Gerry Ritz

[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.

[Petitions, June 3rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to present a petition from a number of people from my riding of Battlefords—Lloydminster who wish parliament to enact Bill C-225, an act to amend the Marriage Act and the Interpretation Act so as to define in statute that a marriage can only be entered into between a single man and a single female.

[Employment Insurance, May 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the real money is in a surplus. It is growing toward $20 billion and looking more like $25 billion next year.

The minister talks about the choices his government has had to make and now he is faced with a tough one. He is being called out by his friends as well as by his opponents. The New Brunswick Liberals can see there is something fishy about the federal books.

Will the minister have to be dragged through the courts by the provinces like Ontario is threatening before he returns the EI surplus to Canadian taxpayers?

[Employment Insurance, May 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I will shift gears here for a minute. The finance minister is under increasing fire first from Mike Harris of Ontario and now his Liberal cousins in New Brunswick for allowing the surplus in the EI fund to become a cash cow instead of the insurance program it was intended to be.

Will the minister assure this House today that he will make real cuts to the premiums and return the EI fund to its original purpose?

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, May 13th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster I am pleased to speak today to Group No. 1 amendments to Bill C-36, the budget implementation act.

Like the budget itself, the act is full of items that may have good intentions but are badly thought out or whose purpose seems to be to fool Canadians into thinking the government is managing taxpayers' money properly.

As a member of the Standing Committee on Finance, the most glaring example I can see of good intentions gone bad and turning into a political boondoggle is the Prime Minister's millennium scholarship fund.

I am sure the thinking in the Liberal cabinet was: Who could possibly disagree with putting more money in the hands of deserving students? In principle, no one really disagrees.

However, most of the presenters to the finance committee in the past weeks all had problems with sections of this fund, including the student groups themselves.

The Reform Party certainly supports the concept of encouraging these young Canadians to pursue higher education but, in the time honoured tradition of its predecessors, this Liberal government has managed to separate the taxpayer from his money only to offer it back to him as if it were a favour.

After cutting $6 billion from the amount the provinces were expecting to help pay for further education, this finance minister had an embarrassing problem. He had taxed Canadians to the limit and built up a budgetary surplus.

Why he could not bring himself to leave these excess tax dollars in the hands of the people who earned them we will never understand. In any case, he ended up with $2.5 billion to dispose of, to hide from his fellow colleagues as it were.

The finance minister decided to charge his credit card this year and start paying for it two years down the road. The benefit of providing only 7% of Canada's students with $3,000 a year will not even kick in until the year 2000, but the taxpayer gets to foot this bill right away. The auditor general says nobody else could get away with this creative accounting and we certainly agree with that statement.

Our colleagues in the Bloc have been pressing to allow Quebec to opt out altogether and to decide how to dispense its share of the millennium scholarship fund.

I certainly agree in principle since the provinces are responsible for education and this bill states nothing about how to approach the various types of schools that each province has set up to provide a range of education opportunities.

However, in committee we were told that there is no provincial share because this is not a federal program in the legal sense of the word. This is a new breed of animal that commits taxpayers' money to a private foundation. This government sets up an entity with public money but says it does not need the auditor general to look after it.

The board will name its own auditor, state its own salaries, hand out taxpayers' dollars on merit—whatever that might be—or need, or both, ignoring the fact that provinces and the federal government and, for that matter, private industry already have bursaries, loans, grants and award programs in place to help students who demonstrate that merit and need.

Are we going to reward the poorest of the best or the best of the poorest? That is one of the comments we heard at the finance committee the other day. I think it is certainly true.

No wonder this government does not want the millennium scholarship foundation to be subject to the Access to Information Act. It is clearly a political ploy to convince Canadians that the Liberals care about education when what they really care about is filtering tax money through their offices to get credit at election time.

To sum up, the Reform Party wants this government to return to recognized accounting procedures that only book funding in the year that the project actually takes place. We propose the that Auditor General of Canada be named in the act that creates this scholarship fund, that this fund be subject to the Access to Information Act and that an appeal process be specified to deal with applications that are turned down.

Further, we propose that each province and territory be allowed to access scholarship funds based on the system in place and the needs as determined by the governments based on student populations.

If we are to assist the next generation in developing the skills and education they need to build a better Canada we should look first at how we can leave the maximum resources in their hands and then how we can provide them with the most flexible and cost effective ways to support their efforts.

[Taxation, May 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, a constituent named Julie Hubbard has written to me to describe her situation. Julie is a single working mother of two. She has a total income of just over $20,000, placing her well below the poverty line.

The tax code forces her to add her child tax benefit money and the GST credit to her gross income. Now she finds herself owing another $186 to Revenue Canada.

With tax codes like this, will the finance minister acknowledge that his tax code is creating child poverty, not solving it?