Lee Morrison

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 13th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I guess there was a question in there somewhere. I was touched to hear that the hon. member was hurt by the tone of debate in the last parliament, as the practitioner of some of the most vicious debate that I have ever heard in this place. It brings to mind the old proverb of the pot calling the kettle black. This is one for the books.

The hon. member mentioned that she will only get a pension of $17,000. I do not know what she did wrong or why she will be punished. Anyone else with her number of years of service would be getting $19,096. Perhaps she was bad and they took away some of her money.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 13th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, here we go again. I thought all this had been put behind us back in 1998 but this pension issue is kind of like a smelly dead animal. The dog buried it in 1995 and then he dug it up in 1998 and then he buried it again. Now he has dug it up again within the last few days. Maybe, just maybe, some day the public will be sufficiently offended by the smell of this dead animal that they will react against the Liberal Party and make it pay a price for its Machiavellian games.

This bill, this action on the part of the government, has had the effect of reinforcing the very unfortunate public perception that politics is a dishonourable profession and that MPs as a group are self-serving and venal.

As an institution, why on earth would we do this to ourselves? Why do we want to send out that message? More properly, I would say, what motivated the government to do this?

The most charitable interpretation is that it was simple mischief. It wanted to start the type of debate that we have heard going on in this House for the last 20 minutes, which went on last night and which will probably continue on interminably and forever. I would have to say that unfortunately there is a more probable cause than simple mischief, which is simple venality on the part of some of government members.

The member for Edmonton West, for example, with her defeat imminent, has to be protected, along with many of her colleagues who want to have the best of both worlds. They want to have their pension at 55, but they would like to have severance pay as well. It is a new twist on double-dipping. However, even if mischief were not the prime consideration, it did give the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough the opportunity to make a campaign speech tonight.

Did he attack the government for its perfidy? Of course not. He raised this silly fiction that somehow the government is doing this to help the official opposition.

I have been around this place for seven years and I have yet to see the government do anything to help the official opposition. That is not the way the game is played. The hon. member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough should know that. It would be extraordinarily naive to think that we could move the government. We cannot even move it on the really big, important stuff. How on earth could we move it on something like this?

Anyway, the member supported his good friends on the government side, irrationally attacked the official opposition on a great variety of issues, and no doubt will have his reward in heaven or will be rewarded by his good buddies across the aisle. It must be really tough to belong to a dying political party and be reduced to licking the hands of government members.

This pension scheme was wrong in 1995 and it is still wrong. It gives members of this House an indecent advantage over ordinary citizens. It is as simple as that. People who sit in parliament should in no way receive a greater public benefit than that to which ordinary citizens are entitled. This is quite fundamental in my view to the way democracy is supposed to work.

People who rationalize and say that we work hard and we really deserve this pension forget that a lot of them would not have had a pension of any kind if they had not been elected to parliament. Now that they are here, they say it is a good idea.

I am not saying that a pension per se would be wrong. I never have said that. However, the pension that we are talking about today is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is an indecent assault on the taxpayers of Canada. I do not know of a single member of parliament who was dragged kicking and screaming into the House of Commons and forced to work for menial wages. Then, to take a pension at the end of that work perhaps would not fit with his views of what is right and what is wrong. We are all volunteers.

I simply cannot go back to my constituents and say that I have changed my mind and that I will buy my way back into this pension plan because I sure could use the money. My self-respect precludes that. I have to look in the mirror every morning when I shave. We cannot do that if we do not feel good about ourselves.

Five years ago, two years ago and again this week the government could have fixed this plan. It could have made it acceptable to all, but it did not. Originally it could have abided by the recommendations of the Blais commission. It ignored it. It had to have the lollipops inserted into the legislation, and the lollipops have stayed all the way through the various ramifications of the legislation that we have seen over the past few years.

I would like to comment on a comment which was made by the member for Winnipeg—Transcona which suggested that our party was not playing by “the rules” because some of our officers, after having agreed to let the government bring this legislation forward on a fast track, then followed our party policy for heaven's sake and voted against it. How terrible to vote against something to support the policies of one's own party. How dare we do that.

With respect to the hon. member for Winnipeg—Transcona, I would like to point out that some years ago I had a long and spirited but friendly correspondence with the late Stanley Knowles, one of my political icons. If Stanley Knowles were alive today he would be horrified. He is probably spinning in his grave when he sees his party supporting this perfidious pension scheme. This is a party that has, unfortunately, forgotten its roots.

Well, by God, I have not forgotten mine. I know where I came from. I know who my constituents are. I know who pays the bills around this place. I will not support legislation which unfairly takes money from the pockets of ordinary, decent, taxpaying Canadians in order to create a completely unacceptable and immoral pension scheme for members of parliament.

The hon. government House leader alluded to private pension plans, which he said are just as rich as the one we are discussing here. I wish that he would name one as a specific example. In his statement he talked about a one to one contributory rate, to which I say amen. That has been our policy forever, a one to one contributory rate, but we get $3.61 of taxpayer funding for every dollar which members put into this plan. That is why it is not right. It is both fiscally and morally unacceptable to me and I believe to the great majority of my colleagues.

Let us not kid ourselves. It is easy to rationalize. It is easy to throw out one's chest, as the hon. member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough who is going to get his pension has done, and criticize the rest of us. The bottom line is that it is a bad plan. It smells. It is that dead animal dug up for the third time. I hope that this time we bury it and bury it for good, and that the next government of Canada will again revisit this situation, appoint a completely neutral commission, with no ties whatsoever to this place, and say “Gentlemen and ladies, sit down and give us a plan. What is an MP worth? Show us the remuneration. Show us what the pension should be and then we will act on it”. Then we would not have to have these nasty, divisive debates again and again. It is unproductive and I am getting sick of it.

[Firearms, June 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the minister should some day answer a question.

On June 4 only 382,498 firearms had been registered under the new system and about 103,000 were in process. Depending upon how many firearms are actually in circulation, completion of that process will take somewhere between 18 and 50 years.

How many thousands of employees does the minister estimate will be required to supplement the 1,600 who are already employed in this idiotic fiasco?

[Firearms, June 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, as of June 4 the Canadian Firearms Centre had issued only 183,353 personal licences and had a backlog of about 144,000 applications in process or awaiting attention.

At that rate, even using the justice department's lowball estimate of three million gun owners in Canada, it would take about 25 years to complete the licensing process.

I ask the justice minister, what is going to happen on the deadline date of December 31 of this year?

[Agriculture, June 9th, 2000]

Will the minister withdraw his remarks about the witnesses?

[Agriculture, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I take it then that the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food is saying that all the people who appeared before us were liars.

[Agriculture, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board.

Bill C-34, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act, is linked to a memorandum of understanding between the wheat board and the minister responsible, in other words, an agreement between the minister and the minister.

The minister clearly told the standing committee that the MOU was prepared in consultation with stakeholders, but the grain companies, the railways and farm organizations that appeared have all denied this. Just who did the minister consult?

[Immigration And Refugee Protection Act, June 1st, 2000]

And with such an important riding.

[Immigration And Refugee Protection Act, June 1st, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by complimenting the member for Winnipeg Centre for his very reasoned comments about the over-reliance of this new legislation on regulation rather than having the rules clearly stated and built into the bill. This is just another of hundreds of examples that we have seen in the last seven years of the gradual erosion of the powers of parliament and the handing over to either the centre of the government or the bureaucrats, or both, the powers which should be exclusive to us in this Chamber.

As the son and grandson of immigrants I have a very keen interest in what I see happening around me these days. We have become, for the third time in a century, an immigration dependent country, an immigration dependent economy. I do not think anyone would deny at this point that in order to keep the pump primed we do have to bring in more people, preferably people with skills, people with ambition, and people who can contribute physically and financially to the maintenance and growth of our economy. This should be the prime purpose of immigration. This is what Canadians want.

For the record I would like to quote the policy of the Canadian Alliance Party on that particular point:

We should have an immigration system that will accommodate independent immigrants who will quickly add to our economy; a system which will welcome genuine refugees and which will reunite people with their families as soon as possible.

The government has failed to deliver that, and I do not see any sign in the new act that it is on the line for the future.

I should like to address briefly the question of refugees, which seems to be the part of the Canadian immigration system that is attracting the most public attention and is causing the most concern to the general population. It really hurts me as a Canadian to see how our country has been made a laughing stock of the world because of the way we handle refugee claimants.

Migrants get their toes on Canadian soil, say the magic word refugee, and they are in. That is a wonderful setup for criminal traffickers in human beings or for plain scofflaws and queue jumpers. This is not the way to run a country. If we to do it that way, why have an immigration department at all? This issue is that it is becoming a rubber stamp. It makes no sense.

This goes back to a court decision in 1985. The Singh decision made very clear that once people gets their toes on the ground they have all the rights and privileges of a Canadian citizen, or at least that is the way the decision was interpreted by the immigration department.

The government extended the Singh decision to mean that all refugee claimants, in fact any foreign national who lands on Canadian soil, should be given the full protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That interpretation is certainly a major contributing factor to Canada becoming the favoured target all over the world for people traffickers, for scofflaws, for people who cannot be bothered to go through the formalities of proper immigration procedures.

This new legislation will outsing Singh. According to the new act anyone who applies for entry into the country, no matter where in the world, automatically gains protection under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There is no other country on the face of the earth that gives citizenship rights, or rights equal to those of citizens, to foreign nationals outside its borders. People trying to get into this country will think we have lost our minds.

I have talked to immigration officials who have read the bill and see what is coming. Obviously I cannot quote their names but they are appalled. They are asking what they are going to do now when what looks like a spurious applicant comes before them and they say no for a good reason. The person will then immediately invoke the rights our citizens would have under our constitution to challenge the decision made by these officers.

If the officers are confronted with this often enough, they will simply throw up their hands and say “It is no use. We cannot keep bailing. The hole in the boat is getting bigger all the time. Our jobs are without purpose. We will just have to open the floodgates and let people in”.

I sincerely hope that clause in the legislation will be amended out before we finally get to vote on it. It is an absurdity. I do not know who makes up these things, but it must be somebody with a fine imagination.

I have talked about the idiocy of the new legislation, but there are some good things in it. There is the stiffening of the penalties for trafficking, for example. However, if we look at that closely, those clauses are without much meaning.

If someone is a big time people smuggler, that person will not come to Vancouver, set up a booth on Hastings Street and say “Come now and we will arrange your illegal immigration”. He will reside either in his home country or in a third country where we cannot get at him. We have a law that says one could get a million dollar fine or a year in jail. So what? It has no effect.

I have heard today a couple of times about how our minister has presumably partially stopped the flow of illegal immigrants by going to source, making trips and talking to officials in the source countries of illegal immigrants. I am sure, oh so sure, that really deterred a lot of people. In the real world how many do we think it deterred when we have legislation coming up that will give people the right and the opportunity to say that if we do not want to let them into our country they will appeal again and again and eventually get in. What is our minister doing?

I deeply regret that I have only 10 minutes. I wanted to tell the House a whole bunch of horror stories on the other side of the coin about legitimate immigrants, people who have come here with the best will and intent. They have good jobs and are contributing to the country. However, after years and years of effort, they have been unable to get landed. I have a number of them in my constituency. Even though I am in a rural and so-called remote area, I get more of these kinds of cases than of almost anything else but income tax.

[Grain Transportation, May 5th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it is tough to be at the bottom of the food chain. Just ask a rabbit or a western farmer.

The recently announced increase in grain freight rates will add $1.45 a tonne to farmers' surging costs. The CTA is not at fault. It just crunches the numbers mandated by parliament. The government is to blame for not acting on the recommendations of two very costly reports.

Will the Minister of Transport get his act together before August 1 and implement the revenue cap recommended in the Kroeger report?