nitpick legislation at second reading. That is why we are here, to debate and try to find flaws in the existing legislation so when it goes to committee it will have some guidelines on what to look for in order to correct the bill and make it better.

I am not quite sure where the member for the NDP was coming from. Possibly she had not read the legislation or perhaps she misunderstands her role as a member of the opposition.

For my part, I have never hesitated as a government member to examine legislation at second reading debate very carefully and to point out where I feel there may be shortcomings. I do not share the same concerns as the Reform Party members that there is a problem in the bill with respect to the allocation of sovereignty. I actually believe the bill provides for this. When it is debated in committee the members opposite will get the reassurances they need with respect to not giving away the store and creating mini states within Canada. I do not believe the bill does that.

I have one concern with respect to the bill and I hope a member opposite will address it. I cannot find anywhere in the bill a provision for transparency. There are some clauses that talk about accountability but there is no clause that I can find that would require the management groups or whoever administers this act on the reserves or on the self-government entities provide for open debate.

The difficulty is that there cannot be accountability without transparency. There has been a trend over the years to create legislation that does not firmly provide for committees and councils in self-government regimes to have their debates in an open forum. That is key to an amendment or change I would like to see in the bill. I would ask the member opposite or a member of the Reform Party if they might share the same concerns I have, that we should be looking for an amendment that clarifies a need for transparency in deliberations when the bill goes through.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I share with my colleague a concern about the terminology with respect to self-government and sovereignty. We do not want small nations within a nation. This is a debate that constantly appears in the committee of which I am a member.

When the bill gets to committee and is debated, does the member find there is nothing to the term sovereignty, that it is really not sovereignty we are talking about in these treaties but a form of municipal government?

If we find that kind of reassurance from justice department officials and other witnesses who come before the committee, would the member be willing to take that message back to his community to reassure the people who are genuinely concerned?

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my colleague's remarks with great interest because we are all very concerned about what exactly these self-government treaties involve.

This has been a topic at the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development for some time. While there appears to be nothing that will be a constitutional problem in the treaties we are talking about, nevertheless it would be a reassurance for all Canadians to hear the interpretation of the term self-government from expert witnesses from the Department of Justice.

I am pleased to inform the member opposite that the committee has discussed just that strategy for a witness program when this bill goes to committee. I suggest to him that perhaps he should agree with the bill in principle and reserve his final judgment on his concern about what is actually meant by self-government and whether it is indeed in the interests of all Canadians, as I believe it is, and wait to see what the expert witnesses from the Department of Justice say at the committee. He could then make his decision when the bill comes back for third reading.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, November 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, again I detect from the hon. member's remarks that he does support the bill in principle. I would suggest to him that it is he who should be rising in support of the bill rather than the opposite. The often valid objections that the Bloc Quebecois brings up should be debated in committee. If they cannot be resolved at that stage, it makes sense then to vote against the bill at third reading. When we agree with something in principle, we should support it in principle.

As for my colleague's general remarks, it seems to me that the easiest way to resolve the problem of too much mixed jurisdiction in issues of the environment, the fisheries and the coastal regions would be for the provinces to back off and allow the federal government to play its proper role in managing these resources on our coastal waters.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, November 2nd, 1998]

No, not puffins. On other islands along the shore there are puffins and whales, just along the east coast of the Avalon peninsula. There is wild life and biodivisity in incredible quantities.

If someone in Newfoundland decided to shoot all those birds or kill the whales found along that coast, or maybe develop the islands where the puffins breed, would the people in B.C. care? Would they be affected? I suggest that every Canadian would care if this type of environment in Newfoundland were destroyed. I would say every Canadian would care. The world would lose something but Canada would lose something most of all. Even if we do not see it and even it is not in our province it is important to us.

I move to Lake Ontario. Just off Welland there are two ships that lie in about 500 feet of water. They are called the Hamilton and the Scourge . They are American vessels from the War of 1812 which were actually seized from the Canadians and refurbished into American men of war. A storm came up and the ships capsized and sank in about 500 feet of water in Lake Ontario.

About 12 years ago they were located and an expedition was mounted to go down and examine them. These are two War of 1812 warships that are in absolute pristine condition on the floor of Lake Ontario. They are absolutely perfect. They are a wonderful snapshot of a period in all our history that determined the future of Canada when we were under threat and at war with the United States.

The legislation covers the preservation of that type of historical situation at the bottom of Lake Ontario. It is under threat because all those artifacts on the lake floor are a tremendous attraction to scuba divers and relic hunters.

That is a classic case where the heritage ministry has a role in this kind of legislation. We have to protect that kind of thing. It is of interest. It is of value. People do care in British Columbia, Quebec and Newfoundland about that kind of archeological treasure in Lake Ontario because it is Canadian.

Let us go to Victoria. Let us go to British Columbia and look at Long Beach for example. Long Beach on Vancouver Island is one of the most splendid marine environments we could ever hope to see. For miles there is surf rolling up. We can walk along the shore and find shells of every diversity. The waters off British Columbia are as equally famous as the Red Sea for their biodiversity. Scuba divers come from all over the world to British Columbia to dive in those waters.

The city of Victoria is noted for its very long sewage pipe which dumps raw sewage into the ocean. I would ask members on the opposite side of the House, especially the B.C. members, if they seriously want to tell me that the federal government has no role because we can trust the provinces and the municipalities. We can see for ourselves, and Victoria is the classic example, that in order to save a few dollars or perhaps to save jobs, Victoria is dumping raw sewage into the sea. And it does float back, I have to say, and all they do is make the pipe longer. That is the type of problem that exists when we leave environmental issues solely to the provinces and the municipalities.

The real thrust of my talk is that we have choices in this country. We can believe that what pulls together a country of this size and this diversity is its diversity. It is its difference in its cultures, its environment, its forests and its sheer beauty. Perhaps the fundamental difference between members on this side and members on the opposite side is that I feel very strongly that all of it belongs to me, not just what exists in my municipality which is at the head of Lake Ontario, not just what exists in my province, but the entire country.

I come from a riding near the city that had the Plastimet fire. The Plastimet company came under Ontario and municipal fire codes and environmental laws and what did we have? Hamilton had one of the worst toxic fires in this century, at least in Canada. The provincial controls were there on paper but they were not there in action.

The fundamental difference between members on this side and members on the other side is, be they Bloc Quebecois or Reform members, they do not appreciate—the NDP have indicated that they do not want to be included with the Bloc and the Reform Party and I appreciate that, and I did not notice a reaction from the Conservatives. The fundamental point is simply that the difference politically that exists in this country is exemplified by this legislation. One side wants the legislation for the entire nation and the other side does not want the legislation for provincial parochial reasons.

The Bloc Quebecois members although they do not like the nationalist component in this legislation have certainly indicated that they agree in principle with the general idea of preserving these ecosystems. I know it is impossible for the Reform Party but I would suggest that the Bloc Quebecois remember that this is second reading, agreement in principle. Therefore support it in principle and vote with the government on this occasion.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, November 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am someone who very much likes to travel in North Africa. It is a beautiful part of the world, particularly Egypt. I am very fond of the desert.

One of the most stunning adventures, if one is into the environment and into wildlife and that sort of thing, is to travel to the shore of the Red Sea and snorkel in the Red Sea, which is what I did about six or seven years ago.

The Red Sea is famous for its underwater marine environment. I arrived there and went swimming. There is a reef just offshore. It is quite fantastic because when looking around with my face out of water it is all desert. When I put my face in the water it was a riot of colour. There is life everywhere competing. There were fish, coral, sea fans and everything imaginable within my view. The water was beautiful and perfectly clear.

That was in one little cove that the local guides took us to. I asked to go a little way down the shore where again I went into the water and looked down with my face mask and snorkel on and there was desolation. There was nothing. Everything was totally dead. As I walked along the shore the sand looked perfectly normal, but I stepped on something soft. It was a sand coated globule of oil.

Prior to passing through the Suez Canal the oil tankers trim their tanks by dumping oil into the Red Sea. The devastation of one of the most fantastic ecosystems in the world is unbelievable. It is all because of a weak national government which did not apply standards to the tankers moving through the Suez Canal. Egypt did not apply those standards because it needs the money. It is as simple as that.

Let us return to Canada for a moment and travel with me to Newfoundland, to Cape St. Mary's on the Avalon peninsula. I was there the summer before last. It is an absolutely splendid situation. It is a bird sanctuary. Approaching the edge of the cliffs there is a huge pinnacle a couple of hundred yards offshore. The drop is about 300 feet. Tens of thousands of birds swarm around that pinnacle. That is their breeding ground.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, November 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the member should know that I have two brothers, a sister and a mother who live in Victoria, B.C. I go back and forth and have done that for the last 20 years.

I admire the province. I love the province. I love the island and I feel it is very much a part of me. When he says butt out, what he is basically saying is if you do not live in the province, you have no say over the environment.

As a Canadian I care about this country from sea to sea. It is of interest to me. I know the provincial government in B.C. now is probably the most venal government in Canada. It is inept. It would do anything in order to get votes, including raping the landscape and raping the ocean.

As far as I am concerned the federal government is doing the right thing because if we are Canadians we should care about B.C., about Quebec, about Newfoundland. We on this side do care.