Lee Morrison

[Railway Safety Act, December 4th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. My party and I are being defamed. We have been leading the pack in fighting against corporate welfare.

[Railway Safety Act, December 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I regret that the Reform Party cannot endorse the amendment presented by the Bloc. We cannot support an amendment that would require railways to pay for the removal of hazards created as a result of the emissions of local governments. This defies natural justice. In that respect only we cannot support the amendment.

For example, if a local road authority allowed brush to grow wild on the approach to a railway crossing and then was forced to remove it, under the terms of this amendment, as I understand it, the railway would be required to pay for the work. That would be patently unfair.

If I have misunderstood the motion, I hope during questions and comments that will be brought to my attention. As I interpret it, this is simply wrong.

As far as the general question of this legislation is concerned, in my part of the country this entire debate is becoming moot or academic. The railways it would govern are disappearing thanks to the government's brilliance in writing the new Canadian transportation act. It is pretty hard to have a railway crossing accident where there are no railways. This is happening to us out there at a very rapid rate.

I am a little concerned that this bill has been fast tracked the way it has. Basically there is not much in the bill with which I could find fault. But it certainly is clear evidence of utter disorganization in the office of the minister that the bill has sat around for heaven knows how many weeks and all of a sudden it is being pushed through first reading, second reading, committee, report stage, bang, bang, bang, for no good reason that I can understand unless we are looking at prorogation.

The bill has been languishing over there in that tower. Now we have it here and we have to deal with it. The bill has not even been printed as reported. It is not even available online, on the net. Yet here we are debating the terms. It has not been printed as reported.

I suppose we could raise that as a point of order and create some disruption. I do not intend to do so but this is ridiculous. What is the hurry?

If I had not alerted some stakeholders to the fact that the bill was coming up in committee, they would not have had time to even think about preparing presentations. It caught them completely off guard. They had to rush to do what they had to do and they did it very well. Other stakeholders would have come forward if they had known what was going on. Perhaps I am impugning motive but the government did not care whether the public was aware of what it was doing so the word did not go out that committee meetings were to be held.

I have one example. The Canadian Trucking Alliance hired a prominent transportation consultant to review the bill, specifically the provisions related to crossings and the standards for construction or alteration of railway works. I presume since these guys do not work cheap it cost the association a bundle of money. The report will not be completed until Monday, December 7, which is too late to have any impact. So these people have wasted their time trying to get some input into the democratic process.

The opposition has not obstructed the bill in any way because it is in essence a technical bill. On the advice of various stakeholders we tried to introduce some minor amendments in committee but, as usual, the Liberal members lined up in lock step to stop us. Same old, same old. I sometimes wonder why we have committees when everything is done according to the wishes and whims of the minister. However, we are on the rails here. I am not going oppose the bill nor are my colleagues but we are getting sick and tired of this nonsense of being pushed around and bullied when there is no good reason for doing so.

[Aviation Safety, December 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have no trouble finding hundreds of millions of dollars to finance their loopy gun registration scheme because they say it is a safety issue, but they cannot find any funds to improve or make adequate aviation inspection services.

The Minister of Transport bragged that 179 inspection positions have been generated in the last few years, but more than 70 of those positions are vacant and the department continues to lose a net average of four inspectors per month.

When will the minister address this real safety issue and why did he provide the House with spurious information?

[Firearms Legislation, November 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers opposed to gun registration are not being represented by their MP. When these people asked the Liberal and Bloc Quebecois members to support them, they were met with a refusal. The only people speaking out on their behalf are Reform Party members. It is Reformers who are defending the provinces' jurisdiction over property.

With four provinces fighting against this federal interference in provincial matters, Bloc Quebecois members are silent. They are cosying up to the centralist Liberals. They have sold out.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

The hon. member for Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre says that the Liberals have to have friends and he makes a very good point because aside from the type of people I have been discussing, I do not know who they would have for friends.

I have spoken as much on this piece of obscene legislation as I care to. We know from what the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood said earlier that it is a waste of time to debate things in this House. I will leave it to my colleagues if they wish to continue the debate. Perhaps my colleague from Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre will say a few words.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Mercier was very passionate in her defence of small business people. I certainly appreciate her passion.

However, I wonder whether she has her priorities just a little skewed. The parts of the bill that we do not like are not about small entrepreneurs. They are about big banks and making their lives easier.

These 85% loan guarantees are not meant to be of benefit to the borrower. These are of benefit to the lender. I am sure the hon. member for Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre agrees with me on this point. It is probably the only thing in the world on which we agree.

We do not have to make the world safe for Matthew Barrett. This is exactly what we are doing. If we were to amend this piece of legislation to remove any reference whatsoever to lending money to people in capital leasing ventures, we would be improving the legislation because we would be lowering the risk to the taxpayer, not the risk to the banks. The banks do not take a risk. The parts of the bill we just discussed ensure that the banks are not going to get their hands burned. The only people who are going to get burned are you and me and all the other taxpayers.

As someone who was an independent businessman for most of his adult life, I find that this is unconscionable. I will go from unconscionable to obscene when I look at the provision for allowing small business loans to not for profit organizations.

Good heavens. What does this have to do with economic growth? This is just another backdoor handout by this Liberal government to people who really have no legitimate call on public funds. Of course for the Liberal government that is nothing new. There is always money for SNC Lavelin, for Bombardier and for the Desmarais family, for anybody who is really big and powerful and on the inside.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

The hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood says I am stalling. He said earlier that it was a waste of time to debate these amendments because the decisions have already been made. Having said that, I guess I should give him what he wants and not continue to debate this ad infinitum or ad nauseam. I will defer to the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood and we will get on to the next group of amendments.

We will endeavour to show these folks opposite that some useful improvements could be made to their legislation, that there are improvements that could even cause my colleagues and I to support their legislation but we certainly could never dream of supporting it in its present condition.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

The hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood should get together with the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine to discuss this because they are obviously coming from two diametrically opposed directions on this question.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

The hon. member says I am distorting it. I would invite him to check Hansard when he gets home.

With respect to Group No. 3, the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine stated that it is totally unacceptable that the level of government responsibility for defaulted loans should be decreased from 85% to 50%. Why should the taxpayers of this country be on the hook to support bad management decisions by the poor, impoverished, helpless chartered banks? Good heavens. These are small business loans. These are small loans, period. Do we have to carry the can for people who are talking about annual profits of $1 billion or $1.5 billion? It is absurd.

The eminent economist Walter Williams once made a statement about this sort of thing which I think should be engraved above the Speaker's chair so that everyone can read it. He said “If someone with a business venture of doubtful credibility came to me and asked me to loan him $50,000 to support the business, I would tell him to go play in traffic. But when this gentleman who needs the $50,000 to support a dubious business venture wants money, he does not come to me but to the government, which has the coercive power of the majesty of the law to say `You have to give this business some money. If it goes broke, that is your bad luck. But you have to give it to him because we the government say that we are going to force you to do it through your taxes. Mr. Walter Williams, if you do not pay your taxes, we will put you in jail”'.

By a very direct and easily chartered course we can see that by giving this huge degree of guaranteed support to what may be loans of rather dubious quality we are telling ordinary taxpaying Canadians that they are going support to the utmost these dubious business ventures. If they do not, the government will put them in jail. That is the simple, very easily traced path of what we are talking about.

I do not feel as strongly about the second amendment as I do about the first. The hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine became very emotional about this. I would like to know what is wrong with performing audits without notice. Do we have to allow loans of dubious quality not to be audited through the lending institutions? What is going on? Taxpayer money is being put up to guarantee these loans. Surely we can have the privilege or the right to audit these things without notice. But the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine says no, that would be a terrible thing to do. She has not heard of accountability.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 23rd, 1998]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood made a very telling remark during his dissertation on these amendments. If I may paraphrase, he asked why we were bothering to debate this. It is all decided anyway. We are wasting time. The government knows what it wants. The government knows what it is going to do. This is all theatre.

I sincerely compliment the member for Broadview—Greenwood because he has reached the nub of what this place is all about. I could not have said it better myself. I know I was paraphrasing his words, but that in essence is what the hon. member said.