John Bryden

[Supply, October 30th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, in reply to the member opposite, yes, they do want justice, but I think justice is always understood as having an element of compassion in it.

My concern about a debate on victims rights and so on is that it steers into the whole idea of vengeance. When a crime is committed one can actually set a fixed penalty that is absolute. We have to give discretion to judges. We have to give judges the opportunity to be compassionate.

I will leap to the defence of the former justice minister because I think he tried very hard to choose judges who were very well qualified. I had discussions along this line with him.

In criticizing the system I want to make it very clear that I was not criticizing the government or the former justice minister. I was pointing out that there are judges on the bench appointed by previous governments who have certainly not performed in an adequate fashion.

The system is flawed. The former justice minister would agree that a better way has to be found than relying on the political arm of government to choose judges. I hope that is the kind of debate we would have.

[Supply, October 30th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to follow the member for Abitibi in the debate. I certainly agree with his motion. As well, I find myself largely in support of the original motion as proposed by the Reform Party.

I enter the debate cautiously because I am not a great fan of prevention arguments when it comes to crime. I do find, however, that the motion proposed by the Reform Party is moderate and quite reasonable in its approach to the problem.

I come to the crime of drunk driving from a different experience than the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca who told how as a physician he saw the broken bodies of people who were killed by drunk drivers.

In my earlier days in a former life I was a reporter. I not only saw people who were injured and dying in hospitals but I saw the larger consequences beyond the hospitals. That included not just the families of victims. It also included the families of persons who committed the crimes. That made me realize that when dealing with the problem of applying and creating laws we have to remember to look at it as broadly as possible. The human condition is very broad and each one of us sometimes only sees a part of it.

There is a problem with increasing penalties for drunk driving. I certainly agree we should have penalties that serve as deterrents, but I have a problem when we want to create penalties that basically reflect our outrage at the crime. Then penalties become the vengeance of the state rather than penalties of either deterrence or rehabilitation.

I use an example from my own life in earlier years as a young journalist. The drunk driver, a father of young children, had tried very hard over the years to control his habit and had been largely successful. One afternoon coming home from picking up his children from a soccer game he had been to the pub, had drank, was over the limit, was involved in an accident and one of his children was killed.

What happens then? As a young reporter I saw the tragedy of a dead child. There is nothing more heart rending than to see a child that has been killed in an accident. I do not know why it is that we can tolerate seeing dead adults, but as a reporter I could never steel my heart to a dead child.

Later I followed it up and found that the wife and children of that drunk driver were absolutely devastated, not just because of the tragedy but because of the expected loss of the bread winner of the family. They know that he tried very hard to control his weakness, and despite all his efforts it led to this tragedy.

That brings me to the idea that when we look at justice we must always remember that justice must have compassion. I would not want to see the House pass any law that does not give the judge and the courts some discretion in looking at an entire situation, not just at the victim, in this case a child, but at the family of the accused when it is very clear that whatever sentence is coming down is not a question of deterrence. The individual did not want to do it in the first place and nothing would have compelled him to do it other than a psychological weakness.

On the other hand is rehabilitation. There is no doubt we certainly must have penalties but we have to apply the law with compassion.

There is a lot of valid criticism, but I think the weakness is when judges pass sentences that we know are inadequate for the crime, where there are no mitigating circumstances such as I have just described, when looking from the outside we see judges pass a sentence that is far too light for the circumstances of the crime, be it drunk driving, murder or sexual assault.

We just had a very recent incident in Toronto where a judge passed sentence on the most horrendous sexual assault case and most of us feel the sentence was far too light.

The problem is not just looking at the law and considering whether we should revise the penalties, which is what this motion proposes. Because it is moderate I cannot oppose that in principle. We also have to look at the question of who our judges are and how our judges come to be.

We are experiencing in society some serious reservations about the way we appoint judges, the way judges become judges. Our whole court system is predicated on the principle that the judge should be a person of great experience in life, of great integrity and of great professional experience.

It is widely felt across the country that perhaps the judges from the supreme court right down to the provincial court are not all they should be. That may be because of our current method of appointing judges. In many instances judges are political appointees.

I do not want to get into a debate about patronage. In some ways I think patronage is a very good thing, but when it comes to judges I have a great deal of reservation about judges being appointed by any aspect of the political process.

I suggest to my colleagues that if we want better quality judges so we can have better decisions in cases, be it drunk driving or be it supreme court decisions, we must set up a new regime for appointing judges.

Perhaps we need to look at a mechanism of independent appointment coming from perhaps the governor general, where the governor general examines the credentials of potential applicants and ultimately decides who should sit on the bench. Perhaps that would elevate the quality of judges so decisions made in crimes like drunk driving, murder or assault may combine common sense, deterrence, rehabilitation and compassion where necessary; not foolish compassion, not politically correct compassion, but compassion when it is appropriate and right.

I would not want to see our courts and laws become the laws of vengeance. Our courts and laws are there to make society better, to help individual citizens with genuine problems and to protect society where necessary. They are there to help not only the victims but the accused.

This may not be a popular position to take, but there you go, Mr. Speaker.

[Access To Information Act, October 23rd, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I would request that you rule on my request for unanimous consent now, so that I can carry on with my remarks since I was in the middle of making them.

[Access To Information Act, October 23rd, 1997]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-264, an act to amend the Access to Information Act.

Mr. Speaker, this private member's bill would introduce 46 substantial amendments to the Access to Information Act, in effect, overhauling it entirely.

It is an act that is of great interest to every member in the Chamber. Therefore, I would ask for unanimous consent to be allowed to speak for three minutes on my private member's bill and for it subsequently to go directly on to the order of precedence.

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I draw the attention of the member for South Shore to a few numbers which he may like to consider. I listened to him with great attention and I hope he will listen to me with the same attention.

In 1990 when his party was in power the bank rate was 13%. Today in 1997 I believe the bank rate is 3.75%. In 1990 when his party was in power the prime rate was 14%. Today the prime rate is a mere 5.25%. Best of all, in 1990 when his party was in power the five year mortgage rate was 13%. Today in 1997 under the Liberal government after four years of fiscal responsible administration of the country, the five year mortgage rate is a mere 6.75%.

I suggest to the member that the reason there is so much unemployment and so many problems is that the previous Conservative federal government failed to manage the economy responsibly, created a stranglehold on the economy and jobs were lost. Now we see that even the NDP has to admit that because of excellent fiscal financial management of the affairs of the nation we have driven down interest rates in an extraordinary fashion. When the economy is rolling the jobs will follow and they have been following.

I wonder what the member for South Shore has to say about that?

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, if empty rhetoric could create jobs, then the NDP would create full employment very rapidly.

This is nonsense. If the member opposite had listened to me he would know that I would not reject renewed social spending when there is a surplus. This is certainly one government which has a heart and a conscience.

The reality is the previous Conservative government overspent. It strangled the economy. That created unemployment. The way to correct that, the way to create jobs, is to allow the economy to create jobs.

The member opposite would create jobs out of a vacuum. It does not work that way. It works by having people in Canada who are actively creating employment taking risks, creating business. Sorry, I said business. Good lord, we should not say business to the NDP.

Medium and small businesses in this country, not big unions, are the ones that are driving this economy. They are fueling the growth of this economy which is growing faster than any other economy in the G-7. As a result of that, I believe in the last six months or so we have created some 240,000 jobs in this country.

It just shows that we have our fiscal house in order, fiscal not monetary. Monetary has to do with funny money going across borders. Germany experimented with that in the 1930s. It printed money. Actually the Social Credit in the west had similarly crazy theories during the 1930s. Oddly enough it was the father of the Leader of the Opposition who was very much involved in some of these weird theories coming from the west. All weird monetary theories came from the west, whether it was the NDP or the Social Credit, it was the cradle of this kind of thing.

I do not want to suggest that Ontario, Quebec, the maritimes and B.C. have anything exceptional to contribute as opposed to other parts of the country, but I do believe that certainly Ontario and I think now in the maritimes, even though they did elect a few NDP members, will agree that good fiscal policy, getting your house in order is the way to create jobs.

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am sharing my time with the member for Thornhill.

In preparing for this debate I read very carefully the NDP motion. Central to the whole discussion is the words in the motion that the NDP is criticizing the government's policy and creating unemployment because of its pursuit of a monetary policy obsessed with future inflation and so on and so forth. The key words are “monetary policy” as opposed to fiscal policy.

If I may explain the difference, monetary policy has to do with interest rates, money supply, the manipulation of the exchange rates of currencies across borders. Fiscal policy, on the other hand, has to do with government spending; the government public accounts, the amount of revenue it gets in, the amount of money it spends and whether or not it runs a deficit as a result of these spending practices.

I realized as I looked at the motion that one of the reasons why the economies of the nation, of Canada and the provinces, have got into such tremendous trouble over the past two decades is because governments have been pursuing incorrect ideas with respect to the impact of monetary policy on the creation of employment.

The NDP or social democrats in general believe that we can arbitrarily influence employment levels by manipulating the money supply and manipulating inflation. It believes this is an absolute thing that can be done and that fiscal policy can be set aside.

Fiscal policy has to do with keeping accounts balanced. It is very clear that throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the previous federal government, for example, took the lead of the NDP which was very strong in that Parliament. It set fiscal responsibility aside and pursued a policy that had to do with arbitrarily manipulating money supply or interest rates or thinking it could do so. But in the long run the government ran up a huge debt of over $500 million. At the time that government lost office it was running an annual deficit of around $43 billion or $44 billion a year.

It shows me that the New Democratic Party, the fourth party in the House, is still a dinosaur in its attitude toward the economies of nations and the economies of this nation. NDP members should be aware that the direct manipulation of economies through monetary policy has failed worldwide. This is why the Soviet Union collapsed. This is why the controlled economies of eastern Europe collapsed. The highfaluting theories of arbitrarily controlling the strings of the economy and expecting that would directly create jobs just does not work.

The vast majority of Canadians except for a few people in the NDP know it is quite simple. You do not spend more money than you receive. You have to keep your house in order. It makes no difference whether you are a federal government, the government of the United States or an ordinary household anywhere in Canada, in the maritimes or in western Canada, if you spend more than you take in you are going to get into a lot of trouble.

I had occasion to test the Canadian public's opinion on this issue. The fourth party members are fond of pretending they represent ordinary working people and the intelligence of ordinary working people. They certainly do not represent the intelligence of ordinary people, be they in cities or in rural areas.

Annually the Rockton fair is held in my riding. It is a fall fair. It is probably one of the biggest fall fairs in Ontario. Rockton is a little village community of 150 people. The fair has been going since 1853 and styles itself the Rockton World's Fair. It is among the top 10 fairs in Ontario. Over the four days of the Thanksgiving weekend it received 75,000 visitors. It draws people from all around the golden horseshoe area.

My riding is rural and suburban. I have country folk and fairly affluent suburban folk. Nearby is Hamilton which has principally urban people. An enormous mixture of people come to the Rockton fair.

I always have a booth at the Rockton fair so people can meet the MP. If they have complaints they can make them directly to me. The people at Rockton fair seemed extraordinarily satisfied with the performance of the Liberal government, but that is an entirely different story. They are aware that the government has conducted an excellent fiscal policy which has chiselled down the deficit from $40-odd billion to $8 billion in the last year. It expects to eliminate the deficit in the next year. By any other yardstick in the G-7 the deficit is already eliminated. The finance minister mentioned yesterday that we have actually begun to pay down the debt to the tune of $11 billion.

In anticipation of this good news, on Thanksgiving weekend I conducted my poll at the booth at Rockton fair. I placed four jars on the table in front of my booth. I had another tin that said surplus. On a big sign I said “If you were Paul Martin and you had a surplus, how would you spend it?” The four glass jars I had labelled tax cuts, reduce the debt, reduce the GST, restore social spending.

As each person came by the booth and expressed an interest—it is amazing how interested people were—I offered them four beans. I said “Pretend you are Paul Martin and this is $4 billion. You can put it in these jars however you like, in whatever order you like no matter what”.

It is amazing how enthusiastically people took those four beans and approached the jars and thought and considered carefully how they would spend that $4 billion surplus. They would hesitate here and there.

Five hundred and twenty-five people took part in my poll. They represented every walk of life. There were farmers. There were pensioners. There were young people. There were people from Hamilton because the Rockton fair pulls in people from Hamilton. There were people from all over the region. On Thanksgiving Day, it even brought in people from Toronto.

I had an excellent sampling of public opinion, and it cost a lot less than an Environics poll or any of these other very expensive polls that the government engages in. I would suggest that it was far more accurate than most of those polls because the sample was very large.

I would like to give the results of the poll. On the first two days 321 beans showed up for reducing the debt, 207 for increased social spending, 101 for reducing the GST and 121 for income tax cuts. The following day the numbers were similar: 341, 208, 160 and 126.

Approximately 42% of all the people who came by the booth felt that we should reduce the debt first. I wish both opposition parties would bear in mind that these are ordinary Canadians from all walks of life. They said that of course they would reduce the debt first because if that is done first, everything will follow.

I am glad of this opportunity to speak in the House today because I can say to the finance minister, to all my colleagues and everyone in the House that I feel, as a result of this experience, the correct course for government is sound fiscal policy first. Forget about monetary policy because that follows.

The correct course of government is to get the debt down. Then there will be more money to spend on social spending. What I hope will happen is that we will have more money to not cut income tax but to cut the GST. I think it is the worst tax imaginable.

I would like to see the finance minister use 50% of his surplus just as was suggested by the poll on reducing the debt and the rest divided equally between reducing the GST and improving social spending. We, as Liberals, have to be very concerned in maintaining the social safety net. This is where we differ so enormously from the Reform. We are not prepared to spend like blazes like the NDP in order to do it.

[Income Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 1997, October 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I heard the remarks of the member opposite. Is he suggesting, because there has been a problem in the past, that we should not try to correct it as quickly as possible?

Simply because he feels the government made a mistake in the past and even though he is siding with the people who are adversely affected by the current tax regime with respect to social benefits coming from the United States, is the member prepared to vote against legislation that will correct that inequity?

[Income Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 1997, October 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, we on this side of the House are able to express our opinions freely in debate and look for the pros and cons of legislation. We do not commit ourselves to restricting what we say simply because of the party line. A healthy debate on all sides of the House is a sign of an active Parliament.

I address my comment and question to the member who just spoke. In my riding office I received a number of elderly constituents who are receiving U.S. benefits and they spoke of hardship because their benefits were being taxed in the United States. I felt powerless to help them and told them this was a matter of U.S. administration and could only be resolved by a treaty between Canada and the United States.

A treaty is in the process of occurring. We have a bill before the House. I accept that some members may feel it has some inadequacies.

Does the member agree that in addressing the concerns of low income seniors receiving benefits from the United States the bill is a good thing?

[Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, October 7th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, this is one time I really regret not having an opportunity to ask a question of the previous speaker, the member for Calgary Southeast, rather than having a 10-minute speech.

The question I would have asked him pertains to his continued attacks on the MP pension plan. One does not like to hear old time rhetoric from supposedly new style politicians.

As it happens, when he attacks the MP pension plan, he alludes to the fact that in the last Parliament the majority of Reform MPs, all but one, opted out of the pension plan. That was by statute. We had to make a legislative change because the pension plan for parliamentarians is mandatory. What has been the case of the MPs of the Reform Party of the class of '97 recently elected?

A change of statute, a vote in this Parliament, is required for the MPs of the class of '97 to have the option of opting out of the MP pension plan. Instead of moving legislation or proposing a private member's bill, what the Reform Party has done is that each one of the class of '97 has written to Treasury Board saying they want to opt out of the MP pension plan.

The problem with that is, as they should know, Treasury Board does not have the power to act. It can only be done by statute.

The question I would like to have put to the member for Calgary Southeast, and I am sorry he does not have an opportunity to reply, is whether he is prepared right now to move a private member's bill, which he can write himself, giving MPs the option of opting out of the pension plan. If the Reform Party were really sincere in all it says, it should have done this long ago.

The rest of my speech has to do with the accountability, a term MPs opposite seem to like to throw around, of what has been said in debate by the opposition parties, chiefly the Leader of the Opposition.

I listened with great care to the speech of the member for Calgary Southwest because I am a great believer that, in this Parliament, when the opposition speaks it must speak constructively. It has an important role in making legislation better.

I did not find the kind of constructive criticism that I would like to have found from the Leader of the Opposition. Instead I found, for example, the Leader of the Opposition criticizing Bill C-2 because it does not have a preamble. He says the reason it should have a preamble is so the courts will know how to interpret the legislation. He actually says there is a legal reason and that every time Parliament passes a statute it has to make its intent crystal clear.

If the hon. member for Calgary Southwest had consulted with a competent lawyer he would have been told that a preamble has no legal force in the courts. When a judge approaches legislation for interpretation he is not required in any way to follow the preamble. The legal profession disparagingly refers to preambles in legislation as the pious hope clause.

When there is a preamble in legislation it is usually a political smoke screen which comes out of the department that writes the legislation, usually the Department of Justice.

I will give the House a perfect example of a misleading preamble. It is the preamble to Bill C-46, which the party opposite fully supported at third reading. That bill had to do with restricting the rights of the accused in obtaining records from therapists in sexual assault trials. Remember that the opposition party completely supported that bill. It had a wonderful preamble which outlined how it would protect the rights of victims, how it would do this, that and the other thing. It outlined how the legislation would obey the charter.

Within months of getting through Parliament it is being challenged in Alberta because it defies natural justice. It destroys the right of the accused to defend themselves. It has also been challenged in and overturned by the courts of Ontario.

This is the case of a preamble which was put into legislation that was fundamentally bad. Learned parliamentarians on all sides of the House supported a law which should not have been supported.

I suggest that the hon. member for Calgary Southwest, instead of proposing that bills have preambles, should be condemning preambles. Legislation speaks for itself clause by clause.

The hon. member for Calgary Southwest talked forever about payroll taxes. The point he was trying to make was that increases to CPP premiums are a tax. He cited all kinds of academics to prove the point that the increases to CPP premiums are a tax.

It is certainly true that no one likes to talk about a new tax, be it in Parliament or anywhere in the country. Certainly the government would prefer not to talk about it as a tax. The reasoning is that because the government does not directly collect the tax one should not think of it as being a tax.

The argument was not fully developed by the hon. member for Calgary Southwest. The argument is if it is mandatory, if it is taken off a worker's payroll, then it is a tax. It is a tax because it is mandatory. The hon. member for Calgary Southwest said the government is not being genuine because it is really a tax.

What do we find later in his speech? He talks about super RRSPs which are mandatory. In other words, the other party, while condemning the government for proposing a pension tax, is proposing a tax itself. It is a matter of semantics. Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of the language. The reality is that a mandatory super RRSP is a tax as well.

Finally I come to the issue of accountability. The Leader of the Opposition condemned Bill C-2 because he felt it merely required annual reports and proper reporting by the investment board which will be responsible for the funds under its charge, which is a huge innovation in the bill to turn the management of the pension funds over to an investment panel which will invest them in the open market and do so wisely.

Again the member for Calgary Southwest missed the point. Instead of condemning the fact that Bill C-2 wanted reporting he really should have gone after the bill and said that this is the kind of reporting we want. I do not blush as a government member to warn my government that I am dissatisfied with this aspect of the bill. What is missing from the bill is an itemized account of what we expect from this investment board when it presents its annual report.

We want to know the remuneration of the executives. We want to know the cost of administration and management. We want to know the investment plan. We want to know investment performance. Rather than condemning the government, and Bill C-2 because it wants annual reports, the Leader of the Opposition missed an opportunity for valid criticism and he has left it again to the government backbenchers to warn the government that it has not fully examined the bill. I hope the committee will look very carefully at this whole matter of what kind of accountability there should be.

I also listened very carefully to the remarks of the member for Sherbrooke. He is the leader of the fifth party, I believe. We find Sesame Street economics. This member condemned the bill because it took $11 billion out of the economy over six years. Somehow he does not seem to understand that this investment board is going to reinvest it in the economy, in the open market. It will reinvest the money in Canada.

Later the member for Sherbrooke complained that he wanted RRSPs to be permitted to invest 50% in foreign investment instead of 20%. He is proposing that Canadian pension funds be invested outside Canada. He is not interested in investing in Canada, and no wonder. That party did not succeed very well in the election of 1993.