Jason Kenney

[Supply, June 12th, 2001]

With unanimous consent.

[Supply, June 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I believe very strongly that this is one of the most important motions that has come before the House since I have been here. I believe this one measure, more than any other element of parliamentary reform, would empower individual MPs and hence their constituents.

Why do I say that? Because the whip, the Prime Minister's Office or the leader's office cannot control the private members' legislation or motions that members bring before this place. It is precisely those motions which can reflect issues that the political class and the centre of authority in the PMO on that side refuses to have brought forward for debate.

Many sensible bills come before this place, but many deal with issues which are not on the political agenda of the government or for whatever reason, on the political agenda of party strategists on the opposition side. No single step would do more to empower us than to give every MP at least one votable private member's bill. There is no good reason this ought not to happen because if each of the 300 MPs had a votable motion or bill that could easily be contained within the period of time for debate.

Here we are leaving the House two weeks before the parliamentary schedule indicates. There is plenty of time. We could extend hours, sit earlier, sit later or sit longer to debate issues which are of importance to Canadians and to this parliament, which are not brought forward on government orders.

I just want it on the record in questions and comments, and my colleague may want to reply, that on behalf of my constituents I firmly support this motion and I would hope that members opposite, as private members not as partisans, would accept this as a sensible incremental reform.

In closing, I understand that the so-called modernization committee had given near unanimous approval for this, except for one House leader for a minor party. That is unfortunate. I understand that even the government was commendably prepared to give support to a step of this nature to empower members through more votable private members' bills. Therefore, we are almost there. I would appeal to the House leader of that minor party to reconsider why it is that he is being a roadblock to major parliamentary reform in this measure.

[Supply, June 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my friend from Elk Island on his normal loquaciousness and eloquence on the subject of empowering individual members through the private member's bill process.

If we were to have a vote for parliamentarian of the year, I am sure that the member for Elk Island would rank in the top two or three. I am sure members opposite would agree that he is one of the most diligent, thoughtful and hardworking and one of the most present of parliamentarians. He is always here and always participating in debate.

For that reason, it is really quite disturbing to learn, as the hon. member just instructed us, that in his several years in this place he has not once had an opportunity to have a private member's bill come forward and be deemed votable, or even debatable as I understand it, because of the absurd arbitrariness of the luck of the draw system we have here.

I would ask the hon. member if he could expound on that. Has he in fact brought forward private members' bills on the order paper? If so, why have they not been allowed to be debated in the House?

Second, I had an experience where I had a private member's bill on the non-controversial subject of opening the national archives for research purposes for access to the census records of 1901. Unfortunately, a government member, I am sure on the instruction of the minister responsible, moved an amendment to my motion that essentially gutted it and rendered it effectively meaningless. All of the work I had done, dozens of hours of work, and all of the tens of thousands of letters, phone calls, faxes and e-mails from Canadians expressing concern about the issue and support for the bill, was vitiated by a dilatory motion introduced by a government member and passed by the government, which had the effect of completely gutting and undermining my private member's motion.

I wonder if my colleague from Elk Island would also reflect on whether he believes that private members' bills, should they be deemed votable, should be protected from such dilatory legislative manoeuvrings on the part of the government.

[Proceeds Of Crime (Money Laundering) Act, June 11th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am especially grateful to have the full attention of the government House leader. The Canadian Alliance, as my colleague has indicated, will support Bill S-16 which comes to us essentially as legislative amendments the Senate has sought to Bill S-22. I echo the concern of my colleague from Elk Island about the growing practice under the current government of initiating legislation in the other place.

However I would also highlight that Senate committees, in particular the Senate banking committee in this instance, do good work. Frankly they pay more attention to the details of legislation of this nature than do some of our own committees.

The bill deals with the proceeds of crime, otherwise known as money laundering. I rise to make the point as finance critic for the opposition that Canada's laws with respect to proceeds of crime are unfortunately not as robust as they ought to be. Other jurisdictions have taken far more significant legislative steps to plug loopholes which allow those who benefit from proceeds of crime to secrete assets in Canada.

I also second the remarks of my colleague from Kings—Hants who pointed out that although we have a legislative framework to deal with the proceeds of crime, we do not provide nearly sufficient resources to law enforcement agencies to enforce the laws.

In particular, the proceeds of crimes division or white collar crime division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is constrained by quite finite resources. This means major fraudsters have pretty significant resources at their disposal.

These people benefit from tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars of defrauded moneys and assets. They can afford the very best legal advice, lawyers, financial advice and accountants to hide their illegally gained assets and launder them so they become ostensibly legal funds. This is because police simply do not have sufficient resources to combat the problem on a large scale in Canada.

Consequently, victims of commercial crime increasingly are turning to lawyers to pursue civil remedies. That is a concern. I want to raise in the debate the need to consider giving, through our laws, greater latitude to victims of fraud to pursue civil remedies in court. In many Canadian jurisdictions it is difficult, if not impossible, for victims of fraud to collectively pursue so-called class action cases against fraudsters.

The legal framework in the United States allows for fairly robust civil remedies. For instance, when a telemarketing scam defrauds thousands of American seniors, they can put together a class action suit. They can find and hire skilled lawyers to investigate, track laundered assets, seek and in many instances obtain judgments against fraudsters, and restore defrauded moneys to the people to whom they rightfully belong.

In many Canadian jurisdictions similar remedies are not available. Individual victims of fraud are not able to collectively pool their resources and pursue legal remedies. In Canada police do not have the resources or advanced legal expertise to pursue money laundering cases, and affected individuals cannot collectively join together to finance the expensive investigatory and legal work required to pursue these cases. I raise this as an important point.

We need to join growing international efforts to stamp out money laundering. Literally billions of dollars are laundered in and through the Canadian economy every year. Multiple billions of dollars of assets in Canada belong to criminals indirectly and are controlled by criminals. Our police forces do not have the resources or expertise to fully trace the laundering process and restore justice to victims of fraudulent activity. Our legal framework limits the remedies available to those people.

I raise this as a matter of concern. I invite the government to revisit the issue in a broader perspective to find out how we can amend laws to be more clearly in compliance with the growing international intolerance of money laundering. I invite the government to find out how we can give more powerful civil remedies to victims of fraud. Finally, I invite the government to find out how we can better equip the RCMP and other police services across the country to plug loopholes, track down fraudulent and laundered assets and enforce the law to protect the tens of thousands of Canadians who are the unwitting victims of fraudulent scams.

I invite the government to consider all these things. However we in the Canadian Alliance Party will be supporting the bill.

[The Economy, June 11th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is the minister who is fearmongering. Whenever reasonable voices of concern are raised about the direction of our economy he accuses those voices of fearmongering. Instead of doing that, why does he not bring forth a responsible budget which would accelerate tax relief and debt reduction and restore absolute confidence to the markets? Or, is he happy with the fact that disposable incomes are 30% less than the United States, that we have a 65 cent dollar and that our tax burden is a third as high as in the United States? Is he happy with those facts? Does he think those fundamentals are right?

[The Economy, June 11th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the minister is ignoring what credible economists are saying and the signals of concern they are raising. Today George Vasic said that a mild technical recession through the second and third quarters of 2001 is a credible prediction.

The finance minister talks about being tax competitive with the United States. Taxes as a percentage of our gross domestic product are 42% versus 31% in the United States. How can the finance minister stand up here day after day and tell us that we are becoming more competitive with a nation whose total tax burden is nearly a third lower than ours?

[The Economy, June 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this party proudly stands for real tax relief for working families, not the kind of token tax relief which continues, by the way, to discriminate against single income families and which continues to see Canada fall behind the United States in terms of productivity.

This week we learned that Canada had lost 30% against the United States in terms of personal disposable income. How can the government continue to carry us through two years without a federal budget when Canadians have a disposable income 30% lower than the United States? While Canadians are getting poorer the government does not act. Why does it not bring in—

[The Economy, June 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, a tradition existed in this country before the present Minister of Finance appeared on the scene. Historically, democracy required that a budget be tabled every year. Now the Minister of Finance thumbs his nose at this tradition and at taxpayers' right to know the government's financial priorities.

Since parliament will soon adjourn for the summer, will the Minister of Finance tell us whether he will table a budget when we return in the fall?

[Sir John A. Macdonald Day And The Sir Wilfrid Laurier Day Act, June 7th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, one of the reasons it is a pleasure for me to rise to debate Bill S-14 is that it is in part reflective of a private member's bill I had in this place in the last parliament which would have formally recognized the birthday of our first great prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.

I am very pleased to see that one of the great parliamentarians in the other place, Senator Lynch-Staunton, has initiated this legislation and that a very fine parliamentarian in this place, the hon. member for Don Valley West, has chosen to introduce it. He himself is an advertisement for the need for parliamentary reform, that a member with such talents should be stuck in the backbenches. I ask the member to please not include that in his election brochure against the Canadian Alliance candidate next time. However I do believe that members such as he are a very good reason for empowering members of parliament.

I was about to enter the debate by simply commenting on the importance of the bill and how important it is to have a deeper understanding of our history. I was hoping to be completely non-partisan, as is the convention here, but I must say I was disappointed with the intervention of my colleague from Parkdale—High Park for whom I have considerable personal respect.

That speech must have been written by a bureaucrat in the department of heritage and handed to the parliamentary secretary. To suggest that we not pass a bill recognizing our two greatest prime ministers because we are not sure what criteria we should apply is precisely the problem in Canadians not recognizing our history in an appropriate fashion. The bureaucratic notion that the selection of the founding prime minister and the first great Liberal French Canadian prime minister above others is somehow an offence to equality or an offence to standards of political correctness is offensive.

Then we have the idea that we can properly recognize these prime ministers through some Internet program. How did we get on to government connectedness and so on? With respect, the attitude articulated by the parliamentary secretary to the heritage minister reflects precisely what is wrong about the recognition of Canadian history by the official culturecrats in the department of heritage.

That really has me spitting mad because there should be no question at all. We do not need to devise committees of bureaucrats, experts or politicians to say that there are two great and outstanding prime ministers who stand above all others in our early history, Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and that they deserve some formal institutional recognition not just of parliament but of all Canadian people. That ought not to be a matter of contention or debate.

Both these prime ministers recognized that Canada was a unique experiment in the history of liberal democracy, that it was in many respects a confluence of our British heritage and traditions with the culture, language and uniqueness of the French faction in North America, and in some respects kept an eye on the liberal republican democratic experiment in the United States.

In that light we can look to how our friends in the United Kingdom and the United States celebrate their heroes. I submit that both these countries have a very vivid and robust understanding of their particular histories, traditions and the great figures in those histories.

One need only walk down the Mall in Washington, D.C., to see the statues and monuments of their great past presidents, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, great generals and figures of American history. They have entrenched the memory of these men, mainly men, who were central in the history of their founding.

Similarly in the United Kingdom one can walk down the Mall in London and in Westminster parliament to see and feel a connection with history and tradition. One can recognize in a very vivid and robust way the central role of the monarch as the central political institution of the United Kingdom. Those traditions are celebrated in many different and vivid ways.

It is regrettable that in Canada, with those examples before us, those examples of our two closest and best friends, we lack that kind of robust celebration of our great historical figures and the great moments in our history.

This is an important bill. Symbols are important, but regrettably we do not maximize the values of our symbols in Canada.

I am sure that if John A. Macdonald or Wilfrid Laurier were to see the motion before us today they would find it ironic and would undoubtedly vote against it, in part because they would see the sort of recognition of mere politicians in a constitutional monarchy as something inappropriate.

However, I do think that these great men, who contributed so much to carve out of the northern half of this wild, intemperate continent a nation as unique as this, deserve our recognition in a very formal way, which this bill would seek to do by recognizing their birthdates on January 11 and November 20 respectively.

A couple of years ago a new think tank called the Dominion Institute conducted a survey of young Canadians to ascertain their familiarity with Canadian history. Regrettably, it found a shocking degree of ignorance among younger Canadians about our central historical moments and persons. In fact, I think fewer than one-quarter of young Canadians could actually name our founding prime minister.

Whatever excuse we have had for Canadian history in the school system has not worked. We need to reinforce national symbols of our history. Through such symbols people will learn what they may not learn in school about the central people and events in our history. That is one reason why the bill should be supported.

I am glad to see that there is a kindling of understanding about the need to revive Canadian history. Jack Granatstein wrote an excellent book entitled Who Killed Canadian History? which is an excellent survey of this issue. The foundation of the Dominion Institute itself was dedicated to reviving an interest in Canadian history. A recent first time publication by Stoddart, Canada's Founding Debates , is a compendium of the founding debates at the time of Confederation. It allows lay people a very accessible window on the debates that founded this parliament and this Dominion.

Let me quote from an intervention by John Macdonald at the legislative assembly on February 6, 1865 in speaking about his plans for this new federation. He said “We should feel sincerely grateful to beneficent providence that we have had the opportunity vouchsafed us of commonly considering this great constitutional change, this peaceful revolution, that we have not been hurried into it like the United States by the exigencies of war, that we have not had a violent revolutionary period forced on us as in other nations. Here we are in peace and prosperity, a dependent people with a government having only a limited and delegated authority and yet allowed without restriction and without jealousy on the part of the mother country to legislate for ourselves and peacefully and deliberately to consider and determine the future of Canada”.

This was, in a way, a modest vision but for a very immodest project, this country. We owe so much to the great and sacred memory of these two men that the passage of the bill is a trifle. I hope that the bill is votable and that all members will support it. I regret that there is one party in this place that has not even submitted a speaker to this bill, which is a reflection of the need for us to reinforce our remembrance of these great figures.

[Sir John A. Macdonald Day And The Sir Wilfrid Laurier Day Act, June 7th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure and honour to debate Bill S-14. I had a similar motion in fact—