Ken Epp

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, October 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very important point. However I should clarify something. My own personal travel time will decrease greatly because my riding will shrink geographically. Fantastically, it will now include part of the city of Edmonton. Elk Island will disappear and the new riding, which will replace it, will be part of Edmonton and it will be smaller. What I am talking about is the loss of constituents, who I have served for 10 years, because they will be cut out of the riding and put into other ridings. As an educator, how I wish I could use a white board or an overhead projector. I just feel so inhibited not have visual aids.

Instead of having ridings as compact as possible so members of Parliament can travel efficiently, those ridings will be long and narrow ridings. Members of Parliament will now have to travel from one area to an area much farther away in order to see his or her roughly 100,000 people in the riding. The riding next to it has the same organization.

I told the commission that this was mathematically very inefficient. We might as well have 301 ridings right across Canada and slice them up one mile wide right across the country and call those the ridings. Would that not be stupid? That of course is the extreme, but it illustrates what I am talking about.

The fact is that, yes, where we have a sparse population, as we do in rural parts of the prairies, it necessitates much more travel time. However it is not necessary to put everybody into that situation. It could be done with a bit of care so that at least travel time costs and other related things would be minimized.

The riding of Peace River, which is held by one of my colleagues, is about one-fourth of the whole province of Alberta and has well over the 100,000 average number of constituents in the country. That is wrong. The fact that such a large area should be compensated for by having a greater level of representation is wrong. Even under the present rules a variation is permitted but I think it should be utilized. There again, the commission in Alberta totally failed to take that into account.

I should also add that the commission could have done much better if it had done a little more work. It heard very clearly from the witnesses during its investigation, at least during the Edmonton one that I attended. All the commission had to do was go back to the drawing board and it could have done a much better job, but for some reason it decided not to.

The submissions that were made by members of Parliament to the parliamentary committee, with the recommendations going back to the Alberta commission, were, in every instance, rejected even though the commission heard the arguments and concurred with a number of them.

Now that it is set in stone and cannot be changed, I now feel the freedom to roundly criticize the commissioner and the commission in Alberta for having done what I believe to be a totally inadequate job.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, October 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good point. I, in fact, said that there were parts of the bill with which I disagreed. I disagree with the way the boundaries are being rewritten. I do not care whether they are enacted on August 25 or on April 1. Inevitably, they will be in place and I disagree with that profoundly. That is not the purpose of Bill C-49.

Bill C-49 does not in any way change the boundaries. What it does say is that Alberta, which now has 26 seats, would have 28 seats if the next election were held under the new boundaries. I feel that having those additional members of Parliament in our province outweighs the disadvantages that affect me personally in the annihilation of the riding of Elk Island. Therefore, even though I am personally affected, I am putting my own personal preferences aside for the benefit of the larger good.

As I mentioned, I will be supporting the bill because, hopefully, as we plan for the next election, it will increase the certainty of knowing what the actual ridings will be. Otherwise, there will be uncertainty. I also will be supporting it because of the additional seats that will be provided in British Columbia and in Alberta, as well as in Ontario, to reflect the change in our demographic distribution in the country.

I have adequate reasons to vote in favour of the bill. However, the redistribution itself, which is not the issue of Bill C-49, which only has to do with the date of implementation, causes me a lot of problems, and I object to that, but that is not the object of this vote, so I am not being inconsistent.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, October 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to continue my speech on Bill C-49. As I was saying before question period, personally I would like the bill never to be enacted. I wish that there were no realignment of the boundaries because of the terrible, horrible job that has been done on it in the Edmonton area, including the annihilation of the Elk Island riding.

The commission totally missed the point on putting together in an equitable way people with community of interest. It totally missed it. Furthermore, the organization of ridings in Alberta now, the geography of the different ridings, is such that the work of members of Parliament will be made much more difficult due to its inefficiency.

The boundaries have been changed so that instead of having several members of Parliament with large ridings, it has pretty well been arranged so that every member of Parliament in Alberta will have a large riding. That is simply going to put us into vehicles. We will have to sit for hours in cars while we drive from the middle of the province to the boundary of the province. That is how long three of the ridings are. It is totally not needed.

The whole press to move this forward, to advance the date from the point of view of getting a better situation for the representation of our constituents in the House of Commons, and better work on behalf of the constituents by their members of Parliament in the riding, will be made much more difficult by these new ridings.

I am not going to complain. My riding disappears. I have already announced that I will be seeking re-election in a new riding for Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan and part of Edmonton. I will do my very level best to continue the tradition that we have in this party, and which I have personally, which is to represent the people of the riding to the best of my ability and show them here the capability of having a government which is honest, shows integrity and is fiscally responsible, accountable and transparent.

It is atrocious that the commission in Alberta rejected every representation that was made to it. I sat the whole day at the commission hearings in Edmonton. I sat and listened to every one of the presentations. Every presentation, with the exception of one, said that what was being done was not acceptable and that it was not the way to realign the boundaries.

Even the City of Edmonton itself said in its presentation that it would rather have six members of Parliament with undivided interests in representing its cause than eight with divided interests.

The commission said that it would not listen and it would do it anyway, and it did. It went ahead and totally messed up the organization of the ridings. It is now going to be mandatory for members of Parliament to serve these combination constituencies with the result that many more hours will be spent driving. There will be a huge increase in costs to the taxpayer to pay for the mileage for the trips of members of Parliament as they travel throughout their ridings.

It is a matter which deserves the attention of Parliament. I do not know how we could get together with the Liberals in a non-partisan way but we ought to do that with all of the parties in the House. We must look at how the process can be revised so that members of Parliament who actually do the work can somehow have a real and meaningful influence on the way the boundaries are created.

I will simply conclude by saying that I will be supporting Bill C-49 because I do want to have the next election under the new boundaries. I also want to have the certainty as we plan for the next election that we can plan for the new boundaries. It is better to have that than to have two simultaneous organizations going without knowing with certainty what is going to happen at the next election.

Although this should increase it, we know that in our archaic system in Canada the Prime Minister can still call an election whenever he wants. Presuming it is the member in waiting, who everybody recognizes, he could, anytime after he becomes the leader of the party, call an election and he may in fact still do that. Maybe the ridings will still remain the same. If that is the case, so be it, but the fact is that it is good to have the certainty of knowing what the riding boundaries will be at the next election.

I should also add that I am happy to be part of a party that has always had, since its beginning here, when I was first elected in 1993 as a member of the Reform Party and later on as the Canadian Alliance, the policy that we should have fixed dates for elections, fixed intervals so people can plan. There are many ramifications to that. Returning officers need to rent office space sometimes months before it is needed because they have to be ready even though they do not know when an election will be called. It is a weak part of our democracy to allow the sitting prime minister or the leader of the party that has the most seats in the House, for one individual, without being required to tell anybody else in advance, to call an election on the day it starts happening. That is very inadequate and I wish we would find that kind of parliamentary reform. If the new prime minister believes there is a democratic deficit in this country, that is one of the aspects of it.

Even though I will be voting for the bill, it increases the certainty that the next election will be held under the new boundaries. At least we will know what we are working under. There still is no 100% certainty because anything could happen. We have the Liberals opposite who have shown us on more than one occasion that they are ready to call an election way in advance of any technical necessity of doing so, just simply for the case of increasing the probability of them winning. I sometimes fear, out loud, that the new prime minister may call a quick election because he will think that our party is still not organized. I assure members that we are doing our very best to be ready for whenever that election is called.

I will be supporting the bill on that account only and not because I am eagerly looking forward to serving the constituents in my area under the new boundaries and under the new conditions which are being spelled out for us. However, we will do our very best.

[Canada Pension Plan, October 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, here is a letter from a constituent. He wrote:

The number, frequency, and high rate of government mismanagement incidents are totally outrageous to people such as myself. I'm being assessed by Canada Pension Plan for my fitness to receive my money plus they can't figure out why I, a legally blind person, can't find work.

He then indicates that for the third time in five years he is being required to prove to Revenue Canada that he is legally blind. Here is more from his letter:

In the face of the Governor General's million dollar tour of the north, I could live for 50 years on that amount. Being interrogated by CPP while she takes all her friends to travel the north and eat at fancy restaurants really offends me. Why do they waste taxpayers' money while hassling disabled folks? Something has to be done about this government which steals from the poor and gives to the rich.

That is how he ends his letter.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, October 21st, 2003]

Madam Speaker, once again I have to apologize for my rather weak voice, however, it is excellent because it prevents me from yelling at people. I will be sure to be extraordinarily gentle today.

I am very pleased to speak for a few minutes to Bill C-49, the bill which would advance the time at which the changes to the new boundaries take effect. I am very much concerned about this. Realistically speaking I should be voting against the bill but I will be supporting it when it comes to the vote. The new prime minister will be able to call an election whenever he chooses. It could be soon after his inauguration or at least as soon as the present Prime Minister resigns. It is a very interesting dilemma that faces the country politically at this time. He could call the election as early as February or March, but we are pretty sure that will not happen.

If he does wait until after April 1, which is the date proposed by the bill, then the question is whether it will be done under the old or new boundaries. If this bill does not pass, then we will live with that total uncertainty. For me it is a huge uncertainty. As I have mentioned previously in the House, I will no longer be called the member for Elk Island, nor will anyone be called the member for Elk Island because under the new boundaries, Elk Island will cease to exist. It will evaporate.

Of course, we want to believe in the total impartiality of the commission that made that decision. I have serious questions about that, but it is a real change in the way we are organized politically in Alberta. The commission has chosen to annihilate several of the rural ridings, one of which is the riding of Elk Island, and to use a hub and spoke approach. The new riding will now include part Edmonton, a major city and in fact Alberta's capital. The boundaries go out in spokes from the city in order to include larger numbers. I think that is an error.

I know it will be manageable. If elected to one of the new ridings, I will serve to the very best of my ability. It is going to be more difficult because of a serious mismatch in the community of interest definition, which is in the legislation and which the commission was duty bound to observe but which it deliberately chose to ignore. As a result, parts of the city will now be competing for the attention of their member of Parliament on issues which will be quite diverse from those which affect the rural parts. However, as I said, this is a reality and we have to live with it.

In that sense, I would like to vote against the bill. Personally I would like the election to be called using the old boundaries because we have a very good, closely knit riding. We all get along very well together. We have an extremely high degree of connectivity among the members of the communities that are involved. It would be much more effective to continue under that. However, as I said, I will be supporting this legislation because, among other things, this increases the representation of Alberta to within one seat of the number that it should have.

In listening to the speeches when this bill was debated previously and at third reading today, one of the things I have observed is that Bloc members are opposing this bill. They say that they are now being under-represented. According to the Constitution, Quebec has 75 seats regardless of its population. It is my understanding that the population of Quebec has increased at a much lower rate than the population of Alberta and British Columbia. As a result, the fact that they remain the same, relatively speaking, is still giving them a numerical advantage.

If we were to check the numbers I believe we would find that the number of voters per constituency in Quebec is lower than the number in either Alberta or British Columbia. In fact, an argument could be made that Alberta should have had three more seats instead of two, although I will concede that the strict application of the formula, as it exists, results in the two additional seats.

I will be supporting Bill C-49 because I believe Alberta should have additional representation. I also believe British Columbia should have additional representation because it has grown a lot in the last number of years and is certainly entitled to two more seats as the new boundaries would provide. That is the reason I want the next election to be under the new boundaries but I wish the boundaries readjustment procedure could be reviewed and changed so there would be fairness.

What has really distressed me is that the commissioner in Alberta, instead of addressing the issue of commonality of community interests, gave reasons why he should not listen to that.

Alberta has two major cities, Edmonton, which is the capital, and Calgary, which is probably a more major industrial and business centre. Calgary, which has grown more within its boundaries, was entitled to two more seats. However, the commission, instead of just saying that its mandate was to provide for equal representation based upon population, said that if Calgary received two more seats then Edmonton should as well. I totally disagree with that. That is not the case. If Edmonton's population had grown within its boundaries, then yes, but the fact is that it did not.

[The Income Tax Act, October 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to point out that money which goes to those energy producers in the gas and oil industry does not necessarily increase pollution. In fact it reduces it.

I want to tell members about the new Shell Upgrader in my riding. It is producing fuel that is much cleaner burning. It cannot sell it for more because it has to be competitive in the marketplace. I put it into my super efficient vehicle and use a scant five litres every 100 kilometres. We are polluting way less than we did 20 or 25 years ago. That money does not increase pollution. It is used for research to reduce pollution.

[The Income Tax Act, October 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, when we as parliamentarians pontificate about energy and about this proposed small tax reduction for those companies that produce energy, we should try to keep it in perspective.

I am sure no one in the country cheered when the power went out a couple of months ago. No one said that it should be left off so it does not pollute the air. That did not happen at all. Everybody was clamouring for the power to be restored. Canadians are privileged to have such massive amounts of energy available at such a reasonable price.

I would like to point out to parliamentarians that a reduction in tax rates does not necessarily mean a reduction in revenue. It is a very simple product. We can sell more for less per unit and actually get more money, and hence more revenue for the government. This is not a tax break that will take away revenue for other programs but will in fact increase revenue.

We also need to think about the magnitude of the energy problem.

I remember one day when I was driving my motorcycle and, like an idiot, I ran out of gas. Instead of my motorcycle carrying me, I had to push my motorcycle to the next service station. I then realized how much energy that little motor cranked out because I was huffing and puffing like an old man by the time I reached the gas station. It took a lot of energy just at walking speed to move that bike, whereas the bike moves me up to 100 kilometres an hour or faster, but I will not go any faster. We have no idea of the quantity of our energy.

I would like the member to respond about the total energy picture and the fact that we are efficiently converting our natural resources into energy in huge volumes.

[Former Privacy Commissioner, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is pretty hard to believe that on July 26 George Radwanski knew nothing about the job and on July 27 he got the job.

Unless he misrepresented the facts, there is no doubt that the agency knew he was about to step into a $210,000 per year job. It should have rejected the deal and forced him to pay his back taxes.

Now, will the minister take the necessary steps to reopen this file and to recover the money?

[Former Privacy Commissioner, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it was July of 2000 and a former speech writer for the Prime Minister was being offered the position of Privacy Commissioner. There was only one problem: He had to cut a bankruptcy deal with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency for about $675,000 in unpaid taxes. CCRA got him to pay $68,000 and wrote off the remaining $607,000.

When CCRA cut this deal, did anyone in CCRA know that the former Privacy Commissioner was on the verge of an appointment to a very well paying job? Did it know?

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, October 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, often I begin my speeches by saying that I am honoured and pleased to stand in the House to debate an important issue but this time I have to say that I am not very pleased to be debating this bill under these circumstances.

I think it is absolutely deplorable that the Liberal government would, in the face of a large amount of controversy and a lot of details that still have to be worked out, take steps to stop the debate on this bill and to force a vote, which is, in effect, what it is doing.

Having moved the motion “that the question be now put” precludes any further amendments. That is atrocious. Here we have a matter of life and death in the highest possible terms in the meaning of life and the Liberals are flippant about it. I hesitate to say that but they are very inadequate in the way they are doing this.

I heard my colleagues talk about splitting the bill. I do not know why the Liberal government would not do that. Why not deal expeditiously with items which are urgent? Even as we speak a debate is taking place at the United Nations on human cloning. There are some motions being debated, one of them being that all human cloning be banned. That is my position. I think it is an affront to the dignity of humanity and certainly of individuals to say “well, we will just make another one of you”.

Experimentation in human cloning should be totally banned. I know others disagree with that. Why can we not have a debate on it? Meanwhile, we see that Canada's position at the United Nations is ambiguous at best. We seem to be saying, “well you know, we do not really know about human cloning. Maybe it is okay for therapeutic purposes”.

Can anyone Imagine bringing into being a new human life to create spare parts for someone else? Since when have we had in our society the way of thinking that one human life is dispensable in order to provide for the life of another?

The dilemma arises from false assumptions. There are those who claim that the unborn child is not a human. I would simply ask, if it is not human, then what is it? It is not a monkey. It is not a cow or a pig. It is human and yet they say that this unborn child is not human. We have the dilemma in Canadian law that we can be fined or jailed for destroying the egg of a whooping crane which is a protected species and yet we have no such legislation protecting the uncompleted embryo of a human.

Is a human not worth as much as a bird? That is the dilemma. Why government members would just simply bulldoze through and say that they are doing it, they do not care, makes me almost conclude that there is such a moral deficiency over on the government side that they do not have a handle on it.

The bill should have been split so that those very necessary prohibitions could have been dealt with expeditiously. We then could have spent more time getting the other part and doing it right.

I remember one of my colleagues at the college where I taught had a little plaque on his bulletin board which said, “if you don't have time to do it right, when will you find time to do it again?” That is what we are dealing with here. For some reason time is running out, arbitrarily, and we are not doing it right. How can we ever find time to fix it up and do it again?

One of the primary dilemmas is that this is an unprincipled government. Hence, this very important bill, Bill C-13, expresses no principles in the preamble or elsewhere.

I would have liked to have seen in the preamble an overriding principle. It should have said somewhere in there that in Canada there is a profound respect for human life. This is absent in Bill C-13. The government does not even have the moral fortitude to put in the bill, which deals with life and death, a guiding principle that says we have respect for human life.

Sometime I will ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether you are a father and a grandfather and all those good things. I am and it is wonderful. My wife and I have three wonderful children. We have two in-laws that have married into the family. My wife Betty and I now have five beautiful grandchildren. They are the best, our grandchildren in Regina, Dallas, Kayla and I am thinking of Noah, my little six year old grandson. What a neat little guy. I could not even take him for a motorbike ride yesterday because I had to leave to come here. He was somewhat disappointed, but I will do it next time. And there is little Hannah and little Mica, who is only six months old. What a beautiful little baby.

When we look at these little children we cannot help but say that somehow in a profound way humanity and the divine have come together in the fact that we have the capacity to produce new life. And here Bill C-13 talks of cloning and all sorts of other procedures even, if necessary, taking the life of children before they are born.

I always say that the conclusions we reach are a function of two things. They are a function of our initial proposition or assumption and the function of our thought process or analysis as we go along. Those are the two things which determine our conclusions.

If we conclude that the unborn is not human, then no matter what kind of reasoning we use, we are going to come to a conclusion which does not respect human life. I do not care how it is cut. That is the assumption that is made and in my view it is a false assumption.

I remember reading a report of a researcher who was helping infertile couples. He was talking about beginning the life cycle in a Petri dish. The egg is put in the Petri dish right out in the open. It is not inside the woman's body. The male element is added and all of a sudden, the cells start dividing and that document said explicitly that life has begun, that cell division has begun.

I know the debate today is not about where does life begin, but that was a secular non-religious person saying that life had just begun at the moment of conception. Yet this country is ready with that Liberal government over there to deny that very important scientific fact and somehow dull our senses and our ethical standards to the point where just about anything goes.

I reiterate that we need to have in this type of a bill that underlying principle that says we have a profound and a deep respect for human life. We should have in Bill C-13 a provision that when ethics and science collide, ethics should prevail. How can we call ourselves good people if we allow some scientific ability to override our ethical standards? I like the phrase, and I do not know who said it, but it is something along the lines that just because we can do something does not mean that we should do something.

I contend that in this bill, as in all of our considerations on these topics, we ought to say that ethical standards and measures take pre-eminence over simply a scientific ability to do things.

I could go on for another two hours. I would like to ask for unanimous consent for me to have another five minutes.