Greg Thompson

[Income Tax Act, April 21st, 2004]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-516, an act to amend the Income Tax Act (Campobello Island, Deer Island, Grand Manan Island and White Head Island).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to introduce this bill, an act to amend the Income Tax Act, to recognize the special and isolated status of Campobello Island, Deer Island, Grand Manan Island, including White Head Island, by making each of them a proscribed northern zone, so that persons living there will be entitled to a residency deduction under section 110.7 of the Income Tax Act.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Epilepsy Awareness Month, March 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, March is National Epilepsy Awareness month. As the month draws to a close, we can congratulate Epilepsy Canada on its very successful “Lavender. Think Epilepsy” campaign, which included many media and public awareness activities and a new initiative: a lavender ribbon and lavender flower representing the solitude experienced by people with epilepsy.

Epilepsy is not a disease. It is a symptom of a neurological disorder and is a physical condition. Epilepsy causes people to feel hopeless, isolated, discriminated against and often ridiculed.

Approximately 1%, or about 300,000 Canadians, have epilepsy. Each day in Canada, an average of 38 people learn that they have epilepsy. That would be about 14,000 Canadians per year.

Let all of us in the House congratulate Epilepsy Canada and the many volunteers who made its campaign such a huge success this year.

[The Budget, March 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, one of the obvious examples is the $2 billion gun registry. We have had other scandalous spending such as ad scam and the $100 million which was floated away. There is the $160 million that disappeared out of the back door of DND, where every dollar counts and where our soldiers are using outdated equipment.

For example, we have our Sea King helicopters. We could talk about those alone. Those helicopters are older than the pilots. For every 20 minutes a helicopter is in the air, it requires 36 hours to get them back up again. This is one example of outmoded equipment being used around the world by our brave men and women who are out there keeping peace in this very troubled world of ours. As a government, we are obligated to give them the best equipment in the world. What did the government do with $100 million that could have gone to some of their equipment? Even basic things like boots and uniforms would be a help. It spent $100 million on corporate jets to fly the Prime Minister around.

The Prime Minister is in Toronto this morning for a pre-election announcement. What did he fly in? Did he fly in a Sea King helicopter? No, he flew in a brand new jet, one that the government did not need. Its own officials said that it did not need these, that it had enough. He has logged about $500,000 worth of airtime on those jets since becoming Prime Minister, basically in a pre-campaign period. It is just an example. Our brave young men and women in the forces are using, driving and flying equipment that is truly not safe. It is outmoded and outdated, yet the Prime Minister of Canada is flying around in a $100 million corporate jet, which its own officials said that it did not need.

This is symptomatic of how the Government of Canada has browbeat officials in every department where officials did not dare say out loud what was on their minds. They did not whistleblow to declare and bring forward some of the wrongdoings in government on the threat that they would be fired or replaced. We saw a lot of that in the public service.

That brings me to one bill that I introduced in this place three or four years ago. It was a whistleblower bill that would have provided public servants in every government department and crown agency around the country protection so if they did see wrongdoing, they could come forward and the government would have to do something about it or the public would determine that it had to be fixed.

What the government attempted to do, and it did it very successfully, was to silence these people. It could have brought in a whistleblower bill or it could have supported my bill. However, it chose not to because it did not want the truth to be known. It wanted to continue to run the government with a heavy hand. We truly paid a heavy price for that heavy hand of government to do exactly what it wanted in the last 10 years. It has finally caught up with the it.

In this election we will have a united Conservative Party on this side of the House. Canadians will truly have a choice and they can determine whether it will be this group or that group that will be the government. I am absolutely convinced that now we are a government in waiting. We have the talent on this side of the House to replace that group, and believe me, after the next election, it will be replaced.

[The Budget, March 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton—Strathcona.

We have a lot to talk about today with regard to the budget. My definition would simply be that it is an apologetic budget. The government has been in charge for 10 years and has yet to get it right. As evidence of that, government program spending has gone from $100 billion when the government took office to $150 billion now, an increase of 50%. That is not sustainable spending by anyone's definition, but it does not stop there.

We have examples of overspending and the budget was somewhat apologetic for all those mistakes the government made in the past. It is not just mistakes. Some of them are criminal in nature and charges in some cases will be laid in terms of what happened to taxpayer dollars.

By way of example I will give some interesting observations around this place in the last couple of weeks. Obviously these are spending scandals that we brought to the floor of the House as the official opposition. One of the scandals is the disappearance of $160 million or so from the Department of National Defence. How did $150 million to $160 million walk out the back door? Nobody knows on that side of the House and they are not sure what the figure is. Is it $150 million or $160 million or is it more? However it shows that the government is clearly out of control when it comes to spending.

This unravelling of the government and its strong position in the polls that it had following the coronation of the present Prime Minister seemed to come very quickly. It all comes down to a question of trust. Who do Canadians believe and trust in terms of some of the boondoggles perpetrated on the Canadian taxpayers?

At this point it is pretty clear in the eyes of the average Canadian that they do not trust the Prime Minister in terms of some of the excuses that he is using for the mismanagement of Canadian taxpayer money.

I could be wrong on this but, in terms of understanding who the new Prime Minister is and what he is all about, I think it started on the night of the CBC townhall meeting that was broadcast across the country. The Prime Minister went into a little public meeting, took questions and responded to questions put to him by the audience. Some of his responses just were not believable.

For example, one woman, I believe from Calgary, asked the Prime Minister a question concerning CSL, Canada Steamship Lines. She wanted to know why he only pays 2% taxes when the average Canadian corporation pays somewhere in the vicinity, all things being equal, of about 29% taxes. The Prime Minister responded by saying that he had always been a tax haven buster and that he had eliminated tax havens.

On the face of it, that is probably true with the exception of his own company. He, as finance minister, preserved the tax haven in the Barbados to protect his own interests. We will admit that he closed down some of them, but the one that gave his company the kind of break that any corporation would love to have, is still there and is still being enjoyed by his family if we believe he turned over the assets totally and irreparably to his sons. However the fact is that it is still the Prime Minister's company. It is a company that was built by the present Prime Minister and he has played unfairly by tax rules that he could have changed.

When he pretended that he was a tax haven buster, no one believed him because he could have done something but chose not to do something.

When the member next to me wanted information regarding the Prime Minister's company, CSL, the Prime Minister responded by asking how much money his company, CSL, received from government contracts. The answer, which was in response to a question on the Order Paper, was about $73,000 worth, which was clearly wrong.

The member for Edmonton Southwest, of course, persisted, which is one of the beauties of digging, persisting and not letting the government off the hook. Finally, the Prime Minister and the government had to confess that the figure was not $73,000 but somewhere between $150 million to $160 million in contracts to the Prime Minister's company. Coupled with the fact that he was only paying 2% tax because of the offshore registry that he enjoys, which he should have shut down but did not, there is something fundamentally wrong with that.

The member then asked the Prime Minister when he knew about that amount of money. It being his company, the Prime Minister would have known that his company did more than $73,000 worth of business with the Government of Canada. How did he respond to that? His response was that he was busy with the leadership race. He was busy with the leadership race for 15 years. For the 10 years that the Liberals have been in power he was simply undermining his leader every single day so I can understand why he was busy. However no one believed his story. No one who runs a corporation ignores $161 million in income. It just does not happen.

When the Prime Minister was successful in his leadership bid, he stood in the House and said that he would run the Government of Canada like a business. A few days ago our finance critic, the member for Medicine Hat, said that it was unfortunate that the Prime Minister did not tell us that the business was Enron. If people ran their business like that they would be out of business.

What we in this House are trying to do is put those people out of business. The truth is that the Liberals have lost trust. Their trust with the Canadian people has been broken. They have stepped over the line. They have had 10 years to get it right and the numbers just do not add up. They have gone on a spending spree, wasting taxpayer dollars.

One of these, Mr. Speaker, which I know, since you come from a rural area, drives you crazy but you are very limited in what you can say about it because of your position in the House, is the gun registry. We could have taken the $2 billion that has been wasted on that registry and put it in the budget. The Prime Minister of Canada could have had his finance minister stand up and say that he was ending the program simply because it was not working. All the Prime Minister of Canada had to say was that it was a failed policy and that $2 billion in taxpayer money has been gobbled up only to find out that it has not worked.

However the Liberals will hold on to that and try to carry it through the next election, despite the internal bickering and fighting within the party, which is another problem.

I want to give a couple of examples of what $2 billion could do for my home province of New Brunswick. It could pay for eight years of salary for 4,444 police officers. Given the annual income of New Brunswickers, 93,765 New Brunswickers could be paid for a year. Two billion dollars could buy 66,000 police cruisers. Members can imagine how we could have had a real impact on crime and the protection of average citizens.

I am out of time, but I will turn the floor over to my colleague from Edmonton—Strathcona. I have a feeling he will continue on these themes of spending, overspending and lack of direction by the government. It had a chance to get it right after 10 years, and it has not. It is time we replaced the government.

[Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the government may be proud of it, but there is no money in the budget to fund it.

The interesting thing is that the president of ACOA is still promoting it. She is a public servant and totally in contradiction of the ethics act, the code, if I may. This is how the government put itself in trouble on the ad scam issue with public servants refusing to say no or unwilling to say no to their political masters.

Does the minister want to see politicization of ACOA until finally the government is defeated at the polls?

[Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, March 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of ACOA continues to encourage the president of ACOA to promote a Liberal policy paper called “The Rising Tide: Continuing Commitment to Atlantic Canada” with scarce mention and no funding in the budget. This policy paper, in the words of the minister, “will remain part of the Liberal platform in the next election”.

Will the minister now reign in the president of ACOA who is, by the way, a senior public servant, or is it politics as usual at the agency in a pre-election warm-up?

[Employment Insurance Program, March 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the president of ACOA clearly stepped outside her bounds. That is why there is ad scam, the political scandal that is going on on the government side, because officials were unwilling to say no to their political masters.

The minister knows full well that the president of ACOA stepped outside her role when she was out promoting a policy document, not government policy, but a policy document of the Liberal Party of Canada.

It is interesting that the Liberals talk of “Rising Tide”. When the document first came out it was a $4 billion package for Atlantic Canada. They kept paring it down until finally they had it down to around $700 million. Note that the other day in the budget papers there was no money for “Rising Tide”, not a nickel. The only money that is referenced is in the supplementary estimates, according to the minister himself.

How can he get on his feet and brag about “Rising Tide” when in fact the government did not put a nickel into it in this budget? In fact it will be a political discussion paper for the next election.

The minister should be ashamed of himself and he should rein in his deputy minister, that is, the president of ACOA.

[Employment Insurance Program, March 25th, 2004]

You're not being very generous sir.

[Employment Insurance Program, March 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago I put a question to the minister of ACOA. It was based on a speech given by the president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. What I suggested to the minister was that the president of ACOA had stepped outside her bounds as president of an agency when she publicly endorsed a policy paper by the Liberal Party of Canada. It was not government policy, it was simply a policy paper put together by a group of Liberals. In fact it was the Liberal Atlantic caucus, but it has never been government policy.

Therefore, I suggest that she breached the public services ethics act when she did that. She clearly stepped outside of her bounds. She is not there to be a political voice for the Liberal Party of Canada. She is there to serve the agency and to serve all citizens in a non-partisan way. She should not be picking favourites, and that is exactly what she did when she gave that speech in Moncton on February 23 this year.

She has clearly stepped outside of her responsibilities as the president of an agency of government. I would like to quote from the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service of Canada. It states:

Public servants must work within the laws of Canada and maintain the tradition of the political neutrality of the Public Service.

It goes on to say:

Deputy Heads and senior managers have a particular responsibility to exemplify, in their actions and behaviours, the values of public service...It is expected that they will take special care to ensure that they comply at all times with both the spirit and the specific requirements of this Code.

She did not do that. In fact this document that she promoted, which is called the “Rising Tide” was not even mentioned in the Speech from the Throne. It was only a reference when the Prime Minister, the next day, under pressure from his Liberal members of Parliament suggested that he should make reference to it in his speech when debating the Speech from the Throne.

It is pretty obvious that it is not government policy. In fact the minister himself suggested that this would be the basis of the Liberal Party's election platform in the next election.

I think it is fundamentally wrong when a public servant is given instructions from a minister of the Crown to go out on the rubber chicken circuit speaking tour promoting a Liberal Party policy document. When the president gave her speech, she even suggested that it was just a discussion paper and referenced that paper in relation to positions held by other political parties. Not only was she promoting the Liberal Party, she was criticizing positions by other political parties, which is way outside her limits.

She should be reined in by the minister. In fact when I questioned the minister in the House a week or so ago, Mr. Speaker, you were in the chair, and the minister stood on his feet and said in reply to my question:

Mr. Speaker, the deputy minister of ACOA was merely doing her job as deputy minister. She is speaking out on government policy. The implementation--

[Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, March 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the president of ACOA has been out on the lecture circuit promoting a Liberal Party document called “The Rising Tide”. She has clearly stepped outside her bounds as president of ACOA. She should be neutral, supporting all members of Parliament and all parties.

Has the minister spoken to the president to cease that type of action and will he ask her for an apology to all parties in the House and all citizens. She is clearly outside her bounds.