Bob Rae

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, in fact, the situation right now is such that we agree not only with the government, but also with the UN about extending the mission. We agree with all the countries that signed the agreement on Afghanistan, all the NATO and UN countries that are working to create stability in Afghanistan. That does not mean that it is not possible to have a good discussion, a good debate on the situation, a productive sharing of ideas and views on how we can make acceptable progress to create stability in Afghanistan.

The problem I have with the NDP's position at present is, to put in plainly, that the NDP is all alone. All the social democratic parties in Europe are in favour of the mission in Afghanistan. The Norwegians are there, the Swedes are there, the French are there. The Europeans are there, and they accept their responsibilities. The only social democratic party in NATO that does not accept the need to work responsibly and effectively on the issue of Afghanistan is, sadly, the NDP in Canada. All the other social democratic parties recognize that there is a need for stability and for security forces to provide that stability.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

I hear the minister and I am glad that he is here.

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I have read whatever reports have been made available.

I was at the committee last week where there was much less progress made than I would have anticipated in a committee. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs did not seem to want the committee to do its job. He did not seem to want the committee to reach conclusions or come to any votes. It seems to be a bit of a pattern among members of the Conservative Party.

The resolution was passed before the middle of March but the government came forward with no plans to implement the committee. The Prime Minister did not take time yesterday and, so far as I am aware, has not taken time to make a full report to Parliament with respect to what has taken place.

If we look, for example, at the conduct of other great conflicts, there have always been times and places where the government of the day took special opportunity to lay out in front of the House of Commons exactly what was going on, exactly what was taking place and the nature of the challenges that were under way.

Of course much work has been done. No one is saying that no work has been done. All we are saying is that the House called for the establishment of a special committee on Afghanistan but until we moved the motion and indicated last week that we were surprised that the government had not been forthcoming, the government clearly was not intending to proceed with the establishment of the committee.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I heard an interrogatory in that comment.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

moved:

That a special committee, consisting of 12 members, be appointed to consider the Canadian mission in Afghanistan as referred to in the motion adopted by the House on March 13, 2008 (Government Business No. 5); that the committee have all of the powers of a Standing Committee as provided in the Standing Orders; and that the members to serve on the said committee be appointed by the Whip of each party depositing with the Clerk of the House a list of his or her party’s members of the committee, providing that each party shall have the same number of members on the committee as it now has on the standing committees and provided that the said lists shall be deposited with the Clerk no later than April 10, 2008.

Mr. Speaker, with the consent of the House, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Richmond Hill.

I cannot help but note, Mr. Speaker, as you take your seat, and members in the House should know this, but the person who is now occupying the Speaker's chair was at one-time my seatmate many years ago and it was a wonderful experience. I fear I may have driven you out of the House, Mr. Speaker, but I want you to know, sir, that my recognition of your great talents, your oratory and your commitment to the people of Winnipeg remains outstanding. I want to continue to express those thoughts, whatever way partisanship may have taken us over the last while.

The purpose of this motion is to set up a committee, which was called for by the motion that was passed by the House a few weeks ago.

It is rather extraordinary that the official opposition is having to use one of its opposition days in order to get the House to do its business. It says something about the government that we have today to actually implement the motion that was agreed to by the House. It has been left to us to put forward this motion because the government has simply sat on its hands.

The current government ran on transparency and accountability. There is no issue upon which transparency and accountability are more important than our efforts in our mission in Afghanistan.

Just last week we heard the tragic news of the passing of yet another soldier in the line of duty. This is a war among the people in Afghanistan which has taken over 80 Canadian lives, in which many other soldiers have been killed from other NATO countries and in which literally thousands of Afghan citizens have lost their lives.

It is, without question, the most sweeping commitment that Canada has made to an international military struggle since the Korean War. It is an effort that has taxed all of our commitments in terms of the military, the political, the diplomatic and the aid mission that we have in Afghanistan.

It was clear to us that if there was ever an issue on which we would have expected the government to want to be transparent and accountable, it was the mission in Afghanistan.

Instead, I regret to say that we have not had the kind of leadership from the government with respect to the mission in informing and advising the Canadian people on what is going on.

I borrow the words of General Sir Rupert Smith when he described this war, as others, as a different kind of war, as a war among the people, increasingly the kind of struggle in which Canada and other countries will be engaged over the next while.

These are difficult conflicts. They are difficult to participate in and often difficult to see the resolution of. Experts from around the world have been talking about the struggle in Afghanistan in ways that tell us that the easy solutions are simply not there, that we cannot simply go on rhetoric, that we cannot simply go on saying that we support the troops or not. We need to have an understanding of the difficulties and challenges that are facing, not only our troops but our aid workers and our diplomats.

It is our view in the Liberal Party that the House itself must take much greater control and much greater interest in what is taking place in Afghanistan on a detailed basis. We need to hear from a range of experts on an ongoing basis in terms of what is happening. We need to tell Canadians what the challenges facing this mission are and how we will succeed.

We need benchmarks to tell us how we are doing. We need to share this information with the people of Canada and we need to recognize that without their support, their knowledge and their participation this will be increasingly difficult for us to sustain. That is the purpose of our motion.

I know there have been some discussions with the government with respect to some proposals for effecting some changes to the motion, which the member for Richmond Hill will be referring to, t but in terms of the substance of the mission, I want to refer to a few short issues that need to be addressed.

The first issue is that this is a different kind of struggle. It is a war among the people and it requires a different set of strategies and a different set of skills than the ones we have at present.

The second issue is that the border with Pakistan is open, and there are some very important insurgent bases not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. This requires a different response from the government and NATO. We have no choice; this is not like any other war. There are major differences that we must understand and discuss.

The third issue is that Afghanistan now has a narco-economy that is increasingly reliant on the sale of opium. It is estimated that more than 50% of Afghanistan's economy is dependent on an illegal industry. The drug industry leads to violence and corruption, and allows a special class that is very close with Afghanistan's political leaders to get richer. This is a huge problem for us. But this situation has not really been discussed in the House, and we have not had a frank discussion with Canadians.

Finally, we need to recognize that this is not simply a military struggle like others. As Mr. Manley has said, there will not be a simple military solution to this challenge that we face in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, our objective is stability. Our objective is to create sufficient stability and capacity in the government of Afghanistan that it can take full responsibility for its own security.

What we face is a situation where right now we are not fully aware of all the circumstances that would lead us to say that this is the progress we are making toward that stability and these are the benchmarks that we are reaching.

I will close where I started by saying simply this. It is, to put it mildly, a little unusual for an official opposition to come back to the House and say to the government that this is what it said it would do and this is why it is important.

I can recall watching the Prime Minister on television, together with millions of Canadians, talk extensively about transparency and accountability. I must say that I am not impressed with how the government has responded to the need for that very transparency and accountability in the House.

We see committees that are not able to work. We see a government that resists, at every step of the way, any form of inquiry into issues that are clearly matters of public importance. We see a government that is simply not prepared to take its responsibilities in an open, frank and fully democratic manner with respect to the work of the House of Commons.

Nothing is more important for Canada than this mission. These are our men and women who are putting their lives at risk. Nothing is more significant for this country at this moment than what we are trying to do in Afghanistan. We should be setting the test in the House for how well and how effectively we can cooperate. We need to find information and share it, which can lead to a better and a more successful mission than we have seen so far.

That is our objective and that is what we are striving to do, which is why the Liberal Party has taken an opposition day today to do just that. We should do no less for the women and men who have sacrificed their lives and those who are now facing the great challenges and difficulties on the line in Afghanistan.

We need to do our job and, frankly, the government needs to give the House the means to do the job. I hope very much that if the motion passes we will begin to get the kind of information, the kind of accountability and the kind of transparency that Canadians want in the management of a mission of this kind.

[Business of Supply, April 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Outremont is changing what he said. If he goes back and looks at the blues he will see that he actually said that we were wrong. He mentioned a number of Scandinavian countries and he is wrong.

With respect to whether our tax rates will be lower than the United States, I think they need to be lower.

On the corporate side, as my colleague from Markham—Unionville has said, these are tough decisions that governments need to make. We need to look at our competitive advantage, how we will attract investment and how we will keep investment. We are a smaller country. We have many competitive issues to deal with and that is a simple fact.

As for what the relative share of income tax and business tax should be, the answer to that is that we need to recognize that as we go into a downturn, as we go into a deeper problem with respect to what is happening in the United States and elsewhere, corporations will make less money and therefore will be paying less tax. From hard experience, this puts an increasing burden on everybody.

I would tell the members of the New Democratic Party that they are making a false choice and that they are doing it in all the rhetoric that is there. They ask whether we have social housing or whether we have bank profits. They want to know whether we have this or that. The answer is that we need both. We need to have successful companies and we need to have investment in housing. We need to look practically as a country--

[Business of Supply, April 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the President of the Treasury Board and I take them in the spirit in which they were offered. I am perfectly well aware that on the first few days one is here very nice things are said and, from my experience in two other times, the only other time we hear similar comments are on the day we are actually leaving the chamber. I will take these comments in the spirit with which they were offered.

It was a very famous Conservative, Edmund Burke, who once said “there is nothing more dangerous than governing in the name of a theory”, and I am sure you, Mr. Speaker, will be familiar with that comment. I think I can mention Edmund Burke's name because he is dead. Although he was a member of the House of Commons but not this one.

However, what troubles me about the Conservative Party is that it has, in my view, slipped over into the error almost on the other side of where the NDP has gone. In a sense, we have three ideological parties in the chamber. We have the Bloc, which is committed to the breakup of the country and is committed to a very old ideology of nationalism which is quickly becoming more and more irrelevant. We have the Conservative Party on the opposite side, the government side, that is intentionally ideological. We have a New Democratic Party that, as I have described, has somehow failed to turn and failed to move. We have a Liberal Party that is a pragmatic, practical and progressive party and one that I am very proud to be a member of.

[Business of Supply, April 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful to my colleague from Markham—Unionville for giving me the chance to participate in this debate. This is my first intervention in a debate in the House of Commons since 1982, so you will appreciate that in these 10 minutes I am not going to give a long, nostalgic commentary on the last period of time.

I know that is going to disappoint many here, but I want to say it is great to be back in the House and it is great to be welcomed in a very open spirit by my colleagues.

To have been accused by the member for Outremont of having sold out to the bosses and to being a traitor to the working class is a pleasure, if I may say so. I feel honoured to be considered in that particular pantheon by the member for Outremont.

But like me, the member for Outremont has a problem and that is that most of his thoughts are in print. I have this problem and so does he.

I know that members opposite are going to be culling. In fact, when the guy was fired as the Tory candidate in my riding, he had three binders and those binders somehow found their way to my office, so I have the binders the members have and I go to tab three and tab five. So, I know all the quotes the members are bring up.

The member for Outremont in 2002 in the National Assembly of Quebec had this to say about private enterprise. He said:

We are already taxed more than anyone else in North America. And that is because the people in our government insist on pretending to be businesspeople, but they do not let the free market determine which companies survive and which ones fail.

On April 16, 2002, the member for Outremont also said:

A government exists to create conditions so that private companies, the real ones, can have conditions where they can invest and create something.

That is what the member for Outremont said, although he seems to have forgotten. I do not know exactly what happened. All I know is that, when he was a member of the National Assembly and a minister in Quebec, he knew full well, just as everyone who has been in power knows, that people must be able to create something, to invest, as he said, and to create wealth. Without wealth and prosperity, a government cannot create social justice and help people.

I do not have time at this moment to give a full reflection on what I feel about the motion that has been put forward, except to say that I rise with a certain sense of sadness because I have come through an election campaign that was very interesting. The Green Party put forward positive proposals. I did not agree with all of them but they were there, substantive, thoughtful and creative.

My colleagues from the Conservative Party ran, basically, on a platform of anti-crime, anti the candidate, of course, and anti our leader, and that was the campaign.

The New Democratic Party ran on a threefold campaign. It had three elements. The first element was pure gimmickry. The second element was class warfare, of which we have heard more today. When was the last time someone stood in the House and used the language of saying “another member has sold out to the bosses?” What has happened?

My colleague from Markham—Unionville talks about going back to the class warfare of the 1960s. This is not going back to the class warfare of the 1960s. This is going back to the class warfare of the 1930s. This is going back to the class warfare of the 19th century. This is a truly sad commentary. Then we add the third element of the campaign, which is character assassination.

There is nothing that anybody in the House can say about me that I have not heard 1,000 times. It does not bother me, except that it saddens me when a party, which alleges to be in favour of creating greater prosperity and social justice, has a mentality that says that if we create business conditions, which in fact allow businesses to make money, that is a terrible thing. I do not get it. It is a sad commentary.

Then the member brought forward his devastating facts, presumably from the NDP research, which are all subsidized, which say that we were wrong yesterday when we pointed out that there are a great many social democratic countries that have recognized that they can actually lower business taxes and it helps the overall prosperity of their economies. Then he stood up and said that was not true, that we had the facts wrong. He recited all the information but forgot one simple fact: Canada is a federal country. It is a reality of our country.

Therefore, when we look at the taxes that are businesses are facing, we cannot just compare the federal tax rate to the Swedish unitary tax rate. We need to look at the overall tax rate. My colleague from Markham—Unionville gave those statistics very clearly.

It is quite pathetic to have all the rhetoric, all the overblown stuff, all the language, the gimmicks, the class warfare and the character assassination. That party, which at one time was leading the way on social policy and was setting the mark with respect to where Canada should go, has now been reduced to this really sad state of affairs.

The member for Outremont made a point of saying, in very flowery language, that he was looking forward to seeing how the member for Toronto Centre would possibly escape from this trap, which had been so effectively set by the New Democratic Party, how he would be able to live with himself, wake up in the morning and face the mirror because he sold out to the bosses and has now totally fallen in with a capitalist class.

How would he be able to live with himself? The answer is very easily because, like most social democrats around the world, I recognize that business success is not the enemy of social justice. It is quite simply that.

I had the great honour of leading a province through a very difficult recession. I know my friends opposite have said a lot and will say a lot about that, but I want to say this to my friends. If companies are unsuccessful, it hurts everyone. If companies are unsuccessful, it hurts the poorest of the poor. If companies are unsuccessful, it hurts the weakest of the weak. If companies are unsuccessful, it hurts every Canadian.

I want companies to be successful in this country because I want to create a climate for social justice and I want to create a climate for sustainability. That is the kind of Canada that the Liberal Party and my leader, Stéphane Dion, want to lead and that is the kind of country we want to have.

[Business of Supply, April 2nd, 2008]

Add the provinces, Tom, add them.

[Afghanistan, April 1st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the House worked very cooperatively to get to a resolution that could be passed by a majority of the House. We have a non-partisan mission, but we do not have a non-partisan approach to solving this problem.

Why can the minister not produce for us, now, a clear indication of the timetable that will be followed and a transparent sense of the accountability toward the House that will be followed, so the conditions of this mission and the conditions of the resolution can be met by the government?

[Afghanistan, April 1st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yesterday, the minister said that the government could wait until next year for our NATO allies to commit additional troops for our mission in Kandahar.

Will the government set a specific date by which the conditions must be met so that Canada continues its mission in Afghanistan?