David Anderson

[Rail Transportation, May 9th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, last year the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food stood in front of a microphone to tell Canadians how important an efficient and reliable grain transportation system was. That is why the Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act was put in place in the first place, to make the system work for more than just the railways.

Now the Liberals have deliberately delayed until important provisions for western Canadian grain farmers expire. Why did they not tell producers a year ago that their idea of efficient and reliable was giving the railways all the power, taking it away from the producers?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, May 5th, 2017]

With regard to the Prime Minister's trip to the Bahamas in December 2016 and January 2017: (a) what was the total cost to taxpayers; (b) what is the itemized breakdown of each expense related to the trip, including costs related to security, transportation, accommodation, meals, per diems, and other expenses; (c) how many government employees, including exempt staff, were on the trip; and (d) excluding pilots and security personnel, what were the titles of government employees on the trip?

[Taxation, May 5th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, when the Prime Minister stumbled onto a Saskatchewan farm last week, he was surprised that they used complicated tools like GPS.

Producers have other tools that are just as important. One of the economic tools they have had for decades was the ability to defer income from cash grain tickets. Now the Liberals are moving to take that away, a move that punishes Canadian producers and rewards the government.

Why is it that every time the Liberals make a move, they rip money out of Canadian pockets and just put it in their own hands?

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Privatization Act, April 10th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for the opportunity to speak to this legislation this morning.

Like my colleague, when I was asked to speak to the bill, I decided I needed to go to our policy and see whether this is something I can support, and I actually came to the opposite conclusion of that of my colleague.

I will read again the part he read, that we believe that the “CBC-SRC is an important part of the broadcasting system in Canada”. That is true. It plays a major role in Canada across the country. It says that “[i]t must be a true public service broadcaster”. When I read that, I wondered what this is specifically talking about. The bill says “public service broadcaster”. It does not say publicly owned broadcaster. We heard some comment earlier about what this would imply. Does it mean the CBC should be covering emergency services? Should it be covering cultural events, as my colleague just spoke about? Is it about public information? I do not know that it says that the CBC has to be a publicly owned, taxpayer-funded regular broadcaster. That is not how I read that.

It says that the CBC needs to be “relevant to Canadians”. As we have heard in the debate in the House, both from the Liberal side and our side, there is some concern about whether the CBC is relevant to Canadians and how relevant it really is.

What could show public support for a broadcaster more than having private shares issued and having the public decide if it wants to support it? Those Canadians who want to step forward could then put their money where they want it to be. It would be a test of whether the CBC has the support of the public if the bill successfully passes.

I am here to speak to Bill C-308, a bill brought forward by my colleague from Saskatoon—University. I was going to discuss the CBC and its potential future, but I want to talk a bit about the history of the CBC as well, which has been covered a bit here.

During the 1920s in Canada, a number of private media outlets were being set up, particularly radio stations across Canada. It is my understanding that the Canadian National Railways was one of those companies that was establishing media outlets across Canada. It had stations in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Moncton, and Vancouver and covered things like concerts and comic opera, school broadcasts, and historical drama, the kinds of things my colleague just talked about. At that time, no full national program had been developed, but it was coming along.

A Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, under the chairmanship of John Aird, was appointed by Mackenzie King in 1928. The concern was that some of the private Canadian stations were falling into U.S. hands. The BBC was also being held up as an example. There were those who felt that private broadcasting in Canada could not provide an adequate Canadian alternative to the United States. It is interesting to note that almost 100 years later, we are still hearing some of those same arguments.

The private CNR radio stations and other private broadcasting stations were seen to be not enough to stop the idea that public ownership of the media was important. There was a feeling among some that the taxpayer needed to contribute to this media as well.

The moving force within the Aird commission was Charles Bowman, who was the editor of The Ottawa Citizen at the time. He argued that public ownership of broadcasting was necessary to protect Canadians against American penetration. It would be interesting to understand a bit more about the politics that would have been revolving around those decisions at that time as well.

In 1929, just before the stock market crash, the Aird commission presented its report. It recommended the creation of a national broadcasting company. The commission saw it being set up as a public utility but funded by the taxpayer. It would have a responsibility for “fostering a national spirit and interpreting national citizenship”.

Specifically, the report called for the elimination of private media stations. The commission did not want any private stations at all. It thought they should be compensated but removed from the networks. Obviously, when the stock market crashed, that changed a number of things.

It took a while for CBC/Radio-Canada to be set up, but it was established as a crown corporation in 1936. While it may have had a mandate to foster national spirit right from the start, it has always been controversial. My colleague just talked about some of the early controversy even about that.

The question Canadians asked then and are asking now is whether Canadians need a taxpayer-funded broadcaster. For many years it was argued that the CBC was necessary because Canadians did not have direct media service. I come from probably one of the least populated areas of the country, but I think that argument only holds true as new technology is introduced and as it takes time to spread across the country.

I would like to use a couple of examples. There was radio service across Canada in the twenties, thirties, and forties. As TV developed, obviously it took a while longer for TV to get into the rural areas. Would it not have been a better argument at the time to actually spend taxpayers' money to provide the hard infrastructure, the things like the towers, so that people in rural communities actually had the infrastructure to carry those signals, rather than having control of the content, which is what the argument was about the CBC?

Our first TV station was the CBC, in the early 1960s. CTV followed a few years later, and, it was interesting, so did stations from Montana. We were served by five national broadcasters in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan in what many would have considered the back of beyond.

I remember CBC in those days. Hockey Night in Canada was one of the first programs I remember watching on a black and white TV. We had to get fairly close to it. We could not see the puck. We could just see these grainy figures moving around. In those days, I was actually a Montreal Canadiens fan. Over the years there was a whole pile of other teams and it kind of got diluted, but obviously, the Montreal Canadiens, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Bobby Orr and the Boston Bruins were what we watched on Hockey Night in Canada.

There were other things like Bonanza and Red Skelton that came up from the States, and we thought they were great entertainment. Front Page Challenge was another one people watched. I think it was Sunday night when people sat in front of the TV and watched Front Page Challenge.

However, times changed, and other networks were developing with private money. The CBC lost its uniqueness long before Front Page Challenge went off the air, I would argue, as other commercial alternatives developed. Even in our remote part of the world, as I mentioned, we had three U.S. networks, CBC, and CTV, and certainly there was nothing we saw that was unique about CBC. It was mostly the same types of shows, the same types of news, just maybe at different times. Hockey Night in Canada stood out as one thing that was unique, as I mentioned, but even a new CTV without the subsidy was able to develop and go head to head with CBC with its taxpayer assistance.

From my Conservative viewpoint, I think what a shame it was that a company, trying to develop, would have to compete directly with taxpayers' money, and on the flip side of it, that taxpayers were stuck paying for the development of a structure that was being duplicated commercially. It was just, from my perspective, a lot of wasted money. The opportunity for change came and went without adaptation, guaranteeing that CBC would become more and more irrelevant.

CBC and its supporters have always tried to convince Canadians that it is some sort of national institution, but practically, it never has been. The only thing that has made it national is that taxpayers across this country have been stuck paying the bill. The notion that it provides some sort of unbiased Canadian content has not been proven, even as recently as last week, when two provinces were already taking great exception to the latest history project that is going on.

A second example of this failure, I would think, was evident yesterday. I went on the online website, and among dozens of headlines on there, I could not find one, not one, that was critical in any way of the present government. That seems to be quite a change from a couple of years ago. There was not a single critical headline on its website, in spite of the fact that we have a government that is mired in corruption, following a budget that has been universally panned, and in the midst of an attempt to unilaterally change the rules of the national legislature . I do not know where all of their investigative reporters went to. Perhaps they have left, but I doubt it. I think it is just that they actually cannot find anything to criticize.

A constituent called me a couple of weeks ago disgusted by some of the content he saw on TV early in the evening. It was 8 o'clock at night, and his seven-year-old son was with him, and he said it was completely inappropriate content for young people. He contacted the CBC. They told him that he did not actually watch it and that it was not shown at that time of night, so what he thought he saw, he did not see. That was their way of dealing with his complaint about content. I do not think the CBC is actually listening to Canadians at all.

The establishment of the CBC meant that right from the beginning, the taxpayers were paying the bill. Right from the beginning, I would argue, the cost was just too high to be justified. It still is in this day of media expansion.

Let us talk about the taxpayers. We sit here with 100 or 200 TV channels on most of our televisions. We have 1,000 or 2,000 internet channels. We have instant news from all over the world. We have movies and videos from dozens of sources. We have cable TV that has the capacity to charge for what people use but that is burdened with having to carry unpopular subsidized channels, and we have private companies delivering professional production and news services that are paying their own way.

In the middle of all this, there is a $1-billion-plus annual bill to the taxpayer for a provider that no longer provides anything that is unique, and a provider that many Canadians believe fails to provide a balanced and comprehensive view of the issues.

If we look at the mandate, it is not successfully addressing that. It is unnecessary that the CBC be supported by governmental intervention in order for it to continue to exist. It should have been done decades ago. Taxpayers have borne the burden for many years longer than they should have. It is time to make this a commercial entity and let it compete directly with its competitors.

[Taxation, April 6th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the government never misses an opportunity to rip money out of the pockets of hard-working Canadians.

For decades Canadian farmers have been able to defer cash grain income from one year to the next. Now the Liberals want to take that away without proper consultation, and apparently without even knowing what they are doing. This bad decision will affect farmers from across the country.

Why is it that the only new agricultural initiative in budget 2017 is a Liberal rip-off of hard-working Canadian farmers?

[Business of Supply, March 21st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I am excited to to speak to this today—

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, March 20th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, we are here today to talk about Bill C-22 and the committee the government is proposing to establish for the future.

We need to come back to the fact that the committee needs to have authority. It needs to report back to Parliament, not to the Prime Minister. It needs to be appointed by Parliament. It also needs to be able to do a good job of intelligence oversight, or else we are just pretending that we have something that we really do not have.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, March 20th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I wish I had more time to speak to this today because it is important that Canadians understand what the government is doing. Actually, it is important that they understand the work that the committee did.

We have a committee with all members on it who worked together to try to make the bill better. They brought back amendments and the government rejected the amendments that were made by a committee on which the government has a majority.

We need to make sure this thing has transparency. The government is going to remove that tonight with its vote. I am told there are multiple locking mechanisms entrenched in Bill C-22 that block committees from accessing information and calling witnesses. The government is making sure that those locks are in place so the committee will not be able to do the work it should.

We need to make sure this committee is non-partisan. The government is not guaranteeing that. Its chair and its members should not be appointed by the Prime Minister. We need to see that happen. Members of the committee need to be appointed by Parliament. Most important, the committee needs to report not to the Prime Minister but to Parliament. If it could do that, perhaps it could do some work that would be really valuable for Canadians.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, March 20th, 2017]

My colleague across the way is scrambling this afternoon, Mr. Speaker.

I understand the committee did a lot of hard work on this and it came up with a number of amendments that would have given powers to this committee. It would have made it non-partisan. Appointments would not have been made by the Prime Minister. It would have brought in an acceptable level of accountability and transparency. The government rejected those amendments.

Canadians need to be paying attention tonight when we vote. They need to look at what the government is doing to this committee, because when it is done, the committee will have little review. It will have no transparency. It will not have the accountability it should have. It will not have powers of subpoena, even though other parliamentary committees do have that authority.

This committee does not need to be an extension of the Prime Minister's Office. That seems to be what the government is bound and determined to make it.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, March 20th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be here this afternoon.

I am not sure I have seen a bill more emblematic of the Liberals than this bill. As I sit here and listen today, I see there is all kinds of enthusiasm over there, but no assurance of any kind of effectiveness. There is all kinds of work being planned here, but it is likely to have no results. There are all kinds of appointments in the mix, but it does not look as though there would be any balance either.

The Liberals made a promise in the campaign. Their promise was that they were going to set up a non-partisan parliamentary national security oversight committee. Bill C-22 is another broken promise from a government that is becoming famous for breaking them. I will talk about how it has broken that promise, but certainly there is no opportunity for this to be non-partisan or to be a real parliamentary committee, and it certainly is not going to have the oversight it should have.

There are several ways to set committees up around here. The one we thought the Liberals were promising was a non-partisan parliamentary committee. I assume that if we put that in place, we would be talking about equal numbers such that the opposition would be able to contribute on an equal basis and the power on that committee would be shared, perhaps through dual chairs or sharing the chairmanship. It would have the powers of a parliamentary committee. If it was a security committee, it would probably have to deal with some sort of secrecy issues around the content of what it is looking at.

There is a second opportunity, which is to set up a regular parliamentary committee that has parliamentary powers. All of us in the House sit on those types of committees. They always pretty much favour the government, because the numbers on the committee are set by the numbers we have in the House. Those committees are under the control of the government, and we recognize that.

There are also advisory committees of parliamentarians that can be set up, and then there is an advisory committee to the prime minister. We know the specialization that the Liberals across the way have on consultation, but typically those committees are appointed by the prime minister himself.

It is interesting that we saw the Liberals promise number one, a non-partisan parliamentary committee. What they are actually trying to deliver today is number four, which is that advisory committee to the prime minister, a committee that can consult with him and that he can talk to about these issues, but one which has very little power.

I want to take a bit of a look at some of the other countries involved in these committees. One of my colleagues across the way in the government a while ago talked about the United States intelligence committee structure and was actually trying to compare this structure to that. He talked about how there needs to be fairness and justice and that the rule of law must be guaranteed and protected by the bill. Bill C-22 does not do that. It does not compare in any way to the structure that is set up in the United States.

The previous speaker talked about the United Kingdom model being similar too. I am going to go through that a bit as well. I think we will find out that this committee does not have much similarity to the authority and power that the United Kingdom committees have either.

There are a number of other Commonwealth countries that do have oversight committees. New Zealand, for example, has a committee, but it basically is to examine issues of efficacy and efficiencies for budgetary matters, policy settings, and those kinds of things. It really does not have much to do directly with intelligence oversight. The members of that committee are the prime minister, two members of parliament nominated by him, the leader of the opposition, and one member nominated by the leader of the opposition. We can see in that situation that the Government of New Zealand would control that committee at all times. It is basically focused on budget oversight, not intelligence gathering.

The Australian model is a little bit different. It has a committee that is administrative. Its main functions are to do expenditure review and oversight there as well. It can also review matters that relate to some of the agencies that are referred to it, but it does not review intelligence gathering or operational procedures or priorities, and it does not conduct inquiries. Again, we see it is an oversight committee, but it is not what the Liberal government has promised to set up as a committee for Canadians.

The United Kingdom has a little stronger committee. It has a committee of parliament with greater powers. It was actually set up in 1994 as more of a monitoring committee, and in 2013 it was restructured or reformed to give it more powers and increase its strength. It now includes oversight of operational activity and the wider intelligence and security activities of government.

When people were thinking about this committee that the Liberals were promising during the campaign, they really thought that is what was going to be brought in, and it certainly is not, as we see when we look at the legislation, what the Liberals are doing to the legislation, and the work the committee did.

Bill C-22 is called the “national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians act”. Usually a committee is named for what it really is, and if that is the case here, it probably should be called “the Prime Minister's advisory committee”, because while the bill may establish a committee, it clearly fails to meet either the election promise or to establish a real and true intelligence oversight committee.

It is a bit of an embarrassment, I think, for the government to find itself having to completely change its direction from what it promised. It is unfortunate that it is using time allocation this afternoon to cover what I would call its incompetence on this issue. It is unfortunate that we find ourselves once more in the situation of the government wanting to limit debate on a bill that is clearly not going to meet the priorities and needs of Canadians.

We have a Prime Minister who seems to love running around and appearing on stages more than he likes to do this kind of hard work, so it is not surprising to see legislation, time after time, that is written in ways that the government itself is unable to support. It has to reject the work of the committees, reject the amendments made by members from all parties in this Parliament, and basically turn its back on the promises it made.

The bill to set up this committee was introduced in June of 2016. The interesting thing is that the Prime Minister actually appointed a chair to this committee months before the legislation was even presented and long before it was even debated. I understand the member has been travelling around the world. I guess he thinks he is doing some work on this in his committee, but it is probably a pretty good gig to be appointed before the parliamentary committee is even set up and have the government pay to travel around to examine some of these issues. At least there is one person getting something out of this, if the rest of Canadians are not.

As I said, forming an effective non-partisan committee was a Liberal campaign promise. Every one of us in the House would like to ensure that there is an appropriate review of our national security agencies. Conservatives believe that is important and would like the committee, when it is set up, to have the capacity and the tools to be able to do what is required. I think we would all be glad to support a committee that would properly supervise and provide oversight to our national security and intelligence organizations, but the way it is being done in the House this afternoon is a clear demonstration that this whole project is far more about optics than it is about effectiveness.

If this committee is put in place, we need to make sure that it has the tools to do what is required, and that clearly has not happened. I just mentioned that the Prime Minister appointed a chair of the committee long before the legislation was written, or certainly before it was presented and long before it was debated. The person appointed, from my understanding, has very little expertise and does not have a history in these issues.

One of the issues here is that committees usually elect their own chairs and do not have ones imposed by the Prime Minister's Office.

The Liberals promised they were going to form this committee. It is not a parliamentary committee. It is controlled by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. I do not know how anyone in the House could possibly see a committee set up like that to be non-partisan. What does it mean when the Prime Minister has the authority to appoint the members of the committee? Again, as I mentioned earlier, if Liberals really wanted to treat this matter seriously, why would we not be talking about co-chairs and an equal number of party representatives in the House? Without that, we really have nothing useful.

This is just one more broken promise. The budget is being presented this week, and we will be reminded again of how many promises the government has broken. This is one more of those broken promises. This will not be a non-partisan committee. The Prime Minister will be controlling it. It will not be a parliamentary committee. It will not have the powers of a parliamentary committee. What the committee gave the legislation in its work the government is now taking away.

The point is that if it were going to be effective, it would not be under the control of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. It would be under the control of the members of Parliament who sit on that committee. If there were equal numbers of members and a sharing of the chairmanship, Conservatives could see how this committee might work effectively, but the government has made a decision that it is not going to do things that way, and that is unfortunate. It is unfortunate that the government finds itself in a situation like this today, but it is even more unfortunate that Canadians will end up paying for another mistake that has been made by the Liberal government.