John Bryden

[Petitions, February 16th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I rise to present three petitions today. The first is to ensure that the present provisions of the Criminal Code prohibiting assisted suicide be enforced vigorously and that Parliament

make no changes in the law that would sanction or allow the aiding or abetting of suicide or active or passive euthanasia.

[Agriculture And Agri-Food Administrative Monetary Penalties Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I too was listening very attentively to the remarks of the member for Moose Jaw-Lake Centre. I too have a little difficulty with his suggestion that this would give too much power to the minister. He offers as an alternative the setting up of a tribunal which would look after this type of thing.

I point out to him that his party and another colleague in the House have spoken out very eloquently many times against the refugee board in another context suggesting that it is another tribunal which is a waste of taxpayers' money. Now we hear the hon. member proposing yet another tribunal which would draw on the public purse. Would he explain the economics of that for me, please?

[Charitable And Non-Profit Organization Director Remuneration Disclosure Act, February 10th, 1995]

moved that Bill C-244, an act to require charitable and non-profit organizations that receive public funds to declare the remuneration of their directors and senior officers, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour and pleasure to rise today to speak on behalf of Bill C-224, an act that would require charitable and non-profit organizations to declare once a year the salaries and benefits of their directors and senior officers.

This is a votable bill. If passed into law it will have a profound effect on all Canadians. It is a first step in bringing public accountability to a huge sector of the Canadian economy that has never been under meaningful public supervision.

I am speaking of the not for profit sector, the charities and non-profit organizations that pay no taxes and yet account for at least $120 billion in revenues and expenditures each year, about one-sixth of Canada's gross domestic product. Let me repeat, $120 billion, a sixth of GDP.

Incredible though it may seem, Canada has had few rules of public accountability governing this huge sector of the economy. The financial affairs of charities are but thinly disclosed to the public while those of non-profit organizations are entirely beyond public scrutiny. Even though charities and non-profit organizations are funded directly or indirectly by the taxpayer, they have been allowed to operate at whatever level of secrecy they choose.

Oh, yes, they will argue, they have to keep books. They have to be prepared for an audit by Revenue Canada. However there are 70,000 charities and 60,000 plus non-profit organizations. What are the chances of a spot audit? Even if an organization is audited, the Income Tax Act forbids public disclosure of the financial details or the results of the examination. The public has no right to know even when a charity or non-profit organization is discovered to have failed to keep the public trust, neither right nor opportunity.

This is a situation that has gone on forever. The potential for abuse is huge. The scope of the likely waste is difficult to comprehend. If only one-quarter of this $120 billion is being frittered away, soaked up in excessive salaries, improper contracts or bureaucratic inefficiencies, then Canadians are losing $30 billion annually, which becomes $30 billion out of the economy.

No wonder Canada has a debt and deficit crisis. I must say it never made sense to me that Canada, with all its resources and given its fine entrepreneurial spirit, should be in the cellar with Italy in terms of debt among the G-7 nations. Now it does.

No nation can possibly let an economic sector worth one-sixth of its GDP run along without scrutiny, without public accountability and not run up serious bills. And not have the financial crisis that Canada now faces.

There is irony here. As the finance minister casts around for spending cuts and savings crucial to the budget soon to be tabled, he looks in every corner of the rest of the economy; consumers, corporations, social programs, the public service and so on. He does not look at charities and non-profit organizations. Is there no waste here, no savings? Of course there are. I can only guess at the reason why charities and non-profit organizations have not yet come under the deficit reduction microscope.

It may well be because there has been no decent financial overview of the not for profit sector. It has literally been a case of out of sight, out of mind, for a generation of finance ministers.

No doubt this is true of non-profit organizations. There were 60,000 of them in 1986 and up until two years ago they did not have to file an annual financial information return equivalent to that required of charities. They only had to file as incorporated companies or trusts. If they were neither, they did not have to file at all.

Consequently, as the Auditor General stated in 1990, Revenue Canada "has no effective check on the right to enjoy tax exempt status". He could have stated further that the public, private citizens, journalists and even members of Parliament have no opportunity whatsoever to see how they manage their affairs.

However, thanks to the information returns required of charities, though very inadequate in terms of public disclosure, we can at least glimpse the huge dimensions of Canada's charity industry. I would like to refer my colleagues to an excellent paper, "A Portrait of Canada's Charities" which was produced by the Centre of Philanthropy, based on a study of 1993 charity returns.

Briefly, here are some of its findings. Canada has 70,000 charities through which $86 billion passed in 1993 for 12 per cent to 13 per cent of GDP. This amount is equal to the GDP of the entire province of British Columbia and considerably more than the entire agricultural sector. Forty billion dollars was paid out by charities in salaries and benefits-a huge sum.

Government funding of charities amounted to $49 billion in 1993, slightly more than half of all the charities' revenues. Hospitals and teaching institutions received 58 per cent of all

revenues, or about $50 billion. By contrast churches received only 6 per cent of revenues or about $5 billion.

Here is the problem. Anyone can find out how much a minister of a church is making for 6 per cent of the charity take. But it is usually impossible, right across this country, to find out the salary of a hospital or university president for 58 per cent of the charity take.

Why not? Hospitals and universities are all fully funded directly or indirectly by the taxpayer. Why does the taxpayer not have the right to know how much of his hard earned tax dollar is being spent on the salaries of their chief administrators? Why not?

The answer is, and I am sure that 90 per cent of Canadians will agree, that the taxpayer should know. We do have the right. If you are paying the bill you have a fundamental right to know how your money is being spent. That is a given. That is what Bill C-224 addresses.

It would require every not for profit organization to file a statutory declaration showing the total remuneration and benefits received by all directors and senior officers of charities and non-profit organizations. The minister of revenue would then make this information available to anyone who wanted it.

This I should add is no less than what is required now by publicly traded companies in Canada. If for profit companies are required to provide this kind of disclosure to shareholders, why should not charities and non-profit organizations do the same thing for their shareholders, the taxpayers of Canada?

It seems so reasonable, so obvious, so morally right. The fact is, however, that hospitals for instance have often ferociously defended the secrecy of their books and denied absolutely, even to members of their own governing boards, details on the salaries paid their top administrators. Indeed, trying to find out how most hospitals run themselves is akin to trying to assess the administrative practices of the government in Beijing from city hall in Thunder Bay. Most hospital board meetings are held in camera. The public and press are excluded.

This is all the more mystifying in that governments at all levels are told that hospitals are hurting, that beds must be cut back unless funding is sustained or even increased. Yet not even the politicians deliberating the problem of health care spending are entitled to know how much a hospital president is making. Why not?

Some might argue that the current charity information return already provides enough information about remuneration. It does not. It only requires totals and sadly, some charities filling out the form step around the spirit of openness.

For example, the charity return asks for the "total remuneration paid to employees who are executive officers, directors or trustees of the charity". Then it asks for the total number of people involved, which invites division of that number to get the average per individual.

Alas, often the trustees of charities are unpaid. Therefore the number you are dividing by is inflated and the average remuneration appears far lower than it actually is for key administrators.

Sadder still is the fact that many charities simply skip the remuneration lines altogether. The Canadian Cancer Society of Ontario reports paying over $8 million in salaries and then leaves the following lines on executive remuneration blank. Therefore we do not even get totals.

This practice is common. Any random sampling of annual charity returns will come up with many where the remuneration lines are not filled out. There is obviously an unwillingness by many charities to provide this elementary information. They get away with it because there is no penalty for their omissions short of revoking their charity status. There is no adequate screening of the filled out forms either. Errors abound and some must be deliberate.

Bill C-224 partially plugs this loophole. The legislation provides a penalty for the failure to disclose. A fine of up to 50 per cent of the funds received from government is a law that has teeth. Perhaps that sounds tough but in fact legislators in the United States have been tearing their hair and trying to bring to task not for profit organizations that have been giving executives excessive compensation.

The lifting of charitable status is too slow, the ways of concealing excessive compensation too intricate. I have to add that the United States is years ahead of Canada in trying to tackle this problem.

How bad is it? In the United States the information returns of both non-profit and charities are available to the public. There too, they have this phenomenon of organizations skipping the lines pertaining to executive remuneration. Prodding by the Internal Revenue Service has disclosed salaries exceeding one million dollars annually, $300,000 or $400,000 is not unusual.

This is undoubtedly happening in Canada as well. Our charity information returns are primitive in the detail they require in comparison to those of the Americans. The Canadian public, citizens, journalists or politicians cannot even see the returns of non-profit organizations. While these are available to every American on demand at the office of the non-profit organization, the equivalent information in Canada is denied to Canadians.

While my remarks have tended to focus on charities it is only because there is at least some public information on them. There is nothing on non-profit organizations. Nothing at all.

Revenue Canada is not even sure how many there are. The only figure I could obtain, 60,000, is nine years old and nobody-I mean nobody-knows how much money flows through them yearly. If it is even half that of charities, that is $40 billion. I suggest that that figure is conservative. I suggest that it could be considerably more. I suggest the combined figure that I have been using, $120 billion, is also conservative.

Last week I received a visitor at my constituency office in Hamilton-Wentworth riding. He was from Manitoba and while on business in Toronto he drove over to meet me because he had read in his local paper that I was investigating the not for profit industries.

He told me that he headed a for profit company in the business of recycling building materials. He said that he was being killed by a non-profit organization in the same business which enjoyed a competitive advantage because it did not pay taxes.

That same week, I received a call from the president of a Toronto union local representing jail workers. His problem was with a non-profit organization hired by the provincial government to manage group homes for youths convicted under the Young Offenders Act. The union wanted access to the company's financial statements for the purposes of negotiating a collective agreement. Denied. A non-profit organization does not have to disclose financial details to anyone. Secrecy is absolute, no matter how the taxpayer's dollar is being spent, and so it goes.

The real problem is that we do not know the net negative effect non-profit organizations are having on the economy. That many exist purely to pay inflated salaries to their principal officers there is no doubt. In doing so, with the advantage of not having to pay taxes, are they forcing out of business legitimate for-profit enterprises which would pay taxes? How damaging to a free market economy is a plethora of businesses which only have to compete sufficiently to line the pockets of their executives rather than sufficiently to show a profit to pay shareholders? How much of Canada's deficit is rooted in non-profit companies doing barely enough and no more?

There is only one quick way to get at this issue: require non-profit organizations to declare the remuneration of their principal officers, as Bill C-224 proposes, and the benefits as well.

MPs are often accused of having a too rich pension plan. I agree that is so and that it should be brought into line with industry. Tax exempt charities and non-profit organizations are dependent upon the taxpayer too, no less so than MPs. What kind of pensions do their executive officers get? Chances are given that this information has never been available, many of their pension plans would make current MP pensions look starved and stingy.

Just as the public demands accountability of its politicians, so it should demand accountability of those organizations dependent upon public and governmental generosity. There is no excuse for secrecy when tax dollars are being spent, directly or indirectly.

Finally, it is clear that the entire $120 billion not for profit sector is urgently in need of review and oversight. However, a problem of such magnitude cannot be solved overnight.

Nevertheless, something must be done immediately because the loss to the economy is undoubtedly enormous. The floodlight of public scrutiny must be brought to bear as quickly as possible. That is the intention of Bill C-224. It cannot cure in a stroke an industry that has been allowed to function unsupervised for decades but it can bring into sharp relief the fundamental nature of the problem. By forcing into daylight those executive salaries and benefits which are obviously excessive, it can show the greed.

[Peacekeepers, December 15th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to read from a soldier's letter I received not long ago:

I am in the Canadian Armed Forces and have been for 10 and a half years. I have been to Cyprus, Somalia and at this very moment am in Yugoslavia. I am sure you get hundreds of letters per day from people expressing their views on every type of situation going. My letter is just a get to know you letter.

I read in your 1994 fall report that a Yugoslavia family received a Canadian flag as part of their welcome to Canada. The only Canadian flag I've seen is on our sleeves. Could you please send me a Canadian flag for over here and also a calendar to mark off the days left on my tour.

Waiting to hear from you. Yours sincerely-

I immediately sent this young soldier every Canadian flag I could lay my hands on plus 100 pins.

As we approach Christmas, let us remember it is not enough just to talk about how much we value those who help and serve us, we must also show it by our deeds.

[Communications Security Establishment, December 13th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to support the motion of the member for Scarborough-Rouge River.

Let me begin by first making an observation about the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. We recognize that the role of CSIS is one of counterespionage and counterterrorism in Canada. Its role is to ensure that foreign governments do not

have an improper influence on the lives of Canadians in the sense that it would compromise Canada's security.

That is a very important function in Canada because we are a multicultural society. We value very greatly immigration from all lands. We value our tremendous ethnic and cultural diversity. The fear is that this ethnic melting pot, as it were, may be influenced by some of the foreign nations from which immigrants come and the traditional ethnic hatreds that some countries have.

To that end CSIS protects our interests by doing intelligence work in the ethnic communities in Canada in order to prevent terrorists or foreign governments getting a hold. In doing that we as Canadians have to be concerned that while CSIS fills that very important function that it does not go too far and that the rights of Canadian citizens are protected, including ethnic Canadians.

To cover off that problem we have built into the CSIS act a very excellent control, the Security and Intelligence Review Committee. It is basically a committee of Canadians of conscience who are appointed. They have sweeping powers to doublecheck what CSIS does to make sure that while it does operate in secrecy it operates in a way that has the interests of all Canadians at heart.

Now we come to the Communications Security Establishment. This organization springs from the second world war and Canada's involvement in code and cipher breaking. It is well known what it does now. It is an agency whose role is to intercept communications and to process them. Its direction is toward the collection of foreign intelligence.

I should say it has quite an interesting history. It arose from an organization called the examination unit and specialized in the second world war in breaking Vichy French codes and some Japanese and then went on to break the codes of the free French.

Indeed we will find when the book is written on the subject that the Communications Security Establishment during the early part of the cold war undoubtedly specialized in analysing the diplomatic codes and ciphers of France. I think we will find that this was one of the reasons for the vive le Quebec libre speech of Charles de Gaulle. I think he was very annoyed to discover that Canada had France as a target.

There is nothing unusual in that as all nations monitor the telecommunications of other nations, be they friends or enemies. It is a way of determining whether contracts are kept, if governments are interfering in the diplomatic and commercial affairs of one's own nation.

This type of study takes two shapes. It is code and cipher breaking where you actually attempt to break the codes and ciphers of another nation, be they diplomatic or commercial ciphers. It also takes the form of traffic analysis. When you cannot break the codes and ciphers of another nation you examine where messages are being sent and the volume of messages. That gives an indication of what that country is doing in terms of its diplomatic or commercial activities.

Over the last 15 years code and cipher breaking has lessened in importance in the field of communications intelligence, primarily because code and ciphers have become increasingly hard to break. More than that, it is because communications satellites particularly have enabled governments to monitor the affairs of other nations in a much more efficient manner than could be done hitherto.

I believe the collapse of the Soviet Union had much to do with the fact that satellites were monitoring its lack of economic progress more than with any other cause. The Soviet Union could not hide from the satellites that trains were not running, that there was pollution everywhere and that the Soviet Union was in an economic mess. It worked the other way as well. The Soviet Union was monitoring Canada and the United States and the western world. It could see that it was losing the economic war.

In the world of intelligence the agency that looks after domestic counterespionage and the foreign intelligence gathering agency like the Communications Security Establishment are complementary. They always work together. In the case of foreign and diplomatic intelligence it is important for CSIS to monitor what is happening to foreign nationals on Canadian soil who may be engaged in espionage. The parallel activity is the Communications Security Establishment which monitors the actual traffic in diplomatic and commercial communications. These things always go together.

There is the same situation in Canada with its ethnic makeup. While we have CSIS looking after anti-terrorism shall we say, it inevitably has to probe into the affairs and activities of various ethnic communities in Canada. Similarly the CSE has to be in tune with what may be happening in terms of communications, whatever it can derive either from telecommunications or other communications sources what is happening to the nations that may not have Canada's interests at heart or may be attempting to influence ethnic communities in Canada. The two are complementary and very necessarily so.

This type of activity overlaps in subtle ways. I would like to go back for a second to World War II and tell a very brief story which illustrates this point. It was a great triumph for Canadians during World War II and was not reported very well at all.

In 1940 in North Africa the British were facing the Italians in great numbers. Britain had very few troops on the ground in Egypt and the Italians had an enormous army in the western desert. Britain had its back to the wall with the fall of France and

was very fearful with Italian entry into the war about what would happen in North Africa.

The Canadian army intelligence had the advantage of being able to monitor the telegraph lines that left Canada from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and went to Britain, the Canary Islands, Spain and ultimately to Italy. Telegraph traffic coming out of the United States had to pass momentarily through Canada before it went on to Italy.

Even before Mussolini declared war on the allies after the fall of France, or as France fell, Canadians were monitoring the traffic of Italian Americans communicating with relatives in Italy. Mussolini, in an attempt to raise money to buy weapons, had asked Italian Americans to remit U.S. dollars to Italy so relatives would be paid a bonus in lira in Italy. Italian Americans were constantly sending remittances to their relatives in Italy. This was just before the Italians declared war and just after.

Canadians were monitoring all this. As the banks in the United States required that the remittances give names and addresses, it was found that many remittances were being sent to Italians in the military. They were being sent to the actual bases where the Italian military personnel were located. This enabled Canadians to construct the entire Italian order of battle before Mussolini declared war. Wavell, the famous British general who defeated the Italians in the western desert, knew exactly where every division or every unit in the Italian army was in the desert.

We can see how in the intelligence field, communications intelligence, foreign intelligence gathering can be mixed with something that is essentially a domestic phenomenon. In this case it is out of country; it is the Italians but it is a communications phenomenon.

I told the story for the basic reason that we should have a situation in the intelligence world where one arm of secret intelligence gathering, which is CSIS, is responsible and answerable to some review committee which, shall we say, has an oversight role. We cannot have half a loaf; we need the entire loaf. I submit that no matter how competent the Communications Security Establishment inevitably there is some overlap. Both arms of secret intelligence should make this independent review, and for that reason I entirely support the motion.

[Petitions, December 7th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I rise to present a petition calling on Parliament not to amend the human rights code, the Canadian Human Rights Act or the charter of rights and freedoms in any way that would tend to indicate societal approval of same sex relationships or of homosexuality.

[Income Tax Act, December 7th, 1994]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-294, an act to amend the Income Tax Act (public access to information from audits of charities and non-profit organizations).

Madam Speaker, this private member's bill calls on public access to the audits by Revenue Canada of charities and non-profit organizations which presently are not available for public disclosure.

The principle behind this is that non-profit organizations and charities are responsible to the taxpayer because they do not pay taxes. Therefore, there should be full accountability to the public. That is the intention of this bill.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed.)

[Social Security Program, November 21st, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague from Port Moody-Coquitlam for her remarks. I have to say that I think she makes some very good points. The member talked about a national day care program. There are still a lot of questions that have to be answered with respect to day care.

If I may, I will point out to her a little experience I had just recently with respect to that issue which might throw some light on it for her. It concerns a meeting I was at where a for profit lobbyist found her firm in a confrontation. They were hired by a private day care centre in a community to get established in that community. They were up against a publicly funded day care advocacy organization, in other words a special interest group. This special interest group which was supporting national day care and government controlled day care won the issue and the privately funded day care centre was forced to close.

When we approach the issue of a national day care program, I think we all agree that the opportunity must be there however the opportunity is expressed. I think government has to be alert to the fact that we have a lobby group out there now that has for many years been funded by government and that lobby group is very alive and active.

I certainly agree with the member that this is something we should debate. I certainly do not have my mind made up on it. I think we can carry it forward but I hope the debate will be done between ourselves or out in the community rather than without the intervention of special interest groups.

I do not know whether the member would like to comment on that but I would invite her to do so.

[Social Security Program, November 21st, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I wish to congratulate my colleague from Red Deer. I found that his remarks other than the free vote remark were very well thought out.

It is a pleasure to see that everyone in this House has taken this issue of social security reform seriously. It is very important for Canadians to see that.

I have a question for the member, a very serious question coming out of his remarks that I would like him to consider. He mentioned in passing that he thought that the delivery of programs should be downloaded to the provinces rather than the federal government.

I just wish to say that I had trouble with that. I know it is the Reform Party platform point but I have trouble coming from Ontario where I am not entirely satisfied with the way the Ontario government handles education for example.

There is a lot of unevenness in the way various provinces handle various programs. I would like him to consider that. Does he not think that actually it is preferable and more efficient if the federal government keeps as many programs as it can to itself and make them more efficient rather than relying on the provinces to do so?

[Lester B. Pearson Act, November 18th, 1994]

No, I know who wrote Anne of Green Gables , but I do not think Lucy Maud Montgomery day would have the same shall we say caché as Anne of Green Gables. I point out that while in Japan they have Anne of Green Gables on their school programs, nowhere in Canada have I ever heard of a school or university teaching it. Yet this book, published in 1908, has run through more copies and more languages than just about any book of fiction in the world. It is known worldwide.

My colleagues from Prince Edward Island tell me that approximately 700,000 tourists come to the Island every year and about 40,000 of those are Japanese. They come to see the farm where Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables , lived and to see the house that was described in the novels.

I suggest we avoid falling into difficult political traps when we want to recognize a fine Canadian who is recognized worldwide. Perhaps we should look to the young lady of The Lake of Shining Waters . It is appropriate that we as Canadians recognize a person who is recognized in the world's imagination.