Derek Lee

[Supply, October 9th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I was shocked to hear the words of the leader of the party opposite. The words that have been used here today are, at a minimum, contemptuous of the Supreme Court of Canada but they also potentially undermine the entire legal system in this country. They undermine the federation.

I would like to ask the party leader who spoke these words to withdraw them. In the absence of a withdrawal I think he must, like a child, carry these words with him for a very long time.

I am not prepared to sit here and have the Supreme Court of Canada trashed in this House. I would ask him to consider withdrawing and speaking in a more temperate fashion about our high court.

[Petitions, October 3rd, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to christen this new bench in the House of Commons, close to the bar.

I have a petition from Canadians in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario who call on Parliament and the government to declare that Canada is indivisible and that Canada's boundaries should not be altered without a free vote of Canadian citizens or using the amending formula contained in the Canadian Constitution.

[Chinese Canadian Community, April 23rd, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, this year Canada celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Citizenship Act. For the Chinese Canadian community, 1947 was also a year of importance for another reason.

It was on May 14, 1947 that the Chinese immigration act was repealed and immigrants from China were no longer treated separately from other immigrants. This act had been passed in

1923 and virtually prohibited all Chinese immigration to Canada until its repeal.

Attaining Canadian settlement and citizenship was a victory made possible by generations of Chinese Canadians who surmounted great hardship and fought for equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to Canadian society. The Chinese Canadian community across the country is planning a series of events this year to pay tribute to those pioneers who paved the way for those who have followed.

I know that all members will recognize the significant contributions made by all immigrants, particularly by Chinese Canadians, in all areas of Canadian society when this 50th anniversary is commemorated next month.

[Translation]

[Leukemia, April 16th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, too many of our children and adults of all ages and backgrounds continue to be devastated by the group of diseases known as leukemia.

Leukemia is still the most deadly disease for Canadian children. But there is hope. Canadian research scientists and research centres and hospitals across the country have made and continue to make great progress, particularly in the treatment and life expectancy of leukemia patients. More success has been achieved with leukemia than any other cancer.

The Leukemia Research Fund of Canada, a national volunteer organization, raises money to provide grants to Canadian researchers and to educate the public about the disease and its treatment.

I would ask my colleagues to show their support and consider in the very near future the formal recognition of the month of June as Leukemia Awareness Month across Canada, just as it has been known and practised for the last 40 years.

[Income Tax Budget Amendments Act, 1996, April 10th, 1997]

The member will have an opportunity to speak later.

I am also struck by the degree and amount of what I will call the retropromise. It seems that anything that has moved within the last three or four years is now being characterized by the almost hysterical Reform Party and sometimes members of the Bloc Quebecois as a promise. If I per chance two or three years ago had told someone I intend to be in Ottawa on Thursday, hon. members opposite seem to have a penchant now for characterizing those words as a promise.

Day in and day out now in this debate we have constant reference by members opposite to what I call the retropromise. If it moved it was a promise and in the event that I did not happen to show up in Ottawa on Thursday, I broke my promise. That is not fair. I think Canadians see through that.

Aside from these deliberate acts, misleading revisionism involving the retropromise, there are a couple of other areas I could not help but note and I think Canadians noted as well. They are references to tax increases. I have heard members opposite talk about increases in taxes. What they are really talking about is that there has been growth in the economy, there has been population growth, there have been increases in business revenues. Everyone knows that when that happens there is an increase in tax revenues.

If hon. members opposite want to call that tax increases, they can do it but I do not think that is fair. I think that is misleading. When this government says that it has not increased taxes in a certain area, that is the truth. When members here say that, it is the truth and they mean it. When members opposite say there has been a tax increase, they seem incapable of speaking straight on the issue and what they really mean is the economy has grown, business revenues have increased, the population has increased and therefore tax revenues have increased.

I hope members opposite will forgive the growth in the economy and forgive the increasing prosperity of this country for generating more tax revenues.

I do not have any illusions that my remarks today will make much of a difference in the rhetoric around this place, but I thought I should put that on the record.

I want to address as well one of the items in this important bill dealing with the budget. I want to talk about the proposal to reduce the age limit for maturing registered pension plans, RRSPs, the reduction in the age for contributing to those plans from 71 to 69. What that means is simply that individuals will not be able to contribute to RRSPs or accrue pension benefits after age 69. They will also have to start drawing income out of those plans by the end of the year in which they turn 69.

This change is being made for a number of important reasons. The first reason is that it will help to move the maturation age for retirement savings and pension plans closer in line with the ages at which most Canadians will start retiring. The simple fact is that very few Canadians are saving for future retirement when they are in their seventies.

A second and closely related consideration is that the proposed measure will limit the use of RRSPs for estate planning purposes, that is, what will happen to a person's cash and assets after they are no longer with us. The use of the RRSP for that purpose is outside of scope of what was originally intended. The RRSP is for the living. It is for the person who is retiring, and the type of generous tax assistance provided to the RRSP mechanism was never intended for estate planning purposes.

There is the broader question of cost. The federal revenue cost of tax assistance for retirement savings is now quite significant. Technically, inside government it is called tax expenditure. It is really a question of tax revenues forgone in assistance of the retirement savings mechanism. In 1993 that tax expenditure totalled nearly $16 billion. As the finance minister has made very clear, the government is firmly committed to preserving Canada's retirement assistance program which serves a vital function. It does so in a very effective way, measured in both Canadian and world standards.

However, steps had to be taken to ensure that this program remained financially sustainable. The cost of the program was limited while assistance was targeted where needed. Even with the changes announced in the 1996 budget, the system will remain a generous one.

As this is an important debate on important legislation, I return to my opening theme which is to encourage colleagues in the House to try to stick a little closer to the straight line of accuracy when they use terms like those I have mentioned. I respect the need of the opposition parties to hit hard at things. They do not think our policies are the way they should be but it would help us all if we would use a standard of rhetoric and a standard of language. We should use terminology that keeps us straighter to the line and that allows Canadians to better understand the public policy issues that we debate here.

[Income Tax Budget Amendments Act, 1996, April 10th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to engage in the debate on this motion which would advance the government's bill to implement elements of the 1996 budget.

I could not help but reach a conclusion earlier this morning that some of the opposition comments are bordering on the hysterical. I refer to some remarks of colleagues in the Reform Party. Some of the remarks are less than accurate.

I want to attempt to put some balance into the record. For example, there was a suggestion that there was a 40 per cent reduction in the transfer payments from the federal government to the provinces which impacted on education, social programs and health care.

What the Reform Party fails to acknowledge, and I stand corrected if I am wrong, is that at the time those transfers were renegotiated with the provinces there were tax points transferred as well. Tax points are the equivalent of cash.

This is a process whereby the federal government actually turns over to the province the equivalent of a tax point, 1 per cent or a portion of a point of taxes. That is worth money, just as a transfer of cash is.

For someone to stand in the House and not include that in their remarks in discussing transfers to the provinces, whether equalization or the old CAP or whether it is under the current Canada health and social transfer, is less than accurate.

There was also a remark that the federal government has closed more hospitals than the premiers. This could not possibly be a fact. Most Canadians know that the federal government does not administer hospitals.

Hospitals are administered locally and by provinces. To my knowledge, the federal government has not closed a single hospital unless there is some reference to the national defence medical centre which is not closed but which continues.

I think that is less than accurate, if I can continue to use that euphemism, in suggesting it. It is utter nonsense for the Reform Party of Canada to say, and I am quoting what the hon. member said, that the federal government has closed more hospitals than the premiers. Please set me right if I am wrong on this.

[Petitions, April 8th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition from residents of the Scarborough area who call on the Government of Canada to suspend its negotiations with the province of Ontario in connection with the proposed transfer of administration of social housing responsibilities and administration of funding to the provincial level until their has been adequate consultation with the stakeholders in the co-operative housing community in Ontario.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1997]

It is very true. One opposition party is telling us that the government is going to hell in a hand cart for whatever reason, and the official opposition is taking us to hell in a hand cart with its wish to lead Canada into its form of partition. I find it hard to believe that there are MPs in this House who would advocate the partition of this great country but, sadly, there are.

Although many of us understand where some of them are coming from on policy issues, we have a country to run here and we are not going to survive if we continue to admit, even for debate, this myopic, down the tube, kind of mentality that I have heard around here in the last few weeks.

I have about two minutes to talk about this. The government takes pride-and I am sure the opposition will allow this-in its fiscal record; that is, management of the government's finances. I do not have to go on and on because I am sure my colleagues in government have gone on and on about how well we have done.

What the government has done has been recognized around the world as a stunning success in fiscal management. I hope Canadians will recognize that the next time they get a chance at the polls. We are on course and we are going to stay the fiscal course that the finance minister has set out for us. We have done darn well.

We have excellently placed interest rates. We have a current account either in surplus or capable of generating it. We have solid economic growth.

I just received a sheet of economic indicators. It is a forecast from the policy and economics analysis branch of the program at the University of Toronto. There are two items that must be mentioned. The first item is fiscal and the other item is macro-economic.

The macro-economic note worth reading is that the country turned the corner on the debt to GDP ratio between the second and third quarter of 1996. It has dropped from a peak of 55.5 per cent and is now headed downward into the lower 50s and will be into the upper 40s fairly soon.

The other note is fiscal. On a national account basis, the government will have no borrowing needs by the third quarter of 1998, roughly a year from now. Canadians can take pride in this.

Having noted those two major items on the economic front I will close my remarks.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I recognize that I am joining in the debate very close to the end of the day's proceedings. What has brought me into it is the incessant carping of the opposition day in and day out. I hesitate to call the opposition a one trick pony, but it is getting close to that.

The budget that we are debating is much more than the opposition gives the government credit for and most Canadians recognize that.

I bought a car recently. When I was doing my shopping, I was pleased to have a salesman, at one auto dealer at least, tell me that one of the other cars I was looking at at another auto dealer was a good car. Yet, as the opposition carps on about what the government is not doing or what failures it alleges are there, I am not hearing anything constructive or realistic in the assessment.

[Program Cost Declaration Act, March 13th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am please to continue the debate on this private member's bill moved and drafted by my hon. colleague from Durham.

I endorse the bill. I support the bill. I endorse the concept. The member would agree that some fine tuning of all our bills which emanate from private members' business can best be done at committee.

The bill causes the taxpayer, the parliamentarian and the drafter of a bill or statute to recognize at the front end the fiscal costs associated with the change, whatever it might be. It is not a new idea but it is the first time it has been proposed here. It is an excellent idea.

The current procedure, as I understand it, begins in the executive branch of government where a bill is drafted and proposed. Although I have never sat at the cabinet table I understand that modern cabinets have financial assessment figures and projections at the front end whenever they consider legislation. As we are all aware a bill proposed in the House by the government has the support of cabinet. Before cabinet makes a decision cabinet knows what the numbers will be.

I would have thought it would be a fairly simple operation to make the same numbers available when the bill is presented in the House of Commons. Someone has already done the work on the calculator. I would have thought it would be pretty easy to add one page to the bill or the proposal and make it available for parliamentary debate and committee perusal as the statute or reform is being considered.

As it sits now, the House does not necessarily have this information as it considers a bill. It may in some cases be made privy to the departmental calculations as the bill goes through the committee process. In addition I have noted, as I am sure all members have noted, that most ministries deal with these issues publicly when they put forward a proposal. In any event I do not think it is a bad idea at all to nail this little procedure down at the front end.

To draw two analogies of similar concepts at work, the parliamentary secretary referred to what is called the regulatory impact analysis statement, RIAS, which is now used for almost all government regulatory initiatives. That impact statement for regulations includes references to the cost. That is a useful tool. It does not show up in this House because it is regulatory. The field has already been delegated by another statute to the executive branch. The RIAS is a very useful document. My colleague's proposal would in effect put a financial impact statement on the front end of a bill.

The second analogy is with environmental impact statements that are required by statute in many different areas now. They are

very useful in assessing the potential impact of statutes and changes in the way we do things in government.

The backdrop of this should include a recognition that the parliamentary estimates procedure, the process by which Parliament is supposed to review government spending, does not always work as effectively as we would like. Over the years this has been reformed from time to time. Every few years we revise the estimates procedures to try to enable Parliament to get a better handle on what is a very large and complex matter these days, government spending. It is quite huge, exceeding the $100 billion mark. I understand there is ongoing work to improve, change and update this procedure in the House of Commons. The initiative put forward by my colleague from Durham can only enhance whatever process we might subsequently adopt in the House.

As I understand it, given that the government and cabinet already do calculations for all government initiatives put forward by way of statute or changes in policy, given that it already happens in camera in cabinet, and given that the information is not always made public in the process that brings bills into the House, I am very much in favour of a House mandated procedure that would cause the numbers to be placed in front of all of us as we debate, pass and not pass legislation.

With tongue in cheek I might ask-and I do not need the answer-whether there is an estimate provided by the mover of the bill of its financial impact. It might have been a nice start. I do not know whether the hon. member has done that, but it is a great idea and I will support it.