Ken Epp

[Curling, March 18th, 2003]

They won, Mr. Speaker, and what a win it was.

I speak of course of the champion Randy Ferbey curling team who won their third in a row Canadian Men's Curling Championship a week ago. It was an awesome, breathtaking, amazing, fabulous win. Not only was it the third consecutive win of this tournament, for Randy it was the fifth time he was on the winning team.

This win was made more significant by the fact that it was no cake-walk. The runner-up team of Mark Dacey from Nova Scotia put up one gallant fight. They were a formidable team to beat, yet the Ferbey team won a fabulous 13 games in a row.

There were many crucial and absolutely spectacular shots.

You might be surprised, Mr. Speaker, to learn that three of the four members live in my riding. Who says that no good can come out of Elk Island.

Congratulations to the whole team: skip Randy Ferbey, Marcel Rocque, Scott Pfeifer, and David Nedohin. We are very proud of them.

[Specific Claims Resolution Act, February 28th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it will probably surprise you that my speech will be a little longer than those of the other members. I could actually speak from now till 5:30 p.m. I will not bother asking for unanimous consent for that because I rather suspect there would be at least one member here who would decline.

There is so much to be said on this topic. It is one of those issues where again, we ought to be paying a great deal more attention to the facts of the matter than we actually are.

I would like to begin by laying some groundwork. I have had some experience, but not a great amount, in working with native people. When I was in the math department at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, one of the very good projects in which I was involved was setting up a program for students who had dropped out of high school so that we could get them back into the educational route and hopefully retrieve their lost years. We would get them into a program and give them training so that they could obtain employment.

The institute had a program called pretechnology where we taught the basics of mathematics, the English language and science. There was a course in chemistry and a course in physics for them. On those subjects we actually went back all the way to the very basics. We started probably at the grade 2 or 3 level in math. We did not spend a great deal of time at that level because they were adult students, but we laid the foundation and we built on that.

At the end of one year we had taken those students right through to having completed high school equivalency. They did not get a high school diploma from us but we gave them enough education in those basic areas so that the following year they could enter a post-secondary program, just as those who had gone through grade 12 in high school.

Most of the students in that program for one reason or another had dropped out of school any time after grade 9 or 10. They had forgotten everything they may have known, so it was a major task.

I am indicating that today because when I was working in that program, I was also one of the instructors. Even though I was the head of the mathematics department in those years, I also chose to work as an instructor in that program.

In that program we had a small number of native students. I always felt that somehow these students were not anywhere near the potential that was contained in them. For the most part that was true. When I would talk to them individually about this, I would find out that most of them had had very poor opportunities and very poor discipline and learning in the schools that they had attended. There was a big attendance problem. The students were never really properly motivated, whether or not it was because their parents did not support their going to school adequately.

Many of them were involved in cultural things. In the fall they would go hunting. I always felt that if that is what they wanted to do, that was fine, but surely we could devise an education program that worked around that. Their vacation time could be during hunting season if need be. These young people could go out with their dads and learn how to hunt and do all of those things. That would be great, but let us not stop their education.

As a result these students came to NAIT very often with a very poor elementary and lower high school background. They were wonderful people to work with. I say that unequivocally. I found them to be very gentle, if I can make a generalization, and very eager to please.

I actually met one of the students on the airplane not very long ago. He had been in my class. Amazingly I remembered him but he did not remember me, which was quite a curiosity. Usually students remember me because I was the guy up front and they would recall that I had been their instructor. He also was one of my students and we did a little reminiscing about that experience.

What I am trying to say by preamble is that I have a real soft spot in my heart for the natives of Canada because of the situation that they have been in for many decades. I believe primarily it is because of the fact that governments have really done wrong by them, they really have, and it is time to correct it. It is time to put that behind us and start moving forward in huge leaps and bounds in order to allow native Canadians to realize their full potential. That is a goal I think we really need to seek out.

As the House may or may not know, for a time I was also involved in a small business. I remember that one of the young men who was hired to work for us was a first nations person. He was a fine young man. He worked diligently and people could count on him. If he said he was going to be there, he would be there. Unfortunately I have to say that was not true of all of the employees, but for him it was.

I remember as well one occasion, and this is a dead giveaway, when I stopped at one of the Kentucky Fried Chicken places in Edmonton. I was hungry for Kentucky Fried Chicken. This is a free ad for it and everyone can see it had a good, long term effect on me. I was eating my meal in the car. I used to pick up my food, sit in the car at noon time and listen to the radio before I would head back to work.

I was doing that when a young native came to the door of my car and asked for money. Instead of giving him money, I asked him what he needed it for. When I found out that he needed bus money in order to get home, I told him to get in and that I would drive him home. I had an opportunity to talk to him. I found out about what a sad plight he was in. Here he was in the big city and he did not have a job or any means of support. He really was very desperate.

That is not acceptable. It is not acceptable that for years and years these people have been undertrained, undereducated and underemployed. We need to correct that. One of the ways of correcting it is to treat them with the dignity with which they should be treated.

When we come to the topic of Bill C-6, I think this is an area where the federal Liberal government, which loves to crow about its compassionate attitude, has so totally blown it. It has blown it over decades. The Prime Minister likes to brag about the fact that he held all sorts of portfolios, that way back he was the minister of Indian and northern affairs. In all areas where those people have been trying to work with our first nations people they have utterly and totally failed. Now they have deluded themselves into thinking that if they keep on doing the same thing a little more often, they are going to get different results. I do not think so.

I look at the many provisions in Bill C-6. I am rather appalled by the mediocrity of the bill, by the fact that the Minister of Finance under the direction of the Prime Minister and all of the people in that department could not come up with something better than Bill C-6 with all of its flaws.

Another thing that really annoys me is that in the next election campaign, and I can already see it, there is going to be an election platform where the Liberals are going to say, “Do not vote for the Canadian Alliance. It voted against the natives”. That is how they will message it. That is very annoying.

The reason that we in the Alliance are against this bill is it is so totally inadequate. The Liberals will twist it. Instead of saying that we are against this bill in order to improve it for the natives, they will twist it so that Canadian people will be led to believe that we are against the natives. It is exactly the opposite.

It is the Liberals who are against them because of the inadequacy of legislation such as this bill. A careful reading of the bill would prove that what I am saying is correct.

Some of the previous speakers have already drawn attention to the fact that if the goal is to provide for speedy resolutions of claims, the bill would be one of the major hindrances to achieving that goal. How ironic to state that is the goal of the bill and then to design the bill so that it does exactly the opposite.

Madam Speaker, it is as if we were in a race. In order to help you, I as the young engineer, want to get your car going really fast and I say that we should tie a bunch of rocks on the back of the car and then drag them along. You would say, “Okay, you are the engineer, go ahead and do it”. But it would not help. I could say this would help you to go faster, but just because I say it would help does not make it so. In fact it would be just the opposite.

The same is true with the bill. When the Liberals say the purpose is to provide for speedy resolution of claims, it is just the opposite.

I would like to talk a little about some of the specifics of the bill. One that comes to mind is the promise of independence.

One of the reasons the natives of our country feel so downtrodden is that they have had governments lord it over them for too long. Here we have a process in place which again uses a label which is totally opposite to the result. They are talking about having an independent commission, an independent tribunal. Maybe the Liberals should get out the good old dictionary. They should have a look at what it means to be independent. They have missed the boat entirely on it.

I have used this example before in some speeches but it bears repeating here. It is the same as someone who gets into the ring to have a boxing match and the opponent also happens to be the referee. I wish that person luck in winning the match.

The natives are looking for an independent and fair resolution mechanism and what do they get? They get more of the same from the past, the Liberal government lording it over them.

The Liberals do not know the meaning of the word “independent”. If they do, they sure do not give any demonstration of understanding the meaning by the legislation they have here, in terms of appointments to the commission and to the tribunal. It is absolutely incredible that independence is a word only to them.

Of course we know that they do not understand it. Way back in 1993 we were promised an independent ethics counsellor. We have seen in the last nine and half to ten years how independent an ethics counsellor is, who is appointed by the Prime Minister, whose salary is determined by the Prime Minister, who answers to the Prime Minister, who reports to the Prime Minister and who, in effect, has been drawn into becoming part of the Prime Minister's damage control team every time anything goes wrong. We do not get independence by having a close tie like that to the government, to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

It is really a shame that they could not arrange for, as our amendment stated in committee, true independence, people on the board who would be agreed to by both the government and the first nations people. Why could that not be done? Surely they could agree. There must be about 15 million or 20 million adults in Canada. Among those, surely we could find 14 people who would be mutually agreeable.

That would take a little bit of work, perhaps. But the government simply says that it will appoint, and that is what this legislation does, but the actual wording is something like order in council. We in Parliament of course understand that is by order of the governor in council of the executive branch of our government, which means the Prime Minister and the minister and they will appoint whomever they will.

The legislation is so offensive in that regard. They will be appointed by the Prime Minister. Their salaries will be determined by the Prime Minister or by a minister of the department; their working conditions; any bonuses; and the extent to which expenses are paid. Where do the first nations people come into this? Nowhere.

The government will have a person or a group of people who will be adjudicating and determining the basis on which these claims are processed and the whole process will be done by people who are beholden to the government.

What is the probability of commissioners making a fair judgment, which might go against the government, if they know their appointment is to serve during pleasure, which means the Prime Minister and the minister are pleased with their work? How can they ever come up with something that displeases the government?

Why can the Liberals not simply build into that appointment process, that hiring process and that benefit process a way of having an independent appointment process, just simply, as I said, to make sure those individuals who are appointed are mutually agreeable? That should not be difficult.

As I said before, and this is a very small sample, but in my dealings with native Canadians I have found them so co-operative. They seem to be a group of people who have a gentle spirit. I find it unfathomable that in this country we would be taking more and more of them away from their natural ways and training them to become almost militant and to have to stand up so strongly for their rights because they have been put down so long.

Let us look at the appointment of the chief executive officer. The bill states:

The Chief Executive Officer may be appointed to hold office for a term of not more than five years and may be removed for cause by the Governor in Council.

It is right in the bill. What is ironic is that the appointment is for a term not exceeding five years, but the very next paragraph states:

The Chief Executive Officer is eligible for re-appointment on the expiration of any term of office.

There is a flaw in that. I realize members are all paying very close attention to what I am saying, all 170 of them out there. I want to point out the flaw in the fact that the individual would be subject to re-appointment. That puts in another reason that a commissioner would have to make sure he or she did not offend the sensibilities of the Prime Minister or the minister of the department in order to keep the job. And it is a fine paying job. It is ranked at the level of deputy minister and the salary is higher than members of Parliament, if I am not mistaken. There is a very fine pension plan and all that stuff. Of course those commissioners would want to keep their job. They will not rule against the government. Where do the natives stand in this? They come out on the short end of it once again.

Subclause 8(3) states:

The Chief Executive Officer shall be paid the remuneration that is fixed by the Governor in Council.

Everything would be done by governor in council, no mutual agreement at all.

To skip a few points, it is interesting that under subclause 8(6) it states:

The Chief Executive Officer shall not accept or hold any office or employment or carry on any activity inconsistent with the duties and functions of that office--

And then, in a most bizarre continuation of the sentence, it states:

--but, for greater certainty, the Chief Executive Officer may also hold the office of Chief Commissioner.

The bill states that the chief executive officer of the organization specifically can be a member--

[Government Contracts, February 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, Liberal leadership candidate, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, has close to $1 billion a year to spend on pet projects. One of those projects is the HMCS Haida that is to end up in Hamilton harbour as a floating museum. Here is a surprise, CSE Marine Services Inc., a subsidiary of Canada Steamship Lines, has the contract.

Can the minister of heritage explain why she is funnelling money to the former finance minister's not so blind empire?

[Criminal Code, February 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am not pleased to speak on the bill because I wish that we did not have to. I wish that the Liberals would have long ago taken some serious action toward the protection of children. They have not done so. They have been dilly-dallying.

I cannot believe that instead decisive action what we get from the government is an endless line of excuse making as to why it cannot do this and why it cannot do that. It keeps going on and on without ever coming to an end. I think that is frankly rather deplorable. I do not think it is justifiable. I think that members on the government side should hang their heads in shame. To think that they cannot solve a problem such as this is just really incredible.

I have to say that when it comes to issues of protecting our children, it is very important that we do it right. We have in our country right now a charter, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and we defend that charter. It has a lot of good things in it.

Having been raised in a family that escaped from a country where there was very little personal freedom, very little opportunity for personal expression, and where there was no opportunity for political dissent, I very much value the ability to be in a country where there is freedom of speech. We must remember that the first reason for freedom of speech was the freedom to actually criticize the king. It used to be that if people criticized the king they got their heads clubbed off.

Interestingly, we have the symbol of that club as the symbol of authority, even in the House. If we look at the table over there, we see the mace, and we dare not touch it because it shows the symbol of the king, of the authority. We of course all respect that very seriously. We will not challenge that authority. It is right that there be authority of the government.

However, those freedoms and the freedom of expression do have limitations. It is absolutely certain that there are occasions where that freedom is to be abridged, and it is abridged.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, February 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to stand in the House of debate. I sometimes call it the word factory because our job here is to crank out words which then become part of the permanent record. It is a privilege to stand here and debate.

I would like to begin by saying how very frustrating this is. This is undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most important bill that we will debate in this Parliament. It has extremely large, long term ramifications. It has a huge dimension to the value that we place on human life. I find it very frustrating when I think of what is going to happen.

We have before us in Group No. 2 a number of amendments. Those amendments are all very important amendments. They are amendments which correct the flaws in the bill. I would love to debate with members of Parliament in a meaningful way the merits of these amendments but I guess I will just have to be brutally honest and say that I have a big suspicion that no members are really paying attention to this debate. Very few are actually listening or participating. Very few will actually go back and listen to the debates or watch the tapes later. They are disengaged from what is undoubtedly one of the most important issues facing us. I really regret that and I think that is a huge flaw.

Add to that another flaw. My predecessor, Mr. Brian O'Kurley, who represented Elk Island before I did, and who by the way will be the only other member for Elk Island, since he was there in the first term when Elk Island came to be, because the riding is disappearing. It will be gone.

Mr. O'Kurley told me before the election that when I became a member of Parliament I would find out that my most important work would be done in committees. I came here and found that to be true.

When we are working in committee there will be members around the table engaging in debate with each other and with the witnesses. We actually grapple with these big issues and come up with conclusions and recommendations which are included in the report.

In this particular instance, this very important bill was studied at length by the members of the committee. The committee did a lot of good work and made recommendations. What do we find? Does the government, in finishing off the legislation, take these recommendations into account? Does it look at the actual proposals made by the committee, for example to split some of the conditions of the bill? No, it just motors right along.

As a matter of fact, it is my opinion, and I think I am right, that the decision on where this bill is going is not even made by parliamentarians. I think it is people in the back rooms who have determined how this is going to be. They have persuaded the minister to carry the ball for them here and all the government members will vote on command as they always do.

Members may think I am wasting the time that I have in my speech now but I think it would be wasted no matter what I said because I do not think anybody is listening or anybody is hearing. That is very unfortunate.

There are issues here which are of tremendous importance. I have a tendency, when speaking on issues of this nature to try to deal with very deep principles, really fundamental principles. I think the overriding principle that should drive any bill at all on genetic research, on reproductive technologies, on issues like cloning and medical research, should be, and it should be written in huge bold letters on the top of the bill, that we value explicitly each human life. The value of human life should be our priority when we are discussing these things.

I sometimes think our society has lost, as represented in this Parliament, the sense of the special value and the sacredness of an individual human life. We have lost the sense, certainly, of the sacredness of reproduction if we look at some of the things that have come before this Parliament, such as the issue of child pornography and other pornography, the issue of reproduction, and the issue of marriage and divorce.

I do not know how we can separate a debate on these issues from the deep, abiding, moral structure that has held our country together for many years and is now being seriously challenged and eroded. I believe there is a sacred component to human life that we need to get back to. It is an affront to any individual who has that deep conviction to suggest, even for a moment, that a human being in any form is dispensable for the sake of research.

I do not want members to get me wrong. Even though I place great value on human life, I am also a strong advocate of research and development in medical areas. What I am not in favour of is abandoning the respect for one person's life in order to promote the respect for another. When we do that we go beyond the realm of what we should be doing as humans.

When we think of things like cloning and toying with the genetic make-up of a human being and the setting up of a situation where we get an exact replica of another human being, I think we are dabbling in an area where we ought not to go, because instead of taking genetic material from a male and a female, we have imposed on the new individual the genetic make-up of only one of those individuals, and hence the clone. I believe very strongly that we are dabbling in an area in which we should simply stay away from just on principle.

We can use many other ways to look for cures for diseases and ways of preventing other diseases. There is so much to do. I cannot help but think of several of my friends who are in long term care. Actually my mother is in long term care having gone through a recent hip operation. I think of my younger friend who has premature Parkinson's disease and who is totally disabled and unable to communicate most of the time. He is unable to walk and is in a wheelchair. How desirable it would be to have a cure for that disease. However there are many things we can do without encroaching on the moral dilemmas that a bill such as this brings to our minds.

We need to make sure that our legislation and our work here is such that it is directed toward a proper and moral solution that upholds the value and sacredness of human life. I am committed to that. I wish we all were.

[The Budget, February 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, as you know, I am not one to dominate. I was looking around to see whether any other member wanted to ask a question and none stood, so here I am again.

The member mentioned the problem of our national debt. He talked about the fact that it is always bragged about. The Liberals love to brag that the debt as a proportion of the country's gross domestic product has gone down. That is due greatly to the fact that the economy has really taken off in the last nine years. The government keeps on saying it is because of the very fine government.

I contend that if it were not for the mismanagement in the government, our gross domestic product and certainly the taxation levels and everything could have been much more favourable to the taxpayers. We would have had a better economy, even better than it was. We could have had lower taxes but that never happened.

I would like to have the member's comment about the fact that the only time to pay down debt is when there is a surplus. Does he share my regret that the finance minister in this budget chose not to take a major portion of it to reduce the actual numerical value of our national debt?

[The Budget, February 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I always enjoy listening to my accountant friend across the way. He can explain things in a really good way so I am going to ask him for a really good explanation.

He lauded the move on the part of the government to go to accrual accounting. He said we now have to account on the public record for all of the liabilities we have. I would like to know whether that includes the liability for the pensions not only for members of Parliament but for all of Canadians, and whether it includes the unfunded liability of the Canada pension plan. We know there is much less money in the fund than the present value of the amount that could be collected from it. Is that going to be included?

He talked a little about our national debt per se. I would like him to explain how, by going to accrual accounting, magically we lost around $20 billion of our debt, just by adopting a new accounting method.

[Supply, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I hate to accuse the member, but I have to, as I think he made very many tacit assumptions in his speech. He assumed that safety would be enhanced by these measures. If we ask in detail about these questions the answer is no.

In the Elk Island riding not very long ago, we had the abduction by two armed men of a fairly well known radio personality. He lives in my riding and took the occasion the next time he was on radio to talk about his experience and how these guys held their gun to his head and forced him to open his cabinet, on threat of losing his life. So then they had his guns. The registration did not prevent them from getting his guns. It was ludicrous. In fact, even his attempt to store his guns safely was foiled by these guys. He went on and on and was asked if registration would have helped his situation. With absolute certitude, he said absolutely no, it would not have made a single difference in his case.

I think that the member probably should recheck what he has just said, read the statements and assertions he has made, and admit that he is simply making an assumption of what he wishes were true when in fact it is not.

[Business of the House, February 20th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I had a few minutes left in my speech on this bill and I am wondering whether this would preclude my ability to say two more important things.

[The Budget, February 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, as the member knows I have been very interested in education over the years. There was a small mention in the budget speech about students. If I remember correctly, more loans would be made available to students, including refugee students, and they would also have a special bursary or scholarship program for graduate degrees.

It seems to me that the people who are left out of this whole equation are thousands of rank and file students seeking their first or second bachelor degree in order to get a job. They are still facing tremendously high costs for books and ever increasing tremendously high tuition costs. In fact, I noticed from those universities that I have become aware of that the maximum permitted increases in tuition would be put into place this coming fall. So the hardships for these students is increasing instead of decreasing. This particular budget has totally failed to address the real questions and problems that are faced by these students.

Would the member concur with me in that assessment? Would he have any other ideas on how this problem could be addressed?