Gerald Keddy

[Supply, March 14th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, the management issue is an interesting one because we cannot manage an issue unless we understand it, and that has been the problem from the beginning.

I will reiterate in closing, that we cannot work on an issue unless we are willing to negotiate with the players. After over a year, only yesterday did the government finally agree to meet with all the players. It may have met with them individually, but if they were all put in a room, we might get a solution.

[Supply, March 14th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, on the contrary, my comments were extremely accurate. The government was asleep at the switch or, if the member prefers, it was asleep on the stump. We have an industry that is being sacrificed because of the inability and ineptness of not only the Minister for International Trade on this file but also the Prime Minister.

What is really being discussed here is this. The United States wants a number of things from Canada. It would like to see us use something that is more closely related to its stumping system and to use a cross-border reference criteria to establish Canadian subsidies that are non-existent. It would like to see us increase raw log exports to the United States and adopt U.S. style timber auctions which actually jack the price of lumber up instead of decreasing it. There are a number of things that it is after. We cannot just sit back and think that we do not have to bargain with the U.S. We cannot ignore our industry.

As far as Atlantic Canada is involved, we are always left out of the countervail because we have a different system in Atlantic Canada because we are based on private land ownership. That is why. It was not anything that the government did. It did nothing. We represented ourselves. Also, we are certainly willing to support Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and B.C. in trying to have free trade in lumber, but we cannot do that without the help of the government.

[Supply, March 14th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I cannot finish this speech in 25 seconds. There is much too much to be debated. I do have five minutes for questions and answers and hopefully I will have some.

The issue I want to leave the House with is the issue I raised at the very beginning. We have a government that is asleep at the wheel on this file. It did not recognize the deadline that was looming. It has not handled it in a professional and comprehensive manner and therefore we are in the position we are today.

[Supply, March 14th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I am sure my colleague will be here on a timely basis.

[Supply, March 14th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I rise today in the debate on softwood lumber. It is an issue which we all need to take seriously. I congratulate the Alliance Party for bringing it forward.

About two weeks ago the hon. member for Cumberland--Colchester asked for an emergency debate on this subject. Unfortunately the Speaker did not see fit to allow an emergency debate which at the time would have been a much better ruling by the Speaker and we would have been able to actually move forward more quickly on the subject.

The supply day votable motion brought forward by the Canadian Alliance reads:

That, in the opinion of this House, the principles and provisions of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, FTA, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, including their dispute resolution mechanisms, should be fully applied to trade in softwood lumber, and it urges the government not to accept any negotiated settlement of the current softwood lumber dispute outside of the FTA and the NAFTA unless it guarantees free and unfettered access to the U.S. market, and includes dispute resolution mechanisms capable of overriding domestic trade measures to resolve future disputes.

At first glance that is a very good motion. I expect it is a motion the PC Party would support. However, other issues should be taken into consideration.

The first issue that needs to be taken into consideration is that we are in a crisis situation. Some 42% of Canadian lumber exports come from British Columbia. At the present time somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30,000 forestry and forestry associated jobs have been lost in B.C.

A year and a half ago newspaper headlines in British Columbia were saying that British Columbia was bleeding jobs. It is certainly bleeding more jobs today than it was a year ago. We should be prepared to lobby extremely intensively in the U.S. to get a negotiated settlement. We need to continue this with utmost haste.

The Prime Minister has been discussing the issue with President Bush. We advised him to do that more than a year ago. The PC Party raised questions in the House when the softwood lumber agreement was about to expire. There was no panic on the other side of the House. There was no sense of urgency on the government side.

It is nearly a year and a half later and we are in a crisis situation. A huge industry is being severely threatened by its inability to export lumber and raw logs south of the border. We should understand where most of the American interference is coming from.

There is a huge demand for Canadian lumber and a larger demand for Canadian raw logs. I do not want members to think from my earlier statement that there is a problem with exporting raw logs. It is quite the contrary. That is not the problem. The Americans want our round logs to feed their sawmills. Without question that has been a great part of this entire debate.

The Prime Minister and the Minister for International Trade do not seem able to negotiate a settlement with the Americans.

I am not quite certain but either yesterday or the day before, the Prime Minister linked the trade in softwood lumber to the trade in other Canadian commodities. In answer to a question in the House he said that the Americans will talk to us on softwood lumber because they need our energy, because they need our heavy oil, because they need our gas. If the government knows anything at all about the very basis of trade agreements, it is that issues should not be linked. Softwood lumber should not be linked to oil. Softwood lumber should not be linked to gas. Softwood lumber should not be linked to automobiles. The government should not link, period. It becomes a slippery slope and tit for tat. It is a hopeless situation which neither country will ever win. The fact that this agreement needs to be settled is without question.

Madam Speaker, I would like to say in the midst of debate that I will be sharing my time with the member for Fraser Valley. I am sure he will add some excellent comments to the debate.

I would like to summarize a number of the mistakes the government has made. The government failed to recognize that the deadline was looming. Long ago, more than two years ago, I raised this in the natural resources committee. The government was unaware that the softwood lumber agreement was expiring. It was completely impervious to it. The government did not understand it. It was a problem then and it is a greater problem today. The government cannot link issues. It continually tries to do that.

Only yesterday, for the first time in a year, did the government have a stakeholders meeting. The very people who are closest to this issue and who understand it the best had never been called together by the government. The government had met with some of them individually, but it had never met with them all in a group.

The timber producers and exporters in British Columbia and the timber producers and exporters in Atlantic Canada were talking to each other, but they were not talking to each other and the government at the same time. All of them were never in a room together. They did not know what Ontario's position was or what Quebec's position was because they had not been put in a room together. It is unbelievable that a government with that much arrogance on this important an issue had never had a stakeholders meeting.

We should understand that after the Canada-United States softwood lumber agreement expired in April 2001, the U.S. department of commerce levied what we would call an unfair duty, but the initial duty of 19.31% on countervail. There is some discussion from the people I have been talking to in the industry that it may be increased to as much as 50%. The U.S. followed that up on August 10, 2001 with an additional 12.58% anti-dumping charge.

Many parts of Canada were left out of the countervail. Atlantic Canada was left out of the countervail charges, however no one has been left out of the anti-dumping charges because it affects the entire country.

Since talks are resuming today in Washington, this debate is very timely. However, I question the ability and the competency of our Canadian team. We are sitting here a year later and the British Columbia economy is in tatters. In the lumber industry alone 30,000 jobs have been lost.

Madam Speaker, I recognize the one minute signal, but I do not see my colleague for Fraser Valley. Perhaps the questions and answers will take that up and if he is not here by then, I will continue if that is possible.

[Softwood Lumber, March 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, there is talk that Canada may accept an export tax in the softwood lumber dispute. This would be a reversal of Canadian policy and could have been done a year ago. It may be portrayed by the Liberal government as a success story but at what cost to Canadian lumber producers?

Although a self-administered export tax would allow Canada to retain the tax revenue, it would send the wrong message about who controls Canada's forests. Canadians have the right to establish prices that reflect market conditions in Canada. This must be a short term measure and the government's real interest must be to negotiate a permanent softwood lumber solution.

What the Americans really want is increased access to Canadian round logs. Can the Liberal government tell us why Canadians should not benefit from all the value added revenue?

The lesson to be learned here is that the Prime Minister and the Minister for International Trade talk about being favoured trading partners of the United States, yet they have completely failed to negotiate a fair trade deal on softwood lumber.

We need a solution that is fair. Will the Liberal government show backbone and deliver a fair deal?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2001, March 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, because the debate pertains to budget implementation, I have two questions. The first question is for the secretary of state and it concerns the $7.2 billion designated for actual security in this country. How long will it be before that security spending is in place? Most of the promises we have heard in the budget are simply to do something at some time in the future.

My second question concerns the capital gains deferral promised in the last budget for private woodlot owners. The regulatory regime to go along with that is not in place yet. Who will actually benefit from this new capital gains deferral and by that I mean who will be described as a private woodlot owner? Who will intergenerational apply to and what will be the definition of sustainable woodlot?

What we do not want to see in the budget is a repeat of the last budget where we saw volunteer firefighters get a $500 tax deduction that did not apply to them.

[Property Rights, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, certainly I listened with some interest to the member who presented the motion, the hon. member for Yorkton--Melville. I think it is worth reading to the House the intent of the proposed legislation:

That the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights fully examine the effectiveness of property rights protection for Canadian citizens as provided in the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and report back to the House whether or not the federal laws protecting property rights need to be amended in order to comply with international agreements Canada has entered into, including Article 17 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states: “1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. 2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.

As well, I listened to the other members who spoke to the motion, which is non-votable, and particularly to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. To give credit to the member for Yorkton--Melville, he has raised other issues in the House on and about gun control and has admitted that this motion distinctly was brought in to deal with gun control. I noted that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice never once mentioned the words firearms or gun control in his reply. I thought it was quite an interesting discussion. I do not know quite how he managed to avoid it.

Certainly I would agree with the member for Yorkton--Melville that this is worthy of taking to the committee, worthy of looking at, worthy of debate, and worthy of a vote in the House. Whether or not that vote would be passed, whether or not given more information the majority of members in the House would support it is yet to be seen. Certainly a couple of things came to mind as I was listening to the debate.

The first thing that leaped out at me in the discussion of firearms registration was that the member stated he had presented bills to the House before that had been well researched and well drafted and he thought this was another good motion to bring to the House. I am not as certain, after listening to the debate, that this is as well researched and as well drafted as some of the other motions and private members' bills.

Certainly I listened with some concern when I heard reference to the American constitution and the fifth amendment. We can debate, and probably should, and that would be the point of taking this to committee, the provision of the fifth amendment and the American constitution, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the Enron scandal in the United States. The perpetrators of that crime, and it is a crime, are appearing at the inquiry, which is dealing with $100 billion of private investors' money in the United States, and they have all claimed the fifth amendment. It certainly looks as if they will walk, scot-free. It is absolutely scandalous that we would allow such a provision in the charter of rights in Canada, a provision that would allow perpetrators of a crime to claim something similar to the fifth amendment and walk away scot-free.

Also mentioned were the social limits on the ownership and use of property. The member from the Bloc raised a very good point about the fact that many people would claim that child pornography is property and therefore they should be allowed to own it, distribute it and use it as they see fit. I would disagree with that. The Bloc member has made a very good point.

On the issue I take this to be about, the issue of firearms control and some misguided, poorly used and poorly implemented legislation brought in by the Liberal government, certainly I would agree that we need to find an avenue to change it. The only avenue I see before the people of Canada to change that particularly spurious piece of legislation, Bill C-68, at this stage in the process would be to change the government and bring in legislation that effectively gets rid of long gun registration. Until that happens, I do not expect any other changes to be made. We can continue to raise the issue. We can continue to explain to Canadians why it continues to be an important issue, but at the end of the day there is only one thing that will change Bill C-68 unless suddenly there is a great amount of calcium found in the spines of the Liberal backbench members which would actually force the government to bring in some meaningful legislation to deal with firearms registration.

I will just take a few minutes for this because we are talking about property and in this case I am talking about firearms and not about other types of property. With regard to Bill C-68, which was implemented and passed in 1995, I think it never hurts to just spell out one more time the cost of this poorly crafted piece of legislation. The government promised, as we all remember, that it would cost $85 million, and $50 million to $60 million per year to run the registry. That operating budget has soared from a projection of $60 million to $100 million a year. As of November 21, 2001, the cost of the program was confirmed as of that date at $689 million.

I suspect that the legislation may have been brought in with some good intentions. Unfortunately those good intentions have never done what they were supposed to do. The only thing that has occurred from the onset of that legislation is that the government has refused to give out information, has refused to give out statistics and has refused to engage in realistic debate in the House of Commons on the issue, and it has steadfastly refused to amend it. As a matter of fact, the few times it has been amended have probably made it worse.

There are new provisions in the safety act, Bill C-42, which raise real questions about whether or not black powder advocates in Canada, people who either enjoy black powder hunting or belong to re-enactment groups like the King's Orange Rangers, will be able to have access to black powder to use in their muskets. Black powder is an explosive. In Bill C-42, under the section dealing with natural resources and the Explosives Act, there would be some question of whether or not these people would qualify to actually purchase that explosive.

It just goes on and on. We all know about the constitutional challenge to the gun registry. We all know that it was denied at the supreme court. I think we have to go back to the basics. We have to try to understand why the government would bring in such a poorly crafted piece of legislation and why millions of Canadians have still refused to register. The registration date has been changed, first from 1998, then to 2001 and now it is in 2003 that we will have the last opportunity to register on the last minute of the last day. Again the government has come out with a bunch of magical numbers, saying that of 2.2 million firearms owners 90% of them have complied, so that is 1.8 million or something like that. These are ridiculous numbers.

We know there are 7 million to 8 million firearms in the country, mostly long guns, used by people like myself for hunting, or trapping or for varmint control. It is time that we absolutely stopped setting penalties against legitimate firearm owners. We have to do something about it and reverse the legislation.

[Question No.100—, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak to motions put forth on Bill C-49. Motion No. 1 states:

The Authority must, before December 31 of each year following the Authority's first full year of operations, submit an annual report for the preceding fiscal year to the Minister, and the Minister must cause a copy of the report to be tabled in each House of Parliament on any of the first fifteen days on which that House is sitting after the Minister receives it.

The report must include:

(a) national, provincial and regional data on the effect of the air travellers security surcharge on passenger travel and economic development; and

(b) a review of the impact of all the other surcharges levied on air travel.

I will comment on all the motions being debated today during my 10 minutes and then I will speak about them all in one block.

The second motion has been proposed by the Minister of Transport. It states:

Two of the directors must be nominees submitted by the representatives of the airline industry designated under section 11 whom the Minister considers suitable for appointment as directors, and two must be nominees submitted by the representatives of aerodrome operators designated under that section whom the Minister considers suitable for appointment as directors.

Obviously the amendment was put in to cut out the amendment that would have allowed two representatives from the unions to sit on the board.

Motion No. 10 states:

(a) an aerodrome north of the 55th parallel of north latitude that is not served at least five times per week by non-stop round-trip jet service to an airport south of the 55th parallel of north latitude, or

(b) an aerodrome where the population of the adjoining city is less than 3,000 persons.

This is an attempt to waiver the fee.

The Speaker ruled those three motions admissible. Of those three motions, we would support two. However the third motion on behalf of the minister is an attempt to override the democratic process of the committee. The committee already established a bona fide case and allowed an amendment to be put forth that would allow for fair and equitable representation on the committee, but the minister decided to overrule it. This is very typical of not only this legislation but of a lot of other legislation that the government has passed. It just does not seem to understand the responsibility that we all have as members of parliament to ensure that we put forward legislation that is meaningful, representative of all Canadian society and has some built-in process that allows for accountability.

Bill C-49 needs several amendments. If the amendments are not brought in, then the measures that were announced in the December budget will be.

The specific amendments which deal with the Canadian air transport security authority are most important and should be looked at first. Probably there are two tests that should be applied to all those parts of Bill C-49 that set up this authority.

Given the amount of money it would spend, with the lion's share of the revenue being raised by the $12 ticket tax, is the governance structure adequate to protect the taxpayer money? I argue quite vehemently on behalf of taxpayers that there are not enough sections in the in bill to protect their money.

The second rule that should be applied is if there will be sufficient mechanisms for Canadians to judge whether the authority has significantly improved air traffic security or whether it has just become another expensive and bureaucratic boondoggle. Surely there should be a sufficient mechanism built into the authority that would allow us to establish a scale. Is the system working? How will we know whether the system is working or not? We do not see anything built into this.

A number of areas are troublesome. The tabling of information to parliament is extremely troublesome. The directives from the minister are quite heavy-handed. The process for review for the bill and the access to information and privacy are all areas that were not taken seriously enough when the bill was introduced. All these areas need improvement.

Tabling of information to parliament is the very life and breath of the House. Under clause 32 of Bill C-49, the minister would be allowed to block the tabling of information in parliament under section 10 of the Financial Administration Act if he or she felt it would be detrimental to public security. This would affect three specific types of information: directives from cabinet to the entity, which are under section 89.1(4) of the Financial Administration Act; significant problems that may be found during an annual audit that the auditors feel should be drawn to parliament's attention and to inclusion in that entity's annual report which is under section 132(v) of the FAA; and significant problems that are found during a special examination. The examiner possibly, in this case the auditor general, feels these should be included in the entity's annual report.

A special examination must be conducted every five years. Its purpose is to give the board an independent opinion on whether the corporation's financial and management control, information system and management practices are proper. There are absolutely no safeguards built into the legislation to ensure that the minister does not use transportation security as an excuse to simply prevent publication of embarrassing information. It should be further questioned whether any directive would ever, under the legislation, be allowed to be tabled before parliament. It is very questionable how much information parliament will get under the legislation.

At the very least, the bill should have included a motion that would have forced the minister and the board to table information that could present a security threat and have some type of accommodating legislation to prevent such information that was not a security threat, but would simply prove embarrassing to the minister, from being tabled.

Under the directives from the minister, the minister may issue written directions to the authority on his or her own matters of air transport security without going to cabinet. Maybe the minister should not have to run back to cabinet every time he or she wants to deal with any particular issue in Canadian legislation. However we have seen an increase in this type of behaviour on behalf of the government. It is just sheer arrogance that would allow any minister not to refer back to cabinet and never refer back to parliament. He or she need not consult the board. There is no requirement that any directives be tabled in parliament.

Further, Bill C-49 specifically declares that there are no statutory instruments. There is no mechanism for review. For that matter, there is no mechanism for even informing parliament.

There is much more to be said on this legislation, particularly under access to information and under the Privacy Act. There are major areas of concern, typical of a lot of legislation that the government has put forth which has been poorly crafted, not thought out and absolutely not accountable to the Parliament of Canada.

[Petitions, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I will try to be brief. It is certainly a pleasure to present this petition to parliament on behalf of the citizens of the South Shore, who are calling upon parliament to enact an immediate moratorium on the cosmetic use of chemical pesticides until such time as their use has been scientifically proven to be safe and the long term consequences of their application known.