Ken Epp

[The Environment, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is Friday and I am a busy guy today. I seem to be getting up on a number of different motions.

Motion No. 399 brought forward before us by one of our colleagues from the NDP is a pretty good motion because it says we should take some measures that would prevent people from getting ill. It is very hard to argue against that. One would not normally say that we should vote against something that will prevent people from becoming ill.

I would like to read the motion in its entirety. It states:

That this House call upon the government to take the necessary measures, including the drafting of legislation, to prevent medical conditions and illnesses caused by exposure to identifiable environmental contaminants.

How could one ever vote against that? The government should take measures to prevent people from becoming ill.

I regret to inform the House that even though I have not heard all of the debate yet, I will probably be voting against this, not because I am opposed to avoiding illness but because I think this is a measure that is going nowhere. It would take an effort to produce legislation that I do not think would do anything unless it would be very intrusive.

What are we talking about here? First, we are talking about environmental contaminants. There are many things that contaminate the environment. I remember that when I was growing up on the farm in Saskatchewan there were times when the wind blew from the barn to the house and we had a fair amount of environmental contamination. Not very long ago, and I do not know why, I think one of our little friends from the skunk family parked himself right next to our bedroom window at night. It got into a fight with somebody and it was not very pleasant at all. That was a contaminant.

In both those instances, I suppose one could say the offensive smell is biodegradable. For the most part, it has no long term health effects. It is just one of those things that happens in the cycle of life.

However, we have other things that are contaminants, for example, exhaust from vehicles. I used to ride my bicycle to work all the time. That was how I was able to maintain this fine physical condition I am in. I always enjoyed riding my bicycle, but part of the route from my house to the college where I taught involved climbing up a hill. Of course, the human motor when cycling up a hill tends to create the need for more oxygen, so the old guy was huffing and puffing going up the hill all the time.

I remember that right about that time they brought in catalytic converters. The exhaust from vehicles was always difficult. When one breathes really hard when one is exercising hard, as that was for me, one is really pumping in air through the lungs. When these vehicles right alongside the bike path also were going up the hill and spewing out their exhaust, it was very uncomfortable. But when they brought in the catalytic converters I actually could not breathe; it was interesting because the catalytic converters apparently were designed reduce pollution, yet my body's reaction to them was that the exhaust then was something that one should not breathe in at all.

I can think of other examples of environmental pollutants. To me, an interesting one is one my dad told me about. When he was a young kid, they used to mix formaldehyde into seed grain before they seeded. They of course were totally ignorant. My dad at that time was just a youngster. They would take off their shoes and socks, roll up their pant legs and get into the wagon, where they would put in the seed and pour a bunch of formaldehyde over it. The kids would trundle through it with their feet in order to mix it.

Formaldehyde is an environmental contaminant. These youngsters in my dad's family, my dad and his brothers, were exposed directly to huge quantities of it. I think the formaldehyde worked as a preservative because my father lived to be almost 91. At least it kept his feet in good shape for all of those years.

I could go on with different examples of environmental contaminants. This motion leaves the whole issue of environmental contaminants wide open. There is no definition here, which is one of the things that concerns me.

Right now, health and safety in regard to most pesticides is already covered under the Pest Control Products Act, which was passed by this Parliament. I am not at all sure why we would want to have another piece of legislation that would go beyond that. If so, I would like this motion to be more specific in terms of identifying exactly what it is that they want to identify now and control, and I presume it is control.

The other thing is that it is left so wide open. It states: “to prevent medical conditions and illnesses caused by exposure.” How does the member propose to prevent illness caused by exposure to these contaminants? Would it be by preventing manufacturers from manufacturing it? Would it be by bringing in regulations with respect to how these contaminants are to be handled? Would it be, in the case of car exhaust, to plug all the exhaust pipes in all the vehicles so that we no longer have exhaust from vehicles? I think that is probably one of the greatest pollutants.

There are so many things in the bill that are so ill defined I really am reluctant to give carte blanche to the government to say, “Here, go and make some laws, prevent illness and prevent medical conditions that could be caused by exposure”.

There is one thing that is clear, though, and that is the use of the word “contaminants”. It is generally accepted that a contaminant is a negative thing, although again I can think of many instances where we have to use contaminants or totally change our lifestyles.

I think, for example, of the use of batteries. We all have electronic devices with small portable batteries in them, yet those batteries form a significant contaminant. What are we to do with those batteries? First, we definitely should take measures to dispose of them in a safe way, yet there are many people who just throw them into the garbage. I wish that were not so because it puts a lot of contaminants into our soil.

There should be measures taken. Is this the proper role of the federal government? Should the provincial governments be doing this? And is this what is envisioned by this bill? We are not really told, so it is really a difficult thing.

I definitely support good health, and one can tell by looking at me that I am a strong proponent of good health, and I have no problem at all with measures taken to preserve our health and avoid illness in our society, a laudable goal. I am afraid, however, that this motion just does not begin to cut it. It is very ill defined. It has no definitions in the terms and it seems to simply call on the government to do something, which I am not sure gives it even enough direction to know what it should do.

Therefore, I am in the difficult position of supporting in principle the concept the member is talking about, but because I cannot see how this is going to do the job my present thinking is that when the vote comes I will probably be voting against it. However, I will be very interested in hearing the rest of the debate and, as always, my mind is open.

[Committees of the House, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, my answer will be very quick. I would support total disclosure of anything that happens, with the proviso that the member mentioned.

Sometimes people want to talk to members of Parliament and they do not want the public to know that they are going to an MP with an issue. I am ready to protect their privacy.

As far as I am concerned, as a public official, pretty well everything that I do should be an open book.

[Committees of the House, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, that is a very curious question. I have been asked that by members of the press and I have been asked that same question by individuals out there since this has broken out. They have asked if I would disclose my expenses. There are two answers to that.

First, a report already publicizes the expenses of every member of Parliament. It is in the public domain. I believe the Hill Times , if I can do some free advertising for it, gives quite a bit of attention to that once a year when that report comes out and it indicates who are the highest spenders and who are the lowest.

We need to recognize the inherent difficulty with that because sometimes people just reading the numbers will fail to take into account the fact that some members live far away and have very large travel expenses compared to those who are closer.

For myself personally, I like that information to be made public because as far as I know, my travel expenses, even though I go back to my riding in Alberta almost every weekend, I take the care to book cheap flights and I think that I am the lowest spending member in the whole province. For me it would be good. Maybe some of the others would not like it, but that information is out there now.

Second, with respect to expenditures, we have details of our office expenditures which are not in the public domain and I would have no problem with that. I purchased a photocopier for my office some time ago. I have nothing to hide and would let people know that I bought it.

As far as my personal expenses are concerned, I do not use government credit cards or anything like that. I am not a minister. I have no government expenses. Those are on my personal card and I pay them out of my own money. If I were to attribute any of them to a government expense, the instant I do that as far as I am concerned, it ceases to be private information. I have moved it into the public domain myself by putting it onto the public expense card.

Therefore, yes, let it be disclosed. I would encourage that and would welcome it. I would vote in favour of it, and of course it must apply to all members equally.

[Committees of the House, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I actually wish I did not have to get up to speak on this issue.

There is a statement made occasionally that “real men don't eat quiche”. Then there is another one that says “real men don't cry”. I have to admit that when I first saw this unfolding in the government operations committee, of which I am a part, I actually had a tear come to my eye. I was really distressed that an officer of Parliament would have so little regard for truth and honesty in what he did. I was really very concerned.

I should interrupt myself to inform you, Madam Speaker, that I will be sharing my time with the member for Lethbridge.

I would like to say a little in support of the motion. The hon. member who has made the motion is also a member of the committee. I would like to commend him for bringing this forward.

As the House knows, very often these reports are made to Parliament and they basically go on a shelf somewhere or a filing system and as the saying goes “they gather dust”. However this is one report from the government operations and estimates committee that I believe should be concurred in. I would like to urge all members to support this motion to concur in this report.

I would like to take the few minutes that I have to highlight the main reasons for encouraging support of the motion.

This is a report which was done very quickly at the end of June, just as Parliament was winding down prior to the summer when we were informed. To a degree it was almost a stroke of luck, as the hon. member opposite has indicated, that we found out about the total mismanagement, misuse and abuse of taxpayer money in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

To a degree some members may believe the report is now redundant because of actions that have taken place. However I think it is still very important that we concur in it to send a very strong message to all civil servants and indeed to all people who in any way receive public funds that, in my basic premise, are to be used in public trust.

We have heard of trust accounts. We have heard of people who are executors of estates. My young son has just been admitted to the bar and is now a lawyer. Among other things he administers trust funds on behalf of his clients. Whether a lawyer or anyone else is administering a trust fund on behalf of children or whatever, we expect that there be absolutely no absconding of those funds for personal use by that person.

That is my premise as a member of Parliament. Whenever I spend money on behalf of the taxpayer, I must remember that I am doing that as a trust. I do not know whether the adjective is appropriate here but I would almost say it is a sacred trust because it gets right at the basic elements of trustworthiness in government by the people who elect us. If we lose that trust, our whole democracy is at risk. That is why it is so very important that we do this.

One of the phrases in the report which we are debating today and whether we should concur with it is we received information from officials who testified before the committee and who had a duty to speak the truth. However as a result of this, we were informed of a situation which led very clearly to the fact that the commissioner himself was misusing funds.

It is important for us to remember that it is a two-way street here. The Parliament and parliamentary committee have to depend on witnesses and testimony that is given to us in committee. It must be truthful. Otherwise it is not useful. On the other hand, on the part of officers of Parliament, deputy ministers and others, if they want to continue enjoying the support and respect of Parliament, then they must ensure that they maintain this relationship of trust. That trust was specifically breached and in a very dramatic way in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

This report says that we, as a committee, have lost confidence in the commissioner. This was a unanimous report.

If I may just add a little sidebar here, it was so delightful to finally have a committee working together in unison and in unity, putting aside partisan differences. The last thing that any of us wanted to do was to make political points on this issue. This was a matter of serving the Canadian people, and I want to commend the members from all parties that were represented on that committee because we did set those considerations aside.

I do not like the phrase “making cheap political points” because politics, being a politician, a member of Parliament, should be a position of high esteem, trust and honour. We call ourselves honourable members here and politics is the work we do. It is not some sleazy operation. I resent it when people say that we make cheap political points. I do not think we should ever do that. We do the work in a political environment here but it is our work as parliamentarians to do this.

I would like to say that this committee worked in extraordinary harmony without political consideration. That comes forward in this report as well when it says that we were in unanimous agreement.

I also want to say that a very important element is the committee wishes to commend the public servants who came forward with information. Here again I was touched emotionally with the integrity of these people. It was so obvious when they were testifying before us. It was all done in camera, so I cannot divulge the details of it. However some individuals actually admitted very candidly to the committee that they felt that what they were doing put their jobs at risk. That should never be.

If we, as a Parliament, as a House of Commons, vote to concur in the motion to accept the report, I believe that will send a very strong message to all civil servants that we want to trust them. If they come forward to a parliamentary committee with truthful information, they will be commended and we will protect them from punishment. That is what this report says. It says directly that the committee is assuring these individuals that they will receive neither harassment, job action nor any other negative results due to the fact that they have come forward to committee and that they are immune from any negative consequences for having done that.

I would like to add a very hearty thanks to those people who worked in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and who had the strength of steel to come forward and say what they were saying to us. That is in the report. Those are just a few remarks. I probably would not be permitted, but I could go on for a whole hour in putting forward all the reasons why we ought to support the motion, and I commend it to all members of Parliament.

[Committees of the House, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the comments made by my colleague across the way. I listened intently with great interest to the premise that I think he asserted very strongly, as did his colleague, the member who made the motion and whose motion we are now debating.

That is the premise that there ought to be accountability at all levels of government and I think I am right in saying that no taxpayers' money should be spent for them by the government without full exposure, transparency and disclosure. Everything should be available.

I would like to ask the member, how does he feel when we get information in a public document outlining how public money was spent and there is a whole bunch of information obliterated with whiteout? I, too, have experienced that when I have tried to find out some information. I got blank pages with a code that said “private”, therefore I could not see it.

How can private stuff get into public expenditures? That is one of the issues of course in this particular case and I would like the member to respond as to whether that is a general premise that he is making, that it should be full and total transparency and disclosure?

[Committees of the House, October 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I listened to what the member was saying. He was using phrases like “this should never happen again”. I do not know whether he observed when I asked a question earlier today. The President of the Treasury Board responded to my question by saying that we ought to heed the Auditor General's report and not paint with the same brush all the civil servants. I am inclined to believe that, yet these things seem to be dealt with only when they come to public light. So it does raise the question: How often is this occurring, notwithstanding that we do not want to paint all of the civil servants with the same brush? I too want to believe they are honest and forthright.

We now have this report. The member is suggesting that we should concur in the report, but I would like to know what steps the government is taking that are tangible and explicit and which will give a message to all civil servants that we expect that they are honest, but in the event they are not, this is not to be tolerated.

Has that message been sent out? What is the Liberal government doing to actually hit this thing at the beginning and prevent these problems?

[Public Service, October 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General has now twice used the phrase “every rule in the book was broken” in her reports about the financial mismanagement of this government. It appeared in the report on the Quebec advertising scandal and just this week appeared in her report on the expenses of the former privacy commissioner.

My question is for one of the prime ministers over there. Given the stinging indictment of the Auditor General, why is this behaviour allowed to continue?

[Ethics Counsellor, October 2nd, 2003]

Is national security addressed?

[Ethics Counsellor, October 2nd, 2003]

That is right.

[Ethics Counsellor, October 2nd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I would love to keep talking about taxes, but I am also honoured to be able to expose the foibles of the government when it comes to matters of ethics. I think it should go without saying that this particular motion must be supported by all members of the House.

The motion we are dealing with was presented by the member for Calgary Centre. It is a motion for what is called the production of papers, hence the label of the motion is P-15.

The production of papers, for those who may not understand it, is for the basic purpose of providing information to the member of Parliament requesting it in the motion, and thereby to the public, on something that has happened behind closed doors.

I am sure the member for Calgary Centre has more experience in the House than I probably ever will have. He knows all the rules and he knows about all the things that happen here, so I am a little reluctant to give him this caution, but I will: “Be careful what you ask for, because if you get it, it may not be that useful”.

I speak from experience. The one time that I did get the possibility of having a motion debated was on a production of papers motion that I put myself, at the time when we were talking about the Royal Canadian Mint and its decision to open a coin plating plant in Manitoba. It just so happened that the Mint rejected all my pleas for information so we finally brought that motion into the House and it was carried here.

Lo and behold, the people then came into my office with literal pallet loads of paper. When I checked through them, which I did at some length, I saw that a lot of it was just repeats of memos that were sent. In other words, I was given a copy of a memo that had been sent to someone who had copies of previous memos, so I got the same memo probably 50 or 80 times. It was a huge volume of paper. It took us an awful lot of time to go through it. The amount of information divulged actually was not that great in the end, but it took so much time to wade through it.

Therefore, if the right hon. member for Calgary Centre is actually going to get this motion passed, and I presume he will, because I think the government should be embarrassed to vote against something like this, then he should also be ready to have his staff and maybe he himself go to work for some period of time to read all the paper that will come in the paper blizzard.

This particular issue has to do with the resignation of the then solicitor general. I do not remember the name of his riding, but he was the solicitor general way back then and he was forced to resign. The thing that was so interesting about it was that on his resignation he did not admit he was at fault. He merely said that on meeting with the ethics counsellor, the ethics counsellor had some reservations about some of the things that had happened so he then had to resign because that was the recommendation of the Prime Minister. Let us remember that our ethics counsellor reports to the Prime Minister.

We could go into a real sidebar here and talk about an independent ethics counsellor or independent ethics commissioner, something which the government is proposing to provide to the Canadian people, but which unfortunately, in matters dealing with ministers, is still going to be exactly the same as before. The whole modus operandi is fairly well identical, with a few minor changes.

So that is not going to be the answer to the problem, but however, in this particular instance there is an interesting dilemma because the former solicitor general never did admit that he was guilty. He never did admit that he had done the things with which he was charged, but we the Canadian people, we the parliamentarians, were never privy to what it was that he had done wrong. What did the counsellor find? What were the grounds?

I think the fact that the solicitor general basically denied guilt would have him now eager to bring all this to light. I know I would be. If the ethics counsellor had decided on an issue with respect to me and I was totally convinced that I was not guilty as charged, I think I would want to have all the information made public so the public could judge for themselves. That is one of the reasons why we have public courts, public hearings and the independent hearings at various levels in the judiciary. These things are public so that people can see what the facts are and draw their own conclusions.

If I were that minister, or that ex-minister, I would welcome this debate. I would welcome the exposure of truth. I would welcome the divulging of all the information from the ethics counsellor on this particular file, because if he is in fact innocent this will show the people of Canada that he is in fact innocent. If he is not innocent but guilty, then we as parliamentarians and Canadians still have the right to know the truth of the matter.

I believe that this motion brought forward by our colleague from Calgary Centre is therefore a very important motion. It is one which I would urge all members to support. Of course I have a difficult task right now because I am persuading members to vote for it who may not right now be hearing me. It is possible that all those members on the other side who have it in their power to decide whether this motion shall pass or fail may not be persuaded by my words since they may not have heard them.

I urge them right now to sit up and listen and take note, because it is very, very important that this motion be carried. I am trying to persuade them now to vote in that way. I also presume that after this little challenge the word will get out, all of them will eagerly look at Hansard , read this speech and the others that have been made, and hopefully they will hear the arguments and make a wise decision.

It is not a good policy to do government business behind closed doors. I know that some of it has to be for matters of national security, and sometimes there are matters of privacy, but when one is a cabinet minister doing government business, I think the general rule, the general principle, should be as much as possible that all of the business is done in a transparent fashion and is open, accessible, and available to parliamentarians, to Canadians and to journalists so that the facts of the matter can be fairly reported.

Of course that is also a great responsibility for us as parliamentarians: to keep pushing and pushing for openness and transparency in all areas. Because if we can get it in areas like this, then hopefully we will eventually change the culture of secrecy and the culture of confidentiality this government has undertaken in order to protect itself.

I know it is not the object of this motion, but I sure would like to see the negotiations that went on with the former minister of public works and government services. I would like to see the communications, copies of notes, phone calls, e-mails, and the letters and faxes between the Prime Minister and that member which led to that member's resignation, not only from cabinet but indeed even from Parliament. And to see him actually extradited to a different country to me is a tacit admission of guilt, and I believe that Canadian taxpayers, Canadian voters, have every right in the world to be aware of the facts in cases like that.

That is the only way. If all of us knew that what we do, what we write and the decisions we make would one day be made public, even if not that same week but maybe at the end of our term of office, it might just tip the balance on making a proper ethical decision rather than an unethical one, just because of the fact that the accountability factor is a very important one.

Therefore, I would urge all members of the House to vote in favour of Motion No. P-15. Let us have those papers produced. Let us expose the truth. No one should ever be afraid of the truth. Let us do this. Let us support it. I hear the hon. members over saying, “Quit talking already; we are already convinced”, so I will do that.