Gerry Ritz

[Question No. 141, March 17th, 2003]

For all polling by Ekos Research or any of its affilliates and paid for by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in calendar years 2000, 2001 and 2002: ( a ) what specific questions were asked; ( b ) what was the total contract amount paid for each respective poll; ( c ) what written analysis was provided following the results of each poll and ( d ) what was the total number of people contacted for each poll?

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I guess the bottom line in a lot of what we have seen in the gun registry has not been practical policy. It has been political spin to try to handle a problem that happened in Montreal, of all places. It turns out that a lot of this direction is going in a totally wrong-headed way.

No one in the country, including me as a gun owner, a hunter and so on, has any problem with training, safe handling, safe storage or registration as a gun owner, but the government does not need to know what I have unless I mess up with it and then, by all means, it can throw the book at me, as should be done, but we are not seeing that now. We are seeing money redirected into a false sense of security.

My other colleague from Selkirk--Interlake said that he had 30 years of service in the RCMP and retired as a staff sergeant. He saw what was required in the country and part of what drove him to run in 1997 was the wrong-headedness of the registry. This will not address it.

I talk weekly with my own RCMP members in my riding about this. I talked to them at a banquet I was at the other night with a number of members. We were sitting at a table discussing the gun registry and I asked them how they would handle this now that it was back on their table. They asked me what I meant. I asked if they had not heard the announcement where the justice minister just handed it off to the Solicitor General, that it was now back under RCMP purview. These guys did not know anything about it. I guess they did not get the memo.

The RCMP want nothing to do with this. They do not even want to handle the firearms that are turned in. They do not want to because most of them are not registered to do it. An RCMP officer who does not verify, check or do something just right under this stupid legislation can face a one year prison sentence and a $2,000 fine. This is a peace officer who is caught in the middle of this bureaucratic bungle. It is just absolutely untenable that this situation go on.

I did the PAL finally because I wanted to purchase some more guns. I found out that the two handguns that I used to register had not been registered correctly from 30 years ago. Now they want to take them away. I am a criminal because someone else lost the records. I phoned the firearms officer and the staff sergeant at the RCMP and asked what to do with my prohibited handgun. The firearms officer told me to weld it shut and make a paper weight out of it if I wanted to keep it. The police told me not to bring it to them because they wanted nothing to do with it. They said that if I had it for 30 years I should keep it.

Who is right? I am getting caught in the middle of all this bureaucracy. I am trying to figure out what to do with the handgun. I do not want to give it away because it has some sentimental value and some monetary value. I have had it for 30 some years and have not accosted anyone with it and yet this stupid law says that I am now a criminal because someone else did not keep track of the records properly. It is just ridiculous.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand with my colleagues today, on the fourth day of debate out of a possible six, and talk about the last budget, tabled in the House roughly a month ago.

The biggest thing I see in the budget is that anything to do with taxes went up immediately while anything to do with spending, where we get our tax money back in programs we may or may not want, is all done over the next two to ten years. There is a huge disparity here as the government takes in all this cash and then spends it out.

The problem with a lot of the budgetary process we have to grapple with in this place comes back later in the fall and in what we are dealing with now, which is what is called supplementary budgets.

Last fall the supplementary As were tabled. They addressed the shortfalls, let us say, in a lot of different government departments. Among them were a couple of contentious issues, such as more funding for the gun registry, which practically everybody has come to hate because of the costs involved. No one has a problem with safe gun handling and so on, and no one has a problem with registering gun owners, but the problem has arisen in registering all of the guns across the country. That is where the rubber met the road and the government found itself lacking. Programs like that are already in place, but the government has blamed a lot of it on a computer registry that would not work and so on.

I was in Ontario for the municipal convention two or three weeks ago. One fellow talked about the number of drivers and cars registered annually in Ontario. Those numbers were pretty much a correlation to the numbers of gun owners and firearms that the Liberal government says are in this country. The government has had a number of years to register the same numbers, using a computer program that totally failed, yet Ontario does that on an annual basis with car drivers. Serial numbers, people's ages and the same types of requirements are still being dealt with, so how can one province do it annually and yet the federal government cannot seem to get it right in the last seven or eight years? It has spent $1 billion and still does not have it right.

We see that type of thing come up in the supplementary budgets and I know that the government is going to take another stab at it in the next day or two in the supplementary B budgets. This time it is asking for $172 million or thereabouts for that failed gun registry, and that will keep this thing alive until the end of this fiscal year, the end of March.

The last time I looked at my calendar that is two weeks away, so the government needs another $172 million to pay off some debts that occurred because it could not cover them with supplementary As. The government withdrew that itself. In an unprecedented move in this place, the government actually pulled back that demand for cash. Now it is bringing it forward again, but it needs $172 million to run this thing for another two weeks. That does not make a whole lot of sense. Then it wants another $113 million for next year, according to this budget.

This is not just about the tabling of the budget. It comes down to performance reports. Did taxpayers get any bang for their buck or are they just buying a pig in a poke, as it were, and continuing on with somebody's legacy? It is a major question out there.

I looked at some of the specifications in this budget. Global government spending increased 7% in 2001 and 18% in 2002, well above the rate of inflation. We are going way beyond keeping up; somebody has a wish list here that they are trying to cover.

Last year an announcement was made on a major five year tax reduction package. Where is it? I have talked to people in my riding, and my constituents have phoned me telling me they have not seen that on their bottom line. I know that my paycheque as an MP does not reflect any tax savings and, Mr. Speaker, I am sure yours does not either. What happened to that? It has all been pushed off again. None of the major changes happen until 2004, and I guess that is an election year. What a coincidence. Imagine that. Imagine that the government would bring in tax reductions in an election year. How about that?

Program spending is another thing. Spending for the period 2002-03, which is ending in two weeks, will be almost $179 billion. That is how much money the government will take in. It will spend most of it on whatever is required, and a lot of it we question. Next year it is going up to $185 billion.

A lot of folks out there, as well as a lot of my constituents, are saying that we talk a lot of numbers. One million dollars used to be a big number, but now anybody can win that in a lottery. We can understand $1 million and we can get our heads around that, but as for $1 billion, which is where all the government numbers seem to float, people cannot get their minds around the disparity in these numbers. The government lost $1 billion here but is pledging $1 billion there, to official languages or whatever it is, and people cannot seem to get their minds around the disparity.

I had a fellow at a meeting in Owen Sound explain it. He said that the best way to get it across to folks was to convert it to time. He said that if we converted a million seconds it worked out to 11 days rounded off. A billion seconds is 32 years. That is the disparity. That is the difference between a million and a billion. If we convert that back to dollars then people start to realize that the kind of money that is squeezing out between our fingers here in Ottawa is just huge.

With that spending of $178 billion, the new finance minister, the rookie, challenged all government departments to find $1 billion of savings out of that $178 billion, or half of one percent. That is chump change. That kind of money could be found laying around on the floors of most departments. Yet the Auditor General in her report said that the federal government last year misplaced, misappropriated or misspent $16 billion. Fifteen per cent of the spending went in the wrong pigeonholes. Programs could have been trimmed by that. That money could have gone to paying down the debt which would have brought our health care and infrastructure spending back online over the next few years. There is a huge disparity there.

The finance minister is looking for $1 billion in savings. The Auditor General had already told him earlier last year that there were $16 billion and she laid it out line by line. She said money could be saved here, here and here but that was not mentioned. None of that has been addressed, that type of money that could be found and reassessed.

It really flies in the face of so-called good fiscal management. If we had those kind of dollars coming through the federal coffers over the last decade--and there was one government in place for that last decade--where did the money for health care go? Where did the money for infrastructure go? Why are these programs in such disarray that we have to start addressing them again? If we had that type of cashflow in any business situation no one would lack for anything. Each department would have more than it needed. Where did the cash go?

We saw huge cuts in health care. We saw the EI surplus absconded and shoved into general revenue, some $40 billion. I guess some of it went to those great projects in Shawinigan and so on, but there were cuts to health care and transfers to provinces of $25 billion; $40 billion in the EI surplus disappeared; $25 billion out of the pension packages for all government employees got ripped out and put into something else, and we are still these kinds of dollars behind in infrastructure.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce calls the infrastructure deficit across the country somewhere in the neighbourhood of $57 billion. That is sewer, water, highways, bridges, and all those types of infrastructures. Every one of us in every riding across the country knows that it is very real. We started allocating money back to it, but the $3 billion here for infrastructure, added on to what we have seen in the last few budgets, is over 10 years. There is a $57 billion infrastructure deficit and the government is going to address it with $300 million a year. That will not even maintain it. That will not even fill in the potholes on the bad stretches of a road or repair a bridge, let alone build one. It certainly does not replace any water and sewer infrastructure.

I know we have had some major water and sewer problems in a city in my riding. It is trying to get some funding to address it but it cannot seem to trigger any money. It received a few hundred thousand dollars to address a couple of new wells but nothing of the magnitude it needs, the $20 million it is looking for.

A three year program just is not going to do it.

Here is another example that interests me from my riding. The Battlefords is the historic site of the Old Government House for the Northwest Territories. We governed from North Battleford probably three-quarters of Canada before the western provinces joined in, and right into northern Quebec. It was all governed from Battleford, Saskatchewan. We still have the physical structure of Old Government House sitting up there on government hill. As long as I have been an MP, and before that, for 10 years people have been trying to find the funding to restore that historical structure and cannot get five cents. I guess if we jacked that sucker up and moved it east we might find some money but we just cannot seem to tweak it now.

It is a budget that just does not go anywhere. It is based upon a lot of different issues but nothing that really crunches out.

The final couple of points I would make are these. The problem with a budget like this which tries to address a little bit for everybody really solves nothing. Another point that comes to mind is that with it being pro-rated out over the next number of years, it will be up to the next leader over there, not the current one, to deal with all the fallout. I think it is nothing more than another attempt by the Prime Minister to buy himself a legacy. Maybe he has alleviated a couple of problems, maybe not, but ultimately history will judge that these types of budgets have done so little for so few that they really were a waste of time.

[National Defence, February 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the term “best value” in government procurement has always meant that taxpayers receive the best value over the full life cycle of the project. Great concept.

The Liberal government has threatened to go ahead with lowest cost tendering on our maritime helicopter replacement. To cover up a political mistake committed by the Prime Minister in 1993, the Liberals will continue to risk future value by chasing this cheap alternative. The Liberals finally admitted their mistake of trying to split the maritime helicopter contract. Will they now tender on best value, not just cheapest initial price?

[National Defence, February 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the 20 year odyssey to replace the Sea King helicopters may finally be entering its last tortured phase. Next month a government request will allow the aerospace industry to put forward its best proposals. Unfortunately the Prime Minister has renewed his effort to ensure Canadian taxpayers and our naval flyers will only be political pawns.

Since 1993 the Prime Minister has made the Sea King replacement a political issue rather than a best value, cost effective, procurement process. He has condemned the replacement program to delay unnecessary expense and danger for our air crews.

In defiance of Treasury Board practices, public works guidelines, public accounts committee recommendations and the normal business method of every well run company, these Liberals are attempting to buy the cheapest helicopter rather than the best value aircraft that would serve Canada for years to come.

I urge the government to come clean on the purchase, admit that best value and not lowest initial price must be the method used to choose our next maritime helicopter. This cannot continue to be a political game. Real lives and billions of dollars are at stake.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, this is another interesting debate today. It is a bit of a change of pace. Everybody came rushing back to this place this morning all intent on a closure motion that was to have been brought down on Bill C-10, the bill coming back from the Senate on firearms and cruelty to animals.

The government threw us a curve and pulled that one off because it was having trouble lining up the backbenchers on that side, not just the opposition but its own backbenchers, who were saying that they would not support that. It is a bit of an unprecedented thing when we see a closure motion rescinded. It was a bittersweet victory that brought us to Bill C-24 today, the election financing bill.

I watched with some interest as the government House leader threw the curveball, the knuckleball, the Nerfball, the spitball, or whatever it was today, that got us over to this bill. Then he stood up and did a tirade, reminiscent of the old rat pack, of how it was everybody's fault but his. The last time I checked he is the leader of the government that has a majority. He controls the agenda totally and completely. It is at his beck and call, and the cabinet that he serves.

How in any way could it possibly be the opposition shanghaiing this place or withholding this or doing that? How could that possibly be? Yet he stood there sanctimonious as anyone could believe, as hypocritical as anyone could believe--and I see you chuckling, Mr. Speaker. You saw the same act I did.

It would have been a great act to have at a circus. He would have had people coming in and paying money to see that. Without a tear in his eye he was able to do that; without a smile on his face. I guess that is a great attribute that he has after all these years in this place. But it is certainly nothing to do with the opposition.

This particular bill, whether it gets shanghaied or not, has more to do with what backbench members do or not do over on that side and the leadership contests, and problems that they have at this time.

Having said that, I look at the bill and think, here we go again. Regarding the last number of bills that I have spoken to in this place, the direction might be right but the focus is off, this might be right but this is missing, and there are all these loopholes. I see that again in Bill C-24. I see the public disengaged. There is a huge disconnect now between what government says and does in this place, and what the taxpayers who are paying the bills and for whom we are doing this are actually asking for.

We are asking taxpayers to totally fund the political system in this country. They do to a great extent now, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40% to 50% with tax rebates and different things that go on. However, we are looking to take that to an unprecedented level with this bill. If taxpayers had a disconnected appetite for politics before, they certainly will have a larger disconnect once they start to analyze what the bill is all about.

This is all about public money, taxpayers' money, paying for the political habits of parties. We are seeing things in the bill that are not covered under allowable expenses at this point. I wish to mention one thing that is inappropriate.

Candidates who ran in an election, and I will use my riding as an example from the 2000 election, who received 15% of the popular vote received their deposit back. It was basically called that. A candidate received half of the allowable expenses as a rebate from the taxpayers. We have all been through that, Mr. Speaker, and you have too. However I see the threshold being lowered to 10%. I think it should go the other way; it should go to 20%. We are talking about public money here. Someone who cannot get 20% of the popular vote in a riding is missing out.

I know the House leader made a comment that none of the Liberals missed by more than 10% so it would not affect them at all. However, in reality, the Liberal candidate got 17% in my riding because 3% belonged to the aboriginal vote. There were aboriginal folks with whom I had become very friendly with who phoned me and said that there was a problem. The polling booths had my picture up with a big X through it along with signs saying “Don't vote Canadian Alliance” and all these wonderful things, which are not allowed but it was done. That is what gave the Liberal candidate the 3% to get above the 15%. It is a dirty way to get it. He will need that money a lot more than I will next time around if he decides to run again because he is fighting an uphill battle with gun control and all sorts of different things that have helped us out in that part of the country.

However, the bill does not in any way address the fundamental problem with political contributions.

There is an unappetizing flavour in the electorate that we are corrupt. We saw that through the HRD scandals, and the advertising and sponsorship fiasco that is still under investigation. There is hardly a file that public works has touched in the last two or three years that is not before the RCMP or that the Auditor General will not have a look at. Everything is suspect. The bill does not address any of that.

We saw polls at the height of the fiasco last spring that two-thirds of Canadians thought that government was corrupt. They labelled us all together and that was unfortunate. We are all here doing a job at, of course, different levels of our capability, but we are still doing a job on behalf of our constituents. We answer to them, not to the public purse, but to our constituents. I do not see the bill addressing that type of fine tuning.

It is all about corruption and kickbacks that we saw throughout the whole sponsorship fiasco. The bill in no way would stop that. It may stop the numbers at times, but it would not limit it and it would not halt it in any way.

We have a majority government that is having a real problem with a corruption label, and an unethical conduct label for some of the frontbench folks. They have the discretionary money and hundreds of millions of dollars that they can put into their pet projects and say that is what government will do because that is what people want, and so on, because it has done some polling. Even the polling would be covered under the bill. We saw the polling cut out of sponsorships and rightly so, and here it is put back into the bill.

We have a backdoor deal going on to put that polling cost into the bill because it is a significant factor. There is no doubt about it. Good polling costs good money. It is being slipped back in at public expense because the government can no longer do it under the sponsorship file because people are looking over its shoulder. There is a bit of sleight of hand which is part of that circus act that the government House leader was doing before.

I cannot see anything but more apathy and low voter turnouts continuing because people are feeling disconnected and asking, how relevant is this place?

There are many days when I have that same concern. I sat in on a committee meeting this morning and I wondered what the heck we were doing. It is just busy work. We get a few people in behind closed doors and let them listen to this, that or whatever. We are not here to be entertained. We are here to do a decent job and I do not need that busy work. I have constituents that I need to call and work on their files because they are having a tough time with Revenue Canada, the GST, or things like that. I do not need that busy work.

There is a member screaming over there to let legislation go through the House. I say to that member to bring forward something worth voting on and we will do it. The Liberals have a majority. They ram legislation through using closure. This is not legislation; this is ripping off the public. It is all about money. It is all about cashflow for political parties. That is what it is all about: $1.50 per vote. I would do very well because I get lots of votes.

It is all about paying off party debt, bringing it forward, and letting the public pay for it. I do not think Canadians want to do that. They are very critical of bills like that.

There are things that are roadblocks to good legislation coming through the House, but not very often are they caused by the opposition parties. A lot of it is the result of the government not being able to get its own house in order. It has very little to do with us. There are so few tools that we have at our discretion to slow things down from the runway that happens here all the time.

The Senate is not sitting right now. The member says it is because we are halting legislation. We did not pull Bill C-13. The government House leader did. We did not pull Bill C-10 today. The government House leader did. Bill C-20, the child protection bill, has been shanghaied for a little while.

We have seen a long term calendar that might go a week into the future and it is subject to change. Let us see some good legislation that we can put through. Let us see a schedule that the government sticks to. Let us see some dates that are locked down so we know what we are working toward, and we can get in here and speak to that legislation.

We spend so much time, two steps ahead and three steps back, and then we get legislation like this that is so full of holes that Canadians do not understand it. They are concerned about big business and unions taking over the political parties. Good and rightly so, but this bill does not address that in any way at all. It would limit the numbers, but it would change them around and would put them in from a different way.

It is more smoke and mirrors. It is legislation that I certainly cannot support and I know my folks at home would expect me to stand up and say this is not good.

[Canadian Flag, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in the 1970s there was a British comedy called Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River . Now we have a Canadian farce produced by public works called, “Don't Raise the Flag, Lower the Standards”.

A couple of years ago Canadians were bothered by the great flag giveaway of the prime minister wannabe of Canadian Heritage. Not only was it outrageously expensive, but Canadians who sold flags had their market undercut. Canadians who proudly bought their own flag had their patriotism undercut. Nothing drains the value out of a symbol faster than handing it out for nothing.

Of course value has always been a concept beyond the grasp of that other side. In its misguided haste public works lowered the standards for our Canadian flag and made sure that voters would be disappointed after they received their flag.

Maybe Canadians should take a page from the former finance minister's playbook and fly the Panamanian flag. It appears to have served the member from LaSalle—Émard well in hiding his taxes from his insatiable cabinet colleagues.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, February 11th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again to speak to Bill C-13. We face a huge dilemma as parliamentarians on issues of this type that come before us. I guess the bottom line question on Bill C-13 is, when is it okay to use cellular material? There are huge ramifications if we do not get this right this time around.

This particular bill would allow for experiments on human embryos under four conditions. First, only in vitro leftover embryos from the IVF process could be used for research. Second, embryos cannot be created for research with one exception. They can be created for purposes of improving or providing instruction in assisted human reproduction technology. Third, written permission must be given by the donor, although donor is in the singular, and for research on a human embryo if the use is necessary. Necessary is undefined in the legislation so it kind of leaves the door wide open to abuse. Fourth, all human embryos must be destroyed after 14 days if not frozen.

That is what is in the bill. Another huge question is, how do we maintain human dignity for the sufferers of disease who see this as the ultimate answer, as well as the unborn who would become the playground for scientists in trying to resolve some of these issues? How do we come to grips with all of this in the stark reality of legislation?

Part of the problem, in typical government fashion, is that it takes forever to get through legislation with all of these dilemmas attached.

The minister, in her wisdom or lack of it,--and again there has been a change in health minister--has chosen to ignore many of the committee recommendations, and some of the amendments that we see negate the work and effort that the committee spent so many hours on. We just heard the parliamentary secretary welcome the results of the committee and thank it for its work and yet on the other hand the government ignores it or says that it does not like what the committee said and so it will go its own way.

The committee is an all-party committee. It is made up of members who represent their constituencies across the country. They are taking input from the members of their communities, bringing it forward, and in the last write-up of the bill, the minister said no, she is better, the officials know, bang, and away we go. That is where one starts to question the other dilemma causing issues.

During the committee review of Bill C-13 the committee tried to restore some of the recommendations with an amendment specifying that healing therapies should be the object of such research. That is all. There would be no embryonic research for the development of cosmetics or drugs, as we have seen done in other countries, or providing instruction in assisted human reproduction procedures.

That has been left by the wayside and left out. We can look at some of the information that came forward from Suzanne Scorsone, a former member of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. The government is big on studies and commissions. We have seen hundreds of millions of dollars spent and they are piled up in the basement of the library and nobody ever refers back to them. But there is an excellent quote from her and I would like to read it into the record. She said, “The human embryo is a human individual with a complete personal genome and should be a subject of research only for its benefit”.

We were all embryos once. Of course we were. This is not the abortion question, it goes beyond that. When an embryo is not physically inside a woman there is no possible conflict between that embryo and the life situation of anyone else. There are many across the spectrum on the abortion question who see the embryo as a human reality, and I agree, and hold that to destroy it or utilize it as industrial raw material, is damaging and dehumanizing, not only to that embryo but to all human society. We have crossed the bridge. We are on the thin edge of the wedge and it is a pretty slippery slope from there.

Also in true government fashion as we have come to see here, the governor in council would be used to end run a lot of the recommendations that come out in this bill. Perhaps worst of all, the minister would require that the advisory council of the assisted human reproduction agency, her little group,--itself a good idea as we need some watchdog--to report to her alone rather than Parliament and that the council take every ministerial directive as an order.

It is bad enough that Parliament is basically playing God with this research, but now we are going to appoint the Minister of Health as God herself. That flies in the face of everything that a democracy stands for.

There is a one-time, three-year review. That is it. We can never go back and look at this again. Those could be ongoing reviews. That is what democracy and representation is all about, ongoing review. We see that lacking in so many pieces of legislation that the government has brought forward.

We only have to go back a couple of months to the gun registry. If there had been an ongoing review in a situation like that we would not have squandered a billion dollars. It could not have happened because the review process would have kicked out the flaws in that particular piece of legislation.

We also see that as a red flag in this type of legislation. There is no continuing review. The minister herself controls the whole process through her regulatory agency, which we do not disagree with, but she commands complete and total control over what is going to happen to this legislation afterwards. We see that as wrong.

Some of the amendments in Group No. 6 deal with the idea that deliberations and decisions should be open and accountable. What a good idea. Motion No. 93 would delete clause 66 which would allow the governor in council to write regulations after the fact. That could exempt some experimental activity not specified in the act. Accountability and transparency demand that cabinet not hold itself to the privilege of writing exemptions for activities the bill attempts to restrict. However, the way this legislation is written, that can happen.

Motion No. 100 calls for equivalency agreements that would keep changes between federal and provincial legislation in lock step. We see that particular situation break down again and again with the overlap of government to government. We just saw it during the huge debate on health care costs. We saw the Prime Minister whip the premiers into line by saying take the money or else: “My way or the highway”. Most of them, having to go back and deal with their own constituents, took the cash. They had no choice.

The same situation applies in this legislation where the federal government becomes over and above everyone else. It is provincial legislation that we are trampling on here. The problem we can have with it being provincial is the concern of the ability of children conceived through these artificial means to find out about their heritage. Some provinces would allow it and some would not. Therefore there would be a huge mishmash of problems across the country. Some people could be born in Ontario, move to Alberta, or vice versa, and in one province they could find out their lineage but not in another. There are some huge problems with this.

Motion No. 103 attempts to delete the grandfather clauses that might allow undesirable lines of experimentation to carry on. Parliament would decide against them in this bill. Motion Nos. 104 and 105 are related to this. The grandfathering must be limited in time and require licensing, otherwise we open up a huge problem with everybody leaping into these activities before the bill becomes law, and we are not there yet, this is report stage.

Cabinet could exempt certain activities through regulations. Basically it is a get out of jail free card before this becomes locked down in a legal situation. We have some serious, dangerous subclauses. We saw that with the Kyoto protocol, an accord that we ratified that has not been implemented yet, where the auto sector received an exemption. We would see the same type of thing here; politics at its worse. That is what we have seen in other legislation and it does scare us a bit.

Members of Parliament and people who have made representations on this do not have to have a religious agenda. A lot of that is thrown back at us that it is our conscience not that of our constituents. However, I have had hundreds of interventions, e-mails, letters and calls from constituents. I know everyone has. I have seen some of the headings on the e-mail lists.

Canadians are deeply concerned about where society and our economy is going. They are concerned with chemicals in the environment. They are concerned with genetically modified foods, government secrecy, and with the huge databases we are developing. Canadians need to be reassured that we can take a thoughtful, insightful look at legislation like this and come out with the best for Canadians. We need to have this legislation.

The problem with some of the sections of the bill that the Liberals have rejected would make the advisory council less political. They have shied away from that, and we see that as a huge problem. Politics has no business in this type of legislation, but here we see it again and again. The Liberals even rejected a recommendation to ensure that the board members of the new assisted human reproduction agency would not have conflicts of interest. They have left that out.

Therefore, at the end of the day we have some huge problems with this legislation. The Prime Minister must allow a free vote on legislation like this in order to best serve the interests of our constituents.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, February 11th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join my colleagues in speaking to Bill C-13 on human reproductive technologies. It is one of the most controversial pieces of legislation that we will deal with in this session of Parliament, and my colleagues have touched on that point. It really does divide Canadians on the direction we should take. What can be more important than how Parliament approaches the subject of science and human reproduction on behalf of our constituents, Canadian society as a whole? There is a fine line between those.

The Alliance supports some of the aspects of the bill. As in any Liberal legislation that I have seen in the two terms I have been here, there is always a bit of good mixed in with a lot of bad. The trick always is to try to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with legislation that is in the best interest of Canadians.

We fully support, for example, the ban on human and therapeutic cloning. I think everyone across the country wants feels the same. On animal-human hybrids, why would anyone want to go there? Sex selection, germ line alteration, buying and selling of embryos and paid surrogacy are the types of things that people are e-mailing my office about, by the hundreds. Our e-mails are lighting up.

The petitions I have seen tabled in the House in regard to this legislation rival other issues such as the young offenders bill and things like that when Canadians leapt to their feet and said that they wanted changes. They are trying to get changes to this legislation before it becomes law.

Work has been done with non-embryonic adult stem cells. When we talk about adult stem cells, we are even talk about cells from an umbilical cord. A lot of people would think that it is part and parcel of the embryo but it is not. It is considered to contain adult stem cells. There have been tremendous advances made in research along that line and tremendous good has been done. They are finding less rejection with adult stem cells as opposed to embryonic cells. It is a tremendous dilemma.

We also see in the legislation a huge flaw. We see it again and again in some of the legislation that the government brings down. It is a failure to look after the best interests of children as its first priority. The government talks the talk but it does not walk the walk. We saw that in Bill C-20 that was tabled recently. The legislation is meant to protect children but a clause on artistic merit on child pornography has been left in the legislation and the age of consent has been left at 14 of age.

We see the same theme coming through in this bill where the best interests of our kids are not looked after. Under the bill, children conceived through donated sperm or eggs do not have the right to know the identity of their biological parents. We see that as a huge loophole. The donor offspring community gave moving testimony at the Commons' health committee on the need to fill in the missing gaps of their lives. People need to know their history. All of us use that as a foundation. That is what defines us as individuals in society. To leave that out is a huge and glaring hole.

We also have grave concerns over the accountability. The bill allows the minister to give any policy direction she likes to the agency, which she hand picks, and it must follow without question. We have seen that in other legislation where order in council does this, the minister has the right to do that and there is no overview. As parliamentarians, we represent our constituents.

All Canadians are represented by an MP whether they like it or not. We have seen things go astray when ministers have that type of power. We have seen that with the gun registry and in other failed ambitious legislation that those guys take on, where they give ministers sole discrepancy and they hand pick folks they like. We have seen things go off the rails in no time at all. We see that as a huge stumbling block. Whether one likes the legislation, that would be grounds enough to say “Wait a minute, let us take another look at this”, and we should.

Making the agency fully independent and accountable to Parliament as a whole would curb the political appetite that seems to permeate a lot of these things. It would ensure in the long run that it would serve the needs, aspirations and desires of Canadians.

Those two points alone would be enough for anyone of conscience to say that we have to step back and take a look at this.

Having scientists study and propose experimental methods for creating human life disturbs many Canadians. That has been shown in the petitions, e-mails and letters which we have all received. I know we are in the neighbourhood of approaching a thousand hits on this, just since the bill was tabled.

The problem with this legislation is it lets the genie out of the bottle. It is a reality with which we have to deal. The rest of the world is taking steps and moving in certain directions. The Americans have taken a certain direction as have the Europeans. As I pointed out, our Canadian legislation has some large flaws in it. We have problems and concerns with it.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a memorandum to every MP. In its presentation to the Standing Committee on Health the conference outlined its vision of a human embryo as a human being who should be protected as a person.

The bishops are of the mindset, and always have been, that an embryo from the point of conception is a human being. Many people would argue this but that is a reality. Even the scientists who came before the health committee said that. An embryo is of no use to them if it is not alive.

By giving the green light to research on embryos that remain after fertility treatments, Bill C-13 fails to protect the human embryo. We see that as a huge flaw.

The Canadian Conference of Bishops is urging members of Parliament to strengthen Bill C-13 by amending it to prohibit research on embryos. We have had tremendous inroads and great gains on adult stem cell research. We do not have to use embryos. It is just that it is easy.

The conference of bishops made several points and I would like to review a couple more. Some argue that the embryos that remain after fertility treatments will die anyway, so why not do some good. We have heard that line from several different sources.

It is not necessary that we do something with these embryos so that some good or meaning will be given to their lives. They have already had meaning in their lives simply because they are intrinsically human, which also means from a faith perspective that they are known and loved by God. That is what the Catholic bishops said. I cannot disagree with that and I do not think anybody can.

It is unnecessary to search for meaning on their behalf, especially when such a search is really nothing more than a way of justifying the decision to release human embryos for research purposes. The bishops are saying that it is not required and that there is no need for embryonic stem cell research.

The Minister of Health, in speaking to the bill at second reading, said, “outlaw the creation of human clones whether for purposes of reproduction or research”.

Some questions have been raised as to whether the bill does exactly that. Does the bill go where she intends it to go? Are there some weasel words in there and some wiggle room that again we will see this challenged in the courts? We seem to be making laws for lawyers again and again. At the end of the day does this serve Canadians well? The Alliance does not think so.

The bishops are urging members of Parliament to ensure that the bill captures all forms and possibilities of cloning. Do not leave any wiggle room is what the Catholic bishops are saying. I do not think anybody can argue with that. They have put a lot of study and a lot of time into that.

I have an article that was in the Ottawa Citizen on February 10. Françoise Baylis, a medical ethics and philosophy professor, says that she has done some study on that. She suggests that the federal government could face a possible shortage from heavy pressure from Canadian researchers to remove any ban on the creation of human embryos for research purposes. She is saying that there will not be enough embryos.

At the end of the day her argument is a little self-serving. She is looking for a cash grant from the federal government to study this. It is a little bit more self-serving. She is raising the alarm so that she can go in and fill the void. We have certainly seen that done at government levels for that matter. They create a crisis and then they rush in as the white knights saying that they are there to help. It is a cause and effect situation. I do not think there is a lot of credibility in that treatise which was put forward.

Part of the situation we find ourselves in with a lot of what it out there is that we have been talking about this for 10 years. In that 10 years a lot of people have questioned if we have we got it right. I quoted some of the comments of the Catholic bishops. Many people from my riding and across the country have written me and have said the very same thing. They have asked if we have got it right? I guess at this point I would have to say we do not.

When we look at the number of amendments that have come forward on the bill, and a lot of good points in those amendments, will they be taken seriously? Will the minister, in her monopoly on handling this, take a look at those amendments? Will the minister agree that they strengthen the bill and make the bill better? Will she agree to vote those amendments through?

[Government Contracts, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, everybody remembers that 10 years ago the Liberals' campaign red book promised ministerial accountability and transparency in government. Apparently the Prime Minister vowed at that time he would hold his ministers responsible when things like this went wrong, but I guess he did not mean wrong for taxpayers.

The sponsorship program was set up to reward the Liberal supporters with taxpayer money. That is how it worked. Gagliano claimed he did what he was told, just a good little soldier. We have to believe anybody under him was following the same marching orders.

Will the minister now admit that he will never get answers to what went wrong until he asks the guy who was giving the orders?