Lee Morrison

[The Budget, March 14th, 1995]

Another colonial paper.

[The Budget, March 14th, 1995]

What institution is he in?

[The Budget, March 14th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his very dramatic intervention. One thing puzzles me. I know the hon. member is an economist, yet in his intervention I detected hints of three economic theories all warring in the same breast. I heard a bit of Adam Smith. I heard a bit of Engels perhaps and a great deal of John Maynard Keynes.

As far as his immediate question regarding secession is concerned, is the hon. member suggesting that if they bail out and leave the sinking ship of state they will not be required to man any of the lifeboats? They could get off scot free after having benefited from the largess of deficit spending for lo these 20 years. Now they will leave us holding the bag and take nothing. Is this what the hon. member is saying?

[The Budget, March 14th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, as I sat in the House on February 27 I felt I was in a time warp.

For 20 years we have been hearing the same biased platitudes from Liberal and Conservative finance ministers. The Lib con artists I call them, telling us that they have the deficit in hand, responsibility reigns and everything is going to be all right if people will just be patient and trust them.

When the current Prime Minister was finance minister he announced with a lot of heavy breathing that significant reductions in the deficit can be expected, and then proceeded to set a new record for deficit spending.

In 1982 Allan MacEachen said the government cannot responsibly add to the deficit, and then proceeded to set another record.

In 1990 Michael Wilson stated: "We will reduce the deficit to $28.5 billion next year. We will cut it in half to $14 billion in three more years and we will reduce it further to $10 billion in the next year after that". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The government still lives in the same economic fantasy world as its predecessors. It believes it can spend and borrow itself into prosperity.

The Minister of Finance boldly stated in his budget speech that it is time to put our fiscal house in order, a line borrowed from a famous 1989 speech by the leader of the Reform Party. The minister has finally learned to talk the talk, but he made only a feeble attempt to walk the walk. He said that Canadians want clear action and then he proceeded to deliver mush.

Previous finance ministers were able to play budgetary games, sleights of hand for 20 years without making any real spending cuts. I acknowledge that the incumbent did make some real cuts. Thanks to the magic of compound interest he had no luxury of choice. He had to make cuts just to avoid immediate disaster. However he did not have the courage to cut as deeply as necessary to begin to solve the deficit problem.

The proposed $12 billion in cuts are going to hurt but they are going to be offset by additional interest payments which will continue to rise until they reach more than $50 billion in 1997.

What is his program after that? Continued half-hearted cuts until there is nothing left to reduce while annual interest payments continue to rise to $60 billion or $70 billion?

The hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood mentioned the same problem. He said: "We will solve this. We will have a new Bretton Woods agreement. We are going to have this great big international conference so we do not have to clean up our act at home. We will just bring in the IMF and it will solve all our problems for us".

Where does this insanity end? Does the government really intend to continue treading water until it drowns in debt? We cannot perpetually borrow money to give it away to people or entities that do not need it.

Speaker after speaker has risen on the other side of the House to tell us about their compassion. They ooze compassion. Please tell me what is compassionate about destroying the economy of the country?

Canada is like a patient with a gangrenous leg and a tender-hearted but incompetent doctor. That leg should come off but the doctor with misdirected kindness amputates only the foot. When that does not solve the problem, he cuts off a few more inches and then a few inches more, each time subjecting the patient to additional trauma. In the end, the poor devil dies anyway.

The finance minister is fortunate that unlike the incompetent physician, he cannot be sued for malpractice. They are so proud of their transfer programs over there but thanks to 20 years of deficits the biggest single transfer program is now payments to money lenders.

A lot of the transfer payments do not even stay in Canada but are delivered into the hands of financial institutions in Tokyo, New York and Zurich. The Liberals and Conservatives, with their bread and circus approach to governance, have sold us into economic slavery.

It is obscene that this most blessed of countries should be headed for economic collapse and that foreign money lenders are being allowed to continually suck our blood. This is the legacy of Lib-Con economic policy.

The Minister of Finance has refused to face reality in the name of compassion and caring. We are going to continue down that same steep and narrow path to national bankruptcy. What good will his reassuring words do when not too many years from now half or more than half of the national revenue must go into debt service?

What will be his after the fact excuse if the money lenders cut us off and we are no longer able to provide even basic government services, much less social programs? What will he tell the people of Canada when we are unable to help even the poorest of the poor, the old, the sick, the infirm, the weak? How will he explain it when there is no money left, when there is no medicare, when there is no welfare, when there are no old age pensions, no UIC, when there is nothing. Because that is the direction in which we are headed.

The government has again proven through its non-budget that it cannot be trusted with a credit card. For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, it is time to take that credit card away.

[The Budget, March 14th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, sometimes I wonder how much longer we will have to endure this same tiresome line from the Bloc, constantly referring everything that happens in this House to the specifics of how it will affect Quebec. Never mind the country, just Quebec. Frankly, it drives me nuts.

He mentioned the milk subsidies and the 30 per cent cut over two years. He said the west received a much better deal because it received restitution for the cut of the Crow benefit. I wonder if he realizes or if he chooses to ignore that the cut to the Crow benefit was 100 per cent and immediate. He is talking about a 30 per cent cut over two years.

He also states quite correctly that 50 per cent of fluid milk production comes from Quebec. I wonder what he thinks will happen to all that subsidized milk production if he gets his dream of independence and the Canadian market is cut off, as it naturally would be-

[Firearms Act, March 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have owned firearms off and on for more than half a century. I have been a reasonably good citizen but now in the eyes of the Minister of Justice and certainly in the eyes of the popular press, I have become a threat to society, a menace to peace, order and good government.

I am going to be subjected, if these laws that are now before us in Bill C-68 are all lumped together as one-the administrative bureaucracy and the criminal sanctions-of running the risk of being a common criminal. That, to my way of thinking, is neither just nor sane.

If I or anyone else chooses to inconvenience the bureaucracy by failing to comply with the purely administrative requirement, the result will be a criminal record and the penalty could far exceed that which some drunken hoodlums recently received for murdering a harmless old man in the province of Saskatchewan. This is absurd.

The justice minister says that he has actually separated the administrative from the criminal because we have these two sections in the one bill. That is smoke and mirrors if we are still talking about draconian criminal penalties for failure to observe an administrative law. That, in my humble opinion, does not give separation.

I own a few firearms even today but I hardly ever hunt. I do not belong to any shooting club. I do not belong to the NFA. If I lost my guns tomorrow it would not make a big difference to my lifestyle. However, I would be losing something a lot more important than hardware. I would be losing a big piece of my civil liberty.

The justice minister says that the right to own a particular type of property, firearms, is really just a privilege. I submit that Canada's top lawyer has an unbelievably feeble grasp of history and of the common law. Omission from the British North America Act or the charter of rights and freedoms does not mean that a right does not exist. Our legal system is based on British common law and on the sanctity of customary rights.

When Sir William Blackstone codified the common law he noted that every individual has certain absolute rights, including the right to personal security, personal liberty and the right to own and use property. Does that sound familiar? American revolutionaries did not invent those concepts. They merely enshrined in their constitution the rights which as Englishmen they already had.

Blackstone went on to list five auxiliary rights without which the absolute rights could not be protected and maintained. One of them was the right to own personal arms. When Americans passed their famous second amendment to the constitution, their right to bear arms, it was only a modest extension of a right which they had before the revolution.

In Great Britain there has been a steady chipping away at this right, starting in 1870 and accelerating after the first world war. It was supposedly because of the threat from Bolshevik or anarchist terrorists. However, just as in Canada today, public hysteria was fanned by the government and, just as in Canada, laws have become progressively more intrusive, complex and downright repressive. Today they have almost achieved the justice minister's ideal where only police, soldiers and the trusted elite of society have legal firearms. However, there is no shortage of firepower in the U.K.

A few months ago I talked with a Scottish gun dealer and he told me that Great Britain is awash with guns. You can buy one faster and more easily in a pub than from him, and cheaper because there is no tax.

What is accomplished as gun laws are made tougher and tougher? What affect does the hassle and the expensive bureaucracy have on crime? Very little.

I have reviewed firearms legislation and crime statistics from various states south of the border and from several other countries. Now I am going to bore the House with some of the dull facts that the justice department's social engineers cheerfully ignore.

Consider the prairie provinces. Since gun controls began in 1978, the annual homicide rate has averaged about 3.2 per 100,000 people, of which about one-third are committed with guns.

In the four border states of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho the rate was 2.7 per 100,000. That is 16 per cent less. Those are all wide open. The justice minister would probably say those are lawless states where you can own and carry almost anything short of a bazooka.

The District of Columbia, with the most stringent controls of any North American jurisdiction except Mexico has the unbelievably high murder rate of 80 per 100,000 per year, the highest

in the western world. How can there possibly be such problems where guns are strictly controlled?

Maybe it has something to do with cultural and economic forces. Maybe it has something to do with organized crime, drug dealing, racial tension, grinding miserable poverty and a collapsed public education system.

Gun control is an artificially induced smoke screen. It is a cynical ploy to distract the public from the real issues, not the least of which is the breakdown of our criminal justice system. The government helped create this highly emotional issue and now it is playing it for all it is worth. This issue has absolutely no relation to crime control and it is absurd that the justice minister has made the mixture. It is a lot easier to make scapegoats of decent citizens than it is to admit that our justice system is misdirected.

To give the devil his due, this bill does contain some good features actually aimed at criminals instead of ordinary citizens; the four-year minimum sentence for violent offences committed with a firearm, for example, although those receiving this penalty will still be eligible for parole.

In 1978, I told anyone who would listen that we had started down a long slow road to public disarmament, that future violent crimes would serve as excuses for more bureaucracy, that registration by serial number would follow and that the last step would be piecemeal confiscation of weapons, picking off gun owners one at a time. It is all coming true.

Half a million handguns are going to be effectively confiscated, no matter how the minister tries to sugar coat his proposal. Confiscation of registered long guns will begin, as it is already begun with handguns, through a process of natural evolution and will probably be spurred by some horrendous crime such as the Montreal massacre.

Public hysteria is a wonderful tool for government. Early in 1941, before Pearl Harbour, the Government of Canada confiscated the arms of Canadians of Japanese origin living on the west coast. Remember, we were not at war and these were Canadians, but their guns were taken away.

The political establishment was delighted and the tame establishment press bayed its approval, just as it is baying its approval for the proposals on the table in the House today.

This bill is a classic example of the theory of government which states that everything not compulsory shall be forbidden. It is a bit of statism, and a bit of statism, like a bit of cancer, is not good for you.

James Madison said it best: "There are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations".

[Petitions, March 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have only one petition to table pursuant to Standing Order 36. It is signed by 115 constituents mainly from the town of Assiniboia.

The petitioners pray that the government not consider further tax increases. They pray and request that Parliament reduce government spending and implement a taxpayers protection act to limit federal spending.

Unfortunately the petition is moot, the budget disaster having already happened.

[The Budget, February 28th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, after hearing the reassuring words of the minister I would like to be able to say I will sleep better tonight, but I cannot.

The minister referred in his presentation to serving up illusions. The inference is that this is no longer happening to us with the present government. We have had 25 years of illusions, 25 years of rhetoric, 25 years of telling us we are going to get tough with the deficit, we are going to really move in on it this year, next year or the year after that.

What the minister forgets is that it was much easier for previous finance ministers to sell illusions than it is for the incumbent. Previous finance ministers could actually make illusory cuts and sell them, but the present minister, in order to sell an illusion, has to make real cuts. The problem is that it remains an illusion because the cuts are not deep enough.

All that is happening is that the government is making enough cuts in the projected spending for the next three years to keep even with the additional interest that it is going to have to pay on the money it already owes. The government is standing still.

It makes me think of a sailor who has been shipwrecked and is treading water madly. He sees a lifeboat about 100 yards away. Instead of trying to make it to that lifeboat he says: "That's too tough, that's too hard. I'm just going to keep right on treading water". He does and eventually he drowns. This government is treading water and Canada is drowning in debt.

I ask the minister, what contingency plan does this government have for the time when the interest payments on our deadweight debt become so great that there is no money left to maintain social programs or even basic government services? This is the direction in which we are heading.

We are heading in a direction where there will be no social safety net. There will be no pensions. There will be no welfare. There will be no UIC. There will be nothing if the whole rotten house of cards comes tumbling down. What contingency plan does this government have?

[Firearms Act, February 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, many of the concerns expressed by the hon. member apply not only to aboriginal people but to rural people in general.

For example, she spoke of that first rifle. One of the proudest days of my life was my 11th birthday when I received my first firearm. Like the hon. member I was a sustenance hunter for a period of time. We were hard up. We ate the meat we killed.

These laws that are going to come in will be just as restrictive, just as oppressive on non-native rural people as they will be on the people who live for example in the Northwest Territories. I would hope that rather than taking up the cudgels against the rest of us who oppose this bill that she would join with us on behalf of the people of the north, on behalf of aboriginal people and realize that we are all in this together. We are all facing unreasonable restrictions in legislation here. It is not just the natives.

[Supply, February 21st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the hon. member's suggestion that a reduction of government spending equal to 1 per cent of GDP would cause an economic contraction and downturn in this country. Surely the Canadian economy is not that feeble.

The hon. member stands there and uses the old Keynesian magic of pump priming. Just spend more money. Get the government involved as deeply as it can in the economy and everything will be fine.

If that discredited philosophy worked, this country would have no problems. Canadian governments have spent like drunken sailors for 30 years. If Keynes was 100 per cent right, then there would be no unemployment in this country. There would be no debt. There would be no deficit.

We have heard it all. The previous two governments have done it all. They have wrecked this country by abiding by their faith in this wonderful pump priming philosophy. They should have the gumption to face up to reality, see what has been happening in this country and perhaps join the new parade. Start to realize the people out there know what is going on. That is why they come to these rallies. The ordinary common people are speaking and telling us as parliamentarians to get our act together.