Lee Morrison

[Trans-Canada Highway, February 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, during the Christmas holiday three more people died on the notorious Trans-Canada death strip in southwestern Saskatchewan. That brings the death toll to 39 since 1978.

Since this government has expressed no interest in meeting its obligations with respect to what is laughingly called our national highway system, I have some modest proposals. First, we could give the Trans-Canada highway to Bombardier. Then there would be no limit to the availability of federal funding. Or we could turn it over to Doug Young and his associates as a toll road and they could be guaranteed with federal money a reasonable rate of return on their investment.

Finally, and this is the least likely, we could try to convince this government that an adequate Trans-Canada highway would be beneficial to national unity.

[Louis Riel Day, February 13th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I seek unanimous consent to allow the member another three or four minutes to do her wrap up.

[Louis Riel Day, February 13th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, human history is nothing but a litany of injustices. In fact, I would venture to say that if there were no injustices there would be no history. This is what gets written down, usually by the winners if there is a contest. It is recorded. This is how we know about things which happen.

If we want to talk about injustice, some of my ancestors were Highland Scots. They suffered injustices and brutality equal in every way to those suffered by the Metis people and for more or less the same reasons. However, I do not lay awake at night bringing down fire and brimstone on the heads of the wicked English. It is over. It is done. There is no need to go back to it.

I have very great problems with people who want to sugar coat history, who want to rewrite history. What happened, happened. It will not help Louis Riel or his descendants for this Parliament to come up with some sort of vacuous proclamation saying that we really did not mean it. The man was hung. He did not, when he had the opportunity, grovel. He did not ask for mercy. He could have taken a plea of insanity and he would have escaped, but he was a man of principle. He walked to the gallows quite firmly and strongly. He was not dragged kicking and screaming. He did not make any particular effort to avoid capture at the end of the rebellion. He would not have even had to go to trial. He could have gone to the United States with Dumont and been scot free, but he chose not to do so.

At this date, if we come forward and say Louis, it was a terrible thing, we are so sorry, that cheapens the man's memory. He was a tough man. He was not a cry baby. I do not think we should, even though I know we have it in our power, say we pardon him.

Actually, he did not have totally clean hands. He set in motion a rebellion which cost lives. Because he was not a very good general he unnecessarily cost the lives of many of his own people. If he had listened to Gabriel Dumont, the results of the rebellion might have been far different.

The man, let us face it, had a big ego. He wanted to be in charge. He did what he chose to do. He refused to stop Middleton before he got to the Saskatchewan River. He could have done so with Dumont's strategies.

I do not think that at this late stage it makes any sense at all for us even to be debating this in the House. We have more important things to do than to debate gestures. Let us face it, this would just be a gesture.

My advice to this House is to get on with it. We have some very real problems in this country which affect not only Metis people but all of us. Those problems are what we should be dealing with. We should not be debating what happened 113 years ago.

[Employment, February 13th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, Human Resources Development has appointed John Murphy, a faceless, defeated Liberal backbench MP, to the National Council of Welfare.

This individual lacks the aggressive smarts to follow other defeated Liberal maritime MPs to the huge pork barrel, so he will get a $250 a day consolation prize, which is not bad.

Is this part of the minister's Atlantic jobs strategy?

[Charlotte County Ports, February 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for your intervention. I assure you I am leading to the heart of the matter.

Once the government's hearings on lobbying got started, the complexity of the lobbying activities became very apparent. Then despite all the strong words promising to clean up the system, the Lobbyists Registration Act failed to live up to expectations. Once installed on the other side of the House, the Liberals decided that not all lobbying was a bad thing. The final legislation avoided issues such as restricting frequency of contacts or limiting fund raising activities.

As I mentioned earlier, Young is prohibited for two years from meeting with officials in the departments of defence and human resources development because he presided over them during his last year in government. He is however free to lobby officials in other departments, including transport where he spent most of his tenure here in the last Parliament.

The rules also prevent Mr. Young from discussing the business of his clients with any minister who handles the same portfolio that he or she held as Young's cabinet colleague. Therefore, the industry and finance ministers are off limits but there is nothing to stop Mr. Young from approaching the ministers of transport or trade on behalf of a client.

Young is also restricted to giving advice on matters already in the public domain. Theoretically he cannot make use of specific knowledge of programs or policies he might possess by virtue of previous positions.

Of course, none of these restrictions apply to Mr. Zed because he served as a mere parliamentary secretary in the last government and he is available for front man.

One of Summa Strategies' first clients was very familiar to Mr. Young, CNR which he privatized in 1995. The president and CEO of CN, Paul Tellier, was the former Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the most powerful people in Ottawa. I cannot help but wonder what he could possibly learn or gain from hiring Mr. Young. Other Summa Strategies clients include the RCMP, the Prince Rupert Grain Company, and SNC-Lavalin.

Interestingly, a company called Defence Remediation Inc. which is a land mine clearing company is listed as a client of Summa Strategies. I guess it will have to wait until June 1999 before Doug Young with all his department of defence expertise can represent it personally. Right now he can only deal with transport matters.

Let us talk about Charlotte County Ports Inc., a front company which wants to acquire control of one of the few profitable local ports in Canada, Bayside port, on behalf of a very muscular New Jersey based supplier of construction aggregate. The only thing Canadian about Charlotte County Ports aside from its registration is another ex-politician, a former New Brunswick Liberal cabinet minister.

To digress momentarily, it is impossible to talk about Doug Young's post-parliamentary activities without touching on the very smelly Maritime Road Development Corporation's New Brunswick highway deal. In this instance, he was not representing a client but a consortium which he himself was the head of, at least until he realized that a former federal minister cannot work for a company or project that had been directly affected by his decisions as minister until two years after leaving office.

Because MRDC will be collecting tolls on a stretch of highway built under the 1995 federal-provincial highway agreement which Young oversaw as transport minister, he changed hats. Instead of being president, he is now chairman of the board since January 22. Obviously switching positions is not the answer.

Nevertheless, the federal ethics commissioner does not believe that Mr. Young's highway activities violate the code of ethics because Ottawa is not in charge of the project. Just as it does not own the land surrounding Bayside port, because Ottawa is not in charge of the project and did not select the contractors who would build it. I feel a lot better.

The term lobbying comes from the lobby outside the House of Commons in the British parliament buildings. It was there that interested parties and petitioners would try to capture the attention of members of Parliament before they went in to cast their votes.

It is a sign of the diminishing role of Canadian members of Parliament that we do not find any lobbyists in this lobby. Everyone in Canada knows perfectly well that the real government decisions take place far from the House of Commons so lobbyists concentrate on people in the PMO, key cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats.

If nothing else, the large number of lobbying firms in this town, even though they do not ever appear in the lobby, is a testament to how far our system has moved away from control by the ordinary citizens. The influence on public servants is particularly disturbing as they are out of the public eye and not subject to elections.

Firms like Summa make their money by trading on knowledge and contacts of their principals about the inner workings of government. They tend to be providing advice to clients and opening doors or making representations on their behalf.

The question we must ask ourselves which should make the government squirm is could Doug Young and Paul Zed be successful lobbyists if the Liberals had not won the election? What exactly do they have to sell?

[Charlotte County Ports, February 11th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that we are today reduced to debating one isolated example of insider lobbying in a proposed divestiture deal because the problem is pervasive. It almost invariably accompanies any sort of privatization negotiations in this country.

That is why Reformers temper our firm belief in the benefits of privatization with a demand that safeguards be legislated which are applicable to all privatization deals, not only to control lobbying, but to prevent the improper disposal of public assets to clients or cronies of powerful politicians.

Last summer Doug Young's successor as defence minister criticized Somalia inquiry commissioner Peter Desbarats for writing a book on his experiences with the inquiry. Apparently the minister found it unseemly that Mr. Desbarats would profit from information gained, as the minister put it, “at public expense and as part of the performance of a public duty”.

Yet scarcely a month after leaving office Mr. Young was doing exactly that. He was selling his experience. On the night of his electoral defeat a reporter asked Doug Young what his plans were and he said “I can tell you one thing. I am not going on EI”.

Indeed, Mr. Young and fellow defeated New Brunswick Liberal Paul Zed set up shop in Ottawa under the name of Summa Strategies Canada Inc. as Sparks Street lobbyists. Between the two of them they have racked up an impressive number of clients.

This is very interesting. When they were in power, neither Young nor Zed had anything good to say about lobbyists. In fact they declared war on the profession. Canadians were assured that the Liberals would just say no to lobbyists. The current Prime Minister said that during his tenure nobody would need to hire a lobbyist to press for access to his government.

Young denounced the Conservative government's Pearson airport contract as the work of lobbyists. With a bit of deeper digging they found some Liberals in the pile and they backed away from that.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, February 9th, 1998]

Have you ever been on a farm?

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, February 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. This guy is supposed to be a parliamentary secretary. Surely he must have some idea of what is in the bill. I wish he would speak to that.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, February 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would like to know what the relevance of the Bank Act is to what we are debating today.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, February 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the Group No. 4 amendments to Bill C-4 at report stage. I will first deal with the amendment concerning a fully elected board. That is what farmers are almost unanimously requesting on the prairies. There is only a halfway elected board being proposed by the minister.

The whole idea of having five appointed members, political hacks sitting on a board which is there ostensibly to serve the interests of Canadian farmers, is absolutely repugnant. With that set up, as long as the minister has his five captive appointees they only have to win the support of three out of ten of elected producer board members and they can do anything they like in, of or for the Canadian Wheat Board. I do not know of any other organization that operates under those parameters.

Why should the board not be fully elected and empowered to elect its own officers? Has the minister's legal training destroyed his faith in the capacity of farmers to manage their own affairs? Does he look upon them as a bunch simple serfs who should bow and tug their earth stained forelocks whenever they approach his eminence or any of his bureaucrats? Farmers are not made that way.

This is a little personal anecdote. On January 20 I attended a grain day meeting with about 200 farmers in Swift Current. It was organized by the Canadian Wheat Board. Most of the 200 farmers present were staunch supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board. I might even say most of them were rabid supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board. The key speaker was Lorne Hehn, the chief commissioner of the board.

When a motion was proposed from the floor that the meeting go on record as favouring the withdrawal of Bill C-4 from consideration, a huge majority voted in favour of that motion. They are wheat board supporters and almost to a man or a woman, they do not want this bill. So much for the results of the minister's vaunted consultation with producers. I would like to know which producers he consulted with and what precisely they produce because he sure was not consulting with the farmers who produce the grain.

I conduct polls on a regular basis because, unlike the people over there, I do like to know the views of my constituents on the issues of the day. In my most recent mail-in poll I asked a very specific question: Would you like me to support or oppose Bill C-4?

Replies are still trickling in. Of the responses I have already received only 23% say they would like me to support this legislation. I know the minister is very well aware that support for the board is stronger in my riding than anywhere else in western Canada but that support clearly does not extend to him or to his ill-conceived legislation which he is trying to ram down the throats of farmers.

Another amendment which is very important, and it also applies to this question of whether or not the board is going to be democratic, is that the fully elected board, not the minister, must control the selection of the president if farmers are going to have any real say in how the board is going to operate. After all it is the guy who has his hands on the levers on a day to day basis who is really going to make the important decisions.

A president cannot act as directed by the farmer elected board of directors if the minister at his own discretion can call for the termination of that man or woman's position. It just does not make any sense. A president who answers in this way to the minister cannot act in the best interests of the corporation or the producers. He can only be a captive of ministerial discretion.

I would like to jump to No. 18 on this list of proposed amendments. The directors and officers must be placed in a position where the duty and care of farmers, the interests of farmers, is their primary purpose, not serving the interests of the corporation.

There was a court case in Manitoba not too long ago wherein it was determined that the board does not have a fiduciary responsibility to farmers. Their responsibility, and this is a clear court decision, is to the board. If we are going to work within those parameters, surely to heaven the board must be responsible to farmers, must be chosen by farmers and must choose its own officers from among farmers. Otherwise we simply continue the same situation where the board and the board alone is at the end of the responsibility road and it has a fiduciary responsibility only to the government.

The board's job under those conditions is not to get the best available price for the farmer's grain. It is to sell the grain in the largest possible volumes as quickly as possible and get it out of its hair. That is a rather absurd way to operate a business enterprise.