Lee Morrison

[Arts And Culture, May 26th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the heritage minister.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the National Film Board being censored by a person who is the subject of one of the board's films, something about a custodian. I want to know why the minister did not stand up for the National Film Board. Why did she not protect Canadian filmmakers' rights to freedom of expression?

[Fraser River Port Authority, May 26th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, in 1996 and 1997 the Fraser River Harbour Commission, a now defunct federal agency stuffed to the gills with Liberal hacks, donated $4,820 to the Liberal Party of Canada.

We do not yet know what the harbour commission donated in 1998 but we understand that its successor, the new Fraser River Port Authority, purchased a table at the Minister of Finance's Vancouver fundraiser.

Does the Minister of Transport believe that it is proper for public entities to financially support the Liberal Party of Canada with public money?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, May 10th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, there is an old expression, the elephant laboured and brought forth a mouse, except I think in this specific instance perhaps one could say more accurately the mouse laboured and brought forth a gnat.

What has the government actually accomplished after two long years of labour? There is a new name. The YOA is now the YCJA. That sounds like a song. From the government's point of view that is probably a good thing because the YOA was a lightning rod which attracted the anger of the Canadian people against the justice system of this country. Everything that was, is and probably will eternally be wrong, was indeed directed against that one specific act. So it had to be changed. There had to be a little sleight of hand, a little cosmetic surgery and it came up with a brand new bill which is supposed to have us all very excited.

There are some actual changes in the bill if one goes through the reams and reams of paper. There appear to be some changes. The age of responsibility with respect to sentencing for certain violent crimes has ostensibly been lowered to 14 years of age. Superficially this addresses a major public concern. There has been a lot of outcry about that over the last few years, but what has actually been done is merely to create a treasure trove for lawyers.

In order to get the 14, 15, 16 and 17 year olds into the adult justice system for sentencing, there has to be a court battle, a trial within a trial because any young person so charged can, through his or her lawyer, apply to the court to have his or her sentencing done in youth court. Naturally nobody will pass up the opportunity, so there will be eternal legal battles as to who will be sentenced as an adult and who will be sentenced as a youth.

This is an act written by lawyers for lawyers. Of course we all know that lawyers do look after their own. The justice minister recently found $83,000 in her stocking to reward a lawyer who also just happens to be a Liberal hack for three months of work. What a great example to set for the kids.

I had a letter from a constituent who said he wished we could pass a law making it illegal for lawyers to sit in parliament. I do not know how far that would go but perhaps it is worthy of some consideration.

Bill C-68 fails to address the major public complaint against the Young Offenders Act. That is the lack of accountability for repeat or serious offenders who happen to be less than 12 years old. The minister babbles interminably and incoherently that inclusion of 10 and 11 year olds within the youth justice system process would be “barbaric”. However she refuses to accept the reality that these children desperately need help, help that they are clearly not getting from the provincial child welfare and mental health systems on which they are dumped by the justice system because there are no alternatives.

Hundreds of kids are reoffending and laughing at the powerlessness of their social workers while feeling deeply hurt by the disinterest of their parents. By the time they reach their teens, they are hardened little criminals. We have to do something for these youngsters.

Most proponents of the idea that there should not be any legislation governing 11 and 12 year olds have the curious idea that young children cannot make reasoned decisions, that they are incapable of being judgmental. Those people certainly have not raised any kids. They have never been confronted with the guile of even the most benign and sensitive 11 year old.

On the good side, this bill will permit publication of names of young offenders more than 14 years old who qualify for adult sentences or who received a youth sentence for a particularly heinous crime. But again there is no certainty, again there is room for dispute, so let us call that initiative half good.

Alternative sentencing for first time non-violent offenders is, in my opinion, only common sense, as long as it is indeed limited to such offenders and not extended to young thugs who cause bodily harm. Similarly it should not be extended to old thugs who cause bodily harm and it sometimes is.

Diversion programs are also a very good idea, very laudable, but as my colleague from Battlefords—Lloydminster pointed out, the provision as written is wide open for abuse. There has to be some certainty in the law. This is all so wishy-washy, so poorly tied together. Again it is written by lawyers for lawyers. They can probably figure it out. They can find all the loopholes. They know where to jump to get over the barriers.

However it does not improve the justice system in this country by one iota. All it does is put a new coat of paint on the old YOA, and I think this is not an exaggeration, which almost everybody wanted to get rid of.

The government had the chance. It could have given us good law, but we are right back almost where we started from.

Before concluding, I would like to voice my objections to the string of insulting comments the Bloc Quebecois has been making about the west and westerners.

Imagine the fuss there would be if we dared to make such comments about la Belle Province. Attacks like these are revolting.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, May 10th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, when the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain was talking about disasters in the medical system in Canada I thought he would probably mention another case from his riding which I believe is the most atrocious I have heard so far.

An elderly man was suspected of having a brain tumour. He needed an MRI. With Canada's wonderful system he could get one within a year. He thought that was a little tough, so he went across into the United States, as just about everybody does in that part of the world. He got his MRI and was told “You, sir, have a brain tumour. It is growing rapidly and if you do not get it removed right away you are going to go blind”. So he said “I still have a few years left. How much is it going to cost?” He was told it would cost $40,000. He said “I just happen to have saved in my lifetime $40,000, and my sight is worth it, so go for it”. They operated and removed most of the tumour. The gentleman went home quite content.

Then he decided that for his checkups, which he had to have after major surgery of that nature, including another MRI, at least he would get that done in Canada and it would be covered by our wonderful medicare system. Lo and behold, he was told “No, my friend, you had that work done in the United States. To hell with you. Go back there to get your MRI checkups because we are not going to have any part of you here in Canada”.

It is absolutely unconscionable that Canadians would be treated that way. First they get driven out of their country to seek medical care and then, when they come back, the bureaucrats are so mean-spirited that they will not even give them follow-up care.

I am curious. I would ask the hon. member what is going on with that particular case now. Does he have any new information?

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, May 10th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am very interested in the hon. member's comments on the underfunding of medicare. He is, after all, very familiar with the system, having worked in it.

The problems with medicare are not confined to any particular province or to any particular stripe of provincial government. I live in Saskatchewan, the cradle of medicare, which has a dreadful situation. I do not blame the provincial government. I do not agree with its politics, but I cannot point to the provincial government and say it has allowed the system to collapse out of malice or ineptitude. It has collapsed because of chronic underfunding from the federal government, which has lowered its annual contributions from 50% when it started out down to about 15% now. No provincial government can stand that.

There are hospitals in Saskatchewan where elderly helpless people have to rely upon relatives and friends to bathe them and to feed them because there simply is not enough staff to carry the load. I have had personal experience in this regard.

I have lived in several Third World countries and that is the way hospitals operate there. When did we get to that stage of development in Canada? This is awful. I blame the members over there totally for this situation. They took $21 billion out of the health system in a period of only five years and now, whoopie, they are to put $11.5 billion of it back over the next five years. For that we are supposed to be eternally grateful.

The hon. member is a medical doctor. I would like him to comment more fully on that. I am sure his range of knowledge is wider than mine. I can speak only anecdotally, having seen these things with my own eyes. I would like him to say whether he believes any province is doing worse than another or can be blamed for the disastrous condition of medical care in Canada today.

[St. John's Port Authority, May 10th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the transport minister approved the appointment of Mel Woodward to the St. John's port authority even though he works at Coastal Shipping, which is a regular user of the port. He claims that Mr. Woodward has resigned his post and that his appointment therefore does not contravene the Canada Marine Act.

We phoned Coastal Shipping and guess what? Mel Woodward still works there. He is still the boss. Why not? He owns the company.

Will the minister now please obey the law and remove Mr. Woodward from the board? Shame on you, Mr. Minister.

[Health Care, May 7th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, two years ago my parents had the great misfortune of experiencing the Canadian health care system in Saskatchewan. That is when I discovered that even prestigious teaching hospitals are so understaffed that unless patients have relatives or friends to help them wash, eat or go to the toilet, they have a very miserable time.

How can the minister continue to deny that lack of federal funding has wrecked a system that used to be the envy of the world, and that recent budgetary measures will not begin to repair the Liberal damage?

The Liberal's pay more, get less philosophy of government has resulted in a mass exodus of Canadian doctors and nurses and the closure of thousands of hospital beds in the last five years.

In terms of service availability, we are on the road to becoming a third world country.

I wonder which countries we can expect to send medical missionaries to Canada.

[Ports, May 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the new provincial appointee to the St. John's port authority is a prominent Liberal and former candidate, the usual, but it gets even better. This gentleman also owns a controlling interest in a port user, which makes his appointment illegal according to section 16(e) of the Canada Marine Act.

Why did the minister sign off on this illegal appointment of another Liberal hack to a port authority?

[Firearms Law Sunset Act, April 30th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is rather sad that we are still debating horrible legislation which was passed in 1995. It is a debate that never ends.

Even though we are in grave economic difficulties and the country is fighting an undeclared war, whenever I go back to my constituency and visit the coffee shop or walk down the street people still ask what we will do about the idiotic registration law. It never dies.

I diverge a little from my colleague who has proposed the bill, although I support it. The time the studies should have been made was before the bill was passed, not after the fact. We had a bill that was based on prejudice, public hysteria and deliberately falsified data. It was all brought together under a closure motion. That was one of the blackest days in the House. It is something for which democracy is paying dearly.

The hon. member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve said that he did not see anything in the bill that would affect the civil rights of Canadians. I wonder if the right to entry and search without a warrant and the right to seize lawfully owned private property without compensation constitute no threat to the general public.

I said some studies should have been done before the legislation was passed. I took the initiative to do something in this regard. I did a very detailed study of the crime statistics over a 20 year period for the northern tier states of the northwestern U.S. as opposed to the Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

I thought, as a resident of southern Saskatchewan, I would find that the rates of homicide in those two rather different jurisdictions would be more or less equal. I discovered to my surprise that the homicide rates in those northern tier states were actually lower than in our three western Canadian provinces where we have had gun control of a sort since 1976.

In those northern tier states they call it gun control because they have a law on the books in Montana that says you cannot take your machine gun away from your own property. It is wide open and yet their homicide rate is lower than ours and has been for the last 20 years, if one takes the average of those northern states and of our western provinces.

Interestingly, when I was doing this study, I discovered that North Dakota has historically had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people. Maine, another state adjacent to Canada but not included in my study, also has that 1.2 per 100,000. That is roughly the same order of magnitude as the homicide rates in Japan where private ownership of firearms is virtually banned. One can make what one wants of that. It is a fact.

On the other hand, in that great land to the south the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia has what is probably the toughest regulations governing firearms of any jurisdiction in the western world, far tougher than we have in Bill C-68, and yet its homicide rate is astronomical. It is 80 per 100,000 per annum. That is like a war zone and yet they have these extremely rigorous control of firearms.

New York City is another example. Both state and city laws control firearms. Yet the homicide rate there is more than 10 times what it is in the wide open states of North Dakota, Montana and Idaho.

That is the type of study that should have been performed relative to the Canadian experience before we got involved in this hysterical pursuit of a magic fix to do away with crime in this country, but it was not done.

In recent years there have been several academic studies made of this particular question, most notably by Dr. Manzer at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Lott at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Kleck from the school of criminology at Florida State University. These academics have all agreed and determined that the existence of a law requiring the registration of firearms has no particular effect, either detrimental or beneficial, to the prevalence of murder in any society. These are eminent academics.

If the government does not want to consult academics, it would have been worthwhile had the government listened to rank and file police officers rather than to the national association of police chiefs when it went for police input. Some very good polling has been done by the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers of its members. It was discovered that lo and behold 75% of them are opposed to the legislation in Bill C-68. Ninety-one per cent of serving RCMP officers in Saskatchewan are opposed to the legislation. These are the people who are out there on the front lines every day. These are not the political policemen.

I had a phone call not too long ago from an RCMP sergeant whom I know fairly well. He said, “There is a whole bunch of people milling around my office today. I have this big lineup at my door”. I asked what the problem was, what was going on. He said, “All the Hell's Angels in town have come around and they are trying to get their possession and acquisition certificates and they all want to get them on the same day”. Perhaps there was a little hyperbole in the man's statement, but I certainly got his message.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment quoted what she referred to as the positive impacts of this legislation. She should go back and take a look at this legislation and all previously existing legislation because background checks have been a fact of life in Canada for many years. It is not something that was brought in with Bill C-68 and she should know that. To say that there has been a positive effect from this new legislation is not true.

At the same time she set up quite a number of straw men. She said something about the people who are supporting this bill wanted to decontrol the private ownership of automatic weapons. I reread the bill immediately after she said that to see if I could find some reference of that nature and I am sorry, but it is not there.

All the hon. member for Yorkton—Melville is asking is that after five years from January 1 this legislation be revisited, that some proper studies be made of its effectiveness or lack thereof, and that the government then act upon those studies to determine whether or not the $50 million a year that this is going to cost us is a sensibly directed expenditure, if it is going to do any good.

The previous studies I have mentioned certainly suggest that it does no good at all.

I would like to read a brief comment from Professor Kleck who incidentally until 1976, according to his biography, was very skeptical to say the least about the right to gun ownership. He is a criminologist. He said that it was a sort of visceral reaction on his part to think that if there were fewer guns, there would be less crime. However, when he did his academic research, and he has been doing research like this for 20 years, here is what he said—

[Firearms Law Sunset Act, April 30th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Is the parliamentary secretary imputing motive?