Ken Epp

[Canada Airports Act, April 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague for a well delivered speech. He expressed the same frustration that we all hear over and over from Canadians in all walks of life.

Really, the Liberal government is an oxymoron. Liberal means freedom. It comes from the same root word as liberate. Yet we have a Liberal government that has its tentacles of control on every aspect of our lives. Here it is, micromanaging airports in Bill C-27, right down to the little nitty-gritty of flying flags and putting up signs. It is ridiculous to have that kind of thing in legislation.

This government is really a control freak and a tax collection freak. That is all it wants to do. All the Liberal members in the House should be howling in protest at my statement if they do not agree with what I have said. They are really the worst kind of control freak tax grabbers and we need to stop them.

My hon. colleague has expressed very well some of the objections to Bill C-27. I would like him to perhaps enlarge briefly on the subject of the Liberal government's ingratiating control of everybody's lives and every little detail of our lives.

[Canada Airports Act, April 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the speech given by the hon. member at the south end of the chamber. I would like to ask him a question with respect to the whole concept of privatization.

It is true that the government used to greatly subsidize the operations of airports. It seems to me that when it divested itself of them and privatized them, it still wanted to keep its fingers in the pie, so to speak. Even though it now rents out the facilities and collects rent, to a large degree it is interfering with day to day operations.

Clauses in the bill requiring the display of the Canadian flag at airports really is almost a given. If an airport chooses not to have a flag or if its flag is in need of replacement or something, does the Canadian government replace it? No. All it does is pass a law that says airports must have one. It gets into the itty-bitty administrative details and really makes the job of operating the airport very difficult for the local authority.

Does the member have any comment with respect to whether the Liberal government knows whether it is coming or going in terms of its involvement in airports?

[Canada Airports Act, April 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the work that my colleague from British Columbia has done in this particular portfolio. He seems to have an uncanny ability to identify errors in legislation and errors in the things that the Liberal government is planning. I would simply commend him for the tremendously good hard work that he has done.

I have a question for him which deserves a little further exploration, and it is with respect to the success of WestJet. Would he expand on the fact that Hamilton has had such a massive increase in passenger load and the fact that WestJet has somehow been able to survive the tumult, turmoil, and turbulence of the air industry in the last several years?

[Community Activity Support Fund, April 10th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to rise and debate an issue in the House that is of importance to some members.

I would like to first congratulate the member because quite clearly he has thought about something that is important to him and he put together a private member's motion. He submitted it and it was drawn. Therefore I congratulate him for having his motion drawn. That is something for which I am still waiting.

The House knows that we now have the list where everyone's bills or motions are drawn, so I can no longer say that mine has not been drawn, unfortunately. Of course I am at about spot 194 and I have a suspicion there will be an election before my number comes up, be that as it may.

With respect to the elements of the motion, I want to begin my speech by stating unequivocally that I cannot support it. I would like to explain my rationale because I did think about this quite a bit. I was assigned to look at this one for our party, and I was pleased to do that. I have very good reasons to be opposed to this and I will go through them one at a time.

First, as was mentioned across the way, I believe this really opens itself up to interference. I think of this example. There are many voluntary and very fine charitable groups in my riding, as I believe there are in every riding in the country. I choose which ones I want to support. I get many requests and for some of them I write a cheque. The House knows that we now do not have such a fund, so therefore when I write the cheque, it comes out of my own personal money. Actually it comes out of my wife's account. No, I am kidding, she actually draws on my account from time to time. It really is our money that pays for it.

I want to give an example of a group that I have never supported at all. The members invited me to their fundraiser. They said, “Mr. Epp, as a member of Parliament, you're very presence here will help us to have a successful event”. I smiled, thanked them and I could hardly believe it was true. I guess when we have MP after our names some people hold us in higher esteem. That is good and we need to work on ensuring that it continues to be true.

I went to the function. It was a fundraiser, so it had a silent auction. I walked around and I have no idea why but I put a bid on a DVD player. I do not have a television or a stereo that accepts an output from one of those things. My equipment is 40 years old. I am never home to use it anyway. Therefore I put a bid on it, never realizing that my bid, the first bid, would also be the last bid, so I got in a really nice box a DVD player for which I had absolutely no use but it was a good donation to that group.

I brought it home, and one day I mentioned this to my family. My son said that he would be quite willing to assist me in my dilemma . Now my son has a nice DVD player and the group, which was a private school, has an additional $150 that it would not have had otherwise, but I was quite happy to do that.

Should we be using taxpayer money for this kind of thing is one of the questions here. I think not. The taxpayers entrust money to us to support government programs. I think there ought to be criteria for programs that are eligible for funding. If those criteria are met, then those people should receive that funding. If those criteria are not met, they should not. It should not depend upon who one's friend is.

Each one of us have personal preferences when it comes to charities that we choose to support. I do not think it is right at all for taxpayers, who come from all groups, to have to put money into a pot and then have to depend upon one person to use that money and to reallocate it.

I am rather surprised that the member from the Bloc has suggested this, for a couple of reasons. First, I am surprised that the Bloc would want to have a federal intrusion into a provincial matter. Most social programs, such housing, hospitals and all these things, are under provincial jurisdiction. If the Bloc wants to keep the federal government out of this, why not just handle it inside the province?

I heard a member say “my money”. That is the next argument from the Bloc that surprises me. Public accounts notwithstanding, which show this not to be true, the Bloc members contend that they are sending more money to Ottawa than they receive back. I also, by the way, would counter that the public accounts do not actually reflect that as a fact, but that is what they contend. Therefore they would be better off if the federal government did not do this. They then could keep their money in the province. They could do way more with it than if they send it to Ottawa and only receive part of it back.

I have couple of other things to mention in this regard. As members of Parliament, we should concentrate on serving our constituents in two main areas, the first being in the legislative area. We ought to come to Ottawa, debate and vote freely on bills and motions that produce the best laws for this country. That should be our first priority.

Our second priority should be to assist our constituents when they run into trouble with various government departments. Those are the criteria on which we should be judged come election time: Did we do a good job on that?

If we were to introduce something like this, people would be making voting decisions based upon whether or not we were approving money for them out of this fund. I do not want that. I do not want to be judged on the fact that I was given a finite amount of money to give away, to the best of my ability, to whoever asked and then more people asked and I had to say “Sorry, there is no money left”, and they would say “Well I am not going to vote for him again, he does not care about us”. I do not want to introduce that. It is a false criterion to evaluate at election time.

The last thing I want to talk about is the fact that Alberta, provincially, has such a program. In fact, it has two programs: one is the community initiatives program and the other is the community facility enhancement program. Both of those programs are ways that the Alberta government uses to redistribute to the communities money that it gains by the lottery corporation, by its gaming taxes and the royalties it gets. That is partially how it redistributes that money. I have actually been in meetings where people have been almost fighting with their MLAs about who will get the money and who will not. I think it is really bad.

Again I will come back to my previous point. There ought to be set criteria. If people meet them, they get the money. If they do not, they do not get the money. It should not be based upon who can be the best friend or the best lobbyist.

I am also concerned about the fact that the motion says “the government should make available to Members a support fund for community activities”. In other words, it would go to the members and then the members would have it to disburse.

In Alberta, notwithstanding what I just said and notwithstanding the fact that the MLAs' recommendation, as everybody knows, is the primary criteria for whether or not the money is expended, if we look at their criteria, they are very specific on which non-profit groups can get it, all the details on how to apply for it, and there are rules on maximum payouts and even maximum amounts for which they can apply. They must have matching money that they earn and all of these things are taken into account.

With all due respect to the member for Saint-Jean, I appreciate that his private member's bill was drawn and that he stimulated the debate tonight, but I will not be able to support this motion. I will continue to help charitable organizations with my own money when I make that choice and that gives me much greater freedom.

[Iraq, April 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, today we are beginning to celebrate the liberation of the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was responsible for the death of over one million people and his grip on the people is gone.

It is true that lives have been lost in the conflict, military and civilian lives on both sides. This is sad and regrettable, but unfortunately, unavoidable. We need to thank our American and British allies for being willing to put their lives on the line and in some cases to give their lives to stand between the tyrant Saddam and his victims.

Saddam's torture chambers are shut down. No longer will men, women and children have to suffer in ways so horrendous that I cannot even bring myself to describe them explicitly. Lives have not been given in vain. We cannot bring back those who have already died, but thousands, maybe millions more, of his future victims have been saved.

[Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act, April 8th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was in my office watching these exciting debates on my television while I was working on things when somebody said they did not know whether anybody from the Alliance would be talking to this. I thought l had better get in here and express our opinion.

I have some pretty good ideas and I have quite a bit of experience in the area of staff, hiring staff, relationships, collective agreements, all those things. I have some pretty strong ideas about the bill and I am very honoured to say a few things about it.

I believe that where there is a lot of staff, the only practical way of hiring that staff is with a collective agreement.

When I worked at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, we had 750 instructors. It was quite impractical to hire each one on an individual contract because of the diversity that was required in the different areas, the obvious problems of favouritism and that type of thing. A collective agreement was very much in order.

I was the union steward for a while, and the president of the staff association, and the president of the local of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. There were many times when I looked at the collective agreement and said that in a way one size does not fit all. Just as any woman would say when it comes to buying pantyhose that one size does not fit all, this is true in collective agreements as well.

We can have an agreement that says someone who has a certain amount of education and experience gets a certain salary and someone who is required to work from 8 in the morning until 4:30 every day gets one hour for lunch.

At the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology we taught classes. Our collective agreement said that we should all have one hour for lunch starting between 11:45 and 12 and ending one and one-quarter hours later. A person who started lunch at 11:45 would be back on the job at one and a person who started at 12 would be back by 1:15. It did not fit because a lot of us had classes starting at 12:15. When I was there all the classes started at 15 minutes after the hour and went for 55 minutes. Sometimes there were double classes which were basically two 55-minute periods.

We had some problems trying to get that through the collective agreement process. Some individuals said it was not a problem, that they would take their lunch hour from 11 to 12. I was one of those guys who was compliant. I remember one time in my schedule my lunch hour was from 8 to 9:15 in the morning. That is how I got the shape I have now; it started then, from eating at irregular hours. Others said that no, they would only take their lunch hour at the time the collective agreement stated.

What happened was that those of us who were compliant ended up teaching during the noon hour. Those who said that they were standing by the agreement got their lunch hour during the prescribed hours.

It worked out anyway because people were able to work around the system. But it was very difficult because of the variations in individual cases.

Then we had instructors who taught in other areas. I was in the academic department, but others taught in other areas. It was very difficult to come up with one collective agreement that fit the needs of a mathematics or physics instructor as opposed to someone who was teaching medical lab technology, as opposed to someone else who was teaching the paramedics, as opposed to someone else who was teaching heavy duty diesel mechanics. There were many variations.

Somehow the big union was not able to get its head around our particular needs there. We landed up spending almost as much time fighting with our union as we did with our employer, with the result that things really deteriorated.

The reason I am saying this is because in this particular environment we all have some very special needs. I strongly believe that it is absolutely important for us to be able to hire people to work strange hours if that is required. If we have people who work extraordinarily long hours, it would be fair for us to have the flexibility to pay them a little more, and perhaps others who work the more stringent hours, for whatever reasons, to get paid a little less. However, each one of us must be able to do that. It is important to provide a specific work plan for each individual in this environment because we have a relatively small number of employees.

I want to reiterate that when there are a large number of employees, even when I think back to NAIT, I really do not know how else we could have done it. It would have been difficult to start saying that we would have 750 individual contracts. It would have been an administrative nightmare. But here we have a leader of the party who, with his or her chief of staff, has made an arrangement for a staff of between about 50 and 150 people. I think the government probably has quite a few more than that. That is a manageable size. That is not out of capacity at all for individual contracts.

I reject the hypothesis that unless it is done by collective agreement that it will not be fair. The onus is on all of us, as individual members of Parliament and as directors in our respective parties, to ensure that the working conditions, the employment package, and everything there is fair.

When I was first elected way back in 1993, almost 10 years ago, I would have liked a few more statistics. We received this little sheet that said we could hire our staff and we could not pay them more than a certain amount. I had no idea as a neophyte what I should pay my staff. What were the standards and norms? I would have liked a little more actual help in that regard to say what the norm was and what members of Parliament were generally paying. I would have liked means and standard deviations. That may have been as useful as ranges of salaries based on experience and so on. That statistic should be available without divulging individual information.

That would have been helpful, but going to a collective agreement in this particular environment is not a good fit at all. The concept is good. We must ensure that we are fair. However, I reject the idea that unless there is a collective agreement guaranteeing the rights of the employees that they are not going to get them.

We all know the horror stories. I was involved in our staff association. I was the president and the chief guy that dealt with problems, and I dealt with problems continuously. That was in an environment where there was a collective agreement. We are going to have problems either way.

Perhaps what we ought to do is have a better liaison system where staff can go to their party bosses and say that one of our MPs is doing this and could we look at that. There might be a system there, but I would not support this particular initiative even though I do strongly believe in fairness to staff.

As an employer in charge of only three staffers right now, I have an obligation. If I expect loyalty from my staff, I must show them loyalty as well and ensure that they get paid adequately, that their working conditions are fair, and that they can look after their families if that is their need. I insist that we keep that flexibility and so with regret I will not support this particular bill.

[Supply, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated very much the speeches that were given by my colleague and by my leader earlier.

Mr. Speaker, you may have noticed that I hesitated a bit before I stood up. I wanted to give an opportunity to the Liberals opposite to stand and ask some questions and to express their views. It would be good if they were to engage in the debate instead of just sitting back. One of the most serious indictments in this whole situation is that the Prime Minister has not yet given a major speech on this issue. He is standing on the sidelines and we need leadership in this country.

I remember, and this is one of the disadvantages of being this old, when I was a youngster watching a movie, which was in black and white of course. The name of the movie is The Mouse That Roared . It is a classic. I recommend that everyone watch it.

The movie is about a little country that got into a lot of trouble so the people devised a strategy to solve their economic problems. They decided that they would attack the United States because it was known that after the little country lost, and it surely would, the United States would pour millions of dollars into the little country to rebuild and would restore it. That was their strategy.

Unfortunately, and this is what made the movie so funny, at every stage the little country was successful and it brought the Americans to their knees. It was really very funny. It was a comedy, so this is how it worked out. But the premise was that the Americans would help and this is their history.

I would like my colleague to comment on the fact that those who harbour ill feelings against our friends the Americans are totally wrong. Their whole history has been one of stepping into the breach, standing between tyrants and their victims, helping those who are in need.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would like to point out that the hon. member who just tabled a report had an additional statement to make. It is not on the record because her microphone was off and I would like to advise that she should have the opportunity to restate her statement.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, April 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. My reputation of being able to do mathematical computations is at risk. I would like to set the record straight. I think I may have said that the government expenditures for the year is represented by loonies flying at 630 kilometres per hour. It should have been 531. I just recomputed it and I want the accurate number on the record.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, April 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I again have the privilege of standing in our House of Commons representing not only the people of Elk Island but also many Canadians right across this country as we debate Bill C-28, the bungle implementation act.

It was no bungle that I used the word “bungle” instead of budget. Bill C-28 is the bungle implementation act, the Liberal bungling of the finances of Canadian taxpayers.

We have had a little chat in the last couple of months about trust funds and the fact that there should be a blind trust for cabinet ministers when they undertake to become managers of large amounts of money so that there would be a reduction of personal gain by doing that. We had a blind trust suggestion. It is supposed to be in the rules for cabinet ministers. We found out, of course, that the former finance minister had a blind trust that was not blind at all. In fact, it came complete with a Seeing Eye dog, I guess.

The reason I bring this up is that unknown to many taxpayers in this country their money is in a blind trust. They send it to Ottawa and the government here manages to spend it at an astounding rate. It is mostly in a blind trust because no one really can account for where it went afterwards, so it is totally blind. I should not say totally, as we know where some of it went, but a lot of it is very badly mismanaged.

Over the last 10 years that I have been a member of Parliament and even before that, when I remember my dad saying it many years ago, I have had many people say to me they did not mind paying fair taxes. My dad said that he did not mind paying fair taxes, that “It shows that I have an income and I am very happy with that and very grateful to live in a country where I can earn money to provide for my family”. He used to say that he was certainly willing to pay some money for the privilege of living here and to make his contribution to the economic milieu in the country.

However, over and over in the last number of years I have heard people say that they do not mind paying a fair rate of taxation but they have two complaints. One is that the rate is not fair, that it is too high. Second, they tell me that when they send that money they are not content with the way it is mismanaged here. I had someone ask me, “How about these advertising contracts? How is it that somebody can get a contract with the government and not do any work for it but still cash the cheque?”

That is a very good question. The cabinet ministers on the front bench over there should be very concerned about the fact that they are not managing the financial affairs of this country properly and looking after the finances of the country properly. They are really mismanaging money that has been entrusted to them. It was given in trust, but they are not treating it in trust.

I want to mention something about the rate of taxation, and I do not know whether people are aware of it. I like to dabble in mathematics. There was one computation I did, although I do not remember the exact number. If all the money spent by the government of Ottawa, which over the year is around $183 billion, were paid out of Ottawa--and of course it is not, there are huge cheques and large equalization payments and health care transfers--by putting the loonies on a conveyor belt and shipping them out of Ottawa to wherever they go, or within Ottawa, that conveyor belt would have to be going at around 630 kilometres per hour. As I recall the number, that is what it would be. That is the rate at which the loonies are flying out of here.

We know that the loonies are flying in from the taxpayers at an even faster rate because we have been enjoying surpluses. Some of that money has gone to reducing the debt at way too slow a rate, while program spending is going up at the rate of 20% per year. That is not sustainable. That is another area where the government is mismanaging the money that is entrusted to it by Canadian taxpayers.

Certainly, there are programs that need more money. We have been calling for more money for the military. It is atrocious that we send a ship to attend a war that the Prime Minister says we are not in and the helicopter on board cannot fly. First there was the one that crashed on the ship and we had to bring it home. The next one went out, and when it arrived, it got a hole in the firewall and could not fly.

We are asking our servicemen and women to go out there with totally inadequate equipment and no moral or other support from the government, and yet they are putting their lives on the line.

That is an atrocious misuse of taxpayers' money as well because taxpayers are sending the money to Ottawa to, among other things, preserve the national interest. Certainly, as a nation we should be a major player when it comes to looking after the concerns of peace and fighting terrorism around the world. Yes, we would like to have more money there.

We have said since we came here that health care must be improved. I hesitate to use this example, but I will. On the day of my father's funeral just several weeks before Christmas, my mother fell and broke her hip. This happened in Saskatchewan, the province which is the home of medicare. She had to wait for 35 hours before she had attention to it and as a result missed dad's funeral. It was a pretty bad day. I guess that is an understatement.

However, for there not to be appropriate health care in a province like Saskatchewan because of lack of funding is atrocious. We know this because the federal government dried it up in 1993 and 1994 when it first took power. Afterwards the government comes here like a shining white knight saying it will fix medicare. First it gives it the fatal blow and then it tries to blow some breath back into it. Then it wants us to proclaim it a hero for doing it.

I had a phone call or an e-mail, I cannot remember which, from my daughter who lives in Regina. She told of two of her friends who had to travel out of the province in order to get needed health care because the province could not provide it. One was a mother with newborn twins. There was not a reasonable amount of equipment in Regina to look after these babies so they had to airlift this mother and her new twins in a makeshift apparatus to keep them alive until they got to Calgary so they could look after them. That is just not good enough.

We want our government to use taxpayers' money responsibly. I have said a number of times that the government would spend a billion dollars on registering duck hunters. That is a blatant waste of money. There is no proof whatsoever that even if the registry did work successfully that it would save any lives.

I did a little computation. A billion dollars would buy four MRIs for every riding in the country. A city of Edmonton has eight ridings, six in Edmonton and two right outside, one of them being mine. That would be 32 MRIs in the city of Edmonton. Members should ask those people what they would rather have, a registration system for their shotgun, or MRIs so that for serious medical problems they can get a proper diagnosis and receive treatment.

My big complaint with the budget and with Bill C-28, the bungle implementation act, is that the government is bungling the finances of the country and it is time that comes to an end.