Dick Harris

[Financial Administration Act, May 17th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I sit here in utter amazement listening to the hon. member, particular his last statement that he would not expect that anyone would want the government to spend money for something that is already provided.

This party would because the extra money this may cost, which has not been verified yet, would save the government untold millions of dollars by increasing the efficiency of its departments. We would be prepared to see this motion passed.

I am pleased to support the motion put forward by my colleague from St. Albert. The member for Burin-St. George's mentioned a couple of times in his speech that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let me assure the House it is broke, contrary to his opinion.

Let me give an example of how broke it is. It is interesting that no Bloc members are in the House today speaking on this bill. After all, why would they? They could only speak in opposition to this bill because they have not demonstrated in one instance since they have been in the House that they have any intention of bringing the government to accountability. They have no desire to see accountability in any of the spending departments because it does not work with their agenda.

The motion our member has brought forward would strengthen the role of the auditor general and provide much more accountability with respect to taxpayer dollars by the government. Where have we heard that phrase before? Have we ever heard it by the government? No. Have we ever heard it by the Bloc? No. Have we heard it from Reformers over here? Yes. We have heard it for years from Reformers that governments have to become accountable to the taxpayers. Governments must begin to regard taxpayer money as a sacred trust. That is what we are trying to get to.

It would also ensure all departments and agencies would table a response to the auditor general's report. That is not rocket science. That means reporting to the House of Commons, to Parliament, on what someone is doing since the last report which said they were doing a pretty lousy job. When going through the auditor general's reports, at least the ones I have seen since I have been in the House, he has not exactly given a glowing report to any government department.

This motion would ensure that timeframes would be laid out by departments with respect to taking corrective actions as a result of the findings of the auditor general. Timeframes is a foreign word to this Liberal government. This word is used in private business all the time. There is a timeframe for getting this done and there is a timeframe for getting that done. That is why business operates so efficiently. Businesses operate on their own money. The government is operating on taxpayers' money. The money does not belong to the government, so why be efficient?

Last, it would ensure that the public accounts committee and any other relevant standing committee would be involved in the

process. That is not rocket science. Why not? Why would the government be opposed to that?

As the House knows, the auditor general and his department provide an invaluable service. The department is charged with the responsibility of overseeing how government operates. It makes criticisms and gives praise where it is due, although praise has been absent in the last number of years.

The auditor general reports annually to the House on improper money management, improper records maintenance, non-approved expenditures and program efficiency. These are matters with which all of us should be concerned. All Canadians are concerned. The government should be concerned.

The auditor general receives about $50 million annually to fulfil his mandate but many of his findings and recommendations go unanswered. That goes right to the heart of accountability within government and contributes to the cynicism with which the public views how the government is using their money. If we asked the average taxpayer what is the one thing government could do to make him or her happy, I bet that nine times out of ten the answer would be: Spend my money a little more wisely. That is what we are talking about here. We are talking about implementing a mechanism which will force departments to spend the taxpayers' money more wisely.

The attitude within departments appears to be that it is taxpayers' money and there is a lot more where that came from. The auditor general's follow-up findings to past recommendations would seem to confirm this type of attitude within the departments.

If we watch the Letterman show on late night television, every night he has a top 10 list of something or other. The auditor general has a top four list. I would like to read them to the House. Here is today's top four list. As a matter of fact, these items have probably been the top four for as long as the auditor general has been reporting.

Number four: varied, though mostly limited response to our recommendations.

Number three: lack of action on many recommendations.

Number two: measures undertaken are not sufficient.

Number one: progress is slow.

These types of statements are common in the follow-up findings of the auditor general. We can find them year after year. Why? Because there is no demand for the departments to become accountable.

These are the complaints which the auditor general has of the corrective actions which are supposed to have been taking place. Obviously many of the departments are not concerned with responding quickly and effectively to the concerns of the auditor general.

On March 21 the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board stated that Motion No. 166 was not necessary since the government is highly motivated to respond to the concerns raised in each of the reports.

While the government may be highly motivated to respond, this does not mean that it is actually responding or going to respond, but only that it is highly motivated. As an example, I might be highly motivated to go swimming in the Rideau Canal but I do not think I will be diving in just yet because I might be a bit afraid of what I am going to find. By comparison the government departments, although they may be highly motivated into digging into the auditor general's recommendations, are not responding. They are not quite ready to go in there. They may be afraid themselves of what they will find in their own departments. Being highly motivated does not automatically translate into taking action.

Motion 166 goes a long way to addressing this concern. Quite frankly, any member of the House who is concerned about how the government spends taxpayers' money should be supporting this motion. By comparison I would imagine that any member who is not concerned with the way the government spends the money is going to oppose this motion. That is very clear. We have had two Liberal members today oppose the motion. Obviously they do not have any concern about how the taxpayers' money is spent. They are not concerned about accountability.

Two speakers from the Reform Party today spoke in favour of this motion. Obviously they are concerned about how the government spends taxpayers' money. It is as simple as that.

The red ink book, the document of promises, promises, promises which have been broken, broken, broken states that committees are to be given greater influence over government expenditures. That is what the red book says. The infamous red book of the Liberal Party promises openness, transparency, accountability and every other nice thing that one could ever imagine which has never come true actually says that government has to be more accountable.

Here is the opportunity for the government. Instead of breaking red book promises, it could live up to one of them: accountability.

[Standards Council Of Canada Act, May 17th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I was and am prepared to speak on this bill. However, when you were asking for speakers I was fumbling for my ear piece to get the translation and I did not understand what you were saying. By the time I got it in you had acknowledged there was no speakers.

I apologize for that and I ask if you might seek unanimous consent of the House for me to speak on this bill.

[Road Safety, May 17th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today in response to the minister's statement and acknowledge the proclamation of national road safety week in Canada, May 17-23. National road safety week,

which is sponsored by the Canadian Safety Council, is to raise the awareness of the need to promote safer driving habits. In particular, this year the national safety week is featuring Operation Lifesaver, which focuses on grade crossing accidents. It is being co-sponsored by the Railway Association of Canada, Transport Canada and the Canadian Safety Council.

I could continue to talk about the virtues of national safety week and, in particular, the minister's statement today regarding the high annual number of grade crossing accidents. I appreciate what the minister is doing. Certainly no one could say that it is not an excellent project. However, I would like to take this opportunity to speak about my recent parliamentary activities with respect to the terrible carnage taking place on our highways as a result of impaired drivers.

I would like to address my remarks, in particular, to the Minister of Transport. I know he shares the concerns of millions of Canadians who, on a daily basis, see in their newspapers, in the electronic media and hear from their friends about this terrible crime. They are touched every day by crimes committed by people who choose to drink and drive. They kill over 1,400 people every year on our streets and highways.

I know the number of accidents that occur on an annual basis at grade crossings is a huge concern. We have to do everything we can to decrease those statistics.

This might be a starting point for the government. Perhaps I can encourage the minister to join with this side of the House in supporting Bill C-201. The government could join with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Canadian Students Against Impaired Drivers in Canada and Ontario Students Against Impaired Driving in supporting Bill C-201. Locally there is the Nepean community council against impaired driving. The Canadian Police Association and other groups are crying out for the government to implement measures that express zero tolerance to people who even think of getting into their cars when they are impaired.

That would not be hard to do. It could be reflected easily in our criminal justice system. Penalties could be brought in like those in Sweden. Sweden has very liberal drinking laws, but its criminal justice system says that if a person drinks, gets behind the wheel of a vehicle and is caught, his or her driver's licence is suspended for life and the vehicle seized. Why cannot we reflect zero tolerance such as that?

The tragedies that occur at the hands of drunken drivers make the accidents that occur at grade crossings pale by comparison. If the government can take the initiative to proclaim May 17 to 23 as national road safety week and pay special attention to accidents which occur at grade crossings, why does the Minister of Justice stand speaker after speaker in the House to oppose Bill C-201?

I will close by saying that I appreciate what the minister and the government is trying to do but, for God's sake, let us go further to address the impaired drivers who kill in this country.

[Impaired Driving, May 17th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are crying out for justice concerning drunk drivers who kill, and the Liberal government knows it.

Over and over we see slap on the wrist sentencing given to people who choose to drink and drive and as a result of their choices kill people on our highways.

My private member's bill, if the government had the guts to support it, would ensure that anyone found guilty of impaired driving causing death would receive a minimum seven year sentence.

My bill is supported by number of Liberal MPs, but the Minister of Justice will not let them speak in favour of it. Why is the Liberal government denying its own members the opportunity to speak in support of this important bill as their constituents wish?.

How many more innocent Canadians have to die at the hands of drunk drivers before the government does something? How many more senseless deaths? How many more?

[Petitions, May 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present a petition signed by 25 Canadians in B.C.

The petitioners are concerned with the government's consideration of taxing supplemental health care and dental care coverage. The petitioners call upon Parliament to refrain from implementing a tax on health and dental benefits and to put on hold any future consideration of such a tax until a complete review of the tax system and how it impacts on the health of Canadians has been undertaken.

[Petitions, May 15th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the petitions I wish to present today are signed by hundreds of people.

The petitioners pray and request that Parliament proceed immediately with amendments to the Criminal Code which will ensure the sentence given to anyone convicted of driving while impaired or causing injury or death while impaired reflects the severity of the crime and reflects a zero tolerance toward this crime by our government.

[Petitions, May 13th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present petitions containing several hundred names from all across Canada.

The petitioners pray and request that Parliament proceed immediately with amendments to the Criminal Code that will ensure that the sentence given to anyone convicted of driving while impaired or causing injury or death while impaired does reflect both the severity of the crime and zero tolerance by Canada toward the crime.

[Department Of Public Works And Government Services Act, March 25th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today on Bill C-7, formerly Bill C-52 which was presented to the House back in 1993. Just a scant three years later we are looking for approval of provisions for which most in fact are probably already in place.

I do not want to dwell on this subject for an extended length of time because the bill was introduced and then became C-7 in 1994 and the changes within the bill are already in place. However, I would like to make a few points about the bill and the practices of the department in general.

I and my party have some serious reservations about particular sections of the bill which appear to give the minister unlimited discretion with respect to fees, business practices and other operations within the ministry which in itself is sort of scary. As a matter of fact, I have received quite a number of letters, faxes and calls from people who have concerns in relation to those aspects of the bill.

Clause 16 is particularly worrisome because of the broad range of powers it implies and gives to the minister. It states that "the minister may do anything for or on behalf of", and then it enters into a number of conditions. Given the history of the Liberal government when it has such a free rein, that can present a scary situation to a lot of people who are concerned about how the government spends money.

Given the government's penchant for spending money and its history of giving choice favours, if I may use that word or we can call it patronage, to friends of the government, giving a minister this kind of leeway and discretion is particularly worrisome to ourselves and indeed to many Canadians.

Clause 16(b) states that public works can do anything for "any government, body or person in Canada or elsewhere". The term "in Canada or elsewhere" is rather questionable. I thought the purpose of any government in Canada was to serve Canadians.

Why would this minister seek to have a provision that would allow the minister to do things on behalf of Canadians with people outside the country when we are talking about government operations and public works? The focus should be to deal within Canada in any area.

Why is the government giving powers to a department entering into contracts with foreign governments, companies or individuals? We have all those resources here in Canada.

One of the most worrisome parts of this bill is that the government appears to be and is getting involved in providing services that are already available in the private sector. It is our opinion that the government should not be competing with the private sector. The provisions of this bill allow it to do exactly that.

We question why the government would want to get involved in competition with the private sector which pays taxes, tries to do business in this country, provides jobs for Canadians, provides a living for the owners and tries to build a company. Instead, the private sector comes up against a government that is competing with its own tax dollars and generally far more resources than any private sector company has in this country. That is a real concern of ours.

Clause 16 also permits the minister to do what he or she pleases with whom he or she pleases. That is scary in itself. One can apply that principle to any of the functions that might occur in that department.

When we give a minister that kind of wide ranging power to do what he or she pleases with whomever he or she pleases, given the history of the Liberals' penchant for spending money, giving away very lush government contracts to friends of Liberals and appointing friends of Liberals to very well paying positions, we have to ask if this power is excessive. Should it not be curtailed more?

We have put forward amendments that would address these wide ranging powers and the freedom they give by curtailing the department's ability to compete with the private sector first. However, as history will show, when we put through common sense amendments they are defeated by the government. This is curious since the government operations committee just released a preliminary report on the contracting process entitled: "Small Business is our Business". The report flies in the face of what this bill intends to do.

One of the main findings of the report is that more contracts should be awarded to small and medium size businesses. It sounds good to me. However, here we have Bill C-7 which permits the government to enter into direct competition with those very enterprises the report states it should be doing more business with.

In our opinion, the government should have adopted the amendments put forward by the Reform Party which would have been in line with the report "Small Business is our Business". We think it should have listened and should listen to the committee and prevent the department from competing against the private sector.

Many letters have been written to many MPs in this House from private sector companies, whether they be small or medium size companies, stating their distress about the fact that the government can and is entering into competition with them using their own tax dollars to do so. Reformers believe these companies have a very legitimate concern. Why should their own government compete directly with them?

The government should have adopted some of the amendments put forward by Reformers and it should have listened to its own standing committee which dealt with this and provided a number of recommendations.

Ultimately the government should be downsizing the department and getting out of those areas that are controlled and well served by the private sector. Why should the government be involved in areas of operation that are served very well by the private sector business? However, we see the reverse when we examine Bill C-7.

The government operations committee identified a number of areas of concern with respect to the department that are not addressed in this bill. For instance, the committee was concerned that 40 per cent of the contracts, worth about $3.5 billion, given out by the government were sole source. In other words, those contracts did not go out to public tender. They were just given out with no tendering process to particular firms. Nothing in this bill addresses this situation.

As members know, sole sourcing can very easily lead to abuses within the system. This was one of the things we discussed at length in the standing committee. There were a lot of concerns from Liberal members themselves about sole sourcing of government contracts. We discussed it before the House prorogued and before the government decided to take an extra holiday in February. We were prepared to deal with it and hopefully we will now get back to dealing with it in committee. We will send more recommendations to the government in the hope that it will start to listen.

The committee recommended that Treasury Board and public works draft a code of conduct for contracting out which would lay out very strict guidelines on how contracting out would be done by the government. However, the committee report went further by stating that the reporting framework for contracting needs had to be significantly revised.

In all, there is a great deal of concern over the contracting process. What really concerned us was the amended tenders, the amendments that could be made to contracts given out by the government. In other words, someone can bid a price and after they have the contract they can go back to the government at the local level and request their tender or bid price be amended. How could any private business ever operate like this?

When I was in business, after an agreement was made to purchase something from a supplier, a price was quoted, the deal was made and we agreed to it. However, the situation here is that the government can put out a contract, someone can bid on it and win the bid and then turn around and ask for an amendment. Given that the contract is at a certain level, say $30,000 and under, the decision to amend the contract can be made locally within the region. We feel this opens up the process to all forms of abuse and we asked in committee to have it dealt with. We see nothing in the bill that deals with it. We hope that when the committee deals with it again some of the recommendations that come forward might be added into this bill as amendments.

Even though the committee's work is fairly recent, we are all well aware of some of these problems that are hounding the government's contracting procedures. I talked about the contract amendments which add on to the contracts and drive the price higher than what the original agreement was.

To talk about that for a moment, there are some astounding figures. For example, in 1990 contract amendments totalled $602 million. These are not the original prices; these are the add-ons. By 1993, in just a short three years, once the people who were submitting the bids found out how to work the loophole in the system which allowed for contracting amendments and get around the contracting process, the amendments went from $602 million in 1990 to a staggering $1.8 billion in 1993. That is totally unacceptable. No private sector operation could even dream of operating in that way.

This is another situation we feel the Liberals and the House of Commons have to deal with immediately. Reform has been talking about this situation for almost three years now. There have to be more controls to safeguard the public purse. We cannot allow the discretionary power within the department that exists. It is open to all forms of abuse.

There really are no procedures in place other than this discretion that will really safeguard the public purse. These are tax dollars we are working with. These tax dollars are given to the government by hard working Canadians who want to see their tax dollars spent in a prudent fashion. Let us never forget that the tax dollars are basically funds paid into trust by Canadians. The government should regard taxpayers' money as a sacred trust and should do everything it can so that there is no question by Canadians as to how the government spends that money.

Whereas there should be more controls to protect the public purse, Bill C-7 in fact increases the power of the department and the minister and loosens control. What on earth is this government thinking about when it puts in a bill like this and when it asks its members-let me rephrase that-when it tells its members to support a bill like this?

The department is famous for being partial in its provision of information which at best is very difficult to receive. Reformers put forward amendments which would ensure that the disclosure of information was complete and easily accessible which is not unreasonable. Our party appears to be the only one in the House concerned about how taxpayers' dollars are spent by this government. We asked that information on how the money is being spent be easily accessible. We asked for that in the form of an amendment. The Liberal government in an effort to protect its little empire, which gives it all sorts of powers to spend money and reward friends, defeated our amendment which asked for accessibility.

What kind of a message does that send to the Canadian taxpayers, who as we all know are among the highest, if not the highest taxed wage earners in the whole world? What kind of message does that send to the people who are paying taxes, that this government will not allow a party like the Reform Party, who want to be the guardians of the taxpayers' money, or for that matter any other interested and concerned people access to how the government departments spend their money? It is a very poor message indeed. We put forward the amendment for disclosure. It was defeated by the government.

When we consider that $9 billion was spent on contracting last year, we think the public has a right to know exactly how the money is being spent. However, Bill C-7 does not address this issue. It is almost laughable. For all the Liberal government's talk about transparency and openness, all the promises it made on the campaign trail and in the red book about being transparent and open, the public still has difficulty obtaining information from the department of public works.

Forget about the public having difficulty; Reform members have difficulty obtaining the information we want in order to check on how the government is spending the money. I have requested information through access to information a number of times only

to obtain about one-tenth of what I requested and even that was blanked out in many cases. What kind of a message does that send to Canadians?

All of this reminds me of a related issue, which is the privatization of Canada Communication Group I spoke about in the House the other day. Canada Communication Group falls under the control of the department of public works. In July 1995 the minister announced that it would be privatized. In some respects we do not have much of a problem with privatization if it is going to save money and increase efficiency. We thought we would wait to see how it was going to work.

The government struck a committee to advise it on a process which was to be fair, open and transparent. The committee was to advise the government on how the privatization should be implemented. The process was going to be open, fair and transparent, as the government says it would like to be some day. We and the public have yet to hear from that committee. Equally distressing, as I understand it the committee is reporting to the minister behind closed doors on an as required basis.

What happened to the fair, open and transparent process which was to be the committee's criteria? There has never been a report from the committee which has been made public. It is reporting only to the minister who at her discretion can advise Parliament as to how the privatization implementation is proceeding.

All of this is very disturbing to our party and to concerned Canadians who want a little more openness with respect to how their dollars are being spent. Once again the Liberal government promised one thing but did another. That is why we must be wary of the Liberals' promise that Bill C-7 does not confer broad powers on the minister. I would suggest that it does exactly that.

Furthermore, when the bill was before the government operations committee in November 1994, it was rammed through in typical Liberal fashion by the Liberal majority sitting on the committee. Amendments and witnesses were put forward by Reform. We submitted our lists, we submitted our amendments and the Liberals on the committee refused every one of them. So much for openness and transparency. So much for wanting to make available information on how the government operates.

One has to ask, what is the government afraid of? Why does it not want the Reform Party looking into the way it spends taxpayers' dollars? Why does it not want Canadians to have an understanding of how it spends taxpayers' dollars? Is the government trying to hide something?

We have seen contracting out. There is a company that does a lot of business with the government. SNC Lavelin is a very well known Quebec company that does a lot of business with Canada Post and other departments, including Transport Canada. It is a big company with a zillion subsidiaries and is involved in a zillion consortia.

I have been trying to find out why this company is getting so many government contracts. I know it has been getting them for years, contract after contract, untendered for the most part. It has received a number of multimillion dollar contracts from Canada Post through its subsidiaries, SLS Corp. and Clientech and others with no tendering process in place.

We can talk about the contract for the mine sweepers for the coast guard on the east coast. Fenco MacLaren, a company which bid on the work to be done for the government, outbid Halifax shipyards. I was not involved in the committee that was looking into that but I found out that Fenco MacLaren is not even a shipyard. I thought it strange that a company that does not even own a shipyard could get a huge government contract which common sense dictates must go to a shipyard. Yet Halifax shipyards which bid on the contract did not get it. Lo and behold, in looking into the research data on Fenco MacLaren what do I see? It is owned by SNC Lavelin. Well, my questions have been answered so far. We will delve into that one a little more, let the Liberal members be aware and particularly the minister who was in charge of that one.

The Liberals promise one thing and they do another. We put through common sense amendments to open up the process to what is going on and to make it more transparent and the Liberals shoot it down.

The amendments and the witnesses we proposed to the committee were refused by the Liberal members. They wanted to get out of the committee as soon as possible. They did not want a detailed examination of Bill C-7 in any way, shape or form. They rammed it through committee and let it flounder on the Order Paper for about 16 months.

The bill appears to be largely administrative but as I noted earlier, members should have some real concerns about some of the power conferred on the minister. Members should be asking why the bill permits the government to compete with the private sector. Why? If the government is so serious about creating jobs and helping small business as it claims in the flyer "Small Business is our Business", it would not allow particular clauses in the bill which allow it to compete with private sector small business to go forward.

I urge MPs who are concerned about job creation and the health of the small business sector to vote against the bill. Even Liberal members who feel this way are invited to vote against the bill as well. I know Reformers are going to be voting against the bill because we have serious concerns about the powers that are

bestowed upon the minister and her department. Reformers will certainly not be supporting the bill.

[Dangerous Offenders, March 25th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I am not pleased to speak on this bill today. As a matter of fact, I am very upset that this Liberal government, which has a majority in the House and has the power to enact laws to protect our society, our families and our children and to follow through on a promise of recognizing the need for safety in our society, refuses to enact legislation that will do exactly that. It leaves it up to the Reform Party, the opposition, to bring this type of motion to the House of Commons.

While I am certainly anxious to support M-116, the motion of the hon. member for Surrey-White Rock-South Langley, at the same time I am really upset that it has been left up to an opposition party to do this. Reformers have recognized the need to protect society and are proud to do it.

After listening to the hon. members from the Bloc and the Liberal Party speak, it must be said that we have just heard members from these parties prefer to argue for the rights of sexual offenders and sexual predators. They prefer to argue for those kinds of rights as opposed to arguing for the rights of society as a whole and the victims of these very sick people.

The motion the hon. member from Surrey-White Rock puts forward seeks to amend the dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code to ensure that sexual offenders, these predators, will not be free to walk in society and offend again. They would be declared dangerous offenders. This would happen if two psychiatrists who are trained in assessing the character and the mental makeup of the people who have committed these horrible crimes stated that these people would reoffend again. The courts would be bound to keep them in jail which is where they should be.

Being labelled a dangerous offender involves an indeterminate prison sentence. There is a need for this amendment to the legislation. One need only look back a few years to get a sense of how poorly the justice system deals with people who sexually offend.

It has been mentioned before but the House will remember the case of Melanie Carpenter and her killer Fernand Auger, an individual with a tremendously long history of sexual offences. Before being released from prison a psychologist stated that beyond a shadow of a doubt Mr. Auger would reoffend. The system

knew he was going to reoffend but it let him go free. Now Melanie Carpenter is dead because of it.

I am just amazed at these Liberal and Bloc members who, when speaking against this motion, constantly refer back to the criminal justice system as their rationale. The Canadian people know that the criminal justice system stinks. It needs a complete overhaul. Yet the Liberal and the Bloc members use it as their rationale to speak against motions which will protect society. They say it cannot be done because the criminal justice system states so and so and they go on to relate what the justice system says.

The thinking that goes on in the minds of some members is astounding. They try to defend the criminal justice system which no Canadian would ever defend.

The present system is such that psychologists could have done nothing to stop Mr. Auger's release. The system allowed this Auger fellow to refuse treatment while he was in prison. This guy was a sexual predator, a sexual offender. He was convicted. He went to prison and he stated: "I'm just going to stay for a while but I don't need any treatment and I am not going to take it". What happened? The system let him out and he brutally killed someone.

Joseph Fredericks, a man with a long history of sexual offences against children was released from a Toronto jail in 1988. Despite the fact that there was a 99 per cent chance that he would reoffend, the system let him go. The system put him back into society. The system did not have the power to keep him incarcerated even though the system knew he would reoffend. He abducted, raped and killed Christopher Stephenson. The system let him go. Once again the system failed. As a result the Stephenson's lost their son.

More recently, in my home town of Prince George, we learned that Bobby Gordon Oatway, a twice convicted sexual offender, a pedophile, a predator of little children, was being released from prison on parole even though he had refused treatment in prison, even though the corrections people, the parole people, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was most likely to offend again. Out the door he walks. He was coming to Prince George.

Had it not been for a phone call from one of his victims in the lower mainland of B.C. to Prince George letting people know he was coming, he would have come back into our community probably totally undetected. Chances are that he would have committed an offence there.

After the citizens were warned that he was coming, on their own and without the help from the justice system because the system let this Mr. Oatway out in the first place, mounted a campaign and distributed posters. This changed Mr. Oatway's mind and he did not come to Prince George. Unfortunately he is in Toronto now and they are faced with the same problem. They have a predator in their community who is likely to offend again. The system failed. He will offend against innocent children who are just enjoying being kids only to be victimized by some sexual predator, some sick person.

Canadians believe that the justice system is severely deficient when it comes to protecting society from these sick, sexual predators. M-116 goes a long way to addressing the situation. It ensures that dangerous sexual offenders will be kept in prison so that our streets, our playgrounds, our schoolyards and our communities can be safe again.

Why should parents have to worry about where their kids play, how they go to school? Why should parents have to worry about their kids going to a playground and having a good time, like kids are supposed to do? They have to worry because the justice system lets people who are sexual predators out on the streets. That is unfair.

The government has had lots of chances to improve the law as it applies to this type of offender. When the Liberals passed Bill C-45 last year, my colleagues in the Reform Party put forward a number of amendments to address sexual offenders and ways to fix the system so that society would not have to fear these people. Specifically, they argue in favour of a child sex offender registry which would identify them so that citizens could take precautions on their own where the justice system fails them.

As well, they argued in favour of sex offenders having to serve their full sentence and undergo-this will come as a real shock to Liberals-mandatory treatment while in prison. Needless to say the Liberals did not adopt any of these proposals and society remains vulnerable to these sick people who prey on little children and commit other sexual offences.

The problem with the government, as mentioned in the opening part of my speech, is that it is concerned more for the rights of criminals. Victims' rights come second as far as the Liberals are concerned. While a lot of bureaucrats sit around and muse over how to protect criminals' rights, these offenders are wandering around anonymously in our neighbourhoods.

The Canadian Police Association got into the heart of the issue in a submission given to MPs in 1993. It stated: "We think we should rethink the basic assumption that dangerous risk high offenders must be released no matter what danger they pose". Policemen in our streets are dealing with these people on a daily basis. They know these people. They know the chances of them reoffending.

They want to keep them off the streets. That is exactly what Motion M-116 addresses.

We must question the logic in simply allowing the justice system to keep releasing these offenders. I might add that we have to question releasing them when their chance of reoffending is very high. Seventy per cent of all inmates who are dangerous offenders have at least one prior federal sentence. These individuals are hard core criminals and it is not overly difficult to identify them.

Similar to the Canadian Police Association position, the group CAVEAT released a report called "Safety Net". It called for dangerous offender applications to be brought against high risk offenders in order to protect the public. This should be the ultimate role of our justice system: the protection of society, our families and our communities. Unfortunately, it seems as though it has been turned on its head according to the Liberal and Bloc members, and criminals' rights come first. That is a shame.

In November 1994 the supreme court ruled that sex offenders could no longer be automatically banned for life from hanging around parks, school yards and playgrounds. The justice system says that people who prey on and victimize little kids cannot be kept from areas where little kids play. That is a sign of a very sick system. What is even more distressing is that the government supports that decision.

I cannot support the government's position on this. I will support Motion M-116. I urge all members who are concerned about the public, the families and the children of the country to support it as well.

[Pearson International Airport, March 22nd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I was asking questions that had been raised.

Mr. Nixon reported back to the Liberals in 30 days-that was quick work-with a report that argued in favour of terminating the contracts. Were we really surprised? This was because of undue influence peddling among the chief players in the consortium and the Tory government. Can we be surprised about that?

I will not stand here and deny that I do not have any doubt that the previous Tory government may have ventured into patronage payoffs to friends of the party. Mr. Nixon had this in his report which took only 30 days and nevertheless cost $82,000. I am sorry, he got a bonus. After his bill was paid, he was then appointed as chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. I missed that earlier.

He issued an 11-page report which works out to $7,000 per page-