Ken Epp

[Points Of Order, October 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, my second point of order is with respect to the Deputy Prime Minister, who used the term meanspirited. I know this is unparliamentary because I was called on it once.

[Points Of Order, October 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have two points of order. The first one has also to do with the name of the party. Mr. Speaker, you made the ruling very clearly. I would like to know whether you simply urge members to use that name or require them to use that name.

[Taxation, October 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, let me tell you how the Canadian Alliance tax plan is better for taxpayers.

The Liberals tax single people when they earn over $8,000. The Canadian Alliance will let them earn their first $10,000 tax free.

The Liberals give a spousal exemption of only $6,140. The Canadian Alliance will allow $10,000.

The Liberals tax middle income earners at 23%. We would tax them at only 17%.

The Liberals extract over $1,000 in taxes from a family of four with a $26,000 income. We would let them go tax free.

The Liberals love their gasoline tax and the GST on top of the tax. We would reduce the federal excise tax by at least three cents per litre.

Instead of soaking employers and employees at $5.76 per $100 of earnings for EI, we would reduce that to $4.80.

There is much more, Mr. Speaker, but you can see that everyone would be better off under the Canadian Alliance plan.

[Canada Health Care, Early Childhood Development And Other Social Services Funding Act, October 5th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to enter this debate today because it is an issue of great importance to Canadians. As we rush headlong into an unnecessary and unwarranted election, we are being asked to quickly push the bill through so the Liberals can look a little better than they do right now.

Why is there such a notable health care crisis in this country? Where did it come from? I have been sitting here thinking about the different things that have happened over the last number of years.

I remember way back in 1961, when most of the members in the House were not even born, my brand new wife and I left Saskatchewan, the home of medicare, and moved to Alberta. There was no public health care in Alberta. It was a privately operated system called MSI, Medical Services Incorporated. We paid a small premium every month and received excellent medical care.

Those were the days before the technological on-off switches for having babies, and soon after we were married, within the mandatory 10 months, our first daughter was born. Our new daughter and her mother received excellent care. I remember being very pleased with the care they received. Later on my wife had some complications and she had to go to Calgary where she received prompt, efficient and excellent care.

I now think back about 20 years, and it is amazing that it is already 20 years, when my dear wife again had a severe medical challenge. It is called cancer. She had a biopsy on Wednesday, a final diagnosis on Friday and surgery on the following Monday. It was amazing, just like that; quick, quick, quick. It worked. That was in 1980.

Now I am told that people with the same kind of medical emergency are on waiting lists for up to four months for the same operation. People with cancer cannot wait. That is deplorable.

I spoke to a young man in my riding not very long ago. Relative to my age he is young but I guess he is old to some of the youngsters in the group here. He has a medical challenge which requires some diagnostics. While he is waiting anxiously, and I must emphasize the word anxiously, the hospital is telling him that he can get in some time near the end of October. It was a couple of weeks ago when I was speaking with him.

There is a crisis in health care. Where did it come from? With all this blowing that the Liberal government wants to do now, where did the crisis come from? I can tell the House where it came from.

I have in my hand here, and I will hold it so that it cannot be seen as a prop, the budget 2000 document that was tabled in the House by the Minister of Finance. It just so happens that in this document the Liberals are bragging about improving the quality of life of Canadians and their children.

I look at this document and I see the amount of cash transfers for health from the federal government to the provinces. In 1993 it was $18.8 billion. In 1994 it was $18.7 billion. I will not keep reading the years but the amounts are $18.8 billion, $18.7 billion, $18.5 billion and $14.7 billion. These figures are right in the minister's own document.

The Liberal government administered cuts to health care and we are surprised that there is a health care crisis. The Liberal government took the money away and now it is giving some of it back and it wants all of us to cheer. It is like the guy who robs me of my wallet and asks me to thank him because he gives me money for bus fare home. It is absurd.

The Liberal government has literally cut billions of dollars out of the health care budget for the provinces. It is administered by the provinces. Now it is gingerly giving some of it back and it wants a bunch of praise because we expect this unanticipated election this fall.

By the way, just to digress a little, if the election is this fall it will have been called even earlier than the early call in 1997, just a little over three and a half years into the mandate. I do not know whether members are aware of it, but if there is an election every three and a half years instead of every four years, it increases the cost of the elections by over 12%. Why would we not use that money for health care instead of having needless elections? The only purpose of the election is that the Liberals want to get re-elected.

As another aside, I cannot help but mention that this week our party started running some ads. How did we finance them? I and a whole bunch of Canadian Alliance members across the country have donated money to the party in order to run the ads.

I noticed also this week the Liberal Party has started running ads. Who has paid for them? The same guys. We have paid for them because they are tax funded ads with the Government of Canada name on them.

The government is talking about all this wonderful money that it is putting back into health care. I have to be kind, so I will simply say gently that it is a myth. The Liberals have taken so much out and now they are gingerly putting some of it back and they want everyone to cheer and vote for them again. I am offended by that.

As far as I am concerned those ads are inaccurate. They do not communicate truthfully to Canadians what has actually happened. As far as I am concerned they are nothing but blatant election advertising at taxpayers' expense prior to the writ being dropped. I am very offended by that and so should every Canadian be offended by that, because it is so wrong to do that.

I mentioned the numbers. Over the years the government decreased the numbers and then it started adding to them. The Secretary of State for International Financial Institutions, who gave the speech on behalf of the government, talked about the $11.5 billion which the government put back in. Again that is messaging. It is really gross messaging in terms of shading the truth.

If the government says it is putting in $11.5 billion, almost all Canadians assume, because we deal with annual budgets, that it is $11.5 billion per year. Well, it ain't, if I can use that English inaccuracy to make a point. It just ain't true. The fact is $11.5 billion was projected. Most of it has not been paid yet. It was projected over the next five years, so it is just a little over $2.5 billion a year.

That is the same as a policeman who stops me for speeding and asks how fast I was going. I could say I was going 400. The purpose of my trip was to go 400 kilometres. If I said that I was going 400 he would give me a whopper of a ticket but actually I was going 100, planning on doing that for four hours and doing my 400 kilometre trip. The same thing is true here. We are talking about rates of expenditure of public money for health care. It is so much per year.

The government is doing the same thing again in Bill C-45, which proposes to put all this extra money into health care. It did it again by saying it is spending $21.1 billion on health. What a wonderful number. What years are we talking about? It starts on April 1, 2001. The Liberals are going to win an election on it, but they are not even talking about putting any money into health care. They are in other parts of the bill. In the part about the $21.1 billion it begins April 1, 2001. The next payment is April 1, 2002, the next April 1, 2003 and then it goes to 2004 and to 2005.

From the years 2001 to 2005, the Liberals are going to put in a total of $11.2 billion, around $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year on average. It is way in the future but they are advertising it on TV as if the money is here now. They are not stating that it is way in the future. They want Canadians simply to be duped into believing that they are doing wonderful things for health care so they will vote for them again because they want power. I find that offensive and we should put an end to it. It is very disturbing to me that this has occurred.

I am not talking too much about the health care system per se because I am primarily a finance critic. However, I would like to talk a bit about the history of the Liberal government. I did a little math. I love math. I get out my calculator and play with numbers for recreation. Other people bore themselves to death by doing things like golfing. I like solving little math problems.

I have already described how since 1993 the funding for health care went down and then went up again. After 2005 it actually will be higher than it was in 1993. However, after 2001, with the total amount of money that will be put into health care, it will still be less than the amount that was being transferred in 1993. It went down so low that this bill will not even bring it up to the 1993 levels.

What I did was take the numbers from 1993 all the way to the projections for 2005, a total of 12 years. I will not read the numbers, but members can check with me later if they want them. I did a calculation to find out how much the amount had increased. By the year 2005 the government will actually be putting in more than in 1993, 12 years earlier.

That works out to an increase of 11.7% over 12 years. That is an average increase, compounded annually, of 0.9%, less than 1% per year. Our population has grown bigger than that. We are falling behind per person. We are putting less and less into health care per capita and the government wants to applaud itself. I am sure that anyone who knows the facts will not applaud. The government needs to applaud itself because that is the only applause it will get, I am sure.

I cannot help but think about the government's concern for children. It loves to talk about children but it is missing the most important thing. I am very grateful that when our children were young we could afford, with sacrifices, to live on one income. In our family it happened to be that I was chosen to earn the income and my wife was a full time mom. Now two of our children who are married have children. We have four wonderful grandchildren. I am very grateful that they each have a full time mom. I assure members that is not without sacrifice.

The term Liberal government is an oxymoron. Liberal comes from the same root word as liberation and freedom. Instead, the Liberals tax us to death and control our lives. It is shameful. The Liberal government thinks that it does best by taxing people so heavily that both parents have to work, then it wants to be kind and give money back for social services to look after children who really do not have an effective home to live in.

Would it not be better if we so arranged our fiscal affairs that families would be taxed at a level where they could actually afford to make that choice? The operative word is choice. We know that easily two-thirds of families, when given a free choice, would choose to spend time at home with their young children. That is not a choice under the contradictory term of Liberal government. That choice is taken away.

I have to emphasize again that under the programs of the Canadian Alliance, not only would we fund health care adequately, working together with the provinces in harmony, giving them the authority to operate the health care system efficiently, but we would also reduce taxes for families so that those choices would be real and viable.

I could go on and on but I choose not to because I know we are eager to hear what my colleague has to say in terms of the health care system. He will talk more about that part of it.

I simply want to conclude by emphasizing that what the Liberals say and what they do are two different stories. The ads on television this week and what is actually happening is not the same story. One is designed to win the next election. What they are actually doing, by their policies and actual practices, is putting health care at serious risk in this country. It is time to replace these Liberals and put into power a government that thinks clearly about these things, communicates clearly with the Canadian people and will fix the problem.

[Canada Health Care, Early Childhood Development And Other Social Services Funding Act, October 5th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I ask leave to share my time with the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.

[Criminal Code, September 26th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, the Edmonton max is real close to my riding. It is a couple of miles outside the boundary. I talked to one of the guards. He complained that their guns are taken away from them when they go into Edmonton on escorted leave with some of the very dangerous criminals.

It is curious to me that the same government that would take weapons away from the guards would make a law which makes it against the law for anyone else to take a weapon away from a police officer. I wonder if the member could comment on that.

[Criminal Code, September 26th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, again it is a question that is almost impossible to answer. What is cruelty?

I am not into this at all but I understand there are some people who experience pleasure in pain. There are special names for them, sadists and masochists. The line between pain and pleasure is really blurred there. Like I said, I am not into that at all but I can see where there would be a pretty lively debate on whether or not something is painful.

I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. Dad used to get us up early in the morning. When the sun came up, he would say “The Lord put the sun in the sky as a light for us to work. It would be a shame for us to waste it”. We got up early in the morning and worked until late at night. We were hot and sweaty and had chaff all over us. Someone who has never worked under those conditions just does not value a shower at all. There is nothing compared to the pleasure of a shower at the end of a day like that.

In a way it was painful. It was hard work. Sometimes we hurt at the end of the day from the physical exertion we had put out. Nowadays there is a lot more mechanization in farming. It was painful, yet it was pleasurable.

Of course the courts are going to have to rule on whether something is cruel to animals. As I said before, I have actually only been to a few rodeos in my life. The only one I wonder about is the calf roping. Sometimes it looks like they get jerked pretty good, yet I have never ever seen one having to be taken off in a truck. They always survive. They seem to be built for it.

My own opinion would be that most rodeos and circuses are well within the bounds of treating animals humanely. That is my own opinion. We need to keep it all in balance. As I said before, in all cases wilfully causing an animal pain is not permitted.

Just in passing, one more example is the training of animals, whether it be dogs or horses. Anyone who has ever done this knows it is done by a combination of reward and punishment. A small amount of pain is inflicted on the little dog who does his doody-doo where he is not supposed to do his doody-doo. Eventually he learns and becomes a trained dog, and we like him. As long as he does his thing all over the house, we do not like him. We all experience a bit of pain in that regard.

[Criminal Code, September 26th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, my colleague raises a number of important questions.

Certainly I would concur with him 100% that if a person wilfully causes discomfort and pain to an animal just for the sake of causing the pain, it is very serious. I would suggest that the person needs not only punishment from our criminal justice system but we should also arrange for that person to get psychological and perhaps even psychiatric help. There is something wrong with a person who gets his or her jollies by inflicting pain on an animal or another human being. There is a deep psychological problem there.

With respect to what I call the normal use of animals, and I am talking about farmers and, to a certain degree, animals that are used in entertainment, in circuses and rodeos and so on, I do not think the animals in those contests endure any greater pain than do our athletes in the Olympics in most instances. They run, jump, kick and do whatever they have to do.

Having grown up on a farm, I have seen horses without a rider engage in races. They love doing it, especially the little colts. Many of us have seen that. They will take off and run to the other fence to see which one can get there first, just like kids do. There is nothing wrong with our getting enjoyment out of that, certainly within the context of humane treatment.

A number of years ago I spoke to one of my friends who owned a very large pork operation. He owned little piglets. The building had several wings; it was like a hospital or a factory. There was a breeding section and a maternity section. The little guys moved through the different wings in the building, down to the end where they came to the finishing wing, after which they were hauled into the truck and taken off to market.

One critic said it was a cruel way to treat those animals. He responded by saying “These animals are treated better than a lot of humans. I give them total care. Their house has air conditioning, mine does not. It has temperature and humidity controls. They have balanced and very healthy diets. If they have an illness, at great expense to myself, I have a veterinarian on call 24 hours a day who gives them better care than does the health care system in Saskatchewan”.

We need to remember that this is part of the food cycle. It has always been thus. I do not think we can turn it around. Certainly, as my friend does we can provide for those animals, treat them humanely, and cause them absolutely no unnecessary suffering. It was the first time ever that I had actually seen a guy pet his little pigs. He took good care of them. As I say, it is part of the reality, and from thence comes the bacon to go with our eggs.

[Criminal Code, September 26th, 2000]

No, it was mother duck. She said to her children “We had better wiggle our tails and get out of here”. With that they put it in hypergear and away they went. I was able to move over to the shoulder to give them a little space. The truck behind me did not have to do that. All their little lives were spared.

That of course is the object. What we are dealing with in the criminal code is people who do not have a built-in care and compassion for life, whether it is animal life or human life. That is what the criminal code is about. If all of us cared about each other, we would not need the criminal code. We would not need a codification of what happens if a person beats someone up, if someone is brutally assaulted or killed. We would not need those codes because people would not do it. Obviously the purpose of the law is to restrain those who do not have that built-in moral code and who would act on their own accord wilfully against other forms of life.

I will digress for a second. One of the definitions is that an animal is, according to these amendments, to be defined as a vertebrate or any animal that can feel pain. I guess we have a bit of a question there. One of the things I remember doing when I was a youngster is going fishing with my dad. I do not do it any more now. I do not have any time and I have lost interest in it. Many people either make their livelihood by fishing or do sport fishing.

I remember when I was a youngster we went down to a little lake south of the place where we lived. Every once in a while my dad would reward us for working hard on the farm. He would say “Tomorrow we will take a day off and go fishing”. The first thing we did was go out to the garden and dig up some worms. I remember it well. The object was to have a little pail of live worms in dirt, and off we went to the lake.

I hope you do not mind my relating this story, Madam Speaker. It is rather gruesome.

When we got to the lake, we put those poor little live worms on the hook. We impaled them on the hook. I do now know whether the poor little worms are animals capable of feeling pain. I did not hear any of them scream, but I have never heard a worm scream in any case. I do remember that the tail wiggled when we impaled the head end on the hook so maybe there was a response to pain. We know that a worm is not a vertebrate, but it is an animal that can probably feel pain. According to the definitions in the bill, the question is, should a person who goes fishing be charged with cruelty to earthworms?

Speaking of earthworms, I remember that when I was a biology student in high school and university we dissected worms and frogs. We all did that. It is part of learning how the physiology works. We took them apart to see their different parts and to learn about the different bodily functions. We all know that medical students do this extensively in order to become good at what they are to do, which is to help us when we have an illness or injury.

Is that a cruelty? I can imagine some people saying it is pretty cruel to anesthetize a frog into oblivion so that it can be used as a research tool. Let us go one step further. How about the animals that are used in live research? Monkeys are used to duplicate some of the illnesses that befall human beings to see whether various treatments work on them. Rats and guinea pigs are used, as are other animals. Is that cruel or is it not?

Certainly we do not support being wilfully cruel to an animal, but to use an animal for legitimate scientific and medical research surely cannot be wrong. It is an advantage to us in the human realm. By taking out the word wilfully we have opened up a large question. Even with the word wilfully one could have argued that perhaps this was cruelty but now it makes it worse. We should not be getting into the area of making it more difficult for people to do legitimate scientific research even though there are arguments to be made for treating these animals very humanely, as humanely as possible. I agree with that because it is not always humane.

When I see the phrase that the animal is one that can perceive pain, I am reluctant to give this example, but I think I must. We have that very sad case in Canada that a human is not considered a human until it is fully born. One really needs to ask whether in late term abortions of human beings, that unborn human, one minute before it is naturally born, is capable of perceiving pain. In my opinion, there is no cover in our criminal code against that criminal offence any longer. That is perhaps an error that is of considerable consequence.

Madam Speaker, you have given me the signal that my time is up. I am certainly not finished talking about this topic. There are many other areas to discuss but I close by appealing to the Liberal government to change the way it works in committees. I appeal to the government to give careful thought to and actually assent to the amendments we will be bringing forward to correct some of these anomalies. Doing that would make the legislative process work so much better on behalf of Canadians.

[Criminal Code, September 26th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to stand in the House of Commons to speak to Bill C-17. I echo some of the comments made by previous speakers who decry the system of having an omnibus bill that covers a whole bunch of things. It always reminds me of being offered a bowl of pudding that has a little gravel in it. It is nice eating the pudding, but when one chews on a piece of gravel it hurts.

There are a number of things in Bill C-17 that quite obviously need substantial change, substantial improvement. In the end, as is the process in this parliament and by this Liberal government, we will have the task of voting yes or no on a bill containing a number of things. It will then be thrown back at us in a very negative way, because we voted against the bill for a completely different reason.

With an election coming up, one cannot help but think the worst twist will be put on some of the things people do in the House in order to try to discredit them. That is very unfortunate. The Canadian public, the people who vote for us, should certainly have the right to know about these issues and should know our stand on them. We should not have accusations thrown at us. If I vote against the bill for such-and-such a reason, it is not fair of my critics to turn around and say “Well, here is a person who voted against this” and then name one of the really good things in the bill.

For example, I do not think one should normally be opposed to provisions that prevent a peace officer from having his firearm taken from him or her. If, in doing his or her job in maintaining the peace, a policeman or policewoman gets into a scuffle with and is disarmed by an individual who is committing an offensive act, the particular individual should be eligible for a charge of disarming a police officer. Yet if I vote against the bill because of other offensive clauses then in the next election campaign probably one of my critics will say the RCMP should not vote for those guys because they do not support their keeping their firearms. That really clouds the issue and unfortunately does not serve the Canadian public well. Nor does it serve parliament well.

I wish that we could have a greater clarity, or at least that the government would have some openness to accepting some amendments to fix things up. It is our party's intention to propose a number of amendments to the bill in order to correct some of the anomalies in it.

By the way, speaking of firearms and officers being deprived of them, I wonder whether the federal government would be guilty of a crime if the bill is passed. The bill says it will be unlawful to separate a police officer from the weapon the police officer has in order to do his or her job of protecting the peace and maybe arresting a person. It just so happens that the attorney general's department is already disarming these people.

It happens that very close to my riding, just about a mile or so outside the boundary of my riding, is a federal institution, the Edmonton institution. I have had some representation from people who work as guards at the Edmonton institution. They are being disarmed while they take dangerous offenders out on day parole. They are not permitted to take their arms with them while they are trying to protect the public from harm by a dangerous offender. The offence an ordinary citizen could be found guilty of with this law, which we support, is an offence that is already being committed by the attorney general's department in our maximum security prisons. That is just not acceptable. We would all agree that our peace officers should be allowed to use arms in their work, especially if they are trying to control a convicted offender who is dangerous to the public. To say that somehow the public safety is increased by disarming the police officer just does not make sense to me at all. The bill does not address that question. I am just using it as an example.

In the bill there is a very great curiosity with respect to cruelty to animals. There are already provisions with respect to wilful cruelty to animals, but the bill proposes to move the section that covers cruelty to animals to the same section of the criminal code that deals with sexual offences, public morals and disorderly conduct.

It just so happens that nowadays sexual offences, public morals, and disorderly conduct are areas in which, statistically speaking, it is easier to make charges stick than it is in some of the other areas. There is a concern that by just having this in this section perhaps Canadians who are charged under these offences would have greater difficulty defending against unfair charges.

The objective in our justice system should be, but I am not sure that it is under this government, to make sure that those who are in fact guilty of a crime are so found and that an adequate deterrent punishment is meted out to them. If a person is not guilty of the crime with which he or she is charged, if our justice system is working correctly the charges should be dropped or the person should be found not guilty. Hopefully that person could go on with his or her life, having established his or her innocence. That would be the objective in an ideal world.

We all know that in the give and take in a court trial sometimes the truth is actually somewhat muddied in order to make a point as, I might venture to say, is sometimes done in the House.

It is interesting that a word is being taken out, a very important word. Words are so important in giving definitions. In the old code one would be guilty if one wilfully caused cruelty to animals. The word wilfully is being withdrawn. That raises many questions that we need to have answers to.

It is one thing for an Archie Bunker type of guy to come into the house and kick his dog as he opens the door. That is wilful. However, what happens if he walks in and does not see the dog and accidentally hits it? Is he still charged with having kicked the dog? No longer was it wilful according to the act, but he did kick the dog. That is true. He cannot say truthfully “No, I did not kick the dog”, but the fact of the matter is, he did not see the dog so it was an accident. I know that should be a valid defence and hopefully it would be kicked out. The fact of the matter is that with the word wilful having been removed all of that is put into doubt.

I do not think we should go down that road. It is a dangerous road because it makes it more difficult for an innocent person to defend himself or herself against a charge for an act that in fact was accidental.

It is interesting also that other definitions are changed in subtle ways. It used to be that persons could be held responsible if they owned an animal or if they had charge of it, as in when they were transporting it. It seems to me that according to the bill it could apply now to any animal at all that crossed a person's path.

I had a very interesting occurrence in my riding earlier this spring. I was driving along a major highway and there was a big truck behind me. It was not a semi; I think it was probably a farm truck. As I was driving along, lo and behold I saw ahead of me a mother duck with six or eight of her little ducklings start to cross the road. I faced a real dilemma right there, because I am one who would not in any way wilfully harm any animal. Of course these little ducklings were so cute besides. It is always difficult when one looks at a mother and her little children. I faced a dilemma. Do I jam on the brakes and risk having the truck run into the back of me, or do I just carry on and run over this mother duck and her little ducklings?

The story has a happy ending. I was able to slow down. I flashed my lights so that the truck behind me had fair warning. I gauged it so that I would not slow down so rapidly that the truck behind me had no capability of stopping before he was into my back end. I just judged it as well as I could and slowed down as much as I could, giving the trucker as much warning and as much distance as possible. Fortunately mother duck, seeing us bearing down on her and her family—