Greg Thompson

[Points Of Order, April 23rd, 1998]

Today in question period I asked a question of the government in relation to the vote on Tuesday night on the hepatitis C issue and I just want some clarification, Mr. Speaker. I hope you will give me a bit of time here. I think this clarification would probably best come outside question period and outside normal debate.

I want some clarification in terms of what the Prime Minister meant yesterday when he said that it would be a confidence vote. I am in favour of a free vote and I do not want people to imply that I was not. I feel that this vote has to come from the heart and it has to come from the independent judgment of members of parliament.

What did the Prime Minister mean when he talked about a confidence vote on Tuesday night?

[Hepatitis C, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, with due respect, I disagree with the minister.

I want to go at it from another angle. Tuesday night there will be a confidence vote. If the government loses the confidence vote, obviously we move to an election. I am wondering what the theme would be of that election. Would they campaign on the theme of “The land is strong”? Remember that one in 1972? Would it be “Let them eat cake”? Or would the campaign theme be “Abandon the sick”?

What is the theme going to be of this upcoming election?

[Hepatitis C, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I want you to listen carefully to this one. If you were infected with hepatitis C on December 31, 1985, you would not be eligible for compensation. However, as crazy as it seems, but it is unfortunately the truth, if you were infected one day later, on January 1, 1986, you would be eligible.

Simply put, how can the minister stand in this place and defend such a bogus compensation package?

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I just want to remind the member that responsibility for the safety of the Canadian blood supply system rests totally and absolutely at the door of our national Minister of Health.

Given that, on questions and answers in this House over the last few months the minister has repeatedly stated that he did not want to see a lengthy, expensive, protracted legal case for these innocent victims. He said that he wanted to see a package that was compassionate and fair.

How does the member square that with what the party wants to do? On Tuesday the Prime Minister was cracking the whip, holding the big stick over them, forcing them to support something which they know in their hearts they cannot. Have the Liberals not swallowed themselves whole on this issue of compensation?

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the member for Prince George—Peace River on a great speech. He is absolutely right, in terms of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister who is in the Chamber.

The point I want to make is simply this. It brings out the worst in members of parliament when they are not allowed to vote freely on an issue which rests solely on the conscience of the member. I want to remind the Canadian people, and I know the member for Prince George—Peace River knows this, that the parliamentary secretary when he was a member of the health committee in 1993 wrote a dissenting report recommending that an inquiry into the tainted blood scandal be launched. That was done. Justice Krever has reported and now the parliamentary secretary is denying the very thing he supported.

I guess in the real world we would call that swallowing yourself whole. The parliamentary secretary swallowed himself whole on this one. Unfortunately that is because the Prime Minister is holding the big stick over him because he happens to be the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister of Canada. Sadly, there are only about two of them who showed up today to debate this: the parliamentary secretary to the health minister, who is waving the big stick over him, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister.

I would like the member for Prince George—Peace River to comment on the presence of these two and the outrageous defence of the indefensible. Perhaps the member could comment on that.

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I think we have all argued in this House that the decisions being made by the government in relation to this compensation package were made by accountants and lawyers. The human factor has to enter in here. I would rather see the minister bring in a psychiatrist, psychologist or counsellor of some sort rather than bean counters and more lawyers. The minister does need some administrative help but I think he needs more counselling than what he is probably getting.

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I lost part of that question. I know the member has been very complimentary in terms of his support. Specifically maybe one of the members could tell me exactly what he was asking because I was lost in the conversation.

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for your wise intervention.

Simply it is cruel and unusual punishment for members to sit on this side of the House and listen to the parliamentary secretary rant on. He never addresses the motion before this House, which is compensation for the victims.

I am going to take his minister's own words and remind him that the minister stood in this House last fall and this spring, in fact just hours before the compensation package was announced, and led all of us to believe that the government was going to do the right thing. He said he did not want these innocent victims to have to go through a lengthy and expensive protracted court procedure. We took the minister at his own words just hours before the compensation package was announced and he knowing full well that they would not be compensated.

I want to remind the Canadian people to stay tuned on Tuesday night and watch their members of parliament as to whether or not they will support this motion. We will support this motion because it is the right thing to do. We want all victims of hepatitis C compensated.

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, that will probably be the only chuckle we will get out of this entire debate because that is not a tenable position.

Effectively we have 20,000 to 40,000 Canadians left outside the compensation package. The government does not know how many there are. In fact, the other day when questioning the Minister of Health he stood and admitted the government does not know how many people have been locked outside the package. It could be 20,000, it could be 40,000, it could be more. But the victims of hepatitis C are innocent victims. No one in their right mind could support that type of position in a country as historically generous as Canada.

We can imagine what will now happen is that the innocent victims will have to go through the courts to get compensation. They will have to go through the legal system to get compensation. That is their only recourse.

Every legal mind in the country and I think every member in the House will know that the government's position is pretty weak on this one. It cannot sustain its position in the courts. It will lose its case in the courts. When that happens the compensation package will be much bigger than what the government imagines.

The government is going to put these people through a protracted court process. At the end of the day some of the victims we are trying to help today will not be here because some of them are very, very sick. That is the sum of what we have been saying in the House.

The minister is in a very tricky situation. In the past in the House I have accused the Minister of Finance of being the real health minister because what is playing out on the Liberal front benches is obviously the jockeying for leadership. I do not think it is any secret that the Prime Minister is not going to be here forever. Of course, it will be his choice when he decides to open it up to a leadership race, but the leadership race, as we all well know, is already unofficially under way.

Now who we have jockeying for position is the health minister and the finance minister, the two we consider to be the front runners as unbiased observers of the Liberal Party.

The minister stands in the House and says “Listen, I went to cabinet, I fought the good fight and it is just unfortunate that I lost that fight in cabinet”. Guess who he lost the fight to? The finance minister is the guy who is calling the shots.

When we point across here and put questions to the health minister we should in fact be talking to the Minister of Finance. He is the guy who is calling the shots. Unfortunately, the health minister is the weak link in the chain and he is taking the brunt of this decision.

When we talk about opening this package up and doing the right thing, the honourable thing, and re-examining this package in the hope that all victims would be compensated—and we want a straight yes or no answer—what does the minister do? He fudges on that answer. He does not say yes and he does not say no. Why? He does not dare. If he says “Yes, we'll open it up”, zing, he is immediately gone. He is no longer in the front row. He is gone. He is history. If he says “No, we're not going to open it up”, he is going to have the wrath of 30 million Canadians on him.

I think politics is being played out in the front benches of the Liberal Party, on the government side of the House. That is unfortunate because who are the victims in all of this? They are the hepatitis C victims who have been left outside the package. That is unfortunate.

Before I finish I want to remind the House and all Canadians that the government found $500 million to bail itself out of a botched helicopter deal. That was just the legal fees. That did not purchase one helicopter. I will remind the people around the country that it was just to buy itself out of a legal problem which it created.

It did not stop there. It did the same thing with Pearson airport. It got into difficulty there and it cost $750 million to bail itself out of that botched deal.

It does not end there. The present Minister of Health was also the guy who brought in the gun registration bill. That cost the Canadian taxpayers another half a billion dollars.

The government is saying that it has a heart and it wants to do the right thing. We have the Prime Minister sitting over there nodding in agreement with the health minister. All the time this is playing out on the floor of the House of Commons, the only man who is smiling is the Minister of Finance. That is unfortunate.

Some of the hepatitis C victims and some of the leadership of the movement were asking me the other day, when the women from Ireland came over to press their case and to show us how it was done, what would have to happen in terms of parliamentary procedure. How would we proceed? What would have to happen?

I said it was very simple. In a parliamentary democracy the Prime Minister, when he enters this House, can rise in his place and say “Listen, we know we made a mistake. The honourable thing is to reopen this package and compensate all victims”. It is as easy as that.

There is one person in this House who can change it. He can change it on a moment's notice. He does not have to put his caucus or even some of the cabinet ministers, who I know have reservations about this deal, through the meat grinder. He does not have to use a big stick to beat them into submission to support his position. All he has to do is do the honourable thing, rise in this House, get up on his hind legs and say “We have made a mistake. We are going to revisit this thing”.

In the eyes of the international world, this is going to be a black eye for Canada. You know the history of this country as well as I do and probably better, Mr. Speaker. We know you are a student of history. This country cannot afford in the international world to make those types of cold, irrational decisions because we have always been a leader in terms of humanitarian aid to the rest of the world. All we are doing is asking that the same rules apply to us right here in Canada. Let us set the example and do it right here in this country.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for your patience. I will entertain questions from other members. Let this debate continue and on Tuesday night when we come into the House for the vote, hopefully the people on the other side of the aisle will do the right thing and support us in support of this motion.

[Supply, April 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset I want to thank the member for Macleod for introducing the motion. I want to tell all members of the House that we will definitely be supporting the motion because I think this debate on the floor of the House of Commons is overdue.

One thing I am amazed at, and other members have touched on it, is the Prime Minister suggesting that this is going to be a confidence vote. That is absolutely ridiculous. Obviously we all know what happens in a confidence vote if the government should lose, and I think the government would certainly be in a position to lose this one because it does not even have the support of its back benches. What is the Prime Minister doing? He is using the big stick to crack the backbenchers into line, forcing them to vote against the motion, even though in their own hearts most of them would certainly support it. Some of them have been brave enough to say that publicly.

Just imagine if the government did lose the vote and it decided to take it to the people in an election campaign.

Mr. Speaker, I am thinking of some of the campaign slogans of the past, but you are probably old enough to remember this one. Do you remember in 1972 when Prime Minister Trudeau campaigned on the theme that the land is strong? You are nodding in agreement. You remember that.

I do not know what the campaign slogan would be this time, but I imagine the basis of the campaign would be: “We are running on this. We want a mandate from the Canadian people to deny innocent victims of hepatitis C compensation”.

Mr. Speaker, given your political past, do you believe that would be a tenable campaign position?

Mr. Speaker, you are absolutely right. I see you nodding in agreement.