Lee Morrison

[Division No. 202, June 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I wonder if you would seek unanimous consent for members to remove their coats.

[Petitions, June 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition contains 36 signatures from residents of Saskatchewan.

This is one of several that have already been presented in the House calling upon parliament to immediately legislate a moratorium on rail line abandonments in the three prairie provinces pending completion of Mr. Justice Estey's review and the presentation of his report on the grain handling system.

[Petitions, June 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is my honour today to present three petitions.

The first one bears 1,385 signatures of electors resident in New Brunswick, primarily in the districts of Havelock, Petitcodiac and Salisbury.

These electors are concerned with the federal-provincial agreements for financing segments of highways which do not preclude the collection of provincial highway tolls on jointly financed projects.

The petitioners therefore call upon parliament, specifically with reference to one existing road, to terminate any plans which would allow future tolls to be collected on the River Glade to Moncton portion of highway No. 2 in New Brunswick.

The second petition is also with respect to highways. This is about the fifth or sixth petition I have received with respect to the death strip in western Saskatchewan. It brings the total number of signatures I have now presented in the House on this subject to 2,210.

The petitioners draw attention to the fact that the two lane highway between Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, and the Alberta border on the Trans-Canada Highway has caused the deaths of 39 people in the last 20 years.

They humbly call upon parliament to instruct its servants to immediately commence negotiations with the Government of Saskatchewan to jointly fund the upgrading of this vital national transportation link by constructing two additional lanes.

I might note that today on another death strip on the Trans-Canada three people were killed near Golden, B.C., again because of the decrepit condition of the highway.

[Gun Control, May 14th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada, not content with having drafted domestic firearms policies based on prejudice, disinformation and hysteria, has decided to cast a wider net and has agreed to have gun control on the agenda of the G-8 summit meeting.

Will the representatives of the world's richest societies be able to disarm the downtrodden, the marginalized and the dispossessed of the earth by issuing a sugar-coated communique? Somehow I doubt it. What they will probably do is create another excuse to further harass and constrain their own citizens by blaming each other for providing the stimulus.

The strategy is as transparent and as old as politics itself: “When a huge minority of your citizens is angry, direct their rage outside of your own borders and take some of the pressure off”.

[Dna Identification Act, May 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Motions Nos. 10 and 11. I thought I would not get the opportunity. I thank the hon. member for her motion.

Having listened to the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice I wonder who is running this country. The parliamentary secretary gave very lucid arguments as to why we should not tackle the Supreme Court of Canada or put ourselves at risk of a showdown with the Supreme Court of Canada. If in the end the court prevailed and decided we had taken the wrong approach, those convicted during a period of three or four years prior to having the legislation declared void would have to be turned loose because they would have been wrongfully convicted. I appreciate the argument and I would not like to see the guilty going free or conversely the innocent being convicted because of any error on our part.

However, this is a country of laws. It is time we made it clear not only to the public but to ourselves that the House of Commons of Canada is the supreme legislative body of this country and that we do not have to cower in fear of what the supreme court may do. We are trying to make predictions that the supreme court will disallow this legislation or that we think it will disallow this legislation.

If you put three lawyers in a room and ask them for opinions on this or any other subject, you will get at least five opinions. Therefore we should not be cowering here. If the House in its wisdom feels these are good amendments, which I believe they are, then this is the direction we should take.

Compared with what was previously brought forward in committee, Motion No. 10 is relatively innocuous. It states that samples can be taken on charge from previous offenders, not from just anyone who has been arrested. This makes it unnecessary in the event that the charged person is exonerated of having to take special measures in order to rid the databank of the samples as can be done with fingerprints now. If we go only for people with previous convictions then surely we do not have the problem of having samples in the databank from people who have never been convicted of anything because they are convicted before a sample is taken. I think this makes eminent sense. In my opinion there is no civil liberties problem involved in this.

The other question gets a little closer to the bone with the question of civil liberties, taking DNA samples from convicted people who are already in jail. Again the social benefit of doing this in this case may outweigh the danger to civil liberties. These are convicted criminals. These are not people who have been pulled in off the street and hair plucked from their heads to see what their DNA is. These are people who have committed serious crimes, designated offences.

These people could very well have in the past committed violent offences, in particular rapes, for which they have not been caught or charged

When they are in jail and have already been convicted of a violent offence, does it not make practical sense to check to see if maybe the fellow being looked for during the previous five years might already be in custody? I see no harm in this. There is no one in this House who is a stronger defender of civil liberties than I am. People who have known me here for the last few years I think will stand behind me on this.

This is a case where it simply makes sense to go ahead, take the sample and find out if somebody being held has committed some gross crime and if that is the case another charge can be laid and the fellow is kept in for a very long period of time.

I do not buy the philosophy that we have to quiver and shake and say no, the supreme court may override us. If worst comes to worst as I understand the law we could still use the notwithstanding clause to avoid having to turn a bunch of convicted felons loose. I may be wrong on that. Perhaps some of our legal talent could advise me.

That is the way I see it, that the notwithstanding clause could be used and therefore, contrary to what the hon. parliamentary secretary said, no one would have to be turned loose as having been wrongly convicted even if the supreme court did go against us.

[Dna Identification Act, May 11th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to support Motion No. 7 under Group No. 3 which is before us. This motion recognizes the reality that not everyone in the public service is always pure and without fault. It recognizes the reality that confidential information can be misused. In fact, we can cite many instances where confidential information has been misused. Take for example the Income Tax Act. Everything is supposed to be confidential, yet every year we get specific examples of information having been improperly released by bureaucrats.

Although I am not big on very severe criminal penalties for ordinary citizens who get fouled up in the law, I am very supportive of strong penalties for people in positions of trust who abuse their responsibilities and commit offences. I would say that this proposal to raise the maximum penalty from two to five years for the improper release of information is very well placed.

We also could list examples of the improper use of lists. This government is great for lists. In fact all Canadian governments have been great for lists. We will recall that Bill C-68 was passed in the last parliament. Because there were lists of all the lawful owners of handguns in this country the government was able, suddenly and out of the blue, to declare that about 400,000 people owned firearms which were no longer legal. They were, in effect, confiscated because their value was reduced to zero by the stroke of a government pen.

If the government did not have a list, the government could not indulge in this sort of hanky-panky. It is no wonder the Canadian people are reluctant to have their names on anything, particularly in the computer age.

There are other amendments, of course, which we will be supporting to this particular legislation as we go on through the day and perhaps tomorrow.

There is the absurdity, for example, that DNA samples can be taken only after conviction. I suppose we should take fingerprints only after conviction and take mug shots only after conviction. Why there should be different rules for DNA than for fingerprinting is something I do not understand. However, that is another amendment which we will be discussing at a later time.

Getting back to Motion No. 7, I think it is very well thought out. I compliment the hon. member for bringing this forward. I notice some people on the other side nodding in agreement. I hope this amendment will ultimately pass because it really does improve the legislation.

[Canada Grain Act, May 11th, 1998]

You just don't understand.

[Canada Grain Act, May 11th, 1998]

Fifteen years tops. It has taken that long for the government to wake up to the fact that there is something out there it has not yet regulated “We have failed in our duties as a government. Let us get out there and grab them by the neck”.

I return to the specific amendments being proposed. They certainly will ease the pain. Why anybody should be subjected to a form of negative billing by their very own government truly escapes me.

When the cable companies during the last parliament were negative billing on their cable services, there were members on the other side who went berserk. Now the government is proposing negative billing and apparently it is quite all right. Mother government has determined that this is the way to go.

Again my compliments to the member for Brandon—Souris. I wholeheartedly support his amendments. I wish the amendments went further in the sense that I do not think that too many of these people growing specialty crops if it comes right down to it even want the bill, but if we are going to have it, surely it could be improved.

[Canada Grain Act, May 11th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, it gives me pleasure to speak in support of the amendments by the hon. for Brandon—Souris to this legislation.

I am pleased to know it is the intention of the government to keep its program as simple as possible. That warms my heart. We hear quite a bit of this. This is the government of all governments that loves to regulate, loves complications, loves paperwork, loves to control people. As somebody said earlier in this debate, it likes to keep its foot on people's necks to keep them down. That is the traditional Liberal approach in both social and economic matters. I guess it is something one has to get used to.

I am very fortunate as a farmer in that I produce the one commodity which this government has not yet managed to get its grubby little hands on. I still have the possibility of raising a product and selling it. I do not have to get permits. I do not have to tug at my rural forelock when I approach some bureaucrat. I take my product, which happens to be beef cattle, to the market and I run them through the ring. The auctioneer says sold, I get all my money and that is it, finished. That is the last I see of them.

An hon. member says to just wait. Actually we have had to fight this fight on several occasions. There have been constant threatening moves on the part of various federal governments over the years to intervene in our market. We have always been able to stave them off because we have an extremely strong producers organization which defends us from the machinations of the politicians.

We have been able to keep ourselves independent. We do have a small check-off but it is organized by us for us. We deal with our own business and we do not have any government intervention. It is lovely.

There is a situation in my riding which I think is relevant. There is a fellow who grows organic wheat as he calls it, no pesticides and no herbicides. It is not a special crop in the sense of Bill C-26, but a special crop nonetheless. He has problems with his marketing. The elevator system cannot handle the product because the moment it touches a commercial elevator it is no longer certifiable. It will be contaminated with the product already in the system. That cannot be avoided. He has to find his own markets. He has to arrange the transportation. He does it all himself.

Right now Mr. Arnold Schmidt of Fox Valley in my riding has a trailer load of his product sitting at Emerson, Manitoba. This trailer load of product has been hijacked by the federal government. He wants to get it across the border. This is not a carload of grain in a hopper car. It is a bagged product sitting at Emerson, Manitoba. It costs the man $25 a day to have it sitting there effectively under seizure. He can bring it home if he wants to but this would not be a terribly productive operation. If he does, it will cost him more money.

He is supposed to buy that product back from the Canadian Wheat Board. In other words it can be sold to the Canadian Wheat Board and then bought back. In the process about 90 cents a bushel is dribbled off to the government for a service that was not provided. He is not in any pooling system. They cannot use his product but under those regulations he would have to pay into the pool. He has to pay ransom to get his product out of the country.

Understandably this man is a little upset. The problem is that this is his sole means of livelihood. He grows literally thousands of acres of organically grown grains. He is marketing it mostly in Canada but some of it goes outside Canada. There is an outfit in the states called Our Daily Bread which deals in nothing but organically grown grain.

All of a sudden, without warning and for no apparent reason, the government has decided it will enforce this and nail the guy down. This is an example of how the benevolence of government, doing things that are supposed to help us farmers, can simply make life difficult for us.

The people who grow beans, peas and lentils to a large extent are doing it because these products are not under government control. It is a free market out there for this stuff. People can do as they like just as I can do with my cattle. They have their own producers organizations which apparently function very well. However when the government sees something that is not regulated “My God, we have to do something. These people are dangerous. They are making a living and we are not involved”.

This drives me around the bend. How many years have we been growing specialty crops on the prairies? Not very many. Perhaps one of my colleagues could tell me. Is it 12 years, 15 years?

[Rural Road System, May 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the shortage of money the parliamentary secretary refers to could be solved if we gave all the national highways to Bombardier. There is always money for folks like them. Then there would be no argument here today.

I listened to the parliamentary secretary's dissertation and I lost track of the number of times I heard the words “our government, this government, my government”. This is Private Members' Business. I do not think the hon. parliamentary secretary is clear on the concept. In fact he is hardly clear on any concept.

This is the only country in the western world that has no national highway program or even a coherent national highway policy. This country has 900,000 kilometres of public roads, streets and highways. Of them, 202,000 or 22% are in my own little province of Saskatchewan and a minuscule fraction, 15,000 kilometres are federal roads mostly in parks and on Indian reserves. Another 24,400 kilometres are part of the designated national highway system.

The federal government collects a whopping $5 billion annually in fuel taxes of which $4 billion comes specifically from highway fuels.

I would remind the hon. parliamentary secretary that the excise tax on fuels was initiated in response to the first fuel shock. It was used to buy up a bunch of private oil companies. It was a portion of the discredited national energy policy. It was a stick with which to beat the Canadian people.

Guess what? We are not using the excise tax for that purpose any longer. But has anyone ever heard of a government ceasing to collect a tax that it does not use for the purpose that it was designed for? Good heavens, we are still collecting the income tax which was brought in as an emergency measure to finance the war effort in World War I. We still have the excise tax that was brought in to help us through the first oil shock.

To cut this down to a little finer geographic limit, on gasoline alone, not diesel, the federal fuel excise tax in the prairie provinces is $650 million. The annual return to those provinces is limited to a few million, very few million as we heard from the hon. member for Brandon—Souris. For their excise taxes they get back a little bit of WGTA compensation for roads and a minuscule share of the famous infrastructure program.

Concerning Saskatchewan, I have to disagree with the hon. member for Brandon—Souris. Saskatchewan has actually given up on the predatory federal government and has started on its own to go ahead and twin the Trans-Canada Highway. With partners like we have in the federal government there is just no hope.

Saskatchewan actually had all its money on the table four years ago for the twinning program. The feds negotiated but when it came down to the short strokes and discovered that the Saskatchewan government was serious, it ran for the woods. Now we are paying for it ourselves.

I would like to give some numbers. This is the place where numbers should be discussed as it is a technical subject. The U.S. invests 31% of its gas tax revenues in highways. Germany invests 38%. Italy invests 45%. Australia invests 50%. France and Spain invest 65% each. Great Britain invests 100%. Canada invests 4% in highways.

With rail line abandonments we are having a disaster in our transportation system in western Canada. The highways and municipal roads are falling apart. Nevertheless, I do not have exactly the same take on this as the member for Brandon—Souris. I do not think the feds should take dedicated fuel tax revenues and put them directly into municipal or rural roads. I do believe that the government should give a reasonable portion of them to the provinces to use, as they would naturally bring them back into the municipal system.

I also believe the government should meet its obligations and do something about our disgraceful national highway system. We are a laughing stock.

There is one little stretch of the famous Trans-Canada Highway in the western edge of my riding, 108 kilometres, that has killed 39 people in the last 20 years. People call it the death strip. It is one of the places where the Saskatchewan government is now starting to do some twinning. It is in the Maple Creek area. This is only one death strip. There is another one in the Kicking Horse Pass. There is another one not too far out of Revelstoke. They are everywhere and this government will not pony up to its responsibilities.

At one time we had legislation in this country to bring in a national highway system. We actually completed a Trans-Canada Highway of sorts way back in 1961 but since then nothing has happened. We have a federal government that shirks its responsibility.

The Canadian Automobile Association has come with a plan which I and my party have supported now for a number of months. I think it makes eminent sense. They say “We know the federal government is addicted to this excise tax. It cannot just put it all from whence it came into roads where it should go. So give us back a mere 20%, two cents to the litre”. Within six or seven years we would have a national highway system that we would not have to be ashamed of, that would not be killing our citizens, that would not be forcing people driving from eastern to western Canada to divert down through Michigan in order to avoid our national highway.

This is happening right now. It is not just mom and pop on vacation but the commercial trucking industry is picking its way down through the United States in order to avoid the use of the Trans-Canada Highway. That is embarrassing. That is disgraceful.

As a Reformer of course I cannot avoid talking about costs. The hon. parliamentary secretary alluded to it. We would not have money to do surveys on the desirability of sodomy if we were going to spend money on public roads. But if we do not look after our roads they disintegrate.

In the first 12 years the cost of maintaining a paved road is only $500 to $1,000 per annum per kilometre. At that point deterioration accelerates and we have to start resurfacing at a cost of about $80,000 per lane kilometre. After another 12 years pavement break-up begins and full reconstruction has to be done at a cost of about a quarter of a million dollars per lane kilometre.

What is the old saying, a stitch in time saves nine. If we looked after these roads, if we gave them the maintenance they deserve, we would not be getting into the box we are in now.

The Trans-Canada Highway is old by highway standards. The two lane highway we have through most of the country was actually built in 1961-62. It has to be fixed. Nobody except the feds has any money and the feds glom every nickel they can get. It is about time they started to live up to their responsibilities.