Derek Lee

[Supply, May 18th, 2005]

Mr. Chair, at this time the legal process for refugee determination involves a hearing and a determination by the Immigration and Refugee Board. There is not, as I understand it, a technical direct second level of appeal to that. An individual can go to the Federal Court and allege a defect in the process and have a review in that way.

I personally feel that the system is working rather well with all of the challenges that it has, but I do have a question for the minister. Has the department given any consideration to the alleged unfairness that may exist from time to time when that first level of determination does not have a built in second level appeal process? Can he comment on whether or not he or the department is considering any revisions to the system that would allow another level of appeal? That may drive some people crazy. Many Canadians think that there is enough due process built in with the determination at point of entry, the determination process and then the possible appeal to the Federal Court, et cetera. Could the minister comment on that?

[Supply, May 18th, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I am quite pleased to participate in this debate tonight. It is a procedure I actually have not previously participated in. It is of course intended to shed some light on, focus on the scrutiny of and challenge the expenditures of the ministry that we are dealing with here tonight.

This happens only a couple of times a year and is usually driven by members of the opposition, but there are a lot of government members who take great interest in all of our ministries. From time to time we cannot locate the minister in the caucus room to have a few words with him or her, so we like to have this opportunity in the House to take up issues.

I would like to address the refugee determination system. Clearly Canada's traditions are known and respected around the world. Whenever I have had the privilege of representing Canadians as a parliamentarian in my travels, those traditions and those Canadian ways of doing things are recognized in many countries around the world. We are often congratulated, and occasionally criticized, but for the most part we tend to do things well and that is recognized.

One of the things Canada does is provide safe haven for individuals who may face persecution in their homelands when they flee from internal strife. Over the last 10 years Canada has been able to accommodate about 250,000 people. We call them refugees or asylum seekers.

That seems like a large number. It is about 25,000 per year. They are accommodated in our immigration target number, which is at this time about 240,000 per year. This means that refugee landings are about 10% of our immigration intake. It seems to be working reasonably well but not flawlessly. It never has. Of course, refugee procedures do not work well in any country. All countries recognize this and continue attempts at improvement.

I am going to make a few remarks and then I am going to ask a question of the minister. I know he will want to give us an answer.

The world today is a much different world than it was 50 years ago at the end of the second world war. It is a much different world now than it was when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was created to deal with people's movements around the world.

The post-war situation was much different than the one we have now. Canadians know that. Canadians see that. I represent a riding that is 75% immigrant. That is a very large percentage. Those immigrants know the immigration system very well. They have been here 5 years, 10 years or 50 years. The people in my riding know the immigration system. My work as a member of Parliament in the constituency is about 90% immigration. Whenever the minister wants to let the portfolio go, I could probably take over for a few days quite nicely, with the help of my constituents, of course.

Many of the urban ridings have large numbers of immigrants. Let me say that when there are difficulties, obstacles, discontinuities, these problems in the immigration system, there is no better place to know where the problems are than in an immigrant community. Immigrants know where the problems are. They see them and they talk about them. Many of these people, through their families, experience these difficulties.

There have been huge changes in people migrations around the world. It is easier to move around the world now. There are people who, for pay, smuggle people around the world. There are movements of that type. There are also drought, famine and all kinds of things.

Most countries now are suggesting that we have to make some reforms. We have to make some changes.These discussions are happening at the UN and they are happening here among MPs who are active on this file. We are talking about it.

Canadians know that accepting refugees is part of our core values as Canadians but they also know that our system is abused. Our immigrant Canadians know it. They see that there is abuse from time to time. A little abuse is fixed in one part and then something happens somewhere else. That one is fixed up and then it happens again. It is similar to a leaky roof, I guess. Our core value is to extend the compassion that we always have.

I will move to the immigration and refugee determination system. The 2005-06 report on plans and priorities for citizenship and immigration notes that the department along with the Immigration and Refugee Board, the Department of Justice and the Canada Border Services Agency will be developing processes to help improve Canada's domestic refugee determination system.

Could the minister outline what types of changes are envisaged, what we are going to do to try to reduce the abuse and resource a compassionate, effective refugee determination system?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the speech of the member opposite. For a speech that was intended to address the budget, I certainly heard an awful lot of politics.

I suspect that I spent more time listening to political rhetoric than I did listening to substantive comment on the budget. We heard a lot of talk about the New Democratic Party and I think that my colleague opposite and her colleagues are perhaps a little bit too distracted by the politics.

Having said that, I acknowledge 100% that this is a political place and that politics is going on all the time. We should not be too negative in talking to each other just because things are political.

However, getting back to the budget, I do not quite understand how the member opposite can reach a conclusion in her speech that somehow the government does not know what it is doing. The record of the last seven or eight fiscal years has shown very clearly that it does know what it is doing. I could go through all the statistics, but I am not going to even mention any benchmarks because they are repeated here all the time, indicating that the government has done extremely well.

Among the G-8 countries, it is actually a leader currently and projected to be leading in so many of the economic statistics including balanced budgets. That commitment persists to this day. We will balance the books and our budget this time is calculated to continue to do that for the next few years.

I do not understand the member when she suggests that the government does not know what it is doing when the record clearly shows that the government does know what it is doing fiscally and politically.

[Privilege, May 10th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I know colleagues do not want to spend the whole afternoon debating this issue, but I want to make two remarks.

First, I intend to support the motion, not because I believe it is, as has been put, a clear-cut case of breach of privilege but it certainly falls within the category of difficulties that the procedure and House affairs committee is looking at now.

Mr. Speaker, I would not want your ruling to be taken as a ruling that a franked envelope communication from a member of Parliament to a person in another riding would constitute a breach of privilege of the member in the other riding where the letter was sent. Members of the House of Commons routinely send out communications to Canadians either in reply to letters or for other purposes.

In terms of free speech and our franking privilege, I just wanted to make it clear that members have to continue to be free to communicate with Canadians on issues, especially when Canadians write to individual MPs who are not their members of Parliament.

The second point I want to make is that the rules that govern both mailings, whether it is under the frank or whether it is a 10 percenter or whether it is distribution of householders or the bulk mailing machinery that allows us to send communications by weight, I regard the rules now as an absolute wild west show. I do not regard the rules as being in keeping with the way these privileges and services developed originally.

When I first came to this place, there was a rule that mailings of that nature did not include partisan material. Eventually that rule sort of fell by the wayside. It was honoured more in the breach, which is a very unfortunate thing to say. The rule was not followed so we abandoned the rule because we could not police it. Then, not only did we have the partisan material going out routinely as part of any of those types of mailings but we started to add in negative political material. It would not just be promotional of one's own party; it would actually be negative about another party, or another MP, or a minister.

Now all kinds of communications are going out under different categories of parliamentary services, paid for by the taxpayer, which is loaded with political self-promotion and negative political content about other members and other parties. I do not believe the citizen would be able to keep track of it all. I am afraid to even inquire into it. It is a wild west show. None of us is actually in a position, singly, to grab hold of this, but I am hopeful that the procedure and House affairs committee will signal the problem and commence on developing a resolution.

Ultimately, it is not the procedure and House affairs committee as much as it is the Board of Internal Economy that will have to deal with these rules. Of course that particular body, the Board of Internal Economy, operates in camera and its minutes are not public. Nobody knows--I do not even know--how his or her representative or how the representatives of their colleagues in the House are dealing with this issue on the Board of Internal Economy. That is just not the way to run a democratic institution, especially when we are dealing with on one hand, members' privileges and services, and on the other, our democracy, which relies on fair free speech, as was pointed out earlier today, and communications between this place, its members and our electors.

I make those remarks in trying to be helpful. I regret if my inability to immediately unanimously agree to the motion has prolonged debate here, but I hope my remarks will be taken as helpful.

[Committees of the House, May 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, that is a lovely leading question, but the answer is of course, yes. International aid is one of those areas where we can shovel a lot of money. Three-quarters of 1% of our GDP is $7.5 billion because I just did the calculation. That is a great deal of money to be sending abroad where there is not necessarily transparency and accountability.

Therefore, before the money moves into development aid and helping people and countries build, there has to be groundwork, infrastructure and frameworks along with the expertise. My colleague has just pointed out the essential need for that to be there before we start to move the money.

The doubling of our resourcing is wonderful. We just cannot do it tomorrow. It will happen next year and the year after, and the year after. We will do it carefully. We rely heavily on non-governmental organizations. We call them NGOs and they are essential in our delivery if we are going to find new and better ways to do this, and better our efforts to get more bang from our bucks.

[Committees of the House, May 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I was certainly being critical of one of the member's colleagues who seemed to be deprecating the current discussions on assisting the people in the Darfur region of Sudan and turning it into a political football.

The member also made some comments about Canada's heritage in peacekeeping and our work with the United Nations in international development. As I recall, Lester Pearson received the Nobel peace prize for his efforts in peacekeeping as opposed to international development. There was a serious problem in Gaza at the time, the Suez crisis, and Canada made a serious and positive contribution toward its resolution. Mr. Pearson won the peace prize for resolving that issue.

Since then, Canada, like most of the developed countries, has been a contributor, sometimes more and sometimes less, to international development. The standard he referred to, .75% of our GDP, is an often sought after standard, but we are not there yet. I do not even know whether we are half-way there yet. We are committed to increasing our percentage of GDP. So we know what kind of dollars we are talking about, Canada's GDP has just gone over one trillion dollars. This is a moving number. It is a lot of money.

Canadians are committed to international aid. They want to do it responsibly. There is a large amount of money in the budget, including a significant investment in our armed forces. That money will not go toward international aid, but go toward international peacekeeping.

[Committees of the House, May 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am certainly not in a position to continue the debate of the previous speaker. I am kind of shocked that a member would regard the situation in Darfur as just a political issue, a location where there is what we regard as abject lawlessness, where men, women and children are being killed.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the African Union and the United Nations, more has to be done there to protect what life there still is in Darfur. Thousands and thousands of people are huddled around in camps because they are at risk of death or being maimed or raped if they move.

I do not accept that the Darfur issue around here is purely an issue of party politics. I regret that the new member is falling into a pattern of regarding the debate around here as just politics. I am not sure Canadians will be tuning in much longer to hear the political rhetoric.

I would like to get back to the motion even though it has been radically altered to conform to the Conservatives' plan here. I will speak to the main motion through the amendment if I can, as difficult as that may be to do.

The original motion had to do with the committee report that looked through the financial circumstances surrounding the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. That was what I would call a three-headed monster at one point in time. It was a matter that I, as a member, worked on for awhile. It seemed to me at the time that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner had been spun off like a satellite. It was out of touch with the normal accounting processes that were in place around here. As it was spun off, as it carried on its work on behalf of Parliament for Canadians, there was an obvious reduction in transparency and very reluctant accountability.

I just want to make a note here that the Privacy Commissioner was and is an officer of Parliament, not a functionary of the government, not a civil servant nor a public servant in that sense, but someone who serves Parliament as an officer of Parliament. In that regard, it is Parliament that would normally carry the can on accountability. It is Parliament that authorizes the money for spending and it is Parliament that should be providing the management vehicle, in this case not the fault of the former privacy commissioner. In a sense, Parliament and, a bit more broadly, the government, did not have its act together.

A whole list of issues come to mind now as we look back 10 and 20 years. As the parliamentary component of governance has grown, we have not grown the management infrastructure there. Even today we are working on the funding mechanism for officers of Parliament and other issues.

In this particular case, when problems became apparent it was up to Parliament to ferret out the facts and find out what was happening so we began our work. It was not easy to do. For that period, I sat on the government operations committee which was an all party committee. All members worked hard and eventually we succeeded in finding out enough information that allowed us to bring the matter back to the House, in the end as a contempt matter.

It was a difficult thing to do but at the time it was acknowledged that there were three other offices of Parliament that could bring some expertise to bear: the Office of the Auditor General, the Public Service Commission and the Treasury Board. Those three bodies responded at the time and responded very aggressively on behalf of Parliament, on behalf of the taxpayer, in an attempt to regularize what was happening in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The same thing happens in the corporate world. When people do funny things with money they do not write a press release. They hide it. They bury it. It is actually quite difficult to find these things when they are going on. I say again that it happens in government, in business and probably in families but we need to have the mechanisms and the transparency that will allow us to find these things.

I want to acknowledge the work of the Auditor General, the Public Service Commission and the Treasury Board in responding to both the report from the government operations committee and the report of the public accounts committee. Both these parliamentary committees were active and busy in trying to essentially fix what was broken and clean up what was, in light of the size of government, a small problem but every dollar is worth a dollar. This was a small department.

In thinking back to the years 1993, 1894 and 1995 it was a time when under program review the government attempted to reduce the expenses of government. I was not working in that area at the time but the government decided to reduce the number of comptrollers. We are getting back into very boring territory but the comptrollers are the people who essentially oversee the spending directly. They do not actually write the cheques but they make sure everybody is following the right procedures when money is spent. The number of comptrollers was reduced. I fear that the reduction, with the objective of saving money, actually ended up costing us a lot of money.

However over the year it might be interesting to see just how much misspending, unfortunate spending, regrettable spending and improper spending there was over the period with the reduced number of comptrollers. The government has now decided that there will be more comptrollers. We are investing in a whole new mechanism of comptrollers. It will take a couple of years to get them all back in place but that I am sure will provide for better public spending.

A lot of us use the airport parkway. I can recall that in about 1991 I was sitting in opposition. I see a member opposite who was actually sitting in government then. As an opposition member I used the parkway to the airport. The National Capital Commission, which maintains that roadway, decided at the time to replace the shoulders right up to the pavement of the road with grass much as exists in the Gatineau parkway. It is a lovely parkway road up in the Gatineau. The NCC wanted to do the same thing on the way to the airport on this side of the river.

The NCC loaded all the gravel on the shoulders for about four kilometres or five kilometres on both sides of the road and then brought in lovely new loam soil. It was put down at the side of the road. It looked like a garden getting ready to happen. It then brought in sod and put it down. It was looking pretty good for the first couple of days. It took them some weeks to do this. It was a big project. I do not know how much money was involved but it was a lot.

Son of a gun, drivers actually did not stay on the paved road. A lot of them pulled off to the side which put tire marks and ruts into all the lovely new grass and soil that was probably imported from some place in Manitoba. After a while it started to look like a grass parking lot after a rainstorm.

I felt bad about what had happened because I was looking forward to having a parkway as lovely as the one in the Gatineau. Son of a gun, if the NCC did not change its mind and along came the bulldozers. They pulled up all the sod and the soil and got a new kind of gravel from somewhere else and laid it down on both sides of the road for 4, 5, 6 or 7 kilometres. Someone made a bad decision, which is what that was all about. It was not necessarily a stupid decision or a corrupt decision. The NCC wanted to make the road look better. However it probably cost us $10 million or $20 million.

I was in opposition at the time so I poked around a little bit but in the end the money was spent. That is an example of how in government things can just go wrong and money gets misspent. In the private sector people might actually be fired. The private sector might actually tell its employees that the project was so dumb that it could not keep them around anymore and they had to get out.

In government, however, it is more of a collective decision. There is usually not one person involved. I can assure the House that the government did not write a press release when that roadway was finished a year or two later. I was so embarrassed I just wanted to forget about it.

That is not being partisan. It does not matter which party is in government because when the stuff goes bad it goes bad. It is not political dollars. It is taxpayers' dollars.

In any event, that takes us back to the current motion. As we all recall, the motion was to concur in the public accounts committee report on the subject of the financial management of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The motion has now been converted into a non-confidence motion that would bring a vote at some point in the House.

It seems like every avenue we try to go down we just end up coming back to the same old politics. It looks like it is going to be that way. All the opposition wants is a vote. The two opposition parties on that side of the House seem to think that they will win the vote. They do not know whether they are going to win the vote but they want to have a vote. They think that if they win the vote it will trigger an election, which it may do. However the government has to be defeated on a confidence motion that is a real confidence motion, not a fake confidence motion.

The amendment to the motion that we are debating here says that we will take that committee report, which was a good committee report, and we will gut it. We will drop everything in it, send it back to the committee with magic words about non-confidence and we will get the committee to re-report that. In other words, we will send the report back with a little grenade, get the committee to report the grenade back to the House and then we will vote on this like a time bomb. That is pretty cynical procedure.

I actually have to allow the opposition the right and ability to do that because the job of the opposition is to test the government. I just regret that it seems to be almost 100% of the stuff we are doing around here now is this testing, because there are still some good things happening around here. The opposition will not agree with that but I am seeing it. If we read our newspapers carefully we will see it. The government is still accomplishing things and that is because the government is not what is in the House.

The government is made up of all those civil servants who are spending about $150 billion, $160 billion of taxpayers' money. They are out there doing the good work. The government and its ministries develop policy. All that is good stuff, unless we are talking about the NCC roadway that I mentioned earlier. Maybe the government is not 10 out of 10 all the time, but there is a lot of good stuff happening.

Canadians had a very good weekend as we opened the new war museum and paid tribute to our veterans. I felt very good about that. That was a non-partisan piece of governance and I thought it went very well for the country. No one here would argue with that, I am sure.

We have this very partisan, 10 out of 10 delivery of landmines here intended to, at least at this point, cause a vote. We will have a vote. I will be one of the 308 members. Just for the record, I know there are 308 MPs. One is the Speaker and one of our seats is vacant. We are waiting for a byelection in Labrador. I am hoping the new member will be from the party that I know best, the Liberal Party.

However, the voters in Labrador will know what is best and I will have to accept their judgment, whatever that is. There will be 306 of us who will have a chance to vote. I am hoping that the vote will not be on the motion we have cynically floated by the House today. I am hoping it will be on a matter of substance and a matter dealing with the budget.

There is a tonne, a list this long of things in the budget. Maybe not every Canadian agrees with everything in the budget, but there are a whole lot of good things in there, dealing with infrastructure for our cities, early learning, and reinvestment in our armed forces. The record here is replete with discussion on the budget.

Regrettably, we are not discussing the budget now, but that debate must be imminent. I am encouraging the government House leadership to get to a debate on the budget as soon as we can. When that debate is near the end, then we will have a vote. That vote will be a confidence vote not because we make it that but because a money bill, a budget vote, is a confidence vote.

In the meantime, I have some work to do. My colleagues on this side of the House have work to do and there are probably some members in opposition who have work to do. I am hoping they will get a chance to do it with all the political rhetoric going on because it has not helped the House too much. The rhetoric is getting so sharp that some of us are getting awfully distracted. I admit I get a little distracted at times by the sharpness of the rhetoric. It is not necessary to be that sharp. We could probably do a little better.

I am hopeful that colleagues on both sides of the House will have a few more days, a few more weeks or, who knows, a few more months to make this Parliament work. That is what my constituents want me to do. I will continue to do that, but I know we will have a vote coming up. I am getting ready for that as are members opposite. On this side we are planning to win that vote.

[Committees of the House, May 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I was not going to make a comment but in the latter portion of the hon. member's speech I think he betrayed his real intent.

I can understand a member on the other side rising and slagging or criticizing the government. In a sense, that is what opposition members do. They are not all one trick ponies but we have a few around here today.

I can understand why the hon. member might criticize the government in this scenario. I am not saying that the criticism is all justified. I am just saying that I can understand that an opposition member would do it. However it is so politicized that he stopped slagging the government and began slagging another opposition party for the only reason that it decided to try to accomplish some of its priority objectives around here. That is the most politically imbued, sodden position one could take around here.

It is hard to believe that he could forget about all of the terrible things he says are going on. He blames it on the government but then takes the time to slag the New Democratic Party. To me that simply says a thousand things about the political nature of the debate here. It is so political we cannot even get to the substance.

I will pause there and leave the comment hanging. I am sure the member will stand and talk more politics, slag some more, slag again and keep going. He can be my guest. I thought I would make the comment.

[Petitions, May 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my third petition is from constituents in east Toronto, including Scarborough. The petitioners call upon Parliament to increase quotas for sponsored parents under the Immigration Act and to reduce processing times for those sponsored parents.

[Petitions, May 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitioners to present today. The first two petitions are from residents of Scarborough, Pickering and Markham. The petitioners regret that the courts have changed the definition of marriage.

They call upon Parliament to redefine marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.