Ken Epp

[Points of Order, June 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to bring to your attention and to the attention of all members in the House that we have a bit of a dilemma on our hands with this inquiry.

It just so happens that if the Ethics Commissioner is to examine the taping and the tapes and all this, the dilemma is that he himself is named in those tapes. It is indicated that it is possible that people on the Liberal side in the government could perhaps influence the Ethics Commissioner to change his position or to influence a positive outcome with respect to the member for Newton—North Delta. The dilemma is very clear. The Prime Minister's chief of staff has indicated that this is a possibility. Now we have that same Ethics Commissioner, whom it is presumably possible to influence, now investigating exactly that. There is a big problem there.

[Privilege, June 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I think I can be of some assistance to you by telling you that in my opinion there is not a thing that you can do about this and you should reject the complaint.

It is a matter of the way the Internet is being used. While these things have been going on, I actually logged onto the site on my computer and, frankly, it is a process that is being used by people who care intensely about the issue of marriage.

In looking for these sites I found the one for the riding of Halton. In that particular case it says “You can trust”, and then it names the member and says that he is in favour of the traditional definition of marriage.

In the case of the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, at the top of the website it states, “This is not the official website of”, and it names the member's name. So there is a total disclaimer there. Indeed, they have his picture and they have used .ca, as the member has indicated, but there is nothing he can do short of making sure he has registered and preserved all of the variations of his name if he wants to avoid this.

There is not a thing that the Speaker can do. I do not think there is anything that any court of the land can do. That is just the way the Internet works and all of us are subject to this type of thing. I would urge the member to listen to what the constituents are saying.

[Criminal Code, May 20th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am burdened to speak to this bill today, burdened because I hear the Liberal critic will recommend to his caucus, and I presume that means it will follow, that it vote against the bill.

We do not know where NDP members stand, the new partners of the Liberal Party, since there seems to be no one willing to speak on their behalf. The member for the Bloc member indicated specifically that the Bloc would not support it. I do not know whether their members will be given a free vote on it or whether it is one of those whipped votes in that party. That was not made clear by the member who just spoke.

At any rate, I want to speak strongly in favour of the bill.

It is probably unfair to get up and repeat all the words in the bill and some justification for taking the stand I am without giving a bit of my background and without appealing to people to consider the true and deep moral structures that have guided our country for many years and which seem now, in our present day and age, to be rapidly falling apart.

As I have indicated in some previous speeches, I had the privilege of being raised in a wonderful, loving family. My dad had nine brothers and sisters, actually he had 10 but one died in infancy, and they were all wonderful, loving people to their spouses and to their children. Until recently, there has been a very good record of marital fidelity in our family. I have made reference to that in previous debates where I have talked about the fact that my parents were married for 67.5 years. They would have gone a little longer if Dad had not have passed away. The record of all my uncles and aunts is impeccable in this area.

I also grew up in a religious context. We are often told that church and state do not mix. However, I am quite impressed that we bring to the debates our actions, our words, our moral framework, whatever that is. I believe that even those who claim to have no faith in God, or in the Bible or in any of the other religions is a religious decision. It is based on faith. It is something that one chooses to believe, based on the amount of evidence that he or she has gathered.

I have made a lifelong study of the scriptures since I became a Christian at age 20, and it is very meaningful to me. I believe that the good book, as some call it, is a definitive instruction book for how we ought to live. As I have studied it over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the instructions in this book are there for our good. We can take every one of the rules and laws in it and they are all positive for the behaviour of families and of society in general.

That is the kind of the background from which I come. In that I then also take that marriage is designed in order to provide for the best for families and for children and it is to be a lifelong marriage.

I believe also in the basic moral concept that sexual activity is not a game that one plays, like basketball or football. It is a very sacred thing, to be participated in within the bonds of marriage. I think we do our society a disservice by not reinforcing those kinds of boundaries and encouraging our young people, in every way possible, that sexual activity is to be saved for and kept within the boundaries of what is called holy matrimony.

I realize that we live in a society in which those morals have been deteriorating rapidly. We even have in the House a bill that would seek to inalienable change the definition of marriage and thereby attack a very solid teaching that many Canadian citizens, by far the majority, have espoused for years.

In the present context, we find that more and more people are engaging in sexual activity outside of marriage and sometimes by coercing others to do so or at least by seducing them. That is what we are talking about.

I have to share with members a very sad thing that is happening in my community way back in the Edmonton Sherwood Park area. I do not know what the latest count is but around 30 bodies of young women have shown up in my riding east of Edmonton in the last 10 or 15 years. These were young women involved in the sex trade and who were killed by someone. It is not known right now whether it is a serial killer or whether it is several individuals.

My heart is broken. I am so sad about that happening. I am a dad. My wife and I have three children. I might hasten to add, perfect children. Not many families can boast that. My daughter Beverley came along first and then sons Brent and Brian. If I think of my daughter being sexually abused by anyone in the family or outside, that is so foreign to my thinking and if someone else were to do it there is something that swells up inside me that says as a father I have an obligation to protect that young girl.

We had a wonderful open relationship in our family and we discussed these things over the years. I am very happy to say that it is our belief that our children grew up according to those standards.

There are many families in which this does not happen. There are parents who permit their children to become involved in other relationships, sometimes with older people, and there are some who would like to resist it but unfortunately, in our present legal system, do not have the right to do so.

When I speak in favour of the bill, I am speaking as a loving father and, I might add, a loving grandfather. Our youngest granddaughter just had her sixth birthday. We have a grandson who is younger than that. He just turned two a couple of months previously.

I am thinking of my grandchildren: Dallas at 13, Kayla, Noah, Hannah and Micah who are wonderful innocent little grandchildren. For me to think of anyone luring them, getting them involved in sexual activity, taking away from them the ability to retroactively be pure in their marriage, I find that very difficult to accept.

This bill would address the issue of individuals who would lure young people into sexual activity. We are talking specifically of those who are older, who would use prostitutes and, when that is not enough, they lure children either on the Internet or by some other means. They get them involved in sexual activity that is dangerous, as we can see. Sociological studies have shown that when children are involved in sexual activity when they are young, even if they have given consent, they are ripe and open to being lured into the business of prostitution. As I just said, I would not call it a profession, it is a dangerous thing to do.

We need to do everything we can to protect our children. I am saying that if someone were to pick up my young granddaughter, or my daughter at 14 or 15 years of age, and involve her in sexual activity, I do not think there should be a defence. I do not think anyone should be able to say that a child talked them into it. She probably would not have, although there may be some who I think at that age lose their heads.

It is up to us as parents, us as grandparents and us as legislators to provide a protective framework for those young people so they are not subject to this kind of vicious and brutal attack.

I would strongly recommend that all members of the House give careful thought to what we are considering here, to support the bill as I do most enthusiastically for my constituents and on behalf of my colleague from Lethbridge.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, out of respect for the Chair and for this House I gladly withdraw that term. I was ill advised to use it.

I have a simple question for the member. He is the one who had the private member's bill asking for a new revision of the access to information legislation. This Prime Minister said to him to withdraw the bill and the government would make sure to give him everything he wanted in the legislation. What happened? The Minister of Justice came to committee and presented not a bill, not a draft bill, but a discussion paper. Hey, just what we needed, more time to talk about it.

The member himself was upset at the time. How does he expect that those people, who cannot be trusted, are going to deliver anything they have negotiated other than that they want to stay in power? That is what it is all about. The Liberals need to be turfed because of that.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am so glad that the member for Winnipeg Centre came to the House. He is the member who says that before those crooks are led away he wants to make sure he gets some of their money on the basis of their promise that--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the member's speech. I want to again thank those people in the translation booth since I happen to be one of those unfortunate unilingual Canadians who only speaks English. Without their help I would not have understood a word that he said, but now I feel that I understood too much of what he said.

I want to point out to him that this deal that the NDP struck with the Liberals is actually curious to the extreme. It used to be that budgets, when presented in the House, were basically left unchanged. It was against the rules to leak anything. The government leaks budget speeches and proposals almost willy-nilly these days. It is just a barrage of leaks.

The finance minister presented the budget and lo and behold, we are now going to be voting on a budget bill which was not in the budget, almost $5 billion worth of expenditures not in the budget. This NDP member is saying that this is really good. I think it is a violation of a very important principle. Canadians should be able to trust what the budget speech says when it is delivered. This is so dramatically different from what was delivered and on that count alone one should be defeating it.

Then on the other hand, I am also amazed that the NDP would be willing to strike a deal with the Liberal government when even to one of its own members, the Liberals have proven themselves not trustworthy. When the deal was struck with the member from Winnipeg to drop his bill on access to information on the promise that there would be a bill from the government, the Minister of Justice showed up at our committee and presented a discussion paper. There was no bill. We are just going to talk about it some more.

The member from Winnipeg was really upset about that and rightly so. Why can these NDP members not learn their lessons? We cannot trust these guys. Why cut a deal with them?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I do not know if I should increase the pressure on the member, but I really would like him to answer the question that I asked which had to do with the money.

I certainly agree there are grievances that the province of Quebec has, as do other provinces, with the way the federal government is run in Ottawa. We need to work together to improve that. I also see where the Bloc members are coming from in the sense of some of these slights that Quebeckers have suffered, from their perception, in terms of our Constitution. I have some measure of sympathy for that.

The fact of the matter is still that being part of Confederation, Quebeckers are net beneficiaries of the equalization system. I know they say they pay taxes, but so does everyone else in the country. Taxpayers in Quebec though get a net benefit from the equalization program of around $6,000 per family per year. The province that I come from gets to pay about $10,000 per year per family, or even more. That is fine. I do not mind doing that. I love my neighbour. I help him whenever I can and that is great.

Why can the Bloc members not simply acknowledge that this is there and represent their constituents by working to stay in this wonderful country instead of trying to escape from it?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I would like to simply advance the same debate that I had with the member's colleague earlier today about equalization.

I did a rough calculation and I do not know if my numbers are right, but one could consider that there are around seven million people in Quebec. One could also consider that on average over the last number of years the net equalization payments into Quebec have been $10 billion a year. I am not sure whether that includes the health and social transfer or not, but it is in that neighbourhood. That works out to almost $6,000 per family.

Those members are representing their constituents from the province of Quebec, and they do so ably and work hard here. They are always here participating in the debates. I have no problem with that. They were elected by their people to be here, but surely they cannot properly represent the well-being of their constituents if they say that they want to get out of Canada and thereby lose what is a very substantial benefit per family on average in terms of the services that their government is able to provide because of these payments.

I am sure the member has an interesting answer and I will be eagerly listening to it.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am sure the hon. member heard my speech in which I expressed my support for Quebec staying inside the country and us working cooperatively together to make this into a stronger country.

The old rule that I remember is that in matters of relationships like this, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Each province in the country is much stronger because of the fact that we are part of a greater whole, and that is the whole country of Canada.

He mentioned equalization payments. I want him to know that our party is a firm believer in and a strong supporter of the principle of equalization. It is in the charter. We agree with it. It is good that citizens in all of the provinces can have comparable levels of services with comparable levels of taxation.

When I think of equalization, because he mentioned it in particular, obviously it is of benefit to some degree, at least as it is now, but I wonder whether he has given any consideration in his push for leaving our country as to the financial loss his province would suffer if this equalization were to be removed.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to talk about this. If there is anything that I value, it is my family, my wife and my children, and of course, I value very highly the solid family that I grew up in.

I grew up in days when there were very few child care spaces. It was just a fact of our generation. In those days, mostly the men, but sometimes the women, would go out and earn the living while the other one stayed home to look after the children. I am happy to tell members that all of our children so far, who have given us grandchildren, have chosen that same route, where there will be, for the sake of the children, a full time parent at home. I think this is wonderful.

I think that Canadians across this country, if they stopped to think about it, would say that we should provide help for people who need help looking after their children, but that we should give them a choice in what kind of help they need. In many cases, they would forgo a second salary in order to give the very best assistance and best training, and best care for their children by having one of the parents at home. I think that Canadians should have a choice and that is what our party would support.

There are many people across this country who live far away from these so-called institutionalized day care centres. They would not have access to them, but they would still have to pay the taxes to fund them. There are many people who choose not to.

If I may, I would like to give a personal example. It just so happens that my wife and I sort of adopted a family that lives just a couple of miles from our house. My wife, by the time our kids were gone from home, was well trained in child rearing. We raised three perfect kids, so she had the credentials. She had no degree, but there they were, three perfect children. She got a job with this family we adopted and she became their live-in day care helper and basically helped that mother raise her three children. There was no institutional day care. My wife did not have a degree. She did not have any formal credentials. However, I will tell members that she was the most qualified person in the world to give good, loving care to those children.

I do not see any reason in the world why we should force more families to leave their children at home, for both spouses to go out and work to earn money to pay an ever increasing tax bill, and not give them the choice on what kind of care they could have for their children if that is a necessity.

Even beyond that, I think it is atrocious that nowadays almost all families have a requirement for both spouses to work because of the fact, as all studies show, that half of every family's income goes to taxes at all the different levels anyway. In other words, when the second parent goes out to work, usually it is simply to help pay all the taxes that are there. If we could have some meaningful tax reductions for families, then of course that would open up a whole new level of choices.

The Liberal government is so wrong in the approach that it is using here. It is unfortunate that it is taking away from parents their right to make choices on the most valuable thing that they have, and that is their children.

I have often said that I can choose which place I go to get my car repaired. Why can I not choose who is going to look after my children and why can I not have that choice made by me, in a country as rich as ours?