Gerry Ritz

[Agriculture, October 27th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, there is a growing farm income crisis in the country. The minister must be aware the farmers have to make decisions now that affect the future of Canadian agriculture for next season. They need real action from the government to deal with the whole spectrum of difficulties facing their operations.

We need to keep more money in the hands of producers, not burden them with rising fees, taxes and charges that follow mandatory government programs. We have to make adjustments for international trade distortions and make it clear to our trading partners that we will not tolerate massive subsidies which provide short term illusions of relief. We have to address the shortcomings in the net income stabilization program.

We are asking the government to move now to help Canadian agriculture and its supporting services brace themselves for the rough road ahead.

[Criminal Records Act, September 29th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand here this evening and speak in the final hour of debate on the private member's bill put forward by my colleague from Calgary Centre. It is of profound importance for the health and well-being of our most important resource in Canada, our children.

Governments at all levels often say that they recognize the importance of children's welfare for the future of the country, but they often have a strange way of showing it. Our income tax structure encourages two income families and common law relationships, although there is overwhelming empirical evidence that both these situations are among the least desirable for the healthy development of children.

Many members of this House have probably bought into United Nations documents that are supposed to protect the rights of the child. Because of manipulation by special interest groups, many subsidized by the Canadian taxpayer, these charters actually seem to undermine the ability of and the responsibility for parents to guide and nurture their children.

In a recent news article the Secretary of State for Children and Youth said “We feel our activities are child centred. Our main concern is what happens to children, and the issue of parents is very, very, I would say, controversial”. If the concern really was for the child, then the well-being of parents and their families would be front and centre, not considered an annoyance by this government.

The term “child centred” also appears in education literature that was popular a few years ago. The philosophy that letting kids decide what they wanted to learn, when they felt like learning it, was somehow going to lead to happier, well adjusted students. The result, as we now know, is that a lack in direction and in an appreciation of the responsibilities that adults were supposed to provide them, many children felt no obligation to learn at all. Many jurisdictions across Canada are retreating from the failed experiment of trying to turn innocent children into miniature adults.

I am not claiming that there is a direct connection, but the policy of absolving adults of their responsibilities to behave properly seems to be the other side of the coin. We seem to have forgotten the social impact of giving individuals a free ride when it comes to the consequences of their actions. We often seem so concerned about the rights of the convict that we completely ignore the loss of dignity, privacy and the enjoyment of life that these criminals visit upon their victims and families.

Members on this side of the House recognize that all legislation must be concerned with balance.

The administration of justice requires not only a presumption of innocence for the individual charged with a crime, but that any punishment that results from a rightful conviction must fit the crime.

There is a process in place for dealing with criminal activity that has to include mitigating circumstances. We may stop a lot of thieves by ordering their hands to be cut off, but our society has decided that sort of punishment is too extreme.

We believe in mercy and we believe that people should get a chance to atone for their transgressions at a later date. At one time these were a couple of elements among many in our justice system, but these days many Canadians feel that they have become the driving force.

Many Canadians feel that the balance has been upset and now the justice system assumes that criminals are always remorseful and will automatically respond to things like day parole and psychiatric counselling. Far from it.

Rightly or wrongly, the perception has been created that the justice system has been skewed to give every consideration to the criminal and little is being done to heal the wounds of the victims.

Many Canadians have expressed the desire to see more done on the side of prevention. They want more police officers on the street, more direct and immediate consequences for all criminal acts, more onus being placed on parents for the actions of minors, a greater emphasis on making criminals pay the full price for their crimes and less of a push to get them back on the street.

While opposing sides may argue about the efficiency of incarcerating versus rehabilitating criminals, police are aware that a rash of property crimes, for example, usually points to the recent release of a criminal who favours that sort of action. It is a fact of life.

There is no end of statistics to show the tendency of various criminals to reoffend and these are often used by people to prove their pet theories about justice.

I do not want to get into a numbers game, nor do I want to argue whether criminals need more or less jail or whether one kind of punishment is more effective than another. That is not what Bill C-284 is all about. It is not about tormenting a particular type of criminal for the rest of their life or imposing more jail time on someone who has supposedly served their time and is now trying to make a life for themselves.

It is true that Bill C-284 does target a particular kind of criminal and seeks to put at public disposal an item of personal information that our system has a method of keeping from the public under ordinary circumstances.

Some may interpret this as being unnecessarily intrusive, but this bill seeks to safeguard a particular kind of victim and is an attempt to bring balance to the system on that victim's behalf.

We recognize that criminals have certain rights and that the criminals who have served time for their crimes may have earned a certain relief from further punishment. However, the victims who we are concerned with here, like many victims who survived the violation against them, often serve a lifetime sentence themselves. They carry those emotional scars for life.

The victims who this bill concerns itself with are usually helpless, vulnerable and find it difficult to comprehend or deal with what is done to them. These victims are our children and our families.

The perpetrators of this most hideous crime are known as pedophiles or sex offenders. Despite what our deepest revulsion urges us to do to these people, we try to remember that we must have balance.

The members of this House should understand that Bill C-284 is not about the punishment of that individual based on suspicion or prejudice, it is about directing convicted criminals away from situations in which they have proven they cannot be trusted.

We are not asking that pardoned sex offenders be barred from society, but that people in positions of responsibility over children be given the opportunity to discover the true history of the potential employees they are looking at hiring.

This bill does not call for the public broadcast of anyone's criminal history. It merely allows for responsible parties to find out if an individual had ever been pardoned for a sexual offence, and then only if that individual actually applies for a job working with children.

When we consider the words of Correctional Services Canada that there is evidence of a substantial increase in the risk for sexual re-offending for that group of offenders with a prior history, and when we discover that the National Parole Board does not even keep track of the more than 16,000 pardons it hands out by type of crime, then we can say that there is a very small price to pay in terms of curtailing the freedoms of this group.

I would like to close by saying that the solicitor general already has the legal authority to override a pardon if it is in the interest of the administration of justice.

I believe it is only just that we work to prevent the tragedy of child victimization any way that we can, and this bill gives us one more tool to accomplish that end. I urge everyone in this House to support the bill.

[Dna Identification Act, September 29th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, it is certainly a pleasure to rise today to speak on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster regarding Bill C-3, the DNA data bank.

The Reform Party continues to be firmly committed to restoring confidence in our justice system and providing Canadians with true security in their homes. This means providing the law enforcement agencies with the latest technological tools to detect and apprehend criminals. DNA identification is certainly this type of tool. If used to its full potential, the DNA data bank could be the single most important development in fighting crime since fingerprinting.

Bill C-3, in its present form, denies police the quality tools they need to fight and solve crime. At best Bill C-3 is a half measure aimed to placate Canadians.

DNA data banks are currently in use in the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand. DNA forensic analyses have been instrumental in securing convictions in hundreds of cases in Canada and have helped in the release of wrongly convicted persons.

Bill C-3 in its current form gives law-abiding Canadians a false sense of security. The Reform Party cannot support the bill in its current form because of that. We do support the creation of a DNA data bank, but the current scope of the bill is much too limited. It seems the government would rather protect the interests of criminals over those of law-abiding citizens, not an equitable trade-off I am sure.

The government cites finances as one of the reasons why it is not willing to expand the DNA data bank and allow for samples to be taken at the time of charge rather than conviction. The Reform Party proposed that samples be taken at the time of charge and not analysed until conviction. This would have satisfied the concern of the Canadian Police Association regarding offenders who are released on bail pending trial and constitute a flight risk.

The total cost of the DNA data bank, we are told, would be in the $15 million to $18 million range. We see Bill C-68 implemented at a proposed cost of $85 million on the premise that it may save one life, The costs have now escalated to two, three, four times that. No one is sure. Again in order to save one life we are wondering why the implementation of a DNA data bank, which has proven to save lives and convict criminals in the long run, would not be a good buy.

Unlike Bill C-68 costs can be recouped. The conclusive nature of DNA evidence often results in substantial savings for police in their investigations and the courts since that investigation can be narrowed down and a trial simplified. Therefore in the long term this is a cost effective tool and a great protection to society. By analysing the DNA of all persons charged with violent offences we could have numerous samples in that data bank. We should think of the added security this would mean to Canadians.

There are hundreds of unsolved assaults, rapes and homicides where DNA evidence has been left at the scene. DNA identification now offers us an unparalleled opportunity to solve many of these cases. They have a real opportunity to strengthen our hand-cuffed justice system and they refuse to change.

People's lives are at stake here as well as their quality of life living in safer neighbourhoods. It is interesting to note that the taking of a blood sample in the case of a suspected impaired driver does not raise much concern. In fact society applauds that policy. Why is it different, then, in the case of DNA samples left at the scene of a crime? We take blood samples for purposes of determining impairment. There is no difference.

The invasion of privacy has already taken place. The Criminal Code looks after that. Is there a difference here? I think not. The authority to take samples is already in the Criminal Code and overrules the privacy issue.

The Canadian Police Association prepared and submitted a legal opinion to the justice committee concluding that there would be no constitutional concern about taking samples at the time of charge.

We all want to fight and reduce crime and reduce the time it takes to solve a crime. We have a tremendous backlog in our courts. If the fear is over the data bank and the keeping of blood or fluid samples, we just have to look at the thousands of samples taken by doctors and nurses each day and kept in some sort of bank. These bank files are not being exploited so why would a DNA data bank constitute any more of a risk?

This is certainly a major and very important piece of legislation. The government must justify to the Canadian Police Association and Canadian voters the reasons for invoking time allocation for the seventh time to ram through a work in progress. Canadians deserve better from their elected officials.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, September 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly a pleasure to rise today and speak in this debate on Bill C-53. I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Prince George—Bulkley Valley should we have time left.

The title of this bill is a real mouthful in itself. Bill C-53 is an act to increase the availability of financing for the establishment, expansion, modernization and improvement of small businesses. It sounds like we are going to be all things to all people here.

In every area of economic activity we find taxpayer sponsored programs whose objectives claim to be that they will help people work more or expand their businesses or make more money. The problem is this is precisely what people naturally want to do with their businesses in the first place. What we see is that many of these government efforts are actually taking resources away from people in taxes who would otherwise prosper on their own.

Some members of this House may accuse me of preaching some form of economic Darwinism, that the government should disappear and let the strong survive at the expense of the weak. I do not believe this would be a formula for success right across the board. There are many situations in which incentives can be provided to encourage certain outcomes but clearly we cannot be all things to all people and we have to let small businesses make many choices on their own.

As I said, people naturally want to succeed. That is the direction that many small businesses like to see.

There are a variety of things a government can do to encourage business success, just as there are many things it does to defeat that success, and this bill does little to address either side of those conditions.

At the moment we have many questions about government participation in small business financing. The auditor general raised several of them in his spring report. His figures indicated that 46% of loans under the SBLA could have been handled privately through normal financial channels. We have to wonder if a moral hazard is not at work here. By that I mean because the banks have a way to deflect risk on to the taxpayer through this program, are they inclined to get on the SBLA bandwagon because it is there?

We have no hard numbers to say this program is the difference between success or failure at getting that financing. We know that the CFIB places a high priority on access to financing as a major factor for business success, and I do not question those numbers, but do we have in this bill the best or most effective way of doing that?

Recent figures indicate that 80% of small business loan applications are successful but we have no figures to indicate whether that is an optimum level or not. Is 100% a healthy level, for example, or would that expose lenders to extraordinary risk? In other words, should the government step in and drive that loan approval rate up to 100% as a policy objective using taxpayer money to subsidize it?

As a small business owner in a couple of different fields, I have a great deal of sympathy for people who want to go into business and need that first boost of capital to get them going. Of course that does not mean that everybody with the same dream is equally qualified to pursue it, so there are bound to be rejections for a variety of reasons.

If we look at where those applications ended up we see that 68% went to the chartered banks, 27% went to other financial institutions, credit unions and such, and 11% went to the small business loans program. No one on the government side of the House can say that the 11% would go without financing if the SBLA were not there. As we know from the principle of moral hazard, people choose the easy route only if it is available. Without the vast web of bureaucratic programs paid for by an equally vast web of taxation, factors in the financial services sector of this country could behave in a different fashion.

As it is, the number of high risk loans has been increasing along with the default rate and bankruptcies, although Industry Canada has so far kept that report very close.

Speaking of missing documents, we also have to wonder about the cost benefit of this program. This is one argument that pops up to try to legitimize many government programs, particularly when taxpayers see those billion dollar bottom lines starting to add up.

As the finance minister often reminds us, governments have to make tough choices. What we rarely see is this government making a choice to give up on a cherished boondoggle when it is shown that money is not being spent in a way that has a clear, positive return to the taxpayer.

Often we see good money chasing bad in a futile effort to prove that a program is working, not because it was wrong or unnecessary in the first place, but because not enough money has been poured down that sinkhole. This kind of thinking is epidemic in government and never leads to good choices.

We should be looking at innovative new ways of making financial support more available to our small and medium business sector. In many countries around the world, and I understand even in certain regions of this country, there is a system of micro lending. Loans as small as a few hundred dollars show a tremendous return on the dollars placed.

There is a system in the U.S. where lenders are required to commit 6% of their profits to the communities in which they are located. Of course there are hundreds of banks in the U.S. versus a dozen in Canada, so the locality does not have the same relevance. But perhaps there is a way to implement such a requirement in Canada, as long as it does not lead us back to the same situation we have now where the government seeks to force choices on its lenders.

I think more important than inventing new government programs, however, is taking a good look at the environment that exists for business in Canada. Should we be rushing to enact this kind of legislation when this government has yet to digest the Mintz report on business taxation? The professor warned that governments were relying increasingly on profit insensitive taxes; taxes and charges that were not related to whether the business was succeeding or failing, but were demanded of the business owners regardless.

We have seen in recent years an explosion of user fees, which are not by themselves a bad thing. That is, they are not bad if the fee goes to the service being charged in the first place. This government is not alone in preferring to pour all of its revenues into one basket, but it has a lot to answer for in many areas.

Gasoline taxes are outrageously high by themselves, but we see very little of this windfall going toward transportation infrastructure that would assist businesses of all kinds. Worst of all are the payroll taxes that are a direct and undeniable killer of jobs and entrepreneurship in Canada.

Not only does this government insist on imposing ridiculously high rates, it also raises rates such as the CPP under the auspices of what I mentioned earlier. Is the program not working? Pour money down that sinkhole.

The case of employment insurance premiums has already been broached in this House and by no means are we done with that topic. Yes, the premiums have been reduced from the highs under the former government, but this government's own experts are declaring that they must go lower. Under the law they are supposed to go lower, but the finance minister, instead of returning money to employers and employees, threatens to change the law and keep the money for choices that have nothing to do with the original tax.

Canadians should take note that the finance minister has in fact already taken that money to apply against his deficit last year, so it is actually part of the Liberal smoke and mirror budget plan to argue about where else to spend money that is already owed to another program.

My point is that this bill is a questionable necessity and fails to address the real needs of the business constituency that it claims to help. What entrepreneurs in Canada need is the ability to keep more of the profits they generate. Capital gains taxes need to be at least minimized and at best eliminated. Payroll taxes need to be kept low and directed where they were intended.

There has to be a serious study of the burden of paperwork and overlapping regulations that exist in this country.

The GST regime should be overhauled for one thing, but the layers of bureaucracy between federal, provincial and municipal administrations have to be examined as well.

Employers need a flexible, well educated, motivated labour force. Workers obviously need to keep more of their money as well.

Finally, this government has to take a serious look at the flexibility and competitiveness of our whole financial services sector. We have the MacKay task force report to look at. We should take the opportunity, use our combined imagination and innovation in reforming the regulations of this industry to provide real access to reasonable cost financing for business.

It is unfortunate that this government is in such a hurry to push through Bill C-53 without answering some of the problems that have been mentioned here today. What Bill C-53 represents is not a helping hand to business but the hand of a government stuck in the past with no new ideas.

I certainly commend and agree with my colleagues on their motion earlier today to send this bill back to committee for more study.

[Supply, September 22nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly enjoyed the presentation by the hon. member for Saskatoon—Humboldt today on Bill C-68.

The one thing he did not touch on and the way the government is selling this is on the proof that there will be tremendous criminal reduction in activity there. There will be fewer suicides. Domestic violence of course will be toned down and so on.

Does he have any thoughts in that regard? Does he know other jurisdictions where this has been tried? What were the results?

[Petitions, September 22nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured today to stand on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster to present petitions on their behalf regarding Bill C-68. With the big rally here today it is very timely.

The constituents are very concerned that their federal government is going down the wrong road on this issue. They pray that the government will rescind Bill C-68 and really take a harder line on criminals.

[Supply, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I guess we are down to the issue of the chicken and the egg. What came first in Canada, the laws or the courts? In our estimation, the laws had to come first and the courts are there to interpret them. The justices are asked to interpret those laws to the given cases before them, but not to write the laws or to fill in the blanks that they feel are missing. That is the fundamental difference in our philosophy and theirs.

[Supply, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

When we referred to the justice minister and her statement supporting the institution of marriage as it now stands, it was in a letter regarding a constituent who wrote in with concerns that Bill C-225, a private member's bill before this House, is very timely.

The constituent supported that bill to the full letter of the law and asked for the justice minister to support that bill as well. In the letter back to the constituent, the justice minister reiterated that under today's laws in Canada the definition of spouse is the marriage of people of the opposite sex and that she would continue to defend that concept of marriage in court, if should be.

That is basically the premise of the motion today. It is to ask the justice minister to appeal Ontario's decision in the Rosenberg case to the highest court of the land, the supreme court, and see it to its fruition. Let us get a little more attention on this. Let us look at it through the lens of family friendly regardless of our definition of family and get this thing out in the open and have a long serious look at it. I think we need to do that.

As to how a Reform government would approach this situation, we are talking about moral issues here. In our blue book we propose a matter such as this going to a binding referendum that would be held Canada-wide. Let everyone out there have a say rather than just the justices giving us direction or the parliamentarians who may tend to skew their constituents' answers. We would ask our constituents themselves to make the ruling on these types of institutions.

[Supply, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with pleasure to speak on behalf of the constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminister on the motion that my colleague from Calgary Centre has placed before this House.

I would like to take a moment to clarify something. The member for Windsor—St. Clair read a motion in her debate and it certainly is not what we are proposing today. Our motion states:

That, in the opinion of this House, federal legislation should not be altered by judicial rulings, as happened in the redefinition of the term “spouse” in the Rosenberg decision, and that, accordingly, the government should immediately (repeal) that decision.

That is what our motion reads today; not the one that she came up with.

I believe that all duly elected members of this legislature can see the logic in the first part of the motion. We are sent here by the voters of our respective ridings to represent their wishes in this House and we all go through a lot of trouble to get here. Occasionally we disagree on how to reflect those wishes, but when we come up with legislation we expect that it is the best that can be written and passed, once again by a majority of votes, and that it will be acceptable to a majority of our electorate.

If we want to continue to fight against what we see to be bad legislation, then we do so in public. Ultimately we stand for re-election based on what the voter sees as our view of that legislative program.

Of course, no law is perfect and for the purposes of reviewing those laws and testing their fairness we have a judicial branch whose job it is to uphold or strike down individual statutes. Judges at various levels are asked to interpret laws as well, but this means it is their job to define the meaning that the words contained in the statute were meant to have, and only the meaning.

Nowhere and at no time have judges ever been given the task of putting words in that are not there now. Not only are judges not elected by popular will, they are not chosen to write laws or to create public policy with the potential to affect millions of lives or dictate the expenditure of millions of taxpayers' dollars.

Revolutions have been fought over the issue of the people being taxed without representation, but in this country we seem willing to ignore history; if not blatantly, we re-write it and hand over authority to unelected individuals or groups who have their own narrow agenda as their driving force.

The case we cited as an example of judges overstepping their bounds involves the redefinition of spouse in the Income Tax Act, but it has implications for hundreds of other statutes and regulations as well. No doubt many commentators will read into this example that Reform is on its high horse about the sanctity of marriage and the restriction of family to certain approved forms to the exclusion of others. This is a complex issue and no one is suggesting here today that people should not be allowed to choose how they want to order their lives.

The issue is whether or not judges have the right to impose on all of society an interpretation of laws written by elected representatives—and I stress elected—and debated openly in our public forum here in this House. Where the interpretation involves adding words that were never included in the statutes in the first place is wrong. Canadians should be worried about this growing tendency of courts to re-write legislation on the fly and I would like to touch on some examples which have no doubt been brought up already today.

Professor Ted Morton of the University of Calgary relates how the Supreme Court of Canada struck down provisions in the Elections Act that prohibited prisoners from voting, and it did this not once but twice. In the first instance it disallowed a blanket prohibition which may have been unfair to the odd individual, but even after the act was amended to include only convicts serving two years or more the justices felt that it was unreasonable. The only thing unreasonable was the nonsense being perpetrated on law-abiding Canadian voters by these self-styled guardians of democracy.

As Professor Morton writes:

Giving prisoners the right to vote is not only bad policy but also bad law—. To allow those who break the law to make the law is an insult to all law-abiding citizens and devalues the meaning of citizenship. It is for this reason that there is no other nation where prisoners enjoy a constitutional right to vote.

At a time when we are struggling to instil in our next generation respect for the law and a sense of social and civic responsibility, the beliefs and actions of this unelected elite who supposedly represent the law itself are undermining all of our efforts and their status as well.

Another professor at the University of Western Ontario, Mr. Rob Martin, writes in a recent issue of Law Times that it was Justice Antonio Lamer who first invented the idea that judges could read in what they feel to be missing from legislation. In Dr. Martin's opinion, Justice Lamer has even suggested that he and his colleagues could fill in gaps in the Constitution, creating new institutions whenever they felt so inclined. A little overstepping their bounds.

It must be clear to even the most hardened sceptic that the practice of allowing judges to rewrite statutes, order public money spent and change the very meaning of our language to suit special interest agendas can only mean that parliament will become unnecessary.

Society at large will be subject to the whims of a handful of individuals meeting in private and handing down decisions without ever having to justify themselves or those decisions.

Of course this is a worst case scenario and aside from having lots of other institutions break down at the same time, one would also have to believe that the individuals on the various judicial benches all had some sort of evil intent. Far from it.

I want to make it clear that I do not believe that is the case here but let us also be clear that even good intentions can lead to bad policies and bad decisions. As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and some of these judges just seem to want to get there and put in street lights and traffic signs while they can.

I have read where lawyers are complaining that they not longer have any idea what kind of decision is going to come out of a high court proceeding. Maybe this is an indication that justices have painted themselves into so many corners they cannot remember if they are half way through painting the floor black or half way through painting it white. These hints of confusion and disagreement among the justices may explain some of the recent decisions we have seen.

Look at the 1985 Singh decision or the more recent Halm decision that together create a massive bureaucracy to handle refugees. The irony is that according to Professor Morton, the UN had regarded Canada's immigration system as one of the world's best before the justices started to mess with the handling of refugees.

Now we have massive backlogs, $179 million in extra expense, millions going to a refugee industry run by lawyers, and thanks to another supreme court decision we are forced to treat convicted drug traffickers as choir boys. They are not guilty here yet.

I suppose since the immigration minister herself has apparently tossed the rulebook out the window regarding accepted convicted criminals, perhaps the justices felt it was time to rewrite the Immigration Act on behalf of Canadian people. We can see that prisoner voting and the extraordinary rights of convicted criminals as refugees in Canada form a pattern and the final piece of that puzzle was supplied last year in the Feeney decision. In that case a young man allegedly beat an old man to death and returned to his trailer to sleep off a drunken stupor.

The police had every reason to believe they had found their man and within the law as they understood it they could make an arrest. They had probable cause. Not so, said the justices. A warrant was necessary in that case although previously it had not been.

We are not talking here about innocent people caught up in an irresponsible system. It is not a question of presumed innocence being abused but of law officers on our streets and in our immigration system doing their jobs by the rules of law as set out by parliament, the legislators.

When our police cannot count on the rules, how can they expect the private citizen to respect and obey them? What tends to happen is that police are discouraged and frustrated to the point of taking matters into their own hands, leading to less liberty, not more.

I have a final word about Rosenberg. It is true that the Reform Party policy sets out that marriage exists as a union between a man and a woman and subsequently that spouse refers to the members of the opposite sex in that union, as the justice minister herself has stated in her communique.

This is what the law has said for centuries and is what the vast majority of the Canadian people believe and there are many good empirical reasons why that definition should form the basis of Canadian society for years to come. This is not exclusionary. People are still free to choose. They still have rights. If it is a question of how individuals are to share social programs to reflect their lifestyles, then by all means we will look at the benefits in a separate scenario. But let us do it here in this House where the debates can be followed by every interested party and where we can have input from a variety of viewpoints. We do not have to redefine society to suit every individual if we can simply redefine benefit.

I offer another quote from Professor Martin: “It is a principle of our law that constitutional issues should only be raised as a last resort. If a case can be resolved on non-constitutional ground, then it should be.”

We must put an end of the knee-jerk reaction that suggests every identifiable group is a victim simple in need of extra rights to go along with the ones they already have.

[Income Tax Act, June 3rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to speak today on behalf of the many mechanics and technicians of Battlefords—Lloydminster in support of my esteemed colleague's private member's Bill C-366, an act to amend the Income Tax Act to allow for the deduction of mechanics' tools.

It is only fair that young men and women working to advance their careers in this growing field should be treated the same way by the tax code. There is quite an inequity here. We see no logic or common sense in denying these young people that tax deductibility. The only thing we can see holding this up is that there is no desire from the government at this time to implement any kind of tax relief for their situation.

As the parliamentary secretary said so eloquently a short time ago, there have been interventions on this issue. I was at the finance committee with him during those interventions. It has been done for the past number of years and no one has really taken the bull by the horns and made it happen. I am wondering with such logic and common sense in place to put this tax code in place, why are we waiting. We talk about complexity of the act, that this cannot happen. The Liberal government says don't worry, be happy, we are studying it, something is going to happen somewhere down the road. I wish to tell young mechanics and technicians not to hold their breath. Their tools are going to be old and rusty before the government ever gets off its duff to make this happen.

My son is a mechanic. He is 19. Already he has over $6,000 worth of tools and it is a prerequisite of the job. The total is well over $6,000 which is a big chunk of change for a young guy starting his career in the workforce. If that were tax deductible there would certainly be an incentive to expand what he has and to work a little harder at the job.

There is a tremendous pride in the ownership of the tools. It is very self-evident in the workplace that they do. They keep the workplace neat and tidy because of that, because they own the equipment. My son has a little sticker on the side of his tool box that really says it all, “Don't ask to borrow my tools. The only thing we loan out belongs to the old tomcat and he always brings it back”. That is kind of evident of the way these kids feel about these tools. They worked hard to own them, so there is a pride of ownership. Why can we not extend that to being tax deductible as we do for all the other instances that were presented with here today?

There are differences in mechanic and technician tools deductibility. It is a growth industry. There is a tremendous demand for young apprentices. Exceptional expenses are involved. As opposed to a pair of shoes to feel better when you are working in a store, we are talking right off the bat of thousands of dollars of input.

Also we are looking at programs in our community colleges to get the young people into the workforce. A two year program puts them into a mechanic or body shop situation. They are earning money and paying taxes. It is only fair that there is an incentive to make that happen.

There is a shortfall in the job sector for youth employment that the government is so intent on addressing. There is a tremendous opportunity out there and making a deductibility for mechanics' tools and technicians' tools would certainly add to that. We would see many jobs filled in that sector. We have seen numbers as high from some interveners as 100,000 positions could be filled. It may take just this little incentive to make it happen.

The objective of the bill is fairness in taxation. I applaud my colleague's desire to see this done. He is the latest in a long list of people from all political parties who have tried to put this act before parliament and have it acted on. I have to stress the youth employment potential. It is economically positive. It is an excellent bill and I urge the government to act accordingly and have it implemented immediately.