Ted McWhinney

[Speech From The Throne, September 29th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Scarborough East.

This government has delivered on its key 1993 election promise to restore fiscal responsibility to the nation after the record $42 billion annual deficit we inherited from the predecessor Conservative government.

As the Speech from the Throne has noted, we are now well ahead of our own optimistic 1993 projections to balance the budget by the year 2000. We expect to achieve this budgetary goal no later than the fiscal year 1998-99.

We are putting the debt to GDP ratio on a permanent downward track and we have undertaken to devote one-half of the anticipated annual surplus to a combination of reducing taxes for Canadian citizens and amortizing the vast accumulated national debt left behind by the predecessor Conservative government.

The other half of the anticipated annual surplus will be addressed to the social and economic needs of Canadians. In striving over the period 1993-97 to get rid of those huge annual budgetary deficits that had become standard practice, we insisted on maintaining the integrity of our famed Canadian social security network and our pensions and free national medicare systems. We will continue these policies.

Members will note from the Speech from the Throne that the government has understood, better I think than governments in other countries, that the approaching 21st century will be a knowledge century dominated by those who have mastered the new sciences and technologies and who have comprehended the infomatics revolution.

In our last budgets we invested heavily in education capital from the $167 million for the TRIUMPH advanced physics research project at the University of British Columbia, with its direct spin-off to major industrial export contracts abroad, to the foundation for innovation with $800 million for modernizing advanced research infrastructures in health and medicine, environment, science and engineering, and the $50 million a year for creating networks for centres of excellence.

Canada leads today in the aerospace industry, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology in agriculture and fisheries and environmental information and telecommunications technologies.

Where our last budget offered $137 million in post-secondary education support for 1997 and substantially increased scholarship and tax credits for post-secondary students and their families, the Speech from the Throne commits to a new millennium scholarship endowment fund intended to reward academic excellence and to open access to universities and colleges for the well qualified children from low and moderate income families throughout Canada.

In recognizing the key to national economic prosperity and access to meaningful long term employment for our young people lies in community investment in higher education and in advanced research, the government has learnt the main lesson from the ending of the cold war that dominated world community relations for half a century after World War II.

The old political military base of world public order where effective power was determined by the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles that one had in one's arsenal is completely out of date. Of what value are those remaining ICBMs in their silos and an aging nuclear powered submarine navy if one's economic house is not in order?

The new base of world public order in relations between states is economic-industrial. The use or the threat of the use of force as a solver of international problems has increasingly yielded to peaceful modes of dispute settlement that rely heavily on friendly co-operation and reciprocity and mutual advantage.

In the Speech from the Throne there is a renewed commitment to an activist, independent, internationalist role for Canada in the world community in the tradition of our one time Prime Minister and Nobel peace laureate Lester Pearson whose centenary we celebrate this year. In this spirit we are co-operating with like-minded countries in revitalizing and modernizing and also democratizing the United Nations by seeking to expand the membership of the security council on a more broadly representative and legally egalitarian basis without any extension of those special privileges that were conferred on the five permanent members at the time of the UN's founding in 1945 and which seem increasingly out of date.

In addition to continuing our longstanding historical commitment to the protection of the international environment and to the conservation of the earth's diminishing natural resources, as part of, in the United Nation's own phrase, the common heritage of humankind, we have led in the achievement of a new international treaty signed by 90 countries recently in Oslo banning anti-personnel mines which have so cruelly killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatant men, women and children around the world in the bloody civil wars of our times.

Rather than pursuing some far off larger international consensus that might have included also holdout superpowers at the price however of open-ended exemptions or delays or special geographical regional exceptions, our foreign minister has preferred to move now on behalf of a clear and unequivocal treaty text that really does have some teeth in it.

At the formal signing ceremony in Ottawa this December, we do expect other countries beyond the 90 who have already rallied to the cause to join and to help perhaps to educate by their own positive example the numerically small but still important and also politically disparate groups of holdout states.

We will continue our efforts on two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, to ensure respect and full compliance with existing international law obligations, both multilateral and also special bilateral as to the protection of endangered fish resources and their equitable sharing under law.

We will maintain the position that we have advanced in the international battle against the Helms-Burton law that a state in the application of its own national laws is limited as to any purported extraterritorial reach by the legal principles of international comity and the duty at the same time to respect the legal sovereignty of other states.

We are continuing our efforts to establish an international criminal court which as a court of universal and general jurisdiction would replace limited geographical sectoral bodies like the recent ad hoc jurisdictions as the former Yugoslavia and also Rwanda. It might necessarily extend also to cover United Nations peacekeeping forces and other regional or state forces operating under UN legal authority or under the UN aegis generally.

The end of the 20th century as an era of historical transition has seen a remarkable convergence of two contradictory historical forces: the movement toward supranationalism and political and sometimes economic integration on a regional or at least transnational basis and the revival of local nationalism and ethnocultural particularism sometimes on a pathological basis that finds its outlet in internecine conflict within the one state.

Our renewed commitment in Canada to a strong internationalist foreign policy indicates our own Canadian, more optimistic view of the coming century and of the ability to achieve a genuinely one world outlook in a plural world community through the United Nations and related international institutions of the world community.

[Immigration, September 24th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the new measures announced by the United States are extremely damaging to Canadian and to American business. They are counter to the initiatives taken by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister to dismantle controls at borders and to promote the free circulation of people and of goods. They are probably counter to NAFTA.

Our objective is to secure the removal of those controls from application at the Canada-U.S. border. We are encouraged already in our efforts by the amendments introduced by a member of the United States Senate and a member of the United States Congress to this effect.

[Rick Hansen, April 22nd, 1997]

Mr. Rick Hansen of Vancouver, on the 10th anniversary of his Man in Motion world tour that is being celebrated this week, is an example of courage under extreme physical stress, of the determination in the setting of goals for oneself and of grace in achieving them.

We salute Rick Hansen as a model to our Canadian youth that they can indeed achieve their dreams if they have the imagination, the dedication and the will to overcome the difficulties and pressures in their path.

[Salmon Fishery, April 16th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the agreement on the management of salmon issues to be signed today by the Prime Minister and the Premier of British Columbia vindicates former Prime Minister Lester Pearson's concept of co-operative federalism.

Intergovernmental relations in a federal system should be based not on confrontation and a rush to the law courts but on pragmatic accommodation and administrative partnership. Today most major issues transcend the problem-solving capacities of any one level of government and require a melding of decision making, not a fragmentation of power into watertight compartments of constitutional competence, federal or provincial.

We all have everything to gain by this highly pragmatic, empirically based approach to the regulation and conservation of a great national resource on the west coast.

It is to be achieved not by the frustrating processes of formal amendment of the Constitution, but by consensus of the respective heads of government, concretized in a legal agreement based on the constitutional principle of good faith and on mutual benefit.

[Pacific Salmon Treaty, April 10th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, current negotiations between Canada and the United States over Canadian complaints that the United States is violating the conservation norms of the Pacific salmon treaty of 1985 have seen a breakthrough in traditional diplomatic methods. There is direct involvement in the negotiations of the actual stakeholders, the active fisher people in both countries who have the most to lose from any violation of the treaty norms.

In a series of direct meetings whose consensus is reported back to the two governments, the Canadian and U.S. fisher people bring both practical experience and also human concerns to a traditionally rather abstract technical bureaucratic process. Why not? It is the new pluralism. It balances the new co-operative federalism, which the federal government is now seeking to pursue with the Government of British Columbia, in implementing the Fryer commission's

unanimous report on solutions to west coast fisheries problems and in seeking to establish permanent federal-B.C. partnership at the fisheries administration level.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member speaks well, I feel, of the agreement between the Prime Minister of Canada and the Premier of B.C. on maintaining and organizing the fisheries. All provinces are free to reach similar agreements. As for unemployed fishers, surely the two governments can unite to face this common problem. I hope the Government of Quebec will have the intelligence and the open-mindedness to follow up and reach its own agreement with the federal government.

As for the question of unemployment per se, our government has created 750,000 new jobs in the past twelve months.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Capilano-Howe Sound for his very interesting question.

He will be aware from my own discussion in the last few minutes that the budget does not operate in isolation, in its own watertight compartment. It operates within the general parameters of the Constitution and the principle of equality before the law, which it therein enshrined contains the very explicit affirmative action provision. I imagine the areas he is referring to reflect that.

Also a main thrust of the budget is creating jobs, creating meaningful education and meaningful training in advanced technology for young people. This is the whole thrust of the extraordinarily augmented provisions for aiding students and their supporting families.

I and other members fought very hard for having the federal government accept its role of leadership in education. We were oriented to the young. The groups he speaks of, under 45-year-olds whether white or any other colour, are very definitely the beneficiaries of the budget.

What we have done by creative extension of federal power to fill a gap in decision making we hope to extend for the future. It is a very necessary part of the new society as we enter the new century.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I will note at the outset that I am sharing time with my colleague, the learned hon. member for Kitchener.

This latest federal budget confirms that we are well ahead of schedule in achieving the Prime Minister's goal of a balanced non-deficit budget before the year 2000. In 1993 we inherited a record $42 billion plus deficit budget from the Mulroney government. Since then we have been reducing the enormous deficit on a step by step basis with each of our annual budgets. This year the deficit will be down to $19 billion which is $5 billion ahead of our own favourable projections.

We have decided to stay the course in our goal of a balanced non-deficit budget, possibly attainable by 1999 now, and not to succumb to the pressures to undertake lavish federal spending programs.

What we have done, however, is invest in those key areas of vital concern to our economic future and our general well-being by maintaining our social contract with Canadians and our famed social security network which earlier generations of Canadians paid for with far higher taxes than their counterparts in the U.S. This means a stable national pension scheme with no reductions in benefits for those now in retirement. It also means upholding the integrity of medicare and, beyond that, also making significant new additions to take care of the disabled persons and to maintain and extend medical clinics and laboratories.

It also means new investment in advanced education and scientific research in medicine and engineering as the key boost to creating leading edge industries capable of competing successfully

in world markets and also to providing the long term, highly skilled professional jobs that go with that.

President Clinton in his second inaugural address on January 20 spoke about becoming an education president for the 21st century. The Prime Minister, in asserting a necessary federal government role of leadership in establishing national education and scientific standards on a competitive level with other post-industrial states, has moved to fill the gap in constitutional power created by uneven performance at the provincial level and different, sometimes mutually competing, provincial policies and programs.

The investment in pure research as the basis for long range, leading edge technological advances was the key to the German and Japanese economic recovery miracles post-war. We are making that same investment in advanced education and science now. As a result, we have in this new budget a very much strengthened and extended federal government program of support and financial aid for students and their families designed to provide a flow of high calibre professional and scientific graduates into new industries.

Taken as a whole, the budget demonstrates our commitment to fiscal integrity and to freeing Canadians from the burden of huge annual interest payments to foreign creditors. In this way we will be able to devote even more of our resources to much needed social and educational programs and to move at the same time, when the budget is balanced, to reducing taxation.

The new budget also has its direct implications for governmental structures and processes that go to the roots of federalism. The constraints on governmental spending in a period of fiscal integrity directed toward the goal of a balanced non-deficit federal budget mean that community decision making on major community projects that transcend any one level of government, federal or provincial, have to be made on a basis of co-operation and of common joint problem solving through mutuality and reciprocity of interests of the different governments.

The federal government and Quebec have for a number of years shared decision making over immigration with effective co-ordination of federal and provincial lawmaking.

Recent inspired initiatives by the Prime Minister and by the premier of British Columbia have been directed to human resources and to immigration. We have resolved, thereby, some longstanding intergovernmental differences.

Further agreements could follow in other areas like fisheries, for which the basis of co-operation has already been laid in several joint federal-provincial commissions for inquiry and study of long range goals. This highly pragmatic, empirical, problem oriented approach, proceeding on a step by step basis is the new co-operative federalism. It seems to be yielding concrete results in easing intergovernmental tensions and ending long festering differences. It is, in any case, a refreshing change from that old fashioned, essentially abstract, a priori approach to federalism that insisted on isolating problem solving into separate water tight compartments of lawmaking power, federal and provincial, with an absolute ban on the different levels of governments ever working together toward a common result.

In another, in its own way, unusual parallel development, the federal government has opened up the diplomatic processes of negotiations over Canadian complaints of non-compliance by the United States with the provisions of the Canada-U.S. Pacific salmon treaty of 1985, with its important conservation imperatives. It has opened it up to input from the main private stakeholders involved, the actual fisher people. The Canadian fisher people are having a series of meetings with their U.S. counterparts and feeding back their consensus and conclusions to the diplomatic negotiators on both sides.

This is the new pluralism which balances the new co-operative federalism. It is an application of a broadly inclusive participatory democracy which should see more informed and rational federal government expression of Canadian community interests in the fulfilment of our international law based treaty rights and duties.

The federal system, as we know it, thus continues to evolve, undergoing change through developing custom and convention as glosses on the Constitution as originally written. This is being achieved in concrete, substantial ways, in spite of the seeming failure of those rather abstract exercises in the dry light of reason, represented by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown projects of yesterday.

The latest federal budget, by establishing the fiscal parameters and necessary financial limits to federal government decision making, enjoins a new form of pragmatic, problem oriented federalism based on intergovernmental co-operation and shared decision making, federal, provincial and municipal; the new co-operative federalism.

Thus the debate in the House over the present budget makes its own very distinctive contribution to the new constitutional law in the making.

The budget with its ambitious, imaginative and innovative approach opens the way to new ideas in federalism and in the structures and processes of government.

[Peacekeeping Or Peace Enforcement Commitments, March 12th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, we have had in this particular area of United Nations peacekeeping missions and Canadian contributions to them a very high level of debate in recent years. It is a debate to which members on both sides of the House have contributed significantly.

As the member for Rosedale rightly reminded us, Canadians have a special interest in UN peacekeeping. The concept is a Canadian creation. It was the brain child of our then foreign minister and later Prime Minister Lester Pearson. He recognized that there is a period in a conflict in which in a certain sense the parties have exhausted themselves emotionally and physically and where the interposition of a third force may allow them to retreat without intolerable loss of face. It is in this context thatMr. Pearson proposed a UN peacekeeping force for the resolution of the Suez crisis.

It worked perfectly and it has become known as the special Canadian contribution to the United Nations international organization. He was later recognized for his work with the award of the Nobel peace prize.

This was an area, if one considers the participants in this particular difference-Great Britain, France, Israel and Egypt-in which there was special Canadian interests apart from the idea of a foreign minister who was a UN man par excellence.

Similarly, I would have said with the Congo in 1960, which was the next big exercise in a UN peacekeeping operation to which Canadians contributed, there is a special Canadian interest in every issue where the presence of a French speaking force is crucial and one with openings to the English speaking world and recognizing the American interest in all these things. The Canadian mission becomes logical, sensible and almost inevitable.

The lesson from our debates in the House in recent years and in the present Parliament has been that we need to redefine our roles in missions, that we have to be more selective in the allocation of our energies, our forces, our contributions to missions and that we should, as far as possible, husband our scarce resources and apply those to situations where there is a Canadian special interest.

I would have thought, and I would agree with people on both sides of the House on this, as to some of the more recent missions, the Somalia mission, I would have thought by most tests, it was not a good case for Canadian involvement at the very beginning. There is something to be said for the thought echoed by the hon. member opposite that when the telephone rings at five in the morning and somebody says that they need our help, maybe the correct response is to say: "George, why do you not go back to sleep and call at regular hours?"

Somalia was a case where the special expertise in terms of the language, in terms of the significant Canadian ethnic community with links to the territory, in terms of knowledge of the culture of the region, the special problems of language and religion, and also the historical divisions within the country was absent. These were outside our knowledge. In some senses it was a tragedy waiting to

happen when we sent over, in essence, a regiment trained more or less for anti-terrorist activities.

I would have said that Bosnia was possibly an issue of which we should have been more cautious although there were special pressures on us by members of Canadian communities with roots in the homelands of the former Yugoslavia. On that we can leave the question open.

However, the main issue is that the pragmatic consensus which has developed in the debates in the House over the past several years is that Parliament should be involved. I remember the Minister of National Defence making this view known to the House during the course of the debate. Sensibly any administration, recognizing the political aspects of these operations and the dangers of misconception or misconstruction of a mission, should be very sensitive to parliamentary opinion. I believe these undertakings were given sufficiently at that time.

The problem we have with this motion is that we recognize the spirit. We believe the spirit has essentially been accepted on both sides of the House, but it does introduce, with its too narrow limits, too specific limits, a limitation that frankly could be extremely troublesome in a period of international crisis solving where urgent action is required.

On that basis, I believe we could say to the party opposite moving this issue that the spirit is there. I think the spirit is accepted and understood on both sides of the House in a responsible way. However, our suggestion to the members opposite is that the tethering limits of the motion create serious impediments to situations in which Canadian interests and Canadian special knowledge and competence suggest an intervention.

Looking at the situation in Somalia, the United States was involved.

The U.S. admiral advising the United Nations in that situation simply did not understand that American federal conditions could not be replicated in a country that was more similar in its social political organization to, for example, Great Britain in the 13th century. I am speaking in terms of the confrontational situation of feuding feudal barons. In Bosnia largely the exercise in policy making had been made in a few key European foreign ministries and not necessarily along lines that were sufficiently broad in their conception to yield a lasting solution.

On that basis I thank members of the third party for their contribution. It adds to the thoughtful contributions of earlier debates made in particular by the member for Saanich-Gulf Islands and the member for Nanaimo-Cowichan. These sentiments are understood and appreciated on this side of the House.

It is in this spirit I repeat the thoughts of the member for Rosedale. We think the limitation is too tethering. We think it could be a serious impediment in a crisis situation. In any case the pragmatic understanding on both sides of the House is enough to achieve the spirit of what has been contributed to this thoughtful debate.

[Peacekeeping Or Peace Enforcement Commitments, March 12th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member. Accepting the thrust of his speech, would he not recollect the debate on several occasions in the House on Canadian contributions to UN peacekeeping missions and the consensus that developed in which the minister of defence at the time indicated that wherever possible issues of this sort would be referred back to Parliament?

Would he not consider-