Lee Morrison

[Canada Transportation Act, September 21st, 1998]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-430, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act (discontinued railway lines).

Mr. Speaker, this bill to amend the Canada Transportation Act has as its purpose the declaration of a moratorium of three years on the dismantlement of any abandoned rail line.

The reason is that once a line is abandoned, if immediate dismantlement is allowed, that line can never be put into productive use. If there were a three year moratorium it would give interested parties the opportunity to organize, raise financing and potentially put these lines back into service as privately owned short lines.

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

[Canada Labour Code, September 21st, 1998]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-429, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (severance pay).

Mr. Speaker, the purpose of this bill is to remove an anomaly from the Canada Labour Code which in certain cases makes it impossible for older workers upon dismissal to claim severance pay.

The problem is that under the Canada Labour Code if someone is entitled to pension benefits, even if they are much reduced pension benefits due to early retirement, that person is not automatically able to claim the same benefits under severance pay as younger employees. I believe that is wrong. That is the object of the bill.

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

[National Parks Act, June 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague a question not so much for my own benefit but for the benefit of members in the House, most of whom are central Canadians who have never seen Banff.

What is the current day rate to enter Banff National Park? I also remind my colleague that it is pretty difficult to maintain accessibility of the public to a park when all that money is needed for Bombardier.

[National Parks Act, June 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member should dig out his ears and listen to what other speakers are saying.

When I spoke of the caribou being an easy mark, I was not making any disparaging references to native people. I have had conversations along this line with Inuvialuit people who know that the caribou is a stupid animal and easy to shoot. That is all I said. Please pay attention.

The member was talking about wiping out the buffalo with automatic weapons. That would have been quite a trick inasmuch as automatic weapons were not developed until about 20 years after buffalo were nearly extinct. But that is a sideline.

[National Parks Act, June 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I will be dividing my time with the member for Calgary East.

Creation of the new park of Tuktut Nogait is a good idea. We should have some tundra hills preserved for posterity. However, I would hasten to point out that this site certainly is not unique. There are hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of virtually identical terrain. The boundaries that were arbitrarily developed are not necessarily the ideal ones. It is very unfortunate that they were established without any environmental assessment and without a resource inventory.

As a matter of fact, with respect to the resource inventory, there was a mining company with exploration rights on a portion of that park. It was proposed as the hon. member for Rimouski—Mitis has just explained to have a small portion of the proposed area removed so that the mining company's exploration program could proceed. The proposal by the Inuvialuit was actually presented by no less a personage than Nellie Cournoyea.

Nevertheless the government in its wisdom has decided to press on. The mining company was pressured to “voluntarily” relinquish its rights and here we are. It is the usual story of urban know it alls from central Canada dictating to the local people with respect to parks.

Unlike the great parks of the Rocky Mountains which have negligible mineral potential, Tuktut Nogait may contain economically important deposits. Nobody knows because nobody has ever made a serious effort to find out.

Fortunately future generations will be able, I suppose if it is deemed in the public interest, to change the boundaries of the already established park. But why not start out correctly from the very beginning? There should have been an assessment. This should be true of any new park.

There should always be an economic and environmental assessment, a cost benefit study to decide where the park should precisely be and then cast the boundaries in stone. Do not just draw lines on maps and say “Gee I think it is a good idea to have a park here”. It requires a bit of science and a little thought.

As far as the possible disturbance of the bluenose caribou by this exploration proposed in two and half per cent of the park is concerned, my personal observation is that caribou are quite compatible with human activity. I have seen them browsing in the shadow of a mine headframe. It is well-known that prospectors or explorers in the barren lands have had their tents knocked down because the caribou find that they are very convenient rubbing posts. Caribou are not shy animals; they are anything but.

The local people regard them as being a little on the dumb side and easy pickings for hunters. There is not much glory, not much honour, going out and shooting a caribou. It is like going out and milking a cow on the farm.

Talking about interfering with local people, just a few days ago our revered heritage minister vetoed a very carefully thought out and democratically approved development plan in Banff park. The local people looked at this very carefully. They decided what they felt was needed, decided what was suitable for their own particular environment. But no, our heritage minister gets up on her white horse, comes roaring in and says “They shall not do it. Never”.

The same people in Banff had to fight for years to preserve their airstrip. Fortunately they were able to enlist the assistance of the Canadian Air Line Pilots Association who pointed out that the airstrip in Banff as well as the one in Jasper are very important for safety reasons, for emergency landings.

They have been able to keep the airstrips but one wonders what the furore was about. Both of these parks are bisected by a highway and a railway. They were going to shut down a little 3,000 foot grass strip, which is highly essential to the preservation of human life, because somebody got a bug in their ear. Anyway, that battle has been won.

Hopefully when the present minister is sent to her reward with whatever patronage appointment she will get, this airstrip will again be returned for the local people to use. There are people in Banff who fly and use their aircraft for search and rescue. They have done so for many years.

Eventually I think they will get their airstrip back. It probably will revert to the situation which existed wherein they did the maintenance work at no cost to the federal government. Since these airstrips are going to be strictly for emergency use, the federal government's parks department will have to cut the grass and plough the snow.

I have another example of the local people being run over roughshod by Parks Canada.

This one is rather near and dear to me because it is in my own riding, the Grasslands park in southern Saskatchewan. The local people are really frightened by this vast area of ungrazed prairie which is beside their farms and ranches. This is a powder keg, a potential fire hazard of unparalleled proportions. They have begged and pleaded with Parks Canada to allow limited grazing of cattle in that park.

The natural condition of the prairie land is to be grazed by large ungulate. They used to be called buffalo. We have no buffalo any more. So not only does the prairie grow wild and present this terrible fire hazard, but it is deteriorating because in the natural balance certain species tend to overcrowd the others when ground is not grazed. Any rancher knows this, but the academic geniuses in Parks Canada who have never probably seen a cow or a buffalo or a blade of grass do not know what is happening out there.

The same parks people also continually get into unpleasant situations with the local people simply by being bad neighbours. They unlawfully impound stray livestock, for example. They refuse to participate in the maintenance of line fences. They say “that is your problem”.

On one occasion they actually were convinced under great duress to put up a fence. A fence the local ranchers had moved off the survey line for generations was then placed exactly on the survey line right down the middle of a creek. Brilliance. So naturally the first spring it went away and there was no fence at all and the rancher had to rebuild the fence back on his own land.

The problem with stray livestock was taken seriously enough that the local municipal government has passed the only open herd law in Saskatchewan that I am aware of. You can now run your cattle anywhere, including on your neighbour's front lawn, between I think October 1 and April 1, simply because Parks Canada is so obdurate that they will not get along with their neighbours.

I have to leave some time for my hon. colleague but I could go on for a long time about people at Parks Canada, some of my favourite whipping people.

[Government Spending, June 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Health would have us believe that there are no funds available to compensate hepatitis C victims, but in his previous portfolio he had no difficulty committing the government to a loopy firearms registration scheme that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars for no discernible benefit, a scheme that has already cost far more than his initial estimate with nothing yet to show for it.

There are no funds for victims of governmental ineptitude and hundreds of millions available for useless and repressive bureaucratic exercises.

The chairman of the Toronto police services board reported a 40% drop in the criminal use of firearms in the last four years. Just as this government continues to ignore the indignation of rural people, it is ignoring the fact that firearms are not a problem in our largest city.

Priorities, boys and girls. Priorities.

[Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation And Safety Board Act, June 12th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, on November 4, 1997 the deputy chairman of the Senate committee on transport and communications made a rather remarkable statement with respect to Bill S-2: “We will be making history this afternoon in that this is the first bill we will be dealing with ab initio since this is a Senate bill. We will then pass it along to you in whatever form that may be”.

What a satire of parliamentary democracy. The unelected, unaccountable troughers in the other place are initiating important bills and sending them off to us, in whatever form that may be.

I admit that Bill S-2 does not differ to any great extent from its previous incarnation as Bill C-86 in the 35th parliament. But in theory the senators could have done anything they wanted with this bill and sent it off to us here. That is wrong. I fondly hope we will not see in this parliament any further bills with the letter S prefixing them.

The Senate should be limited to its function of providing sober second thought, and even in that role it is illegitimate because of the manner in which its members are chosen. Only yesterday the Prime Minister had the effrontery to appoint five more, thumbing his nose at public opinion. However, Bill S-2 is a housekeeping bill and it is basically sound. It does have a couple of failures which I would like to bring to the attention of the House.

In section 4 which specifies the terms of employment for board members and establishes that there shall be no more than five, of whom three shall be full time members, there is no provision for a transparent merit based system of appointment. Members will continue to be chosen at the discretion of the minister, just as they are for a plethora of other boards and agencies.

This one in common with, for example, the National Parole Board and the Immigration and Refugee Board, has the capacity to do harm if the wrong patronage choices are made. There has to be a better way.

The second fault is that this board will continue to have the discretion to not investigate fatal accidents if it feels that such an investigation would be unlikely to lead to a reduction in risk to persons, property or the environment. But if no investigation is made how can such presumptions be reasonably made? Of course to investigate more accidents the TSB would need more money. It would need more investigators. Its current investigative staff is only 135 and its budget for 1998-99 is only $22 million.

One has to question the priorities of a government which has hundreds of millions of dollars for grants and forgivable loans to corporations that build aircraft but only a pittance to determine why aircraft crash. Bear in mind that although air crashes are spectacular, the TSB also must put together the puzzles of fragmented trains, ships and pipelines.

Those 135 investigators are stretched too thinly. I urge this government to remedy the situation.

Bill S-2 does not address the intrinsic problems of the board but its defects that I have drawn to the attention of this House are defects of omission rather than of commission. Reform members will therefore support it as a housekeeping exercise.

[Petitions, June 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, this is the last petition I have. There are 37 signatures on this petition. It is from citizens of Limerick and Assiniboia, Saskatchewan.

The petitioners draw the attention of the House to the fact that most Canadians understand the concept of marriage as a voluntary union of an unmarried male and an unmarried female and that it is the duty of parliament to ensure that marriage as it has always been known and understood in Canada is preserved and protected. The petitioners pray that parliament enact Bill C-225, an act to amend the Marriage Act and the Interpretation Act so as to define in the statute that a marriage can only be entered into between a single male and a single female.

[Petitions, June 11th, 1998]

The next petition is from residents mainly of Gull Lake and Medicine Hat regarding the death strip on the Trans-Canada Highway.

These 244 petitioners are pointing out that the section of highway between Gull Lake, Saskatchewan and the Alberta border is a disgrace to our national highway system and that the Canadian government should immediately enter into negotiations with the Government of Saskatchewan to finance the twinning of that section.

[Petitions, June 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I have 11 petitions. You will be pleased to know that nine of them are identical in form and content. These nine petitions originate from about a dozen small Saskatchewan communities with a few signatures also from northern and eastern Alberta.

The petitioners wish to draw the attention of this House to the uselessness of the proposed new gun regulations of Bill C-68. They draw to our attention the fact that the search and seizure provisions and other infringements on civil liberties included in Bill C-68 are an affront to law-abiding Canadians. They therefore pray and call upon parliament to repeal Bill C-68 and all associated regulations with respect to firearms or ammunition and to pass new legislation designed to severely penalize the criminal use of any weapon.

On those nine petitions, there are 1,815 signatures which brings the total that I have presented in the last few weeks on that particular subject to more than 3,000.