Alex Shepherd

[Supply, March 20th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was quite taken by the comments by the member for Winnipeg--Transcona. I think most of us in the House respect his opinions.

The analysis in his dissertation about Canada's commitment or lack of commitment to this war is based on the premise of the difference between a legal and an illegal war. I was kind of captivated by that thought process.

I wonder if the member could explain to me under what terms and conditions he feels that war is legal. By definition, if he believes the war is illegal there must be, in his definition, some thought process that a war is legal.

What kind of process says that a war is legal? At what time is it legal for a nation to invade, strike, maim people or kill people?

[The Budget, February 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I always enjoy answering the questions from the member for Elk Island.

He asked if we could not do it better. The reality is that Canada leads the OECD countries in economic performance. Can we do it better? I suppose we could, but the reality is we are doing pretty darn good relative to most other countries.

We have to look very closely at the budget papers that show things like contingency reserves and so forth. Some $3 billion a year will be applied to the debt. The estimates of revenues and expenditures of the Government of Canada are probably, and have been historically, on the conservative side. We are hopeful there will be more down payments made on the debt as we go forward.

[The Budget, February 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, to answer the initial question, I believe that the CPP liability is included in those figures. I am less sure about the old age pension and some of those things. Maybe we could look at that another day.

I talked about the $30 billion that sort of disappeared from the debt. He said $20 billion; I get $30 billion. Be that as it may, it is a recognition that there are significant assets that the government has.

The problem with this issue is, what is the value of the House of Commons? It would presuppose that somebody would want to buy it for a hotel or something, I suppose, but that is the reality within those statements. Some people say that they are suspect. If we are never going to sell the assets what are they really valued at? That is the move toward accrual accounting.

One thing I did want to touch on is that our seniors have not been mentioned in this document nor indeed in many of our budget documents for years and years. I am concerned about seniors who are trying to live on the combination of the old age pension and the GIS. It is about $12,000 a year. It seems to me that they are the people we are ignoring constantly year after year.

It is time that we sat down, reviewed the GIS, and announced whether we should increase it. People are phoning my office. They are being hit with high energy costs, especially during this cold winter. They are the people quite frankly who cannot afford it. They are not the people who stand outside the House of Commons with placards and phone us on a day to day basis but I think it is time that we started to do something for our senior population.

[The Budget, February 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to be sharing my time with the member for Mississauga South and to support his campaign regarding fetal alcohol syndrome. Certainly all of us have been enriched by his interest in that file, including myself. I appreciate his comments.

This budget is another in a long series of budgets with fiscal responsibility. I was happy to go to my riding the morning after and do a budget breakfast. The business community came out in fairly good droves. I would like to thank the Clarington Board of Trade for its support and also the local accounting firm of Hobb Bakker Bergin Hill. The budget was well received among the business community.

The only way I can measure whether people are happy with our policies is when they phone us, contact us, or tell us we made a mistake. I would say that by a long country mile the people have been telling us that the government is going in the right direction.

I want to touch on a few points in the budget that concern me. There are some positive and some negative things as well.

My first point deals with the whole accountability framework. We talk a lot in the House about accountability in government and I was happy to see that within the budget documents not only is there a commitment for improved accountability in the government itself, but actually there is a mechanism which will make it work.

It is clear in the documents that $1 billion worth of resources are to be allocated on a yearly basis and that $1 billion is being reallocated from older programs to finance new initiatives. In fact, over 15% of the new spending initiatives announced in the budget would be financed by reallocating dollars from other programs.

People ask why we have to do that. What I have discovered in this place is that often governments set up various programs for good reasons, but they often take on a life of their own. We do not spend enough time reviewing them, maybe five or ten years down the road, to question whether in fact these programs are doing what they originally intended. Maybe the problem has gone away, maybe it has been exasperated or maybe there are better ways to solve it today. We do not spend enough time doing that. Governments are good on policy decisions, but they have been pretty bad in some ways about program delivery when it actually hits the people in our riding.

I was happy to see that the government not only has a commitment there but a line in the sand saying we must find at least $1 billion every year to reallocate in this fashion. That is a positive thing for the taxpayers in the country because it will force governments to ensure that the programs that they are executing have efficiency and will require, through the Treasury Board and individual departments, for them to be accountable.

They will have to step up to the plate and explain why it is that their program should continue or whether in fact their program should be either curtailed or eliminated due to this provision in the budget. This is a positive thing that we have put in place and I look forward to seeing how that is going to be executed.

Another issue that was quickly mentioned, glossed over and people quickly forgot about was the whole issue of the move to accrual accounting in the budget. The Minister of Finance made passing reference to it saying he was not sure what it meant but finally has learned to embrace the concept.

Accrual accounting is the concept that we have to take in all of our assets and all of our liabilities into our balance sheet.

For the government, it was quite complicated, especially in the area of defence, where it had to determine the value of a destroyer or the House of Commons on its balance sheet when we never actually thought of putting that in as an asset of the government. Similarly, some of the liabilities that have been outstanding for years have often been almost forgotten, things like government guarantees on loans. Even the liability of pensions for members of Parliament must now be included as a liability of the government.

Every year I give my constituents an analysis of where the debt is going. When preoccupied by the debt, a lot of people say we do not have to worry about it any more because it is based on a percentage of our GDP, it is something like 50% and therefore we should not be worrying about it. However, that is erroneous because the debt to GDP ratio is just that, it is a ratio and it presupposes that our gross domestic product continues to rise. Heaven forbid that we ever get into a recession or a contraction of the economy where in fact the GDP goes the other way because the debt to GDP ratio will start to rise again.

That is important because it gives governments flexibility in how they spend money and if we have a high debt commitment and high debt servicing cost, then we have a lack of flexibility in government financing. The budget from 2002-03 showed an $8 billion reduction in the overall debt. At the same time it showed about a $2 billion reduction in debt service payments.

Let us think about how much flexibility we would have if we could reduce our debt service payments, that is, money that we pay out in interest on government debt of something like $2 billion a year. This would allow us to make all kinds of decisions for the betterment of the people of Canada. I would encourage the government, and I know the numbers going out show contingency reserves and so forth, to flatline the debt even though some members across the way are doing comparisons with the Americans. They talk about the deviation in income tax rates and so forth even though our rates are now equal to or better than theirs.

Even so, the United States has one big problem and that is it has not funded a lot of its social infrastructure. Its social insurance system is unsustainable based on the current levels of premiums and government financing. Without increased government financing it will have difficulty in the future years servicing those kinds of social commitments. In Canada we have the old age pension and other pension systems. The Canadian system is a lot more sustainable than the American one. Even though it would appear on the surface that Canada's taxation system is marginally higher than that of the United States, the United States is simply having short term gain, but in fact will probably have some long term pain when these factors start kicking in.

I mentioned the debt of the accrual accounting system because I was amazed when I was preparing this summary for my constituents that all of a sudden $30 billion seemed to disappear from the debt. I had to go back and try to figure out why that was. It was a sleight of the pen that said that the increase in assets, the destroyers, the House of Commons, et cetera, minus the addition of liabilities, in fact, saw $30 billion more showing on the financial statements of the Government of Canada.

It is probably more a result that people did not understand it, but I am surprised that more people from a political point of view did not run around saying that there has been a $30 billion payment on our debt. In fact, it received little attention whatsoever. It does seem to indicate one important factor and that is that the previous system did not acknowledge all of the assets that we really had. It is nice to know that we are not nearly in debt as we thought we were. However, the problem with the accrual system is that managers in the future may have a tendency to look at the fact that asset acquisitions are no longer being expended. They are being amortized over the life of the asset.

This is a concern as we go out that managers will have a tendency to buy more fixed assets than they would do normally in their budget because it does not show as an immediate expense. We are hoping that does not happen.

Finally I want to touch on a major issue. I want to talk about seniors and the importance of increasing the payments to the old age pension.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, certainly I believe in democracy. The recognition is that this is a majority government, that it has the support of the people generally, and the executive of that governing body is entitled to make decisions which affect the country.

I am sure within their wisdom the time will come when they will possibly want to go back and consult with people through the House as well. But there are many different ways of consulting the people; there is the House but there are also other venues within the general population.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, once again we could propose votes on just about anything in the House but the reality is we are not even close to making a decision about sending troops to anywhere for that matter. It is incumbent on to us to debate the whole issue of whether we should be going down that road at all. I dispute the premise of the member's question because I believe it is premature to even be talking about a vote that would send Canadian troops anywhere.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to defer to my House leader. That may be thought of as a cop-out but the reality is that this debate is much more important than debating the semantics and workings of the House.

It is important to get our message across to the people of Canada and more important, to get their message into this place. We have been limited on the amount of time we have had to debate the whole issue. I have been frustrated and I am sure many other members have been also, to bring the issues of Canadians to the House. I am more concerned about that than I am about having a simple vote. We have to have more opportunity to vet this issue for the people of Canada.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am surprised that the opposition would want to interrupt a debate which is profound to the parliamentary governance issue. For members of Parliament to stand in this place and vote on something as profound as whether we go to war, surely we would want to have a debate on the merits of that. I am surprised at the member. He simply wants to say yes or no today to that issue. This seems to be part of the Alliance's basic foreign policy, that we should go to war based on a simple yes or no. It is not as simple as that. We are talking about something very profound.

What is the long term agenda? What happens when we make that decision, when we vote in the House and vote for confrontation? What is the long term result of that situation in the Middle East? What happens when a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens are killed? If we have this great build up of military might in the Middle East, there must be some other rogue regimes there with which we are not very happy. Where does it all end? It is not as simple as saying shall we vote on having a war today. We have to think of the long term consequences of that.

Quite frankly, the whole motion may well be hypothetical because we are not even at the stage of discussing whether Canada should enter this conflict. Maybe the House leader will put some of those arguments before us. I question whether the motion itself, because of its hypothetical nature, should be voted on in the House.

We are debating the motion before us today. I am happy to go back to looking at the consequences of the policy the United States has entered into, this so-called national doctrine. I hear people in this town in particular say that anybody who objects to that must be anti-American. I do not believe that for one moment. I think we are pro-American.

When the word conflict is added to the fear and the combination of religion and poverty in that part of the world, we enter into a significant period of aggression. The kinds of detriment that could be caused in this country and others are not from nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. Rather, anyone who has a paint factory could create chemicals which could annihilate huge sections of populations wherever they may be.

I and my constituents are very concerned. I am before the House representing my constituents. I want to convey to the House the concerns of the people of Durham. Not only do they not want to go war, nobody ever wants to go war, but they also do not want to be committed to a long term aggression where their personal safety is also on the line and where the safety of our men and women in our armed forces is in jeopardy over an issue such as this.

The United States is not talking about disarming India. India and Pakistan are probably more of a threat to world peace than Iraq. We know North Korea has nuclear weapons and we are not talking about a war on North Korea. We are talking about war on Iraq. The issue with Iraq is these people are more of a threat to their own people than they are to the rest of the world, and that was my point.

We have to give the United Nations greater time to work and our responses to that have to be proportional to the threat of war.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to enter into this extremely important debate. I first want to thank the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast for bringing his motion forward today, which has helped further the debate in the House of Commons. I know we have had some initial debate, but it is such an important issue that I believe it needs to be more fully discussed.

With respect to the whole issue of resolution 1441 by the United Nations, clearly some of the current evidence tends to strongly support the position that there is a question of non-compliance by the state of Iraq to the intentions of the United Nations. I think the problem for a lot of international communities is the non-compliance somehow then translates into moving us directly into a confrontation involving war. I question whether that is a natural evolutionary process. I believe all sane-minded people would want to prevent conflict and war. I believe it is really more of an opportunity for Iraq to reconsider its position and for the international community to find ways to avoid this.

I know I speak for many of my constituents when I say that when we entered the 21st century we believed the cold war was over. We believed that we were entering into an unprecedented time of peace. Now we find ourselves a short three years later on the precipice of war. I know I speak for my constituents who have great consternation with that approach and believe there is a better way.

People have questioned time and time again whether we are really friends of the United States. I think we are its best friend, but I do not believe that friends always have to agree. Friends can have disagreements, which can be very constructive.

I am very concerned about the regime in the United States called the national doctrine, which was entered into by the president and accepted by Congress. It more or less lays out the U.S. foreign policy. It is interesting and I will read a few lines from the policy. It states:

In keeping with our heritage and principles... We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors humanfreedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewardsand challenges of political and economic liberty.

It goes on to state:

--the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedomacross the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, freemarkets, and free trade to every corner of the world.

It may sound like brave new worlds in the 21st century.

I harken back to another document that states:

America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement.

We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history.

This sounds very similar to the national doctrine. It is a statement by John O'Sullivan, back in 1839, who wrote of the whole concept of the manifest destiny of the United States. This has led to so many wars, both within the United States and within the western hemisphere, even in conflict with this country because the United States at one time had a presidential election based on the theory of fifty-four forty or fight. In other words, it was a conquest of Canada's sovereign area as well.

Because of that we are very concerned that the United States is prepared to enter into this in a unilateral framework. To support that, I go back to the national doctrine which says:

--identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders...we will not hesitate to act alone,if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defence by acting preemptively...

This doctrine entitles the United States to attack any country in the world that it preconceives to be a threat to it. While I suppose some of us might argue that a country has a right to self-defence, it is a difficult and unusual concept of international diplomacy that we would sanction a doctrine which gives a country the right to attack any country. We are talking about country of Iraq. I think that most people--

[Petitions, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition concerns possible amendments to sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code. The petitioners are calling upon Parliament to protect the rights of Canadians to be free to share their religious beliefs without fear of prosecution.