Gerry Ritz

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

They never will because they have been promised and denied so many times. They remember little things like the gun registry, the invasion on their civil liberties, and their rights and freedoms.They look at things like the national energy program. They remember things like the payout on the home heating fuel that went to prisoners and people who did not even live in the country. They look at these guys as poor fiscal managers. That point is getting nailed home.

I look at polls and they show the Liberals at 38% in Saskatchewan. That means that all three people voted because that is how many people in Saskatchewan get called when they do a sample of the country. I guess all of them were Liberals, but in my riding we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who would stand and say “I am a Liberal and I like it”, because the family is under attack, the sex offender registry does not go anywhere because the Liberals will not make it retroactive and it does not protect our kids.

The DNA database that the police are crying for is not retroactive and never will be, so we have a bunch of blank sheets of paper. What good is that? We have Police Chief Julian Fantino from Toronto saying to take the money from the gun registry, put it into a sex offender registry, and make it work. He runs the largest police force in the country. He just had a huge tragedy in his area and he realizes what needs to be done. We have to get it done. A majority government can do these things.

The Solicitor General stood up in reply to a question in the House today and said that a motion I introduced totally scuttled Bill C-23, the sex offender registry. That is a David and Goliath story if I ever heard one. As if I took down a majority Liberal government. I would like to pass a couple of other motions on a few other things if it were that effective. However, he did not read the other half of the motion which said that Bill C-23 should be withdrawn until it is made retroactive. It is useless until we have some names in the registry.

Even when the government does implement the half measures it is talking about, the offenders can still apply to a judge and say that they cannot have their names there because it is not in their interests. Well of course it is not. It is in the interest of the poor victims out there who suffer again and again at the hands of these perverts. These guys just cannot help themselves.

We took many years to make a few changes to the Young Offenders Act and then it was softened because one province said it was too strict. The other nine said it was not strict enough, so the majority did not rule. Democracy does not count for a darn thing in this place at times. It is political will.

We see that in the helicopter replacement procedure. The government keeps crying that there is no politics in this replacement procedure. History shows that it was politics that cancelled it, it was politics that debundled it, and it was politics that bundled it again once the government saw a consortium coming together that it wanted. Now it is politics that says the specifications are all watered down.

During the late show last night I presented all of the things that have been changed, such as payload requirements and the potential for crash landings. The Liberals can lose the aircraft and nobody is concerned because that is how they have dumbed down the specifications. That is not good government. That is not good practice at any level in the private sector or government organization. We cannot do that. We cannot play politics with major procurement systems like that. We cannot play politics with sponsorship programs or job creation funds. They all hit the proverbial fan.

People in Canada are finally starting to keep a scorecard, saying “This is where it went off the rails. This is where it went wrong. This is why we have to hold these guys accountable”. That has to be done and there is a political price to pay for all of this tap dancing that we see around the edges.

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

A soldering gun, Black & Decker.

The government took a little for everyone, tried to please everyone with a little and no one was pleased at the end of the day. We see money thrown into every pigeonhole it could find. I did not happen to see any new reallocation for the pigeon shooers this year. Perhaps they are out of work or the pigeons have moved south. We are not sure. There was that April Fool's joke that there would be a new statute of Pierre Trudeau and I am sure that would have brought all the pigeons back. I know the ones from the west certainly would have rallied around.

The finance minister has challenged the departments of the government with this budget. He is spending $178 billion or $180 billion. He is challenging his departments to find a billion dollars in reallocation money. One-half of one per cent is as tight as he can get, saying that is how accurate the Liberals are with their forecasts and budgeting.

The Auditor General, who has been doing it for a little longer than the finance minister, says that there are $16 billion that could easily be found. She says to trim the fat. He is looking for one-sixteenth of what she says is already there. It just flies in the face of logic that a billion dollars would somehow make a difference in $180 billion of spending. There are so many places that it could go.

It has really been an education in this last session. In the almost six years that I have been here, although some days it seems longer and some days it seems shorter the way things work around here, we seem to be pushing everything uphill. We are in the midst now of the Liberal leadership, and of course we have a frontrunner that no one can catch. It is just not going to happen. Now we have a provisional government.

I have heard members from all parties talk about this interim governing body that is allowed to operate as long as the member for LaSalle—Émard says that is where he wants to go when he becomes prime minister. I guess that is fair enough because no one wants to carry the present Prime Minister's baggage. It just weighs too darn much. I can certainly understand why the member for LaSalle—Émard wants to hold back on certain bills that he feels are being patterned after the logic and the practices of the current Prime Minister. I can see where he would want to make a clean cut with that.

The member for LaSalle—Émard, as finance minister, talked about and initiated under his rule the single largest tax cut in Canadian history. Where the heck is it? Everyone in my riding called me up and asked, “When does thing kick in?” In year four we were supposed to start to see some numbers shrinking in what we had to send in to the federal government. This is year four. It has not happened. Perhaps it will happen closer to the end of the year as we ramp up toward an election. That would be a curious thing if that was to happen, and I am sure we will see it.

We are finally seeing some increases in our dollar. For so long we saw our dollar mired in the 65¢ or 66¢ range and the Prime Minister said that it was good news, that a low dollar was good for trade. It turns out it is good for trade actions. Every time the Americans lob something across our bow, the softwood lumber thing and now another one on the Canadian Wheat Board, it always seems to bring our dollar back to par. That is what they seem to be doing with their trade actions.

Is a low dollar good for trade? No, it has been good for trade actions. We faced a myriad of them and the government has been dismal in its handling of some of those actions. They are dragging on and on.

The government says that it is working on these files. People are losing their jobs while it is working on those files. Where is the interim money? The HRDC minister faced a question here yesterday about the softwood lumber folks in B.C. who have been waiting 18 months for the $110 million which has been promised. I guess the carrier pigeons could not get it out there fast enough. It just has not shown up in their post office boxes.

All these promises come forward and it is always big dollars, always throwing money at a problem. We have seen that with SARS. The government is throwing money at it but It is too late. The damage has already been done. On softwood lumber, it is too late. The damage has already been done. However the money is there. Supposedly fiscally we have the capacity.

I see that in my own riding to the nth degree with agriculture. We have been five years struggling with the agriculture minister trying to get some sort of a program that will stabilize primary agricultural production. Notice I say primary because the rest of the agricultural world, the value added, the processing, the distribution systems and transportation are doing very well. However the primary producers, the guy and his family taking all the risks on the land, are not doing so well.

There is a reason for that. We do not take agriculture seriously in this country. We have never been hungry. We have never faced shortages or restrictions at a grocery store. When we talk to people in a lot of centres now, they are so far withdrawn from the land, where their pioneering grandparents generally were based, that they think milk comes off a shelf at Safeway. It does not. Someone has to raise and milk the cow. That is how it gets there. It does not come in that jug on the Safeway shelf.

It is the same thing with a loaf of bread. Someone has to grow the grain, transport it, mill it, package it, make it into bread and set it on the shelf. There are many steps in between. The steps in between seem to be doing okay but the guy taking the risks on the land is not and has not been for a number of years. Farmers are barely getting by and are farming away the equity that they have built up in their farms: machinery costs, input costs, fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, taxes. Everything has gone through the roof.

Again, it goes back to our low dollar. Everything we do in the primary production of agriculture is based on American money: our fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, machinery, machine parts. Everything is based on American dollars because that is from where we import. We do not do that here anymore. Even the fuel that we did out of the ground here is still based on Texas crude.

We faced a huge hurdle in western Canada with that low dollar on our input side. Then we had it compounded when the Crow rate disappeared.

There was a huge debate at that time. I was one of the folks who said that maybe it was time for that to go that way because now we would have access to the value added sector. That means I can take my durum and grind it into pasta flour, export it that way and get one step up the food chain. We are not allowed to do that. That was the second half of the Crow rate reduction. It was a cash payout for a number of years of freight balance and then the ability and the right to look after my product and do with it as I saw fit.

The government forgot that half of the equation. That is why the pulling back of the Crow rate has been such a huge economic factor in western Canada. Each farmer lost on average about $25,000 to $30,000 a year, right off the top, because of the increase in transportation costs that the Crow rate stabilized. We have lost timely access to markets and things like that because we can no longer control it.

We have seen the Liberals in the Ottawa bubble here try to come with transportation and agricultural policies to fit a western Canadian problem about which they know nothing. The minister and some of his cohorts may travel out there but the bureaucrats that design and develop this stuff do not. They are still here in the bubble. They crunch numbers, they crunch percentages and say, “There you go”, but it does not work in actual fact and it does not work in the true application.

We have pointed this out again and again to the minister. We are not allowed to speak to the bureaucrats because they are faceless and nameless. We can never get access to them. However the minister says that he will get right on that but it does not happen.

We still do not have the rules in place for CFIP for 2002. The members can check their watches. What is the date today? It is 2003. My farmers are on the ground. They are seeding. The government still does not have the rules in place to make the payouts work for 2002. That is shameful.

The government is sending out a portion of what our guys need 100% of, and they may get the balance in December 2003. That is after the next crop year. That is ridiculous. The money has been pigeonholed. It is in play according to the minister. Where the heck is it? We cannot trigger it.

Now he is screwing around with our NISA accounts, the only part of the safety net that ever was worthwhile. Now he will take that and start to funnel programs through there. He is ripping it apart and there is nothing to be gained. There is not a farm group or a business group in the country that agrees with the APF. No one says that there is any basis in here to build a good solid foundation on and we will be stuck with that sucker for five to six years because that is the lifetime that it is supposed to run.

We have been two years trying to get it in play so I guess it is like the helicopter deal. As long as it is being talked about, somehow they think we have new helicopters. We do not. We just have not got it right.

Little things like that drive people crazy. We see the money and numbers tossed around. Everybody is supposed to feel better about their lack of progress on these files because they are talking about money that is in play. It is not getting anywhere and that has been the problem with the budget, a little bit to a lot of places. Nothing ever gets there.

On balanced budgets, the member for LaSalle—Émard, as finance minister, made a big thing out of balancing the books, and the Liberals were talking about it again today. How did he do it? Taxes went up. There are more people paying more and more.

The Liberals talk about the job numbers being great, that they have created 462,000 jobs. There is a reason for that, everybody has two or three part time jobs. There is no such thing as a big full time job anymore. They have it watered down to the point where nobody has a good full time job, something to build a future on, and they do not seem to like that point.

Anybody could balance the budget by taking the $40 billion surplus out of the EI fund and applying it to whatever the person wants. Take the $30 billion surplus out of the civil servants' pension plan, take the $25 billion that was cancelled out of the CHST and lump all that together. It does not take a great mathematician to say that we could finally balance the books. There would an extra $100 billion to use as a slush fund to make it happen. That is exactly what did happen. It was not done on fiscal prudence. It was done on the capacity to rob every column possible and make creative accounting work.

We saw that happen but it is unfunded liabilities like this that will come back to bite us right where we sit, and it is going to happen, whether it is this term or the next. It is going to come back to haunt folks.

We see all the moneys piled up. We had the other contender from Hamilton in the leadership race, visit my home community of the Battlefords a week ago or whatever. In her zealousness to become leader, she has been scattering $100 million across the country, a few bucks here and there, kind of a calling card, so they would recognize who she was and maybe remember her when she left.

In the Battlefords we have the seat of the old government for the Northwest Territories as it was called at that time. We governed more of Canada from Battleford, Saskatchewan, than Ottawa does now. We had the whole north end and everything, other than Upper and Lower Canada and parts of Manitoba. British Columbia did its own thing. We had it all. We cannot get 5¢ of funding out of the heritage minister to attach that government house to the our national park, the old Fort Battleford. We cannot get 5¢ of funding to maintain that government house and make it the tourist attraction that it could be.

We have groups from Alberta who want to disassemble it, move it out by taking private money to do it, and set it up again, but they were not the capital, we were. The grounds are still there. The graveyards are there along with the land registry building and government house. All those things are there and there is no money.

If that sucker was built in Quebec, Ontario or even the Atlantic provinces, guess what? There would be no problem getting money. I have been to a lot of those historical sites. Some of course have some significance like ours and some do not, yet there is no problem getting funding to put them on the map and make them a tourist attraction. What is wrong with us? I guess we did not vote Liberal but I can say that my folks out there will never make that trade.

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

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to join my colleagues in this third reading debate on the budget. The government has to put its budget in play to start paying the bills for this fiscal year. However it has already done that, so it is kind of a moot point to debate what it should and should not do when the race has already begun. The spending is out of control already.

I read an article in the newspaper this morning saying that the Rolling Stones may consider coming to Toronto. They will not charge their regular rate, but for a small $10 million fee they will put on a concert. What a bargain. I guess I would be all for it as long as they start and finish their presentation with the Canadian taxpayers' lament, that good old song they wrote, “I can't get no satisfaction”. That would be worth the $10 million, if they dedicated that to the taxpayers of this great country. It would be well worth the price of admission and well worth the $10 million. We foolishly spend a lot more than that on any given day here in this place. I am sure the Liberals will take that into account when they invite them to come, and ensure that they play that particular tune.

We are talking about budget 2003. We had a rookie minister who gave it his best shot and he came up short. No one across the country felt or saw that this was a good budget. It did not please anyone. My colleague from Brandon--Souris talked about the shotgun approach. I do not disagree with that. Of course the parliamentary secretary talked about a machine gun approach. I guess that is why the registry for firearms has gone so far off the rails; the parliamentary secretary does not know a shotgun from a machine gun. It really was.

[Petitions, May 16th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to present a petition on behalf of my constituents. This particular petition comes from individuals in the Kindersley area of my riding. The petitioners call upon Parliament to protect our children by taking all necessary steps to ensure that all materials which promote or glorify pedophilia or sado-masochistic activities involving children are outlawed. They would like that done yesterday.

[Points of Order, May 16th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to provide some clarification on a response the Solicitor General made while answering a question from my colleague from Edmonton North. He seemed to say that single-handedly I had short-circuited Bill C-23, the sex offender registry.

In fact, it was an amendment to the motion. The reason that we were seeking to have the bill set aside was that the bill failed to provide retroactive registration of sex offenders.

[National Defence, May 16th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, last night on the road to Halifax the member for LaSalle—Émard had an epiphany. He said his government must get new maritime helicopters “as quickly as possible and absolutely the best”. Petty politics will not let this government reorder the EH-101 as still the best value purchase. It will just not go there.

Will the member for LaSalle—Émard, as prime minister, be forced to cancel another helicopter replacement contract? Will he have to go there?

[Chief Actuary Act, May 15th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for that. I have to wonder why natural resources is involved in this when we have public works and defence; I guess she drew the short straw. She is the only who would read that canned speech.

Certainly we are not in the cold war anymore. We are in a war on terrorism. These helicopters will have to work from the heat of the jungles to the cold of the Arctic to rescues off in the north Atlantic where it gets really nasty. We need a good quality replacement vehicle. We need something that is at least as good as the Sea Kings we have.

Nobody questions the role the Sea Kings have played. It has been heroic. In spite of the government, they have done the job for an extra 20 years and they will have to do it for another 10 years until we finally get around to taking delivery of something.

This in no way serves our armed forces in a proper way. No one could say this is the right way to run a procurement process.

I only hope that when the member for LaSalle—Émard becomes prime minister, if he gets to that point, he finally has the political chutzpah to order the right helicopter, because it could be his own crews for CSL that are adrift.

[Chief Actuary Act, May 15th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the late show and get a little more time to harangue the government. In this case we are going after the maritime helicopter replacement. It is very hard to get everything locked into a 30 second question, so four minutes seems like an eternity.

In the 10 year saga over which the helicopter replacement has dragged its heels in the political process here, we still have not even placed an order yet. We have not even nailed down what it is we are going to order. Ten years have gone by and these poor old Sea Kings are just getting older by the day.

There is a common thread we have seen through all of this procurement process over the past 10 years and that common thread is political interference. I know you find that hard to believe, Madam Speaker, but it is absolutely true. As more and more facts come to light, we see that it was politics that cancelled the order in the first place. It was politics that debundled the order. Alfonso Gagliano, who was the minister at that time, said in July 2000, “I just do what I am told, I am just a good little minister”. Who told him what to do? His political masters, of course.

The government has never really fully explained why the contract was debundled. It has never been done anywhere else in the world, not or in any industrialized country, for that matter. Nobody could find out why. Then the government clung to that stupid ideology for two and a half years. Now we have the Minister of Public Works and the Minister of National Defence both taking credit for rebundling it. Another two and a half years have squeaked by and we still do not have anything.

The Liberals throw around a lot of fancy titles like “statement of requirements”. That is what this late show is based on. The other day the Minister of National Defence said that the government had not changed the statement of requirements since 1999, that nothing had changed. I guess technically that is true. The statement of requirements has not changed, but what has changed is the requirement specifications that make that statement of requirements into a helicopter. That has been played with, up, down, sideways and all over the map.

I have done up a bit of a flow chart as to what the government started out with and what it has dumbed it down to at this particular point. There are things like the fact that there is no requirement now for structural crashworthiness. It used to be that 85% had to remain structurally integral. Now there is nothing. As well, there is no requirement now for a safe landing after a single engine failure. Originally operators had to be able to maintain a hover by losing an engine. When it is only a two engine helicopter, of course that can be difficult, especially if one is under load at the time. Now there is no backlash if an aircraft is lost because it cannot maintain a hover, so there goes the crew and several hundred million dollars worth of stuff. There is no backlash if operators dump out their full cargo and jettison everything to try to maintain and limp back to shore because they have lost an engine. It is huge.

There is no requirement now to maintain a fuel reserve once the helicopter is back to base. It used to be that it had to have 30 minutes of fuel on board for adverse conditions. That is gone. There is no requirement for a tactical air navigation system. That can always be bolted in later, but that is what gets the helicopter back to the safe base. It is not there anymore. The payload has been lightened by 500 pounds since 1999.

The big thing was mission reconfiguration. There was nothing in the original one that allowed for anything to happen at that end: an hour and the helicopter was on its way. Now there is no interoperability. The operators fly back to ship or shore and have three hours to reconfigure the helicopter to get out and rescue somebody. As hon. members well know, in a rescue minutes count and now operators will be allowed three hours to go back to shore, tear things apart and then fly back out again, and flight time is added to that.

That is how much this has changed, so when the Minister of National Defence stands in the House and says that nothing has changed since 1999, it is a bald-faced abuse of the truth.

[Question No. 196, May 9th, 2003]

With regard to the following Indian bands, namely, Burnt Church Band, Council, Dakota Tipi Band, Gamblers Band, Garden Hill First Nation, Ginoogaming First Nation, Gull Bay Band, James Smith Band, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, Little Black Bear Band, Long Lake No. 58 Band, M'chigeeng First Nation, Muscowpetung Band, Mushuau Innu Council, Neskantaga First Nation, Nibinamik First Nation Band, Northlands Band, Ochapowace Band, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, Piapot Band, Pikangikum Band, Pinaymootang First Nation Fairford, Red Earth Band, Red Sucker Lake Band, Red Pheasant Band, Roseau River Tribal Council, Sagkeeng/Fort Alexander First Nation, Saulteaux Band, Shamattawa First Nation, Sheshatshiu Innu Council, Washagamis Bay Band, Yellow Quill Band, what are the names and addresses of the third party managers for each named Indian band?

[National Defence, May 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of National Defence said yesterday that the 1999 statement of requirements for the Sea King replacement is his bible. Apparently he is quoting from the King Jean version.

The minister claims that he is trying to get new helicopters as quickly as possible, but the contract stipulates Canada take no deliveries for at least four to five years. He claims the 1999 requirements have not been changed, but we know the military was ordered last July to dumb down the requirements to qualify Eurocopter.

Is the minister just trying to reinforce our view that he is totally incompetent, or is he misleading the House?