Gerry Ritz

[Agriculture, June 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is always somebody else's fault. Time is of the essence here. Four weeks have dragged by and there is no plan. There are no specifics. The beef industry is fighting off bankruptcy on its own. There is no help from those guys. Two more weeks to study the findings, they say, and there is still no clear signal to the industry or to banks that help is on the way.

What the heck is wrong with those guys? Do they not get it? Why are the Liberals always found lacking in any crisis?

[Agriculture, June 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, of the 2,000 animals that have been put down and tested, only one tested positive. The investigation was comprehensive. What has never been comprehensive are any specifics on any compensation package for the beef industry.

Why do the Liberals always come up short on agricultural programs?

[Amateur Sport, June 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Works and Government Services announced last December that there would be no more sponsorship money for professional sports teams, but lately he and his colleague the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport inked a deal with the CFL for close to $1 million to put Canadian flags on the league's helmets.

Last year Revenue Canada singled out Saskatchewan, claiming that teenage hockey players on volunteer-run teams must pay taxes. The Secretary of State for Amateur Sport cannot explain why stipends to young men living away from home are income, while handouts to Olympic athletes are not.

The public works minister cannot explain why a professional football league populated by American players requires taxpayers' money, while his province of Saskatchewan is being penalized for trying to develop future Canadian hockey stars.

The secretary of state has a soiree tonight in honour of amateur sport. Maybe he will announce that Canadian youth should play under the flag of Barbados to take advantage of tax breaks like millionaire shipowners can.

To avoid the mindless greed of the Liberal government, what else can Saskatchewan hockey players do but put the flag of Barbados on their helmets?

[Canada Elections Act, June 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join the debate on Bill C-24, the new fundraising bill for political expenses that will again be incurred by the taxpayers of the country. We seem to see a common thread here.

The concern from the Canadian Alliance standpoint is that this again misses the target. We see a lot of different bills come to this place that, politically, look like they would be a good thing but when we skin that animal out we realize that it does not go anywhere near what needs to be done.

We have seen a huge problem here. The Prime Minister himself was quoted in the Toronto Star . He said there is a perception that money can unduly influence the political process. He said in the House earlier that there is a perception that corporate and union contributions buy influence.

It is not the donation to a political party that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is when we see things like the sponsorship fiasco that rocked the government a year ago or when donations follow a political package to a friend of someone.

The bill in no way addresses the types of political patronage and the abuse of power by mostly frontbench cabinet members. They have the discretionary funding. We have also seen the Prime Minister being a good little MP and making phone calls to folks who are outside of Treasury Board rules and guidelines. We saw the public works minister and one after another as they fell by the wayside rocked by these scandals. We saw the government struggle to come up with more rules. What is the good of having all these extra rules if nobody follows the darn things anyway? We keep rewriting the rule book, but everybody throws it aside and does their own thing.

Again, we see that in Bill C-24. The relevance of this does not remove the underlying problem of kickbacks, handouts, and donations to the Liberal Party. It is almost proceeds of crime. I am sure that if the RCMP were to dig to the bottom of all of this it would find out the percentage that was required back. It is almost a tithing system the way this was done. Money went to certain parties to perform jobs that were questionable, whether they needed to be done or were done, and then the money was back in Liberal coffers. It is a terrible way to run a government, but that is what is done.

The bill in no way addresses the patronage and kickback problems or even these huge trust funds that certain MPs have developed over the years. It does not address any of those types of situations.

There has been a myriad of articles written on this and I know we stand alone as a political party in saying this is not the right thing to do. We have the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport over there yammering away, but he does not understand what is happening outside the Ottawa bubble. We give these guys a bigger job, a car and driver, and they forget what their folks at home are saying. They will pay the price in the next election. We saw it in the byelection just a short time ago.

Professor Ken Carty is Canada's leading academic analyst to party leadership and electoral process. He said:

Freeing parties from the resources of their members and their supporters will leave them as instruments for professional politicians to mobilize and control voters rather than tools for citizens to direct their public life.

He has some major concerns and I think he hits it right on the head with that statement. This is all about long term political control. These fellows are very good at that as has been demonstrated in the years that they have controlled the country. They have waited for the long term spin to be to their benefit. They are more than happy to take a little short term pain in order to gain some long term control. We have seen that time and time again.

There are a lot of special interest groups out there and a lot of them put pressure on MPs, but mostly cabinet ministers, because they have the resources to change any sort of legislation that comes down here. As backbenchers or opposition members, we do not have a lot of influence in what a final bill will look like. We see that time and again. Members from all sides of the House do great work in committees, and when a report finally gets here, where does it go? It goes into a dustbin. It is gone. Nobody ever picks up some of the amendments and they are good amendments. Some come from this side and some actually come from Liberal backbenchers. These are good, solid, and sound amendments that would make legislation better. However, we see them tossed aside because cabinet ministers have a certain idea where they want to go and they will not deviate from that. They will not rewrite a clause or change a thing in those bills. That is a real frustration.

We have other folks like Errol Mendes, who is a law professor at the University of Ottawa. He is an expert in ethics and human rights. He is troubled by the bill and he is speaking out too.

Professor Mendes has a lot of education along these lines and has sound logic and good thinking. He is saying that there are violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms right here in this piece of legislation. We had the House leader rise and say he does not believe any of that, that it is all hooey and it will end up in the courts and the lawyers will sort it out. There we go again: a piece of legislation that will make a lot of work for lawyers and the courts, and we are already overburdened with courts.

Professor Mendes is the editor-in-chief of Canada's leading constitutional law journal, the National Journal of Constitutional Law . He has written numerous articles about this and has some major concerns, none of which are even close to being addressed by a couple of the amendments that have squeaked through. The problem with those amendments is it makes this package richer, not more accountable. He is saying that this is being ratcheted up.

As a constitutional lawyer, Professor Mendes has some grave concerns. He said that this “subsidy scheme” violates the charter. That is what he calls it, a subsidy scheme, and that is more or less what it is. It is taxpayers' money being subsidized back into political parties which they may or may not support.

Professor Mendes says that under section 15 of the charter, which is designed to protect minorities who have traditionally been blocked out of the system, this goes even further and blocks them some more. The bill does not address the 50 seat rule that we have and so on. Anyone trying to start a political party or maintain a smaller political party will have a terrible time under this bill. Again this is part of the long term benefits the Liberals are looking for. The government House leader writes it all away. Part of his quote was that it may keep a lawyer busy, but it is not going to convince him that it is not good. That is a sad situation and a sad commentary from the House leader, who is more intent on ramming the legislation through as part of the existing Prime Minister's legacy than anything that deals with common sense.

There are a lot of other things that come up in our day to day work here and one I have always questioned is these trade missions, team Canada, led by our all star Prime Minister. In fact, I saw a newspaper headline a while ago, a dated issue that showed the leaders of China and Britain at the time, Bill Clinton from the United States and our illustrious Prime Minister. They are all standing in a row in China. The newspaper article identified the first three, but said when it came to our Prime Minister “man at right unidentified”. That was our Prime Minister, who has been a great friend of China and supports that country every way he can. The paper did not even know who he was and he was there on a trade mission.

There are a lot of questions about that. In fact, when we study it, with the exception of China, for every other country to which we have had a team Canada trade mission, our trade has gone down, not up. And for the one country that we do the majority of our trade with, we did not send trade delegations there and our trade went up. So we have to question the validity of some of these trade delegations.

In the study that was done, the findings were that one-third of the businesses on trade missions donated to the Liberals. The author raises his eyebrows and says it was either a hand picked delegation or they were converted on the road to Damascus and started to make donations to the Liberal Party after they were included in one of these trade delegations. There is some huge lobbying that can go on there and there can be contributions back to a governing party outside of anything this law covers. There are grants and contributions and all sorts of good things that go on. It is a huge double standard.

Another thing that speaks to this is that the government now will review the freebie ticket policy. We had the Ottawa Senators go another step up toward their goal of the Stanley Cup this year. Unfortunately the team did not make it, but they did play well, and lot of folks from this House got free tickets. That does not show up on anyone's list because it is under a certain value and so on, but that is preferential treatment. The Prime Minister can even golf with Tiger Woods and that is supposedly worth $50,000. The Prime Minister's lapdog, the ethics counsellor, said it was just a great thing that the Prime Minister was able to talk to Tiger about American and Canadian relations, but the Prime Minister will not even talk to the president, so I do not think he will get very far through the back door with a golfer like Tiger Woods. In fact, Tiger Woods' comment was that the Prime Minister does some creative accounting when he is keeping his own score.

There are these tickets that slip under the wire and there are these trade missions that slip under the wire, and the Bill C-24 legislation is a terrible way to try to slam the door on this. It does not address the fundamental problem. It is the back door deals we have a concern with, not this.

There is talk from the other side that we on this side will take the money and be hypocrites, but this is called the law of the land. We have no choice once it is in legislation like this, and as much as we detest it we are going to have to live with it. All the extra bookkeeping that is going to be required for our constituency associations and all of that is going to be a terrible workload. A lot of people will throw up their hands. There will less people voting in the next election because they are just walking away from this type of legislation.

[Question No. 179, June 4th, 2003]

For the past five years, can the government provide a breakdown of federal research funding, including research projects and infrastructure, by university, including the name of the recipient, a brief description, the type of funding and the amount?

Return tabled.

(Return tabled)

[Government Contracts, May 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the minister continues to claim that the RCMP is investigating the advertising firms for their wrongdoing and that is enough. The ad firms did not set up the scheme. All they did was launder the money for the Liberal Party.

Will the minister now admit that these kickbacks to the Liberal Party amount to benefiting from the proceeds of crime and give the money back?

[Government Contracts, May 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the minister said he was not going to defend the indefensible. Yet hiding behind a policeman on horseback must smell like politics as usual for that bunch over there. A former boss, Alfonso Gagliano, was spirited away to a safe house in Denmark. He disappeared.

How does the minister think he will ever get to the bottom of anything if the guy in charge never has to answer for the Liberal Party taking its share of that pyramid scheme?

[Question No. 186, May 26th, 2003]

Concerning contracts: ( a ) what is the total value of contracts made annually by the government since 1993 broken down by province and territory; ( b ) what is the total value of contracts made annually by department, agency, and/or crown corporation since 1993; ( c ) what are the top ten contracts in value for each year since 1993 (please provide the name of the recipient, location, and the value of the contract); ( d ) for the last five years, what are the top five lawsuits on an annual basis against the government over contractual disputes and what was each dispute about; ( e ) for the last five years, what are the top ten contracts awarded to companies outside of Canada and what were those contracts for?

Return tabled.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 16th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, let us talk about the folks who have multiple jobs. All my constituents must have jobs outside the farm and so on to support their farming habit. I am told that 75% of the farms in western Canada are viable because of off farm income.

I talk with my constituents all the time. They complain that the major employers in this country, the Wal-Marts and so on, do not offer a full week of employment. My daughter is working part time for Sears as she finishes university. There is no such thing as full time employment.

While the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport was on his feet, I would have welcomed his comments on what the government did to junior hockey in Saskatchewan. We have written him letters about how these junior teams have been taxed as though they were employees. There is no such provision in the tax code to do this. The government made a horrendous example--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 16th, 2003]

Yes, it cost them a byelection. It really did. People are starting to pay attention. It just flies in the face of everything we talk about.

Another thing out west that has people really upset is this whole Kyoto protocol that we ratified. Where is it now? We were in such a rush to put this in play, however I do not see a thing on the agenda that even speaks to that issue anymore, and rightly so. We do not need it. Canada contributes 2% to the global problem. We could clean everything up within an inch of its life and it would not make a difference globally.

We did this for the public relations spin and for the politics of the issue. As people became aware of the costs attached and what the targets would and would not be, they moved away from it. Western Canadians were enraged when they saw the auto sector get an exemption. It will save 40,000 to 50,000 jobs in Liberal Ontario, but it will put 40,000 to 50,000 jobs in Alberta and Saskatchewan at risk because the Liberals do not represent them.

Well we do and we will not stand still for that type of action from the government. We will never tolerate it and these folks will never elect Liberal members in my part of the world because of the way they handle these files.

There is no consultation. Liberals do not talk to the folks that need to be involved. They ignore them and say that they are smarter. They say they are from Ottawa and they will make the rules. Canadians should just abide by them and pay their darn taxes and keep them coming. It is an atrocious way to run a country.