Lee Morrison

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, would the hon. member care to elaborate further on the Conservative economic policies which he is lauding and which I believe led to a doubling of the national debt and an increase in the annual deficit to something in the order of $42 billion a year? It brought in the wonderful GST which we all love so much! Was this visionary? I would like to hear more about this because it gives me a thrill to hear about these so-called wonderful policies that wrecked the Dominion of Canada.

[Petitions, March 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition from residents in my riding in the districts of Mankota and Kincaid primarily.

The petitioners make reference to the proposed multilateral agreement on investment, the MAI. They state that there are problems with this proposal. They request that parliament impose a moratorium on Canadian participation in the MAI negotiation until a full public debate on the proposed treaty has taken place across the country so that all Canadians may have an opportunity to express their opinions and decide on the advisability of proceeding.

[Petitions, March 8th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition signed by 189 Canadians, mostly residing in the districts of Edgeley, Edenwold and Fort Qu'Appelle, just east of Regina.

Their formerly very peaceful and crime free rural area is being plagued by break-ins, sometimes while householders are at home. They say that whereas break and enter often involves serious loss or damage and whereas serious sentences for property offences are ordinarily minimal, especially when the offenders are minors, they call upon parliament to recommend more stringent sentencing for property crimes and to make laws requiring those convicted of vandalism and/or break and enter and theft to make financial restitution for damages.

[Canada Marine Act, March 8th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, as predicted by the Reform Party, Liberal insider Merv Russell has been appointed director of the new Halifax port authority.

Old Merv is not going to be lonely because the transport minister also appointed Liberal playmates Al Abraham Jr., Elaine Gordon and Gregor Fraser.

The new Canada Marine Act is supposed to devolve control of seaports to local stakeholders. Why are Liberal connections so important for federally appointed directors to the Halifax port authority?

[Shearwater Development Corporation, February 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, Shearwater has given a brand new meaning to the term not for profit corporation.

Shearwater's chairman, Charles Keating, is a high profile Liberal operator. His executive director worked for former MP Ron MacDonald. Neither one of them has any transportation expertise, yet they talked of turning Shearwater into a “multimodal transportation hub”.

They made lots of money running that airport. Where did the money go? Will the minister launch an investigation?

[Shearwater Development Corporation, February 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Industry.

Three days ago Shearwater Development Corporation ceased operations after blowing $2.6 million in public money. In spite of ACOA largesse and a good income from airport operations Shearwater did not pay its principal contractor, Frontec Corporation, last year and has been hit with a $677,000 judgment.

Does the minister have any idea where all the money went and is the government responsible for the debt to Frontec?

[Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation And Safety Board Act, February 11th, 1999]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-477, an act to amend the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act and the Canada Labour Code as a consequence.

Madam Speaker, with the extreme growth that has taken place in interprovincial and international road transport in the last few years, there is a gap in safety regulation with respect to very large vehicles.

Any accident involving them right now is investigated only by the province in which the accident took place unless the provinces makes a special request to the Transportation Safety Board to become involved in the investigation.

This bill would require that the Transportation Safety Board have authority over any accidents occurring with large trucks and buses in interprovincial or international transport.

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

[Agriculture, February 8th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is common knowledge that a farmer receives less than 8 cents for the wheat in a loaf of bread.

Last night I calculated that farmers receive about $1.20 for all components of a first class roast beef dinner. Middlemen take the rest, but they are pikers compared to government.

After freight and handling deductions, a Saskatchewan farmer receives $3.15 for a bushel of malting barley from which about 300 bottles of beer can be produced.

Federal and provincial taxes including GST on that beer would be about $165 or 52 times what farmer receives. Yet the government does not realize that its great milch cow known as the farming industry has to be fed from time to time. Farmers need emergency assistance and they need it now.

[Energy Efficiency Strategy, February 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, Motion No. 300 is an interesting and clearly well intentioned motion.

Like many NDP and Liberal initiatives it takes the attitude that government is the be all and the end all of society and that people will not do things for their own good unless they are whipped along by government coercion through regulation and what not. It also refers fairly heavily to a federal building initiative. I wonder about these things. I will get into that a little later.

The concept of retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient is a very valid one. It certainly is not new. On a very elemental level, 40 years ago my parents decided they were going to install central heating, a furnace in the old farm house. Before they could do that they decided they had better insulate the place. They put in a furnace and did not want to spent a lot of their hard earned money to buy oil to melt snow. That was not considered a good idea. These were practical people. They were not trying to protect the environment. They were not worried about that dreadful gas carbon dioxide being emitted from their chimney. They were interested in keeping some money in their pockets.

In his address of December 18, the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre said the savings are unbelievable and almost too good to be true.

I have had some experience around here with spurious data and glossy ministerial bunk in other fields of endeavour so my reaction is that sometimes if something seems too good to be true, it is probably false. Before private owners spend money to upgrade buildings they do cost benefit analyses. They do not do that as a make work project. Their decisions are validated by the bottom line. Above all, after they have made decisions they let contracts to do the work in a properly tendered manner.

As a cautionary note, when we talk about federal government retrofitting, I invite hon. members to look around them. We have been retrofitting this place for the last four years. It is interminable. The last time I looked the government had spent about $400 million. It is already over budget and it is half done. This is the way the federal government operates.

I have some problem with the idea that we must look to the federal government to take care of waste of energy problems. I would like to see some figures that are believable and provable. When our critic in this area tried to get some details on some of these federal building initiatives from the government, he was effectively stonewalled. There was no detail available. So a word of caution.

Industry left to its own devices, free of a lot of regulatory and tax impediments, will develop energy efficient strategies because it is profitable to do so. Although this is anecdotal, I will tell the House about a couple of projects developed by the innovative Canadian mining industry many years ago not to conserve fuel in the national interest or to curb emissions of combustion gases but to help them make more money.

One of the best examples I can think of was designed and built more than 80 years ago in the town of Cobalt, Ontario where a mining company drove a vertical shaft up near the bed of a river at a waterfall so they had an enormous cascade of falling water coming through the raise. That water was used to compress air. The compressed air, which was produced at virtually no cost and with no fuel, was then used to power the drills to drill the holes in which they would load the dynamite to break the rock in the mines in the neighbourhood. It was a wonderful system developed 80 years ago.

There is an example in the Sudbury area with which I am more familiar because it gets into my age group. In order to help with the ventilating system of a deep mine, International Nickel Company drove a raise into the bottom of a very large worked out area near the surface of the ground and installed its ventilating fans. They would suck the down draft air through these old workings. In the winter the company sprayed a fine spray of water into the old workings. As the water froze it heated the air to give them free air heating to ventilate the mine. There was this great mound of thousands of tonnes of ice sitting near the surface of the mine so in the summer they sucked this air past that mound of ice and had a cooling system for the deep levels of the mine.

Industry is not stupid. Industry will do what is necessary to conserve energy, especially now when we consider the extremely high cost of fossil fuels. They will do anything they can to prevent the waste of valuable resources. This is where the real work will come from.

I have no confidence whatsoever in any federal government initiative to do anything, to do it right and to do it economically. It does not happen, or if it does, it happens by accident.

On that note I will relinquish my space to others. I do hope the hon. member from Winnipeg will give some thought to what I have said.

[Shearwater Development Corporation, February 4th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, on Monday I asked the Minister of Industry how much public money had been flushed out to sea by the Shearwater Development Corporation. The Minister of Veterans Affairs responded with some meaningless gobbledegook.

I now know that Shearwater received an initial payment of $2 million and a later top up of $600,000. The company is not only broke but is being sued for $660,000 for the cost of airport operation and maintenance. The only physical evidence of this so-called development program is a boardwalk and retail complex to which the company contributed about $200,000.

We can do the math. A handful of Liberals has frittered away more than $3.2 million in four years. This cries out for an independent investigation.