Lee Morrison

[Foreign Affairs, February 28th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, as one who is somewhat pedantic about the use of language, I look around this vast almost empty Chamber and I wonder why what we are doing here tonight is called a debate.

I would call it a series of monologues, commentaries on decisions previously made by the government. I suspect that even as we speak there are similar discussions going on in several bars in Ottawa that would be equally productive and have equal effect on the decisions that this government may ultimately make.

Haiti was the second nation in this hemisphere after the U.S.A. to gain its independence. Unfortunately from that point onward nothing seemed to go right. That was their last success. It has been an unremitting history of bloodshed, brutality, poverty and misery for almost two centuries. The only prolonged period of peace and

stability was during the occupation by the U.S. marines during the 1920s and 1930s.

Even when I was working in Haiti, which was only about 15 years ago, the infrastructure that we had was almost entirely the legacy of the U.S. occupation and any that was left had been built by foreign aid within very recent times.

It is a sad commentary but those are the magnitudes of the problems which Canada or other countries will be facing trying to pull Haiti perhaps kicking and screaming into the 20th century and trying to build a democratic state there.

As Canadians, we do have a vested interest in maintaining political and economic stability in the Caribbean. We do have a vested interest in creating a democratic state in Haiti. There are two very important reasons why we have this vested interest. One is that we have trade and investment links in this area not so much with Haiti itself but with its neighbours and most particularly with the Dominican Republic which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Therefore, if Haiti blows it up, it will have a direct influence on our well-being in this country.

The second big interest we have and one we share with almost every country in the hemisphere is the question of refugees. If Haiti again does not succeed and everything turns upside down there will be another great flood of Haitians trying to get out of the place in unseaworthy boats going willy-nilly to whatever shore they may find. These people, by the thousands or the tens of thousands, will then become a burden on the recipient countries.

How much better to send some aid and a few people into Haiti to try to straighten out the situation there than to end up with another disaster equivalent to the one we had about four years ago? I do support Canadian intervention. I do support our sending additional troops there to take command now that the Americans have decided it is time for them to leave.

Besides being in our national interest, there is a certain moral imperative for our continued presence in that unhappy country to preserve life and also to provide or assist in the provision of humanitarian assistance.

Finally, unlike the situation in Bosnia, this is an assignment that is well within the capability of our poorly equipped military. There are no heavy weapons to contend with and no well organized opposition. Although, like in any military operation there is always a risk, that risk will not be high unless we do not have adequate rules of engagement. If the rules of engagement are adequate and clearly defined and if our troops will not be unduly restrained from defending themselves, then we should be there. If they are going to be unduly restrained then they should not go. We do not send our people overseas as human sacrifices. That is my primary consideration. The only caveat I would add to my support for this project is that if our military are there they must be able to defend themselves. I have that small reservation.

I will at this time lend my support to the ministers in whatever they have decided to do, whether they are going to send 500 or 750. I know the decision has been made but we will give it our blessing.

[Distinct Society, February 28th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, a nation's laws should be based on its values, goals and aspirations, not its genes. With that observation I wish to read some excerpts from a letter to the Western Producer by T. A. Howe of Regina.

The continuing tragic ethnic wars of our world attest to the folly of promoting societies and distinctions based on ethnic heritage.

A wise and just society builds on the equality, creativity and unity of all individuals without regard to birth or background-

Entrenching `distinct society' status based on the dominant group in a nation or province cannot be justified (either by history or by urgency) any more than granting or continuing special status for any historically dominant gender, colour or creed.

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

What I would like to know is what do we have a Minister of National Defence for? These are the forces who have had no decent support from the politicians and the bureaucrats behind them. They do not have the equipment. The Liberals want to sent them over there to take their lumps. I would suggest that some hon. members opposite, if they are so bloody brave, should pick up their Armalites and head for Bosnia.

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I do not believe I saw the hon. member at the non-briefing we attended.

With respect to the question of air strikes, I would remind the hon. member that when air strikes were first mentioned we had almost unanimous agreement in the House on that particular matter. This is nothing new. At that time it was clearly stated by members from all parties that this did bring in the possibility that our forces would suffer casualties.

Nobody over here is saying that our soldiers are not capable of fighting and that they cannot take casualties. What we are saying is they have nothing to fight with. The Liberals want to send them over there to fight the Serbs with their teeth, and they cannot do it.

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, as I said, it appears the government wants to give an aura of respectability to the decisions it has already made.

The hon. member asked how many soldiers we would send and how we would equip them. I would rather the hon. member tell us how many soldiers the government has decided to send and how it hopes to equip them when we simply do not have the equipment. We did not even have adequate equipment for our poor little peacekeeping forces with their light armour and obsolete personnel carriers. How on earth will we equip a genuine fighting force?

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I will be dividing my time with the member for Athabasca.

Like my colleagues who preceded me, I am considerably disappointed in the fact that this is just a take note debate. There is no great honour in participating in a charade. We are here to give an aura of respectability to decisions made by cabinet and DND bureaucrats, life and death decisions affecting our Canadian forces.

This is a matter which should not have been about partisan politics, a family matter if you will, where we could put our ideological differences aside, sit down and reason together, make the best decisions possible and vote freely without the lash of the party whips. However, that will not happen.

The Prime Minister and I are about the same age. Neither of us will ever be asked to pick up an Armalite or step into a minefield. If, as usual, old men-and we are mostly men in this place-are to be asked to decide to send young people to die in a foreign land, they should be able to make informed decisions, which is a condition this government is denying those of us on this side of the House.

The briefing we received on November 30 was not very informative. That is putting it rather gently. The unfortunate officer who had to deliver it was not in a position to tell us even approximately how large a force cabinet has decided to commit. He did not know what sorts of troops Canada would be sending, what their function would be, or what the long term objectives would be. Under those circumstances, it hardly seemed worth while to ask him how they would be equipped or where our impoverished military would be able to scrounge effective weaponry on short notice.

In spite of my objections to giving a blank cheque to cabinet on this matter, I am not an isolationist. I believe that for the sake of international political stability as well as for the sake of common

humanity we must at times be our brothers' keepers. In fact for more than a year before the UN finally stopped temporizing and bluffing I strongly advocated tactical air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs to protect the so-called safe havens. The tiny under armed peacekeeping forces were incapable of serious intervention, but the use of superior air power was something that was doable. And it did work, albeit too late for thousands and thousands of civilians.

Now, with the hostilities more or less on hold and with most of the exhausted combatants ready to sign a peace agreement on December 14, I can see some merit in deploying significant well equipped ground forces to in effect keep reminding the three parties that the war is over. The two divisions proposed by NATO should be adequate to do the job, although that is by no means certain.

I believe Canada should participate in something, but what? Canada faces a moral and practical dilemma. We must never again send inadequately equipped troops into harm's way. Our peacekeepers performed magnificently in Bosnia with limited supplies and equipment, some of it obsolete. However, under the more severe rules of engagement proposed for the NATO force, Canadians could end up being cannon fodder. That is not an idle fear. Aside from the fact that Canada cannot properly equip a significant fighting force on short notice, there is no indication that Canada will be significantly involved in the military and political decision making process beyond helping to define the rules of engagement.

If the mission does turn out badly, neither the Minister of National Defence nor the Minister of Foreign Affairs can assure Canadians that our soldiers will not be put at undue risk because of decisions made by other nations. We are no longer a big kid on the block, and we are unlikely to be treated like one within NATO councils. With our deteriorating economy and feeble military capability, we cannot expect to be taken very seriously, notwithstanding our past contributions to UN endeavours.

NATO has indicated that this will be a quick and dirty operation that will only last about 12 months. That sounds reassuring, but what exactly is proposed if when the magic deadline approaches the troops are actively engaging one or more of the belligerent parties? If DND or the Department of Foreign Affairs have the slightest idea, they are not telling anyone. There is no such thing as a timetable for war. Even if DND could cobble together an adequately equipped and militarily significant force right now, we would not have the resources to sustain it for a prolonged and indefinite period.

In summary, Canada's participation in whatever cabinet is proposing to do might save lives and help to maintain world political stability. However, with our military gutted by this and preceding governments, with our top heavy military bureaucracy and our thinly stretched and overused cadre of combat troops, we simply lack the capability to make an effective effort. In military parlance, the tail of the Canadian forces is overdeveloped and the teeth have been neglected. Our plethora of generals and colonels cannot throw their desks at the Serbs.

To suggest that we can continue to be the world's 911 number is false and misleading puffery. My advice to the government is that it be guided by its white paper of December 1994. Sit this one out. Do not get us in over our heads. Do not start something we cannot finish.

[Firearms, December 1st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, violent home invasions are becoming a serious problem in Canada. The Liberals say that they want a safer society, but by protecting criminals from decent citizens they make life more dangerous for us all.

The Prime Minister has on various occasions stated that it is somehow un-Canadian to possess firearms for home protection. That is easy to say when one is protected by armed guards. However a few weeks ago when the system broke down, the Prime Minister discovered that even the mighty are vulnerable.

I have this vision of the Prime Minister shivering in his nightshirt, clutching his soapstone carving. I wonder if as the long minutes dragged by he would not have felt more comfortable if he had been holding a .38.

The rest of us do not even have sleeping policeman around-

[Constitutional Amendments Act, November 30th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is very interesting to hear a member from the province of Saskatchewan oozing around this question of what the legislation will do for or to the small provinces. I am glad he has cleared this up, because we know that Saskatchewan has not been relegated to fourth class status but only to third class status. This is progress. I really do appreciate the hon. member's words.

When he goes home to Saskatchewan and is able to present his case before his electors, I am sure they will be thrilled beyond measure by this. If the name of a certain Norwegian during the last war, which Beauchesne will not let me mention, is ever raised at one of his meetings, he will know what they are talking about.

[Endangered And Threatened Species Act, November 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, not long ago Bill S-7 was introduced through the back door by the government and passed into law without serious thought about its long term consequences.

With Bill C-275 we again see Liberal environmental policy being brought to the House surreptitiously. Why do I say this? By a curious coincidence, a discussion document issued by Environment Canada last winter contains, almost verbatim, material now incorporated into Bill C-275.

For example, section 9 provides for the prohibition or restriction of any activity deemed threatening to an endangered species on privately occupied land under federal jurisdiction or, with provincial consent, on any provincial lands.

That clearly threatens grazing and timber leases in western Canada. Also, according to the definition in the bill of provincial lands it threatens any private lands registered under provincial law. So much for property rights.

What evidence would the environmental bureaucrats need to designate a species as endangered and its habitat as protected? Pursuant to section 4 the minister would have the arbitrary authority to declare a species endangered. Page 26 of the discussion paper recommends that scientific uncertainty should not be used as a reason not to act.

I will read briefly from this document:

In cases when high quality scientific data are not available for a candidate species, methods involving estimation, inference and projection are acceptable. The effect of current or potential threats may be extrapolated into the future as long as it can be reasonably supported. If estimates about the status of a species vary, it is appropriate to choose the one that leads the listing in the highest risk category as a precaution.

The sorry state of science in 1995 is that witch hunting bureaucrats are forthrightly recommending that the scientific method be discarded. I think the envirocrats are smoking something and it is not environmentally friendly.

That pamphlet refers to public consultation work shops to be held in cities across Canada. Consultation with whom? Certainly not with the people most likely to be affected, Canada's farmers and ranchers and their municipal councils which brought this matter to my attention.

This document and the bill spawned by it illustrate the typical attitude of Canadian urbanites that rural Canada is their playground, unfortunately cluttered up by all those quaint rustics who do nasty things like cultivating land and producing cheap, wholesome food for Canada and for the world.

Much of rural Canada is lawfully owned by those who live on it. Urbanite nature lovers looking for pleasant places to have picnics, build fires, ride dirt bikes and dump their beer cans should consider the convenience of doing these things on the lawns of the hon. member for Davenport or the hon. member for Hamilton East. Perhaps then those members would have a more sympathetic attitude toward our much put upon farmers.

Farmers do not have much clout in today's Canada. They made up 30 per cent of the population in 1931 but account for only 3.2 per cent today. They are the real endangered species because in the eyes of Liberal politicians and bureaucratic whiz kids they are irrelevant.

Rural people are as powerless to stop this bill as they were to stop gun control Bill C-68 which the House shoved down their protesting throats last June with no significant input from them. With their feeble numbers they do not matter to a government preoccupied with the electoral map. Like Napoleon, Liberals measure the importance of a group by the size of its battalions.

Legislation of this nature can be counterproductive because it casts Environment Canada in an adversarial role. For example, any farmer with burrowing owls in the pasture would have to be demented to report their presence to anyone. I do not think that we in Canada will ever reach the point that has been reported in

Oregon where it is claimed that some woodlot owners shoot spotted owls on sight. When someone's livelihood is threatened, who knows?

Most rural Canadians, especially ranchers in the west, have been very good stewards of the land and most are appreciative of the wildlife which sometimes grazes on their crops and competes with them for native forage. As a result, wildlife populations in the rural west, especially in my riding, are immeasurably larger than they were 50 or even 20 years ago.

Canadians like to poke fun at the endangered species lunacies of our friends south of the border. It has been 17 years since the Tellico dam project in Tennessee was stopped to protect the habitat of the snail darter, a species remarkably similar to scores of others which, in the fullness of geological time, has become extinct. The silliness took place because under the stringent conditions of the U.S. endangered species act the regulators had no choice.

If that act had been literally applied the deliberate international extinction of the smallpox virus could have led to fines or jail sentences for the public health officials who so wantonly and cruelly destroyed the species.

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent down there to preserve the habitat of various rodents, including the Choctawahatchee beach mouse in Florida and the kangaroo rat in California.

When the U.S. fish and wildlife service learned of the presence of kangaroo rats on 800 acres of Cindy Domenigonis' California farm it would not allow her to work her land for three years. That is the direction in which Canada will be heading if this so-called private member's bill becomes law.

Bill C-275 epitomizes the Liberal propensity to regulate, control and run roughshod over individuals who do not have big battalions at their command. I oppose it and I urge anyone who believes in sound science, effective conservationism and the rights of rural people to oppose it as well.

[Indian Affairs, November 8th, 1995]

You fund it.