Ken Epp

[Ethics, February 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government, the Prime Minister and the former finance minister who wishes to be Prime Minister have brought discussions on ethics and accountability to a new low. They have redefined the term blind trust so that it is neither blind nor trustworthy.

Canadians want to have a government that they can trust. When ministers say that they have temporarily divested themselves of personal interests so that they can function in cabinet without personal bias and without potential for personal gain, then what they say is what they should mean.

It is unconscionable that the former finance minister was giving briefings about his holdings and business deals while he was in office. It shatters what little trust Canadians have left. It is the apex of disappointment and disillusionment.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I too am happy for the opportunity to address Bill C-24. I think the bill is an opportunistic opportunity for the Prime Minister to take some of the heat off the ethical breakdown in government.

We have been literally hammered over the last couple of years with boondoggles, cost overruns, misuse of taxpayer money and all sorts of accusations regarding whether or not there was proper accountability and whether or not ministers properly fulfilled their duties.

The Prime Minister made a big speech saying that he would be making some changes, one of them being, of course, the proposed code of conduct for MPs. Even though none of these scandals involved backbench MPs on the Liberal side or opposition MPs, they have become part of the focus, moving away from the accountability of ministers, who the Prime Minister was quite happy to promote during the election of 1993 where he said that when he became Prime Minister those ministers would be held accountable. We frankly have not seen that.

In any event, now we have, as part of the package, electoral reform. We find that it is an interesting approach that the government is taking. It is interesting because of the fact that it has decided to change the way political parties and candidates are financed.

A couple of times in the debate today it has been mentioned that the Canadian Alliance would probably accept this money. I want to make it very clear that we are opposed to the bill because we believe that some of the measures in it are just plain wrong. However I want to make it very clear that we will obey and abide by the law that is passed.

The Prime Minister has announced that he will force the bill through by making it a confidence vote. In other words, if members of Parliament choose to vote against the bill it would show a lack of confidence in the government. The government's own members are being browbeaten into voting for this whether they agree with it or not. I think that is unconscionable. It is a breach in the democratic process.

At any rate, the Prime Minister has brought this forward and will jam it through and, with that, we will have some notable changes in the way that political parties and candidates are financed.

I would like to be on record as saying that some of the measures in the bill are laudable. I certainly agree with at least the word “accountability”. The Liberals tend to use the word a lot but they do not often produce the results that we are looking for. However I do believe in accountability and openness.There is nothing wrong with having true accountability.

However there is one thing that I have come to understand, one can refuse to be open and accountable in two ways: first, by giving no information; and second, by giving so much that it gets lost in the shuffle. I had that experience not too long ago when I asked for information. Several crates of documents were delivered to my office. All of that information can be called accountability. I looked at it and noticed that a lot of it was simply photocopies of photocopies of the same thing over and over again. It was just a way of trying to snow me. I received the stuff I asked for and I could no longer say I did not get it. However the usefulness of it was minimized because of the fact that the volume was so great. I think this is one of the features of the current rules.

We have rules about publicly disclosing the donations of people who give $200 or more to a party or to a candidate. Frankly, I think that is part of the overkill. I guess there is nothing wrong with knowing who donated to whom. Sometimes people join a party, not because they believe in that party, but because they want to become operatives in the party for spying reasons. I have heard of that happening. I suppose it does happen from time to time. Would it not be interesting if some of the labour unions knew to which parties their bosses belonged in order to get on the mailing list or other things like that?

I think it is redundant to ask for public disclosure of small donations. It is the larger ones that could be open to questioning because they could be used to influence the party at different times.

The philosophical question is how political parties should be financed. We all accept that there are political parties in this country and that hey should have enough money to operate. It is unfortunate that from time to time political parties go into debt. That ought not to be.

I remember with pride being part of the Reform Party in 1993 where one of our campaign slogans was that the party would run its election campaign the way Canada should be run, debt free. We did that for a number of years during several elections. I as an individual candidate did not spend money I did not have in order to avoid going into debt. I think that is a laudable goal. We need to make sure there is a solid base for the financing of political parties.

I strongly believe that it should be voluntary and not coerced. Frankly, if a member of the Liberal Party came to my door and asked if I would help the party raise money for the next election by buying some tickets to its fundraising dinner I would decline the offer. I do not believe the Liberal government is doing a good job of governing the country. I think it needs to be replaced. To ask me to finance its next election campaign would be an affront.

I know people will say that the bill would not take money away, except in proportion. If people vote for them that is how they get their money. It is based on the votes.

I understand that part but in my riding of Elk Island where, I would venture to say, two-thirds of the people would support the Canadian Alliance and about 20%, one in five, would support a Liberal--those are numbers based on the last election--it would be an affront to take all those taxpayer dollars out of my riding and say “That part of your tax dollars which goes to support political parties will be divvied up 50% to the Liberals and 20% to the Canadian Alliance”. Right away there is an anomaly when we bring in that kind of a scheme.

I think it is anti-democratic. I believe democracy is served when individuals are free, when they are given the freedom to support the organization or the political party of their choice, not because it is brought in.

I remember how upset I was, as a forced union member, to watch the union give $100,000 to the NDP. I am diametrically opposed to the principles of the New Democratic Party, as it probably is opposed to many of the things in which we believe. However to force me to pay my dues and then watch the money go to the New Democratic Party was a personal affront to me. It was a violation of my personal freedoms.

That same principle applies when we are taking taxation dollars and giving them to political parties. That will increase cynicism toward political parties and not decrease it.

In order to strengthen the amendment that we proposed, I would like to propose a subamendment. I move:

That the amendment be amended by inserting after the word “state” the words “, an increase from approximately 40% to over 70%,”

For explanation, there are also some commas included in there but I did not read the commas because they are symbols and not words.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the presentation given by the hon. member opposite who is asking for some amendments and, I suppose, for putting the brakes on the amount of expenditure we are asking the taxpayer to spend here.

When I work out the rough numbers it looks to me like the Liberal Party would gain around $8 million. Without having a Prime Minister's dinner at $500 a plate or going around and campaigning and soliciting from individuals or businesses, suddenly, just by the stroke of a pen, by the passing of a law, the taxpayers of the country would be coerced into paying around $8 million a year into the Liberal Party. I guess that would quickly wipe out its present indebtedness.

I think perhaps it is a little bit of a scheme by the Prime Minister to eliminate the debt of the Liberal Party. I do not like it. I would like the member's response on that.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. This is questions and comments, but it is true that the member who just spoke asked a whole bunch of questions of the member here and I think it would be appropriate to give him an opportunity to answer.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I grew up in the member's home province. I know all about socialism. I know all about the fact that people all put in their money in order to get a common good. Mr. Speaker, it may come as a surprise to you, and it may come as a surprise to some other members, but I have a certain sympathy for some programs that are paid for collectively for the common good. For example, I believe that all citizens should pay into a fund that provides a justice system that works on behalf of law-abiding citizens. I believe that Canadians should all pay into a fund that provides decent health care for citizens, for the common good.

By the way, my mother has been, and I am going to use the word, a victim of the medicare system in good old Saskatchewan recently. That is a whole other issue.

However, there are some things that I do not think should be paid for by the public. Justice, health care, roads and schools are all fine, but how about individual organizations that one chooses to support? Let us say for example that we have a member who thinks it is really important for Canadians to walk barefoot to the north pole, so a new organization called “Walking Barefoot to the North Pole Organization” is started and it wants to get some memberships. Certainly if people say that it is a good plan, that they are going to buy into it and they make a donation, I have no objection to that. Anybody can spend his money any way he wants to, and if he wants to support that organization, let him.

However, that is not an organization I would support. If that member came knocking at my door, I would say no thanks.

Now, how about political parties? If we were to look at people in my riding, two-thirds of them would say, at least they did at the last election, that they support the Canadian Alliance and that if they are asked for money they will support the Canadian Alliance. In fact, a number of them did, with cheques for $100, $200 or $300. That was my goal. It was to get donations like that and it worked.

The member says no, that it is something we should do collectively so we should force people in Elk Island to give money to the NDP and to the Liberals.

Let me tell members that squeezing money out of people in my constituency to support the Liberal Party right now would be a very tough sell.

How does the member reconcile the good aspect of collecting money publicly to fund a good project that is for the common public good and then bending that principle in order to support political parties, which is a matter of individual choice? How does he reconcile that?

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in view of the fact that the member supports the legislation and says that companies and businesses should not be able to contribute these large amounts, in fact according to his words he would like to see it reduced further, I wonder whether he is simply announcing that he concurs with the perception that members of the Canadian Alliance and a lot of voters have had for years, and that is that organizations, like Bombardier and others, have bought a lot of favour by making contributions to the Liberal Party.

[Public Service Modernization Act, February 14th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be able to speak on Bill C-25. The whole subject of employer-employee relationships and employer-employee relations has been an interest of mine for a great number of years.

I have indicated on numerous occasions that for 27 years I taught at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in mathematics and computing. For four years before that, when I was just a kid, I taught high school. Believe it or not, in both of those environments I was involved with employer-employee relationships in a very real way.

I was always astounded when I first graduated from university. I really was just a kid. I was 22 years old, I had two degrees and away I went into the work world. I graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with great pride and unfortunately could not get a job in Saskatchewan. When Alberta beckoned and offered me a job, saying that it had never yet been disappointed in a graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, I took the job.

Suddenly, I was the math department in a small rural high school in Alberta. I was just a young person, 22 years old, offering in-service to the other teachers because we were going through the years of new math. The reason I bring this in that it all ties together. As a result of doing this in-service work, I got to know many teachers throughout the whole county. At one of the annual meetings of the Alberta Teachers' Association local there, I suddenly was elected, just this young fellow from Saskatchewan, to be the president of the ATA local. One might call it a teachers' union. We always called it a professional association.

It was a very interesting experience, because as soon as one has the opportunity to work representing other people one immediately finds ways of bringing together people who are far apart. I found it an incredibly valuable experience, because 95% to 99% of relationships between employers and employees are healthy and good and work fine, but there is always that 1% to 5% where a conflict develops for one reason or another. How do we reconcile that? How do we bring those people together?

Of course it becomes a real mixture of psychology and sociology and a whole bunch of other things, and often very little mathematics, although I did apply some mathematics to it. I discovered that if there are two people, there is only one relationship between the two of them. If there are three people, there are three relationships. If I had a way of drawing a diagram, there are person A and person B, so there is that one, persons B and C, and persons A and B, so there are three relationships. That grows geometrically as the number of people increases. For example, if there are 16 people there are 120 relationship pairs.

When we have thousands of people in a civil service, like we have in Canada, we cannot expect that there would not occasionally be frictions between the personalities, so employer-employee relationships and inter-employee relationships become very important. One discovery I made early on when I was a young kid teaching high school math and involved in the ATA was that we have to learn to co-operate. One has to forgive. There has to be an attitude of acceptance and understanding. There has to be a culture like this one: I like my job, I like the people I work with, what I am doing is worthwhile, it is valued by my employer, and it is valued by my clients, whoever they are.

In the civil service, these clients are usually citizens of our country. Many of our civil servants work with citizens of other countries. All of us, regardless of our position, even members of Parliament, have to work on those interpersonal relationships.

When the President of the Treasury Board brings forward Bill C-25 and says that the government is going to modernize the public service, I would like to emphasize that underlying this is the foundation of value for each individual who works in the public service.

I also became involved in this when I went to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Lo and behold, there were about 750 professional staff members there who honoured me by electing me as their first president of the academic staff association at NAIT. Until that time, we had been forced members of AUPE, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, whether we wanted to be or not. Even then, before I was the president of the staff association, I was elected president of branch 38 of AUPE. I had an opportunity there, and later as the staff association president in taking part in the formation of our new staff association, to build on the important foundations I discovered earlier in my life. It was an interesting experience.

There is one thing I want to comment on. Bill C-25 includes the whole subject of arbitration and conciliation and methods of solving disputes. I would like to advise the President of the Treasury Board and all Liberal members here today, the huge crowd of them, that they need to do this right.

I will share a personal experience. When I was the president of the staff association, for our very first contract we put our heads together and asked whether we wanted the right to strike. A number of members said no. They felt that the only time members need the right to strike is when a situation cannot be solved in any other way. So we reasoned. If we have an argument with our neighbour about where a fence should be, we have a court system and a legal system in which that can be arbitrated. It can be determined. We do not have to picket in front of our neighbour's house stating he is being unfair because his trees are on our land or whatever the problem is. That is not how to solve these types of situations. We find out where the boundary is and we have to live with the decision. That is true in every area of conflict. There is a mechanism or there are developing mechanisms in our country to solve those conflicts, through hearings, through arbitration, through conciliation and whatnot.

We argued that for ourselves the right to strike was a means to an end, not an end in itself. We bargained away in our very first contract on a clause which was set up so that it would be perpetual in subsequent contracts. Both parties had to agree if the clause were to be removed. Once the clause was in there, unless both parties agreed to remove it, it would stay in there perpetually, which is a good way of putting it. We put into that clause a whole sequence of arbitrations and mediators and everything, a whole dispute resolution mechanism so that disputes could be properly solved. It worked really fine.

Now I am going to take a slam at the provincial government of Alberta. It worked really fine until those guys in the government, and I am talking now as an employee, those guys in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, passed a rule which stated that in cases of arbitration, the arbitrator must take into account government policy.

That seemed like a really innocuous little statement, but it threw a pile of sand into the smooth working gears of our relationship. After that, when it came time to negotiate a new round of salary agreements or whatever the government would simply, in advance of that, make a public announcement. This was when inflation was 8% to 10% per year. The government would say that its policy that year was that no government employee shall have a raise increase exceeding 2%.

That blew us out of the water. It made it very unfair because it said we could not bargain fairly. If we could not come to an agreement we could go to arbitration because we had binding arbitration. If binding arbitration was there the government had already passed a rule that we had to take into account government policy and it had declared the policy was 2%. That was the end of the show.

The House can see how frustrated we were. It landed up that we were there in the boxing ring and the person with whom we were boxing was also the referee. It made it very unfair.

My advice to that vast group of Liberals who would impose this legislation is to ensure that where there is arbitration and where there is conciliation that it be kept fair. If the Liberals do not, they will cause unrest in the civil service which they do not want.

That is a very important principle. I am arguing a principle, not specifically the wording of the bill. I expect the committee will look after that.

[Canada Elections Act, February 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to assure the member and all of the Bloc members that I totally support their presence here in the House of Commons. They campaigned and either persuaded the electors to their way of thinking or their electors already thought a certain way and they expressed what their electors were thinking and said, “Send me to Ottawa and I will present your point of view”. I support their being here 100% if that is what happened.

However, with respect to this bill, the offensive part of it being that taxpayers, voters, are being asked to fund political parties with which they do not agree, I think it is a violation of a fundamental freedom. For example, in 1993 when I first became involved, many individuals gave voluntary donations to our campaign and I won. That was the money I used for campaigning. Had someone come to my door and asked if I would give a donation to the Progressive Conservative Party to help it, I would have respectfully declined. Similarly I would have declined had someone from the Liberals, the NDP or the Bloc asked. My own personal freedom says I am not going to donate my money to support that in which I do not believe. That is a fundamental freedom in this country.

I want to assure the member that if the rules apply equally to all of the parties, they have as much right to be here as I do, and certainly as much right as those spineless Liberals on the other side.

[Canada Elections Act, February 12th, 2003]

That is demeaning to women. They can raise more money than you can.

[Canada Elections Act, February 12th, 2003]

Come on.