Ian McClelland

[Political Party Fundraising, December 6th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in respecting the tradition of the House, I will make my comments very brief to give the member an opportunity to wind up, if that is the pleasure of the House.

I want to say a few words to this particular bill. As the House knows and as has been made very clear by the member for Kingston and the Islands, I have a bill before committee that speaks also to election financing. I commend my hon. colleague opposite for bringing this question to the House.

I am not speaking in favour of this bill. It does not provide the respect to emerging parties that it should. That has already been covered by others. It does not pay respect to new ideas and to parties that may never in fact elect anybody but do bring new and fresh ideas into the body politic of Canada. That is extremely important to our political discourse as a nation. And this bill does not respect performance. In my view, it is absolutely essential that performance be respected and rewarded. No matter what their historical significance, parties that do not resonate with the people should not be rewarded.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands went to great lengths to point out the contradiction in my presenting a bill to the House that would affect election financing that does not speak directly to the party policy. I want to make it clear, so that everyone understands, that my bill is incremental. The notion and the reason behind my bill is that it will save the taxpayers of Canada $1 million or so. In my books, saving $1 million or so is particularly important. In particular, the measures in that bill would ensure that political parties are rewarded only if they have resonance within the body politic of Canada, that political parties are not rewarded merely because they have the resources to spend money.

I have listened to the debate this afternoon. I think this debate is particularly important. When I started to investigate election financing I noticed that if you measured the number of books they would be approximately eight or nine inches high. These are all books about election financing in Canada.

The point the hon. member from the Bloc raised about making sure the political process in Canada is kept as free as is humanly possible from any taint of scandal or influence peddling is one of the reasons I have come around to the view that there is much we can learn from the way the province of Quebec handles financial donations in that province.

I thank the House very much for the opportunity to speak. Once again I congratulate my hon. colleague opposite for bringing this very important debate to the House.

I concur with my hon. friend from North Vancouver who lamented that this was not a votable bill so we could see where all the dogs lie on this particular issue.

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I am sure that most civilized people would like to see an end put to all of the rivalries and tribal wars, and the genocide that accompanies them, not just in the Balkans, but everywhere in the world. Particularly fearsome is Africa.

Because there is a time limit and this NATO effort would go absolutely nowhere without the Americans, what will happen if the battle moves into Macedonia and the Americans are out of there in a year?

[The Late Robertson Davies, December 4th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to pay tribute to the late Robertson Davies, one of Canada's most treasured writers.

Bridging Canada's two solitudes, a headline in the Quebec media reads:

"With Robertson Davies, Canadian literature has lost one of its titans".

This sentiment accurately describes Robertson Davies' status: a monument to Canadian literature.

Robertson Davies was to me a person of another world. I knew him by reputation only. When I first heard him on the radio I was impressed that he appeared as interested in hearing the opinions of others as in expressing his own. Acknowledged the world over as a great man of letters, Robertson Davies was also a man of the people.

Canada and the world are much the better for his presence and for being the beneficiaries of a great literary legacy on his passing.

[Constitutional Amendments Act, November 30th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I remind the Chair that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Vegreville.

As I speak to this unity debate I am very mindful that I represent all of the people of Edmonton Southwest. I represent everyone whether they voted for me or for someone else. It is absolutely essential that members of Parliament remember the fact that we represent every one of our constituents and that all 295 of us in combination represent all of the people of Canada, whether they voted for us or not.

When I go home tonight I will be seeing my brand new granddaughter who I have not seen a lot of because I have spent so much time in the nation's capital in Parliament. Everything I do is directed toward my children and grandchildren. It seems reasonable that we in the House should have our eyes firmly fixed on the future.

The tragedy is that so many people of Canada are represented by members in the House who have their eyes firmly fixed on the past. While we all recognize that the foundation of the future is the past, we cannot live in the past. There is nowhere to go. The past is dead. There is nothing in it for us. If we as a nation continue to live in the past, we are never going to spring into the future which belongs to our children.

Our generation and preceding generations have managed to somehow magically saddle our children and grandchildren with a debt which has been built up over a number of years. In addition to that we have saddled them with a relationship of our constituent parts which has been fractious and has not worked smoothly for all of my adult life.

The rest of the country has tried at various times to coerce or to buy the affection of Quebec through constitutional changes, quasi-constitutional changes, outright money or outright advantage. For instance, to satisfy the people of Quebec the now infamous CF-18 maintenance contract went to Quebec. None of this has worked. Constitutionally, we are still at exactly the same place today as we were 30 years ago.

All the primary protagonists of this debate are from Quebec. Every damned one of them is from Quebec. The Prime Minister is from Quebec. His primary advisers are from Quebec. The leader of the Bloc Quebecois is from Quebec. Obviously all of the Bloc is from Quebec. We have to ask ourselves why the rest of Canadians are being dragged along as helpless spectators as these people go through their never ending Gordian knot they got themselves into. It is almost as if the leader of the Bloc and the Prime Minister both represent the past. They are bound so tightly to the past that they are unable to see the future. They are unable to see how Canada has grown and how Quebec has grown since the silent revolution.

I ask myself, why in the name of God are we trying to satisfy the separatists? Why are we trying to satisfy people who would break up the country at the expense of federalists? What is it in the nature of this debate that causes us to be so shortsighted that we would risk the future of the country, that we would risk the west of the country in order to satisfy separatists in Quebec who will never be satisfied?

It is our responsibility to build for the future, not for the past. Our responsibility is to our children and our grandchildren and to their children, not to our grandparents and our parents. It is to the future, not to the past.

On the record I would like to quote from a book entitled Rights of Man , written by Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine was one of the architects of the American constitution. The American constitution has lived for all these hundreds of years because it is flexible, because it is living, because it has room for everybody in its constituent parts to grow. He states in his book:

It is the living and not the dead that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.

Members would recognize the corollary of that in which he states: "The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies". What he is saying is that each generation has the right and the responsibility to govern for its time and should no more bind the hands of future generations than our generation should be bound by the past. This then brings into play the whole notion of whether or not a veto is reasonable in a democratic federal state for anyone under any circumstances based on the notion of tying the hands of future generations.

Everybody had a reason to vote against the Charlottetown accord. This was mine: I did not think it was responsible for our generation to tie future generations into a Constitution that would be so inflexible it could not be changed. Is that any legacy to leave to future generations? Do we have that little trust in our children and our grandchildren that we would bind them to a Constitution in cement?

This then brings us to part two of the Prime Minister's new amending formula. If we saw our country from outer space or if we came to this country and we saw this as a blank canvas, how would we and what would we do to make it work? Surely in this country which extends over 5,000 miles from one coast to the other with just 30 million people in it, there is elbow room for everyone. Surely we can figure out a way that we can live together in peace and harmony and with mutual respect. Surely this is not an impossible situation.

The suggestions we have brought to the table concerning the amending formula or veto keep in mind that all of us, every single human being in this country and in this world, are equal by virtue of the fact that we are human beings. When we gather under an apple tree or when we gather in a room and we determine what rights we are going to have, we do not do so based on whether we are male or female, whether we speak French or English, or whether we are black or white. We gather together and through commonality we have governance because we are human beings, because it is in our best interests and our common interests.

How then would we go about doing this? How would we make our country work if we had a clean slate and we could start from scratch? It seems to me that if one group in our country feels threatened and feels that the only way the group can protect its future is through a constitutional veto that gives it the authority to ensure that nothing in the future without its consent can have impact on the group's language, culture, civil code or the way in which it has evolved as a society, what is wrong with that? It is a recognition of the obvious: Quebec is a distinct society. Of course Quebec is a distinct society.

How do we go about recognizing that without at the same time suggesting to other Canadians that they are less distinct or somehow not favoured? We do this with an amending formula based on the regions of the country, but most important the ratification is done by the people through referenda, not by the Parliament and not by the legislatures.

The reason for this is very important. Most Parliaments and most legislatures can have a decided majority yet that majority may only have received a minority of the votes cast. This Parliament is one such example. The Liberals have a huge majority of seats with a minority, 43 per cent, of the votes cast.

The only way we can possibly ensure that changes to the Constitution will bear the imprimatur of the people is to ensure that these changes are ratified through a referendum. That is one exceptionally important reason.

The regions are important because they are and have always been homogeneous groups. The region for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba has always been referred to as the prairies. Everybody knows that. No one has ever described British Columbia as the prairies. British Columbia is growing at a great rate and in one generation will equal the population of Quebec. Alberta is growing more quickly but is balanced by Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It works, and if it works why should we be tied to an amending formula which came from people who woke up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep and said: "Let us just drop the Victoria amending formula on top of this today". That is not the kind of flexibility we require.

The final comments I would like to put on the table today have to do with how we got into this mess in the first place. How did we go about giving legitimacy to this notion of two nations? How did that come to pass?

We have been blessed with some very fine Canadians over the years. One such very fine Canadian was Eugene Forsey. Eugene Forsey was a constitutional scholar. He was recognized by friends and foes alike as one of the paramount constitutional scholars in our country. All his living life he supported the New Democratic Party. In 1961 he left the party because of the notion of two founding nations which it never was; it was one nation from the very beginning.

[Bank Act, November 28th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I will be voting in support of the motion.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

[Bank Act, November 28th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the members for Macleod, North Vancouver and Prince George-Bulkley Valley are no longer in the House.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, November 20th, 1995]

The point the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood raised is so important to what we are to do as a country to get people back to work, for first time employment for all our young people so that they have something to look forward to, so that they feel part of the community, so that they have something rather than standing on the sidelines looking in.

The debate the hon. member opposite has suggested is a good one. It is timely. How do we go about doing that? How do we go about getting someone to risk their capital, to get their idea in gear, to get that sense of drive and ambition so they will start a little

widget manufacturing business or a service and will hire one or two people?

That is the way we will get the country working. That is the way we will get unemployment insurance premiums down. That is the way we will take off the dependence on government and make the country work. We have to re-establish that sense of purpose and entrepreneurialism and zeal on a personal basis. country.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, November 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I do not pretend to know enough about the derivatives market or international finance to be able to respond thoughtfully to the question.

I have a general sense of unease and malaise about the lifeblood of our economy. I do not know it well enough to speak to it so I will not. However I know what makes business work, particularly small business, entrepreneurial business, because that is my background. What makes people start a business, what makes people risk a business, what makes people get up in the morning and provide employment, is a chance to make some money, a chance to be one's own boss.

I was out with one of my sons on the weekend. I said: "Always do the best job you can when you are working. You owe that to your employer. But you will never get rich working for somebody else. If you want to get rich you have to work for yourself". Not everybody will do that, but one will never get rich working for somebody else or being a member of Parliament, for that matter.

What makes people get up in the morning, risk everything they have in life and start a new business is the expectation that they will make some money at it. The problem is that it is getting more and more difficult to make money at business or even to do it. Once one has established a business and sells it what happens? How much of the money does one get to keep after paying all the taxes? It is relatively little.

We can look at the difference between passive investment, for instance investing in bank stock or investing finances with no risk, and investing in an entrepreneur with a lot of risk. What do most people do? In my case I could make a decision to invest in stocks, bonds or mutual funds at virtually no risk or I could make a decision to invest in people, which is high risk. I can invest in the people. Because of my tax situation I get virtually no return on it. I can invest in stocks and bonds and get essentially the same return but I have no risk.

Investing in people is by far the best way to go. It is what we need to do for our country. It is what I am going to do as well. I have a situation right here in Ottawa. A person who works with me in my office is from Edmonton. She is unilingual. She has moved to Hull. She lives and is working in Chelsea. She has taken over as a unilingual anglophone a little cafe, the Cafe Meech, in Hull near the Gatineau Park.

She has to raise the capital independently because it is not a very bankable deal. She has the fire in her belly that she is definitely going to make it work.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, November 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member opposite for the question. I assure everyone here that it was not a set up question. I appreciate the question because it strikes at the heart of what is the difference between members on this side and members opposite. We virtually share all the same values but we do not share how we go about achieving them.

From discussions with members opposite I know the vast majority of representatives in the House share common values. How do we go about providing the kind of society the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood is talking about? How do we get young people working? Why is it that kids cannot play hockey? Why cannot their parents cannot afford it even if both parents are working? Why is it so expensive? How do we go about ensuring that everyone can participate in our wonderful nation?

The root cause of the problem can be found in The Canadian Global Almanac for 1996. It shows the per capita accumulated federal debt. In 1975 it was $849 and the interest per capita was $139. Today, 20 years later, the debt per capita is $17,381 and the interest per capita is $1,299. If we multiply that by four members of the family, it does not take very long to realize that we do not have any money.

We could then consider provincial debts and at our credit card debts as families. It costs 15 per cent, 16 per cent or 17 per cent to service credit card debt. We have the situation where most of us as a country, as provinces and as individuals are using today's income to pay for what we have already consumed in the past. Therefore instead of the money being used to purchase goods and services it is being used to service debts.

It makes us wonder when we read the paper today and see that all five of our national banks have record profits. They have $5 billion worth of profit. How do they get that money? They get it from the interest on the debt. The debt goes up and the interest goes up. The amount of interest goes up in real terms even if the rates do not increase. The banks get richer. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

People who are able to make financial investments get more money through investing in passive capital investments where there is no risk than people who risk everything they have to start a new business. They put every nickel they have including their homes and everything else into a business to get it going. And what happens? They pay tax after tax after tax.

I sat next to a person travelling from Vancouver to Ottawa yesterday in an aeroplane. He is in the garment business. He is also in the sports and recreation business. He has a fitness business. He is getting out of the fitness business. He said the problem was that it cost $33 a month for people to come to work out. People do not even have $33 a month that they can spend. It has to be dragged out of them. People just do not have any money any more.

Why do we not have the ability to create employment, especially entrance employment for young people, generation X? If they are not gainfully employed they will waste their time, get involved in crime and all other social ills. It is that people do not have enough

money to invest in anything other than necessities. Therefore businesses cannot sell, manufacturers cannot manufacture and shippers cannot ship.

Until we deal with the root cause of the problem, which is that we are all broke because we are paying interest on money we have already spent for goods and services, we will not get ourselves out of this mess. We cannot borrow our way out of this mess. If spending money we do not have worked, everybody would have five jobs.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, November 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to put before the people of Canada what I consider to be one of the most disconcerting aspects of the financial situation our country finds itself in today.

Make no mistake that what is happening in Canada today is a result of circumstance. It has far more to do with circumstance than it has to do with ideology. We are talking about how to go about getting the country out of the financial mess it is in. As everyone knows, we are in a financial mess federally and provincially.

As was so clearly illustrated in the Globe and Mail on Saturday in an excellent article on individual and family debt, Canadians by and large are in a financial mess personally. The Globe and Mail article stated that the average family consumer debt in Canada equals 88 per cent of disposable income. This is up from approximately 60 per cent 10 years ago.

The net result is that our federal debt is up, our provincial debt is up, the debt in most municipalities is up and individual credit card debt is up. We find ourselves paying more and more for less and less. All we have to do is add zeros to see that the financial situations of the country and the provinces really are no different from the financial mess most citizens are in.

I can speak with some assurance in saying that most Canadians and certainly those Canadians with whom I am familiar find themselves in an increasingly difficult financial situation. Our incomes have remained fairly stagnant but the cost of living has continued to escalate, even though it is escalating more slowly. We find ourselves being pinched and businesses are being pinched for profit.

What do we do? How do we go about extricating ourselves from this horrid mess? One way the federal government is doing it is definitely a step in the right direction. It is amalgamating the various cash transfers from the federal government to the provinces which are paid in support of people. The transfers used to be separate under education, health, welfare, et cetera and were sent to the provinces with strings attached. These moneys which were transferred to the provinces had to go to individuals specifically and we could track where the money was going.

That was changed in the last budget. Under the Canada health and social transfer act, this money was pooled and is being

transferred to the provinces with strings attached. The strings are rather tenuous and not direct. It is pretty difficult for the federal government to tell the provinces: "We gave you the money. These are the national standards to which you must adhere in order to get the money". I do not think the federal government has any right, responsibility or place to send this money to the provinces with strings attached. Who does it think it is kidding? It is our money anyway and it is just being recycled by the federal government.

At any rate, the Liberal government opposite finds itself in the situation where it will be transferring to the provincial governments and then to the people, $7 billion less this year than it did last year. If we think that is tough, wait until the next budget. We still have at least $20 billion to go in the reduction of transfers before we get to a neutral position and we stop going further into the hole. This is the first scratch, the first attempt at fiscal responsibility in the country.

Some provinces in Canada, most notably Quebec, have yet to cross that rubicon. Quebec is still going along blissfully without considering its provincial debt which is $5.7 billion in deficit this year. Just wait until Quebec begins to address that problem.

We recognize the necessity of addressing the debt problem responsibly on federal, provincial and personal levels. How do we go about making sure that the most vulnerable people in our society are protected? That is what I would like to speak to. There has been built in this foundation the necessity for objectively and realistically looking at what we can do to ensure that those who are the weakest and the most vulnerable are protected and looked after in the true Canadian spirit. This is one of the values which is pan-Canadian, a value we all share regardless of our political persuasion.

We share the value that the weakest and most vulnerable in our society should be and will be protected. We are also very much of the understanding that the most privileged in our society are going to have to pay a premium to ensure that those who are the weakest are protected. That is the way it works and that is how we get social order. The only way we are going to have a society that works is if we are prepared to share. I do not think anybody seriously questions that.

What is being seriously questioned is whether or not people have a right to say: "We have always done it this way and therefore, we are always going to continue to get it this way". We are going to have to change things dramatically in order to make sure we are able to live within our means nationally. Recognizing and understanding this and accepting the fact that we are going to accept change, that we are going to have to work with it, how do we go about making sure that those who are least capable of looking to this change and the most vulnerable are protected?

I have looked at this very carefully over the last few months as a member of the Standing Committee on Human Rights and the Status of Disabled Persons. The government has seriously fallen down in its fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the most vulnerable people are at least to a modicum consulted before change happens and that they feel some sense of confidence that when this necessary change takes place they will be protected.

To my knowledge, the government has not convened one single solitary meeting with the provincial governments responsible for delivering the programs to those persons with disabilities; people in wheelchairs, people confined to their beds, people who cannot get around, people with learning disabilities, people with mental or physical disabilities, motion disabilities. These people who are the most vulnerable have not been consulted through the provinces which are responsible for delivering the care and the services.

The national Parliament has said that in the total basket under the Canada health and social transfer $7 billion less is being transferred to the provinces than was transferred last year. That money has to go to education, welfare, a whole myriad of purposes. One of the purposes is persons with disabilities.

People with disabilities already feel vulnerable. Imagine how people with disabilities feel when they see that funding is going to be reduced by such a substantial amount. They are the most vulnerable of the people in the categories to which the funding is going to be reduced.

The federal government has not done a thing. There has not been one meeting with the provinces to say that it recognizes the relationship between the federal government, which is responsible for funding, and the provincial governments, which also fund, but in addition to delivering the programs deliver the bulk of the money necessary to support these programs. How do you suppose vulnerable people feel if the federal government has not convened one meeting with the provinces to say: "We recognize there are changes coming in the way we fund these programs. Things of necessity are going to change, but let us work together with the consumer groups in the disabled community to make sure the people are protected".

Over the last couple of months witness after witness after witness have come to the committee. They said that because of funding cuts there are people in our country today who are mobility impaired, who cannot get out of bed by themselves, and have been lying in bed in their own waste for hours and hours and hours. There is no funding for people to come in and help them change their linen or even get to the bathroom. This is happening in our country.

We as parliamentarians have a fiduciary responsibility. How we treat the least among us is a measure of the worth of society, the greatness of society. We must look to the most vulnerable people in

society and ask how we are treating them and, if we were in that position, how we would want to be treated.

When speaking to people in wheelchairs in the disabled community we realize that any one of us as Canadians could be in a wheelchair tomorrow morning. We need to think about how it would be for us if we were in that position. We must give some extra thought to the absolute necessity of reducing funding to people and transfers to people from all orders of government so that we protect the weakest and the most vulnerable among us.

I appreciate the opportunity to put these comments on the record.