Ian McClelland

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

What did it happen to do? It happened to get the Liberals elected. And you would put a price on integrity.

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I have just a few words I would like to have on the record.

My experience in the House with the Minister of National Revenue would reflect the same as the member who just spoke: a very capable and a very hardworking member. I do not think we should leave on record the thought that there is any aspersion cast on that particular minister.

Having said that, there is aspersion all around. There is a saying that if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck in so far as it quacks, if you find it in your water and you see it in a group of other ducks, the chances are it may well be a duck. That is the underlying principle this motion tends to speak to.

We know full well, and those who have been in politics understand, that it is possible to promise much during an election campaign and deliver little or nothing after the election. The important thing is getting elected. Once you have been elected and if you have power then, as members opposite and the government have so ably shown in the distasteful handling of the GST promise, you can promise one thing and then do quite another and claim all kinds of reasons for doing this.

In the case of the Pearson airport deal, a deal was launched for well over a year. Whether we liked it or not, there were people involved from both political parties, the Liberals and the Tories, who had in good conscience come together to take over the Pearson airport.

This deal was signed by a Conservative Prime Minister. There are those around who feel that signing it during an election campaign, which I submit was very poor timing although the deal had been concluded by Treasury Board officials well before the election was called, did not show good judgment. In any event, it did become a political football during the election campaign.

During the campaign, the Liberals decided they would cancel the deal. This points out one of the weaknesses in the political process in our country. If someone of high enough stature within any political party, including our political party, but in the political world says something and then instead of saying: "Whoops, maybe I should not have said that", or: "Whoops, I was wrong", all the king's horses and all the king's men are rallied to support whatever position the person in power might have presented. Whether that position was right or wrong, good or bad, whether it was wise or just ill-tempered, it always seems that we have to salute the flag. No matter what flag is on the pole when we go by it we salute it. This is the genesis of the whole Pearson airport problem.

During the thrust of the election debate, because of the perception that this was an ill-timed move by the Conservatives to perhaps reward their friends before their government fell, the Liberals during the heat of the campaign said that they would cancel the Pearson airport deal. It was a campaign promise just like: "We will scrap, abolish, get rid of the GST".

Had the Liberals opposite worked with the same dispatch to get rid of the GST, there would be rejoicing in the land. But they did not. What they did do was work with dispatch but without much reason to cancel the Pearson airport deal. Why? Pourquoi? Because it was perceived to be a sweetheart deal that would favour some of the Tories that were part of it. That is the political reality of the situation.

As it turns out, this whole deal starts to unravel. After it was cancelled, and after the people who were negatively impacted were able to prove that they had gone into a deal with the Government of Canada in good faith, the Government of Canada in order to save any semblance of face or any semblance of honesty to ensure that the Government of Canada's word was its bond, had to buy its way out.

Now we have a situation where the taxpayers of Canada have to cough up something like half a billion dollars or $800 million because someone, probably the Prime Minister and those on the Liberal side, made an ill-timed, ill-tempered campaign promise. He should have said: "We will review it carefully and if it turns out that it is wrong, we will cancel it". He did not. He said: "We are going to cancel it". Eight hundred million dollars later we have no change in the airport, we have no new airport. It is the busiest airport in the country and nothing is happening.

This motion and the situation represented by the Pearson airport deal is perhaps a lesson to all of us in politics. Our fiduciary responsibility is not to ourselves, it is not to the parties that we represent, it is to the people whom we represent. It is to the individual citizens of Canada whether they voted for us or not.

We are charged with the responsibility of using our best efforts to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time. We need to put politics behind us and put principle ahead of us. That is what this issue is all about: politics before principle. In my opinion, we should be making sure that the foundation of everything we do is based on principle and not politics.

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, a point of order. I listened intently to the speech previous to the one of the hon. member. I did not detect the slightest reference to the present minister of revenue.

[Canada Elections Act, March 22nd, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-243, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act (reimbursement of election expenses).

Mr. Speaker, in accordance with the special order of March 4, 1996 relating to the reintroduction of private members' bills, it is my pleasure to reintroduce this bill which is in the same form as Bill C-319 at the time of prorogation of the first session of the 35th Parliament. It will be coming back after report stage.

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

[Supply, March 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

I am reminded that it is nice to have a soft heart or a soft head but you had better not have a soft heart and a soft head at the same time. It is probably wise to have a soft heart and a hard head.

The reality of the situation in which we find ourselves in life is that if you cannot first look after yourself, how can you possibly look after your neighbour? That does not mean we do not have to look after our neighbours or that we do not have compassion. It means that we have to make a basic, philosophical decision. Are we to be personally responsible for the good and bad in our lives or are we to say that society is primarily responsible for what happens to us?

How can we be interdependent if we are are not first independent? I guess that is a basic contradiction between the whole notion of common law and civil law. Do we put individual rights ahead of collective rights?

This conversation typifies the debate that rages in our country from east to west and north to south.

[Supply, March 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I was asked to speak in this debate today and it is right up my alley. I have spent most of my life in entrepreneurial business ventures and I will get into that.

I would like to put on the record and bring to the attention of the House that in my mind the response to the last question typifies the problem this country has and why it is in the mess financially and emotionally as far as unity is concerned. The reason is that for all of my adult life politicians have been motivated by politics and not principle. There is a difference.

If a government is given a mandate by the electorate to achieve a particular end, then principle and character come into play. If that government is swayed from its pole, if it is swayed from north, if it is swayed from what it was elected and given a mandate to do, then it is playing politics. It is the playing of politics and the pandering to the flavour of the day which has got our country into the mess it is in.

If we are ever going to get our nation back on track, we are going to do so because we put politics in its rightful place which is somewhere distantly behind principle and behind character. It is a sign of character that a political party would have the fortitude to brave the weather, the storm that is taking place in Ontario right now, to do the right things for the right reasons. Having weathered that storm it will find itself in exactly the same place as the Government of Alberta. It did exactly the same thing and retains a 67 per cent popularity rating, even higher than the popularity rating of the Liberals opposite who have achieved that for no discernible reason.

It is interesting to note that the government members opposite are pursuing a fiscal regime which has Liberals of the past 30 years spinning in their graves. They cannot recognize the Liberal Party today because it bears no relationship to the Liberal Party of the past. It is an interesting observation that members opposite would make when they show a lack of fortitude, a lack of strength and a lack of principle in not carrying forward the reforms that absolutely must be achieved if we are going to pass along the country to our grandchildren in the shape we found it.

Members of the Liberal Party opposite should get down on their knees every night and say: "Thank you, God, for having Reform Party members facing us who give us the fortitude and the courage to do what we know must be done. Without them we would not have gotten anywhere. At least we are now taking the first few tentative steps on the road to recovery of our country. You should know that we are magnanimous in accepting your good graces".

As Lincoln said, if you do not care who gets the credit, there is no end to what you can accomplish, although at times it is very trying as we stand here and see the Liberals getting credit for the good works we have brought to our country. However we are happy to do so in the name of our grandchildren.

Having said that, let me get to today's Bloc motion. Usually the Bloc supply day motions are pretty well thought out. I have not looked at any Bloc motions thus far, prior to this one, and wondered what it was trying to get at. Usually it has been direct.

The Bloc motion speaks to the recent budget and it speaks to something in our budget which I thought really made a whole lot of sense. For the benefit of those members who have not been here for all of the debate and for those viewers at home who are just tuning in, the Bloc supply motion moved by the member for Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot states:

That this House deplores the fact that the technical committee set up by the Minister of Finance to analyse business taxation is comprised of members who are both judge and judged with regard to business tax reform; and that, this being so, the Minister of Finance should set up a joint committee of experts and parliamentarians to examine business taxation in an impartial manner according to an open and transparent process.

I looked at that and wondered what it implied. It is implicit that the government should not put together a group of experts strictly because of the group's knowledge of the corporate income tax world, that parliamentarians should be involved in it. There is also the implication that somehow, at least in my interpretation of the motion, corporate Canada gets up in the morning and asks how it can screw the country, how it can rip off the country, what it can do wrong. Corporate Canada is somehow the bad guy.

Corporate Canada is us. We are all corporate Canada whether we are owners, shareholders, or whether we work for a business enterprise in Canada. It is us. Corporate Canada makes the world go around as far as business and employment are concerned. It is not the government but corporate Canada.

It seems to me the budget makes eminent sense. I will quote from the budget document: "Finally an effective business tax system should not only raise revenue, it should be designed to help create jobs. We believe it is time for a comprehensive look at this issue. In order to identify any obstacles to job creation currently contained in its tax act and to suggest reform, we are announcing today" the implementation of a group to look at it. That group would obviously include people from corporate Canada who are experts in tax law.

The question then is: Will Parliament have a chance to debate it, to get involved in it, or is it strictly a one way deal? There is cause to be cautious. Very often we find that legislation comes to the House as a fait accompli, or once the government has a report and there is political baggage associated with it, the government is loath to change it.

It is important that this information be vetted through Parliament while it is still in a very malleable condition. There is no reason to believe that would not be the case. Any potential legislation would go to the various committees of the House of Commons and would be thoroughly vetted.

The part of the Bloc motion that speaks to input of parliamentarians and through them citizens in general to changes in the corporate tax act is pretty bogus. Perhaps the most important issue in the Bloc's motion is the presumption that somehow corporate Canada is a bad guy. If I were a representative of Quebec, I might be a little further down that road than I am since I come from Alberta which is known as the bastion of free enterprise in Canada.

If we were to dispassionately examine the attitude of fear, an attitude that is represented in the Bloc motion toward corporate Canada, and look at what has happened to Quebec in the last 20 years or so, we would find that an attitude which puts down or somehow looks at corporate Canada as being the bad guy results in a very negative atmosphere for business and business investment in the jurisdiction. I would support that claim by quoting some statistics.

This is where I believe the Bloc is doing a great disservice to the people it wishes to serve. I do not suggest for a moment that the Bloc in its heart of hearts is not trying to do the right thing for the people of Quebec. However, inadvertently it is creating a disaster for the people of Quebec and the people of Canada by suggesting that somehow corporate Canada is a villain and should be treated that way.

At the beginning of the last referendum in 1980 the business vacancy rate in Montreal was 3.3 per cent. Today it is a 19.7 per cent. I believe this is a direct result of the way that the separatists treat corporate Canada as a villain.

The whole notion of separation and the climate of uncertainty that it brings to the table has caused a flight of capital and entrepreneurship from Quebec. A motion such as this is very poorly considered. I would accept and welcome any questions that anyone would have on this.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, anywhere strong hand and courage are seen, they should be appreciated and respected. I can imagine the Minister of Finance in his caucus has had some the most egregiously difficult times in changing the direction of the Liberal government of 30 years, making members look carefully in a mirror and asking: "Oh my God, what have we done to our country, to the future of our country? What have we done to our grandchildren?"

For the minister to have the strength to go into his caucus and pull half the caucus along grudgingly, that must be respected. While I do not agree the budget is fast enough or strong enough, the last Liberal budget is a light year ahead of the last 30 years of Liberal budgets.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member opposite most graciously for giving me the opportunity to rise once more to address that article.

Visitors to Washington know the famous Lincoln memorial which is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, who was considered to be the number one reformer of the Americas. It was the Reform Republican Party that Abraham Lincoln started. He, as everyone here knows, is regarded as one of the most pre-eminent politicians in modern history. He said: "If you do not care who gets the credit, there is no end to what may be accomplished".

We have raised the issues of fiscal responsibility in the House of Commons. We have made it politically correct to be fiscally responsible. If not for the Reform Party day in and day out holding the Liberal's feet to the fire, telling them to pay attention and change what the Liberal Party has been doing for the last 30 years, pay attention to fiscal concerns and make sure we do not leave our grandchildren a legacy of debt, if not for Reform Party singularly pushing this issue year after year, time after time, the Liberals would not have had the courage or the fortitude to do what in their hearts they knew they must.

We can thank Abraham Lincoln and thank the Reform Party. Remember these words: "If you do not care who gets the credit, there is no end to what may be accomplished".

[The Budget, March 18th, 1996]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. All I wanted was to have it on the record.

It is really puzzling that the country can be in the state it is in today and yet the people are not out in the streets rioting. They do not seem to be particularly upset. One has to ask what it is about the human nature and the body politic in Canada which does not hold the Liberal government accountable for 30 or 40 years of mismanagement of the economy. It got us into this mess in the first place.

If you are looking for ground zero on what screwed up our economy, we are looking across at it right now, the descendants of this paternalistic liberalized state. Why are the people not enraged, particularly the young people in our society who are in university or high school and are looking at their futures? Why do they not feel some sense of passion at the fact that their generation is going to be paying the bills and will have a substantially diminished lifestyle because my generation and the generation that preceded me lived beyond its means?

What it is about human nature and about being Canadian that allows us to accept this? I know we got into this mess gradually. We all know the story about the incipient nature of gradualism and why, we got up this morning and noticed that we had a debt and we were paying almost 40 per cent of every dollar that goes into the federal coffers to pay interest on money we have already spent. Nobody would have envisioned that 30 years ago. Even the Liberals would say it was irresponsible to do that. It was a gradual thing. We gradually grew into it so that we did not have that shock to our system.

Everyone sees what is going on now in the country and where it is our responsibility to pay. As a society we have elevated certain demands. As individuals citizens we expect certain things from government that we used to expect from ourselves. Once we expected to be personally responsible but over the last 30 years or so we have come to count on the federal government to be responsible for our welfare and how we get along in life.

I give this government and the present finance minister full marks for taking the first tentative steps to do what has to be done. Perhaps that is the difference between this government over others. Could you envision the Liberal government opposite, even taking the tentative steps it has in the right direction, if it was facing the kind of opposition that the Conservative government in 1984 was facing? The body politic in Canada has shifted so much that the Liberal members are now looking across at us and we are telling them what to do but to do it with more vigour and more fire in their belly. We are saying that the sooner and faster we do it the better our children and grandchildren will be.

The Liberal members look across to us and we are telling them to get on with the job. However, the Conservative members in 1984 were looking across at a Liberal opposition that cried bloody murder every time the Conservatives made a tentative step in the right direction. That is why the Conservatives lost the will of the people. They did not have the courage to stay the course. They were elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility. They did not do it and now the Conservative Party is dead across the country.

Today the Liberals are tentatively taking the first steps in the right direction, urged on by the Reform Party. The Bloc really does not have a philosophy. Every once in a while its members will say "do not do this" and "do not do that", but they really do not understand or do not have a sense of passion other than getting Quebec out of Canada.

The Reform Party is making it possible for the Liberals to do what the Conservatives should have done. The Liberals know in their hearts what must be done because they got us started on this terrible path 30 years ago. That is the reality of the situation. However we have to continue to ask, how did we find ourselves in this situation? How did we allow this to happen?

The federal government right now is passing off to the provinces responsibility for social programs, for the infrastructure of our way of life that had previously been paid for by the federal government but is now paid for by provincial governments. It is not sending money along to pay the bills. Therefore it is the provincial governments that have to pay the piper. The federal government is calling the tune, the provincial governments are paying the piper.

We see even now the strangest of all things. Miracles can happen. The ex-leader of the official opposition, Mr. Bouchard, is now the premier of Quebec. All of a sudden there is a revelation. He finds that there is another priority. If Quebec does not get its financial house in order what difference does it make if you are bankrupt and broke in French or English? Perhaps he is starting to get his priorities together.

The problem with this budget is not its general direction. The problem is that it is not honest. Over the years the federal government has set up an expectation of delivery of services across the country. It cannot afford to do it but it does not have the courage to say: "My friends, we have been living beyond our means. It is time to tighten our belts. We must do it without sloughing off the responsibility to other orders of government. We must take the heat ourselves".

That is the great tragedy of this budget and in my opinion the great tragedy of the Liberal government as a whole. It has the ability right now to do what it knows must be done and to do it with vigour instead of backing into it and being embarrassed about it. It has to be done with vigour and it has to be done with dispatch because the longer it drifts, the more pussyfooting around that it

does, more of the problems of our grandparents are going to be put into the hands of our grandchildren.

As parliamentarians our responsibility is not to our grandparents. It is to our grandchildren. Everything that we do should be done with an eye to the future.

I expect I will receive a few questions from those opposite. I see some of the members are busy scribbling some information down and I know that soon they will be rising from their chairs, hopefully to take me to task and to ask me to defend my thesis that they started it and that they do not have the courage to take it as fast and as far as they should to solve the problem. I would use as a foundation for that statement the fact that the Prime Minister in his budget address passed off responsibility to the private sector for job creation.

The Liberal government campaigned on a platform of jobs, jobs, jobs, getting rid of the GST, saying and doing whatever it took to get the maiden out. The Liberals were doing whatever it took to get the votes in order to get here.

The Reform Party philosophically differs from the Liberal Party in a number of areas. One major area is that we understand very clearly it is the role and the correct area of our economy for the private sector to create and deliver jobs. Job growth in the future will come from investment in the private sector by the private sector. It will not come from the public sector.

The government challenges the private sector to help. There are some good things about it, such as the challenge to hire students during the summer. That is a good challenge. The private sector can take it up and hire students. It can create work so that the flowers of our future will have a sense of self-worth. We all must buy into that.

I do not think it is necessarily bad to say: "We have to come together. We have to do it". However, the responsibility of the federal government is to create a climate which will allow the private sector to do what the private sector must do: be efficient and innovative. To do that a climate must be created which will allow the private sector to retain earnings; to retain wealth. It is the reinvestment of private wealth that creates jobs. If entrepreneurs decide that they are going to risk everything in order to create a business they must know that they will be able to retain some of the fruits of their labour.

The job of the federal government is to create the lowest possible tax environment, with a good infrastructure, that will allow the private sector to compete in the global marketplace.

I would like to mention some of the budget considerations with respect to divorce, child support and so on. I have a great deal of experience in making maintenance payments. I believe that the government is moving in the right direction. When people bring children into the world, it is the responsibility of the parents, whether or not they are divorced, to raise, nurture and care for their children. The government is taking the first steps in the right direction.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin my comments on the budget debate I would beg the indulgence of the House. I would like to put on record a clarification and a correction to some comments I made in the throne speech debate in which I referred to events or the notion of a distinct society in Quebec as being inherently racist and tribalist in nature.

On reflection and seeing those comments in print I was most uncomfortable because I felt the linking of the term racist was inappropriate; it was wrong. By any inference I would not want Hansard , the official record, to show in any way that I would suggest separatists are racists and that Quebec society is racist in nature. In my experience it is not.

I reiterate Quebec society is very tribal. There is tribalism and a sense of the necessity to circle around a group. I think tribalism is a very accurate description of what is going on with the separatists in Quebec. Again, I would beg the indulgence of the House to allow me to correct the record.