Ken Epp

[Good News Report, October 20th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I bring a good news report.

I could tell members that Sherwood Park placed first in its category in the annual national Communities in Bloom competition. Congratulations are due to the citizens and the organizers.

I could tell members about the exciting upcoming visit of Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra to Saskatchewan and Alberta. Both provinces are being honoured by this tour as part of their centennial celebrations. There are eight major concerts with many more events for students in all our schools in communities large and small. How exciting.

I could tell members about the wonderful new exhibit, “Acres of Dreams”, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in honour of the pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan and celebrating our centennial.

It is too bad that this is all overshadowed by the goings on of this corrupt and failing government.

I am so glad to be a part of an optimistic future when we form government and Canadians will be able to celebrate the good times without this Liberal cloud.

[Criminal Code, October 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague gave a very good speech and argued very forcefully for the idea of minimum sentences. In his previous comments, the Minister of Justice said that the evidence is counterintuitive, in his words. We would expect that minimum sentences would act as a deterrent, and yet, he said, the evidence does not show that. Yet my colleague said that the minimum sentences do show some change in the behaviour of those who would be criminals.

I would like to ask my colleague what he thinks of the minister's aversion to the use of minimum sentences.

[Criminal Code, October 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this is an issue of great importance and I predict that most members on this side of the House will be supporting the legislation because it is going in the right direction. However we could probably support it with enthusiasm if it had some real teeth in it.

The minister is quite happy to talk about these sentences but he uses the words maximum sentences which means that a judge cannot exceed that amount. For example, if the maximum time of incarceration were five years that would mean it could actually be four years, or three years, or two years, or one year, or less. The sentence cannot be over five years.

We believe certain criminal offences should carry minimum sentences. In other words, discretion should be taken away from the judge so that he or she has to impose a minimum sentence of at least two years, or three years or something of that nature. This is a grave problem.

Why does the minister have the aversion, in this act and other acts that are so important to Canadians, to putting into the bills minimum sentences?

[Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, October 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, leadership comes from the top and that is always true. The standards are set by the people at the top. I cannot expect my employees to go beyond the standard that I am willing to set.

With respect to Mr. Radwanski, one of the things that distressed me immensely was the fact that the day before he was appointed he had a considerable debt to pay to Revenue Canada and it was essentially written off. This debt was forgiven the day before he took on a job that gave him a very good salary that would have allowed him to repay that debt to Revenue Canada. That is leadership at the top. There was a deal made by the Prime Minister's Office. There he is with that kind of moral compass going into the job. No wonder there was frustration in his department when people noticed that his lack of moral fortitude showed up in the way he was handling affairs.

The member is absolutely right. The bill would give greater assurance and protection to those who boldly stand up and say that we have to do what is right, that we must protect the taxpayers' dollars and that we must do it truthfully and honestly. I agree with that but it is not the final answer. The final answer is that we need to have leadership at the top.

Very frankly, I believe it is time for the Canadian people to say that they are going to trust the party that is now the official opposition to go on that side. Among other things, I would like our Leader of the Opposition to be the prime minister when the Gomery report comes in because that report goes to the prime minister. In that way we would be able to give Canadians the whole truth of the matter.

[Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, October 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, indeed, my colleague has given me a bit of a challenge to bring it back there, but it is on the same general topic and that is that we need to make sure that Parliament's oversight of the public purse is impeccable and that this type of activity, which my colleague has described, just simply does not occur.

I find it absolutely incredible, as he has mentioned, that this has been known for seven years. If our system were working correctly, in that length of time for a shoplifter there would have been justice, there would have been a penalty and there would have been a sentencing. After seven years nothing has happened.

My colleague's complaint is absolutely and totally legitimate. These laws have to be corrected. The rules and guidelines have to be lived by. They are not and there is no penalty for not doing so.

With respect to Bill C-11, it would increase the degree of thought that a person might give before he or she embezzles public money. The probability of my being caught is now increased. For the person who does not have the built in moral compass that would prevent him from doing it, perhaps the fear and the increased probability of being caught will have that deterrent effect and, in that sense, the bill is necessary.

However I still decry the fact that under successive Liberal governments the culture of lack of honesty has been allowed to grow to this point with no penalties that are visible at all for breaches of that trust.

[Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, October 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether I hold the record for the longest interruption of a speech. About eight or nine years ago I was giving the last speech of the day and the particular bill I was speaking on was not called again for a whole year. It was a couple of days short of a year before we resumed the debate, and I finished my speech after about 12 months of waiting, so to me this little delay for question period is nothing compared to that.

I would like to complete my speech on Bill C-11. Before the interruption, I was talking about the fact that among Canadians there is an increasing lack of trust in their politicians and their government. I think Bill C-11 at least partially addresses this. We must first and foremost change the whole culture, the whole way of thinking. That is what is important here. Hopefully, with people knowing that somebody else can blow the whistle on them, it will mean that we will have many fewer instances of people abusing the public trust.

I would like to point out that one of the reasons for this is that even under the present law when people are found out and found guilty, the penalties seem to be quite disparate from what other Canadians face. I want to share with members an observation made to me by the editor of the Sherwood Park News , which I think is very appropriate here.

She and I were talking about the sentence Paul Coffin got for stealing, which he admitted. He confessed to it. He stole millions of dollars from the Canadian people. His penalty is that he has to give speeches on ethics, but he must be finished by nine o'clock. The editor of the Sherwood Park News said she has covered the local court there a lot and has seen way more stringent penalties for young people who have been picked up for shoplifting in the local mall. So here we have one person who is picked up for shoplifting a $50 or a $100 item and who gets a more stringent penalty than somebody who steals from the taxpayers in the amount of millions of dollars. This needs to be corrected.

I suppose we could say that our case is with the judge who handed down that particular sentence, but it is also with the government of the day. This Liberal government has set up a culture in which this type of thing is tolerated. It must come to an end. This must be stopped. Otherwise, we are going to land up with even less trust and respect for government, for Parliament and for our institutions in this country. It should not surprise us that people increasingly object to having to pay their income taxes when there is so much misuse and abuse.

The latest case with the president of the Mint is another example. How atrocious and how shameful it is that an individual can so abuse the money that is entrusted to him. It is not his money. He is there on behalf of the Canadian people to try to manage, of all things, the printing of our money and the production of our coins. He is in charge not of our monetary system but our monetary framework and he is getting away with this abuse. If we cannot trust the people in Canada's bank, who can we trust? This has to come to an end.

I urge this government not to stop at Bill C-11 with a little whistleblowers' legislation. Let us change the culture of what is happening. Let us communicate clearly to all civil servants what the expectations are. Those expectations must include an impeccable attention to honesty and trust and absolutely no abuse.

Let us do that. Then, hopefully, Canadians will once again be proud to be Canadians and proud to pay their taxes and will have faith and trust in Parliament and in our civil service.

[Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, October 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to stand and speak on this important topic. In general I support this legislation. I have some reservations about some of the details but that is always so. It is not likely even when we form government that every piece of legislation brought forward in every detail will have no imperfection or no room for improvement. I would like to point out a few of those things during the course of my discussion.

I have had an extraordinary privilege for the last almost 12 years now of observing government in action. I was one of those ordinary taxpayers. I was the single wage earner in our family. We made that choice. Even though I was making a very fine professional salary, we found it tough to make ends meet because of the huge amounts of taxes. That is one of the reasons I became involved in the political process.

From that perspective, all the time that I have been here it has been drilled into my mind even more in observing what happens around here, the absolute importance that all parliamentarians, all civil servants, all people who work for government, which is another way of saying that we are employed by and work for the people of this country, treat every dollar as a sacred trust. Maybe I should not use the word “sacred”, but it is an extremely important trust. I compare it to the trust that is placed in a lawyer when someone gives that lawyer money in order to proceed with a real estate transaction. That money is held in trust. That lawyer will lose his or her position, will be debarred if he or she in any way misuses or abuses the funds that are entrusted to him or her.

The same thing should be true for every civil servant, every parliamentarian, every senator, every individual who works for the public in this country. I hesitate to use my own convictions as the example, but it is one that came to mind because of what happened to me last week. I had to change my airplane flight and lo and behold the company, and I will not name the company because it is not nice to pick on Air Canada, would not let me change my flight to one day prior without paying over $1,000.

Even though I have been here for 12 years, I have tried very hard to not become “Ottawized” and think that because it is not my money, it does not matter. I am always concerned about that. I cannot spend money so flippantly that some poor taxpayer in my riding has earned. I went to a competitor, and I am not about to give any free advertising so I will not mention WestJet, but for about $500 I bought another ticket. By the way, Air Canada did let me change that ticket to a date further down the road. I moved that ticket to a future date which I will use and I used the WestJet ticket to take me to my riding. I had to set my alarm at 3 o'clock Alberta time in order to make the flight, but I did so, and on the way to the airport that morning, I thought, “I am doing what is right and I feel good about it”, even though I would have liked to have stayed in bed for a couple more hours.

I hesitate to use that as the example and yet I cannot resist saying that is the conviction that I have. The kinds of decisions we make with respect to how we are using the money given to us in trust should reflect the seriousness with which we guard that trust.

I am in favour of this legislation in principle, but I really wish that all civil servants at all levels would have a built-in moral compass, from the ministers, the deputy ministers, all the way down, as the parlance goes, to the people lower in the organization. I think the real important work is done by those who are at the bottom of the organizational chart. They are at the top, in my view, in terms of the importance of their tasks. They are the ones who are actually delivering the services for Canadians. I wish every one of the people in the organization would have a built-in moral compass that says that abusing, misusing and misspending public money is wrong and that they will not do it. That is what I would like to see.

However, as we always say, laws are not there for those who have this moral compass built in anyway. This is true for laws against murder. It makes no difference to me whether or not there is a law against murder. I am not going to murder anybody. To me it is wrong. I would refuse to murder someone even if I knew I could get away with it and no one would ever find out. I still would not do it. I wish every civil servant had the attitude that they would not do something that is wrong, whether or not there was a whistleblower in the wings. That would be the goal. We need to keep pressing toward that kind of standard in our country.

The rules are there for those who would break them. That is why we have rules against drunken driving. It is not because we want to restrict those who would not do it anyway because it is wrong. We have laws in order to stop those who do not have the common sense and the moral fortitude to make that decision themselves.

This whistleblower legislation in effect gives freedom to other people in organizations when they observe someone misusing public funds or in other ways misusing the public trust to bring it the attention of someone who has the ability to do something about it. That is probably a good measure because, unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there will always be those who abuse their privileges and the positions they hold. This is a way of counterbalancing it and I appreciate that.

I am very glad we live in a day and age in which with computer technology, the Internet, et cetera, there is so much more information available and so much more openness that is accessible, provided the information is put there by the authorities. I believe that exposure is one of the greatest motivations to doing what is right.

For those who wonder whether or not something should be done, if they ask themselves whether it became public and their family, friends and colleagues knew that they did it, that will often help them decide that they had better not do it.

Hopefully, the result of this will be not a whole flood of complaints made by whistleblowers, but rather that the amount of misuse of public funds will be reduced simply because there is this additional motivation to not break those rules.

I have a couple of concerns about this bill. My colleague opposite took the time to read from the bill. I was going to do that as well but I will not repeat it. We need to be aware of the wrongdoings as specified in clause 8 of the bill. My colleague read six points contained therein. Actually there are seven, the seventh one being that every one of the six is a violation if a person counsels someone to do the wrong thing. He read those and I think they are a good starting point.

We need to recognize that there is probably no codification that would cover all the bases. We have to make sure that we build within this legislation the positive part of the culture which says that because in principle we are doing this, therefore the abuses will cease.

I was going to say I had the privilege but it was not a privilege, it was more of a punishment to be on the committee that investigated Mr. Radwanski. It was, very frankly, a dreadful thing. I remember when the investigation was going on and whistleblowers from within his organization came forward to our parliamentary committee, a reporter said to me, “You must be really excited about this because this really helps you as a party”. My response to that reporter was, “No. This makes me incredibly sad. The fact that a person in public trust could do this and put in question his own reputation and the reputation of thousands of civil servants, to abuse the taxpayers' money and to so blatantly break the rules and think that he could get away with it, to me, that is a point of great sadness. It does not give me any pleasure at all”.

Without divulging any of the confidential proceedings that went on in that committee, I must confess there were a couple times when, even though I am a man and real men do not cry, I had tears running down my cheeks as I saw the tremendous depth of emotional turmoil that the witnesses were experiencing in drawing to our attention the wrongdoings that were going on. They were fearful for their jobs. They were fearful for their own futures. That is just not acceptable. They were people who wanted to do what is right.

We need to set up our rules and procedures in such a way that the people who want to do what is right feel comfortable and that those who want to do what is wrong are made incredibly uncomfortable. In this particular case, because of the lack of this kind of legislation, it was turned around. The person who was doing what was wrong, specifically the commissioner, felt very comfortable and at ease because he was in charge and if people broke a confidentiality of his department, he could call for their heads and cause them to lose their jobs.

I am so glad that our committee was able to respond to that. As far as I know, not one of the individuals who were involved in bringing this injustice to light and getting it corrected lost his or her job.

In that sense, I strongly support this legislation, because people who take that risk—and there is always a risk; even with this legislation there would be a risk—should not have to deal with the possibility of losing their jobs and having financial hardship imposed on them.

It is important for us to make sure that when this bill becomes law, and I trust that it will, we press for implementing the spirit of this law and not just the legalities of it.

In our present milieu in Canadian political history, we are at a low point. A number of Canadians have lost trust. This is demonstrated by the fact that fewer and fewer of them even bother to vote. It shows that we do need to do something.

Mr. Speaker, I will finish my speech after oral question period.

[Question No. 163, September 26th, 2005]

With regard to the formal dinner held for the Queen on May 24, 2005, in Edmonton and the procedure for invitations for such: ( a ) were official invitations sent out; ( b ) what were the criteria for being in receipt of an invitation; and ( c ) what was the total cost for this event?

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Since the Liberal side has invoked time allocation or closure on this debate, I think it is important for us to at least remain on the topic that we are debating, namely the issue of marriage. That individual has drifted far from that topic and I urge you to bring him back onto the topic.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, first I would like to say that until 1999 and in the years immediately preceding, we were covered in our definition of marriage by the common law. In fact, superior court decisions at that time were upholding that definition. I do not have them here and I do not have time to quote them, but there were decisions such as the heterosexual definition of marriage being upheld.

In my view, both the courts of the country and the government were in contempt of Parliament, because in 1999, the party of which I was a member at that time, proposed its motion which said that marriage is and shall continue to be defined as “the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others” and that Parliament should take “all necessary steps” to preserve that definition.

When the courts ruled opposite to that, somebody should have said, “Whoops, the court cannot do that”. Yet the government--and I say it did so in contempt of Parliament--failed to carry through on a vote that carried with a huge majority in Parliament by failing to challenge those court decisions. It should have, it could have and it chose not to. The Liberals were sitting on their duffs and they failed the country. That is why we are in this morass now.

The member suggests that the bill should be withdrawn. I agree with that. He said the courts should continue to make the law. I disagree with that. I believe very strongly that this place, right here, where the people are represented by members of Parliament, should have the ultimate say in the law of the land and the courts should have the role of enforcing the laws made here.