Jason Kenney

[Summit Of The Americas, March 27th, 2001]

That would make 171, less the member for Waterloo—Wellington.

There are about 130 opposition members. I just wondered if my colleague would care to reflect on the fact that in this very important government motion on which he just spoke at 1.20 a.m. eastern time, there are eight times more members of the opposition in this place right now than members of the government—

[Summit Of The Americas, March 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from the constituency of Skeena who has done an excellent job here in consistently defending the interests of his constituents with respect to the pending economic disaster of potential softwood lumber tariffs being imposed by our American friends.

This is a very important debate on a major trade accord. Indeed, this take note debate was brought forward to this place in the form of a motion by the government, which holds, if I am not mistaken, 172 seats in this place.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, March 26th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. secretary of state, for whom I have a great deal of respect, for her heartfelt position on this and many other issues.

In her remarks she criticized the principle which guides the position of the Canadian Alliance with respect to the relationship between the Dominion of Canada and aboriginal peoples. She suggested that equality is not an appropriate principle for those relationships.

The principle of equality, which my party articulates in a classical small l liberal sense, is predicated on the ancient Liberal principle that ethnicity and race ought not to be a factor in a relationship between the state and the individual. This was a principle very strongly articulated by none other than the late right hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and of course manifested in his 1971 white paper on Indian affairs, where he proposed a paradigm similar to the one articulated by the Canadian Alliance.

Could the minister reflect as to whether she thinks that Prime Minister Trudeau was wrong for advocating the same position? She says that the Alliance simply wants to take rights away from aboriginal people when in fact what we want to do is for instance grant individual aboriginals property rights which in many cases they do not currently have.

Rather than a kind of confrontational approach, would she consider that there is some merit, certainly Pierre Trudeau saw it, in the kind of approach that we are advocating and perhaps a more constructive dialogue would be a better way to go forward?

[Privilege, March 22nd, 2001]

You bet it is.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 22nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-18.

The official opposition, the Canadian Alliance, supports the principle of equalization payments, but we do have certain concerns relating to this particular bill.

The official opposition does support in principle the constitutional obligation of equalization but has particular concerns with respect to the bill.

We just heard a fairly comprehensive overview of this legislation from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance. We also heard him set it within the larger context of federal fiscal transfers to the provinces. However, the bill is quite narrow in its scope, much narrower than my hon. colleague's comments would suggest. It is strictly limited to increasing or lifting for one particular fiscal year the ceiling for equalization payments. It does so for the fiscal year 1999-2000, now nearly two years past.

At the outset, my colleagues and I are bound by the democratically approved policy of our party to support the principle of equalization. Our manifesto states:

We recognize that different provinces and regions of Canada have different levels of wealth but all wish to provide similar services to their residents. Therefore we are committed to the constitutional principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide the residents with reasonably comparable levels of basic services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.

We do support the notion that in a large and complex federation with fairly significant disparities in wealth, income and standards of living the federal government ought to play some function to equalize access to core public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.

Having said that, we do believe that the current formula and structure of equalization should be open for serious debate and review. Most provinces have called for such debate. We in the official opposition would like to be on the record as embracing that. We believe there are many problems with the current system, many unintended consequences that have the effect of both penalizing those provinces that are successful in terms of economic development and growth and penalizing taxpayers in the so-called have provinces.

It is often observed that in a country as wealthy as Canada it is inappropriate to suggest that we have seven provinces out of ten that are perpetual have not provinces. The mentality of the current equalization system perpetuates an attitude among some which is contrary to economic development.

One point we in the opposition have raised and hope to explore is the idea of opening negotiations to look at allowing provinces that are now bringing on stream certain non-renewable resource revenues to not be penalized in their equalization payments from the federal government for those new revenues for at least a period of time.

As the system is currently designed, there is what many economists refer to as a welfare trap phenomenon, where earning incremental income, or in this case developing incremental revenues to the provincial treasury, results in a proportionate reduction in federal transfers to the equalization program. This is a perverse incentive against domestic economic development among the so-called have not provinces. That is one of the many areas that ought to be explored.

We ought to explore whether indeed the formulae are applied or calculated on a fair and equitable basis and whether all provinces rather than some provinces should be included in the calculation of the equalization formula, as some provinces have suggested. We ought to take a hard and close look at the application of both the floor and the ceiling of equalization. We should see whether this program is really working to equalize access to core public services across the country at comparable levels of taxation.

It has been observed by academic economists including, for instance, those at the C.D. Howe Institute, that perhaps a better way of equalizing access to quality public services across this broad nation is through income sensitive transfers to persons as opposed to insensitive transfers from one government to another.

These economists have asked us to reflect as policy makers on the paradox, for instance, that there are members of, say, my constituency, a western riding in Alberta that is the largest contributor to equalization, who earn below average incomes. They are from modest families with modest means who are nevertheless obliged to pay a very large share of federal taxes. A portion of their taxes goes to finance the equalization program.

Most of my constituents would not object to the general principle of sharing opportunity and wealth across the nation. However, these economists ask us to reflect on how efficient this transfer of wealth is from government to government and from taxpayer to taxpayer in a way that is not sensitive to income. When the lower middle income family in my riding pays more taxes to finance equalization, it may have the impact of improving the road system, or the health care system which, for instance, is used by, among others, higher than average income people in other provinces.

Some economists have suggested that the current way the program is designed is perhaps not the best way to maximize the equalization of opportunities across the country. They suggest that instead the best way to do that is to redistribute wealth from higher income people, wherever they live and in whichever province they happen to reside, to lower income people, the working poor, who need a hand up. That is an interesting observation by academic economists, which I think ought to be included in the broader and more thorough review of the principle of equalization and its application.

I also think that this larger debate unfortunately has not been engaged by the government. Instead, the government tends to approach the issue of equalization on an ad hoc basis and in the crucible of very political negotiations with the provinces. That is not necessarily the best way to make good public policy.

I would point out, for instance, that the bill brings to us an amendment that lifts the ceiling on equalization payments for the fiscal year 1999-2000, pursuant to an agreement struck between the Prime Minister and his provincial counterparts on September 11 of last year.

Hon. members will no doubt recall that the date, September 11, 2000, was about a month before a federal election was called. Certainly the Prime Minister had the electoral timeline in mind. All of the premiers and public commentators were certainly aware of the very distinct possibility of a federal election on the horizon. It was in that very politicized context that this agreement was reached.

Some commentators have said that what we have before us today, this lifting of the ceiling, was a political demand put on the table in a horse trading session with the premiers and that the Prime Minister agreed to lift the ceiling for at least one year. That is not exactly how we ought to make serious, sober public policy decisions regarding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, in this instance increasing equalization payments by some $792 million.

The ceiling is there for a reason: to protect the federal government from unforeseen increases in these payments. It is matched by a floor as well so that provinces are protected from an unforeseen reduction in equalization payments. For some 20 years now, I think, we have had this system that precludes wild variations or aberrations in the payments, either too much or too little, to the provinces. For the Prime Minister to simply politicize this very important part of the equalization structure in the crucible of an election campaign shows that he is not really committed to a serious, sober review of equalization and its application. That is something we would call on the government to engage in.

I am pleased to say that my hon. colleague from Portage—Lisgar, who is the official opposition critic for regional equity, will be speaking to the bill later today and will perhaps outline some of the principles he thinks should be included in a general review of equalization and the federal-provincial transfer arrangements.

Our party did support certain elements of the accord reached between the premiers and the Prime Minister in September of last year, particularly with respect to the restoration of funds stripped out of the Canada health and social transfer fund since the 1995 Liberal budget. I know I do not need to remind this place that in that budget and since that budget, the federal government removed some $23 billion in real hard cash dollars that were designated to the provinces to finance the highest priority program areas of Canadians, namely health care, higher education and other social priorities.

In poll after poll Canadians register health care as their single highest public spending priority. Yet when the government was given an opportunity to demonstrate its fiscal priorities, what did it choose? It chose to slash, gut and eviscerate health care funding to the provinces, a decision that had a very clear and tangible impact on the delivery of care to Canadians in need of health care. My colleagues and I for several years now have been consistent in saying that this was the wrong choice to make, a choice which the Prime Minister sought to undo in the September accord of last year, from which this bill derives.

It was the wrong choice to make because it reflected the wrong priorities. Between 1993 and 1999 the deficit was eliminated. About two-thirds of that deficit elimination came about through increased revenues to the federal government, in part because of higher tax rates imposed by it and in part because of automatic tax increases through the then deindexation of the tax code and various other revenue measures. Basically because Canadians were working harder and working longer hours, they were paying more to the federal government.

About two-thirds of the so-called deficit elimination is attributable to higher taxes which are now at the highest level in Canadian history as a percentage of our gross domestic product. It leaves us with the highest income tax burden relative to GDP in the G-8 and, further, the highest corporate income taxes in the OECD, the 23 principal industrialized economies of the world. That is the legacy of the fiscal policy of tax increases over the past decade.

The other third of the deficit reduction can be traced to the so-called spending restraint. It is the government's worst spending cuts. Three-quarters of the spending cuts involved in the deficit elimination exercise came about in the $23 billion reduction in transfers for health care to the provinces. Another very large chunk came about through gutting the capacity of the Department of National Defence to provide the resources for our men and women to defend our sovereignty and meet our international obligations.

If we take out national defence and the CHST, the rest of the federal government averaged a spending cut of only 3%. That reflects the fiscal priorities of the government. It was willing to cut health care transfers by one-third, by about 33%, and to virtually gut the capacity of our defence forces; but when it came to the myriad of other wasteful Ottawa bureaucratic spending programs they remained virtually untouched.

I will give some examples of wasteful programs: the Minister of Canadian Heritage with free flag giveaways, multimillion dollar handouts, grants to Liberal special interest groups, subsidies to bloated crown corporations, and the Minister of Industry with billions of dollars wasted on corporate welfare.

Then there is the general waste of mismanagement, duplication and misadministration of the federal public sector. It was virtually left untouched because the easier choice for the government was to pass the buck on to the provinces rather than fixing its own problems in its own backyard. They in turn had to pass the buck on to health care consumers. That is a synopsis of the fiscal choices of the government during the past several years.

Bill C-18 has come before us as part of a package. It was a sweetener to have the provinces accept less than a full loaf in terms of restoration of the CHST transfers to 1993 levels. In the September accord last year the governments agreed to increase those health transfers to only $21.1 billion. The money taken out since 1993 was at least $23 billion. The government was still about $2 billion short on its CHST cut in the accord that it negotiated with the provinces last September. In order to make up for this continued shortfall in critically needed health care funding, it offered to raise the ceiling on equalization. That is why the bill is before us today.

I would like Canadians and my colleagues to understand the political and fiscal context of the bill. In other words, had the government not made the wrong choice to slash health transfers by a third in 1995, had it not stubbornly stuck by that, and had it instead made different choices and reduced wasteful spending in Ottawa programs that do not affect real people, we would not have Bill C-18 before us today. The provinces would not have been so short of revenue that the poor ones would have demanded this aberrant lifting of the ceiling on equalization.

In its frantic pre-election effort to cover up the enormous mistake it made in terms of slashing the health care transfers, the government decided to make a change in the pre-existing, longstanding arrangements with the provinces with respect to equalization.

I do not quibble for one moment with certain provincial governments and premiers for seeking any way they possibly could to get more federal transfers into their provincial treasuries to reinvest in the health care and other social spending which had been stripped by the CHST. I do not object at all to their principled and effective advocacy on behalf of provincial taxpayers and health care consumers in this respect.

I am sure all my colleagues would agree that it would be in the best interests of the administration to have predictability and stability in the application of equalization agreements. We ought to try to play by the rules. Surely we could all agree that it is good public policy not to make exceptions from year to year. However the reason the government made the exception it did in the bill before us today with respect to the ceiling on equalization was to cover up for its own political mistake, its enormous policy blunder in its 33% cut in health transfers to the provinces since 1995.

We do not feel the government has much moral authority to come before us and say that it has decided out of the kindness of its heart for one particular fiscal year to raise the ceiling on equalization payments to the provinces to account for unexpected economic events two fiscal years ago. That is nonsense.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance knows as well as I do that bureaucrats in the Department of Finance are no doubt rolling their eyes today as they watch the debate go forward. They know this is undermining the overall integrity of their program. In a way it, politically it had to happen in order to reinvest the money that had been taken out of the health transfer which the government refused to put back in.

Without a doubt the bureaucrats are standing there knowing that it may be good politics but it is awfully bad public policy. I would just say that we see over and over again this pattern of misplaced priorities leading to bad policy outcomes and then the government trying to wiggle its way out. That is what it is doing with the bill today.

Let me also say, lest the government try to paint itself as the great dispensary of Liberal generosity to the provinces, that this is a one time, one year deal. It does not intend to continue lifting the ceiling in perpetuity. If I had an opportunity to ask the finance minister's parliamentary secretary, I am sure he would be opposed to lifting the ceiling in perpetuity.

He would probably argue that it would contravene the rules set out in the agreements and that if we lift the ceiling, we should lift the floor and so on and so forth. I am sure he would make that argument, but somehow he avoided that question. He avoided mentioning why exactly this deal happened and why it applies to one year and one year only.

Another point I would like to add is that the practice of retroactive legislation in general is not a good one for parliament to pursue. When we consider fiscal matters, estimates, spending authorizations, ways and means motions, authorizing tax measures or any form of legislation, a principle of parliament ought to be that it ought not to try to go back and change history, as it seeks to do in this bill. We should make things right the first time.

Later today we will be considering Bill C-17, another example of the ham-fistedness with which the government administers its legislative program. We will be making so-called housekeeping amendments to correct mistakes that were made in the bill some time ago.

An enormous amount of parliament's time is consumed with correcting the mistakes the government makes in its legislation. Today we are seeking to change an agreement with the provinces from two fiscal years ago to help save the Prime Minister's hide. It was a deal he made at the last minute before a federal election to make up for his callous and irresponsible 33% cuts in health care transfers.

On that point I express my disappointment with the government for the manner in which it has handled its fiscal relationships with the provinces over the past number of years. I express my hope, although not my expectation, that it will begin to get things right in terms of long term stable and predictable cash transfers, tax points and equalization to the provinces so that we do not have these last minute deals and we do not need this kind of retroactive corrective remedy in legislation.

[The Economy, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the minister can repeat that fantasy as often as he likes, but the reality is that we continue to have the highest income taxes in the G-7; the highest corporate income taxes in the OECD, says the OECD; and the second highest level of debt in the OECD, says the OECD. After the Bush tax cuts go through we will be losing, not gaining, ground with the Americans in terms of competitiveness.

With the 63 cent dollar today and with inflation creeping up, how could the finance minister continue to keep his head in the sand? Why does he not bring in a real budget with real fiscal stimulus that saves our dollar and our economy?

[The Economy, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian dollar has dropped by half a cent again today and inflation has moved up to the top of the band allowed by the Bank of Canada. This means the bank's ability to match yesterday's U.S. interest rate cuts is very limited.

Economists are saying that all the burden is being placed on the shoulders of the governor of the bank to shore up our dollar and our economy. When will the finance minister finally begin to do his part by bringing in a spring budget with fiscal stimulus, that is a long term plan to pay down our debt and make our economy more competitive?

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the notion of increasing the votability of private members' bills would tremendously empower MPs as independent legislators. Yet again, because there is something of a convention of quasi free votes on those matters, I think we would see many good ideas coming forth.

However, I also think it is time for us to seriously consider complementing what is best about this institution and reviving it by taking power that exists in the Prime Minister's Office and giving it to people. I am a cynic. I am a pessimist. We could change the standing orders of this place, but the conventions exist. The centralization of power exists not because of the standing orders but because of politics and power and because of ambition and the desire of people to get into cabinet, to get parliamentary secretaryships or even to take trifling trips abroad. As long as those carrots and sticks exist in the Prime Minister's Office I am afraid that amendments to the standing orders such as those contemplated by this committee will not be sufficient.

For that reason I would like to empower directly the people through measures such as citizen initiated referenda, where the people could bring forward measures for the consideration of this parliament and the electorate as a whole which government or the legislature is unwilling or unable to consider itself. That, I think, would also be an effective check and balance against the increasing centralization of political power in the hands of the courts, a matter which is of grave concern to myself and my colleagues as well.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am overwhelmed. I do not know what to say, but I thank the member for his intervention.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for your forbearance in the chair. I believe I am the last sheet to be hung here. I commend you. I suspect you will be chair of the committee contemplated in the motion and I gather the deputy clerk is slated to be clerk as well. Your presence late this evening indicates your commitment to this process.

I am also pleased to have seen the general quality of the debate and the spontaneity of most of the interventions contra the normal practice of too many members reading scripted speeches. Let me just say as a parenthetical remark that one parliamentary reform we ought to consider is the adoption of the rule of the Westminster mother parliament prohibiting verbatim reference to scripts for speech making in the House and allowing members to speak from their minds and not those of bureaucrats or their staff.

I wish to say at the outset that one of the reasons I chose to run, to represent my constituents and to serve in this place, for which I have enormous respect as something of an amateur student of parliamentary history, is precisely my great concern about the deterioration of democracy in Canada and the vitality of this institution.

There has been much commented on today but scholars such as Donald Savoie, a leading political scientist at the University of Moncton, three years ago published a book called Governing from the Centre: the Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics in which he quoted an anonymous member of this current government's cabinet as saying that the cabinet was nothing more than a focus group for the Prime Minister's Office.

He said that the House of Commons was nothing more than a talking shop. In a sense he confirmed what we have always known, what the late Right Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, that members of parliament are nobodies 50 feet off the Hill. I suspect that many people would agree that members of parliament outside the executive branch are essentially nobodies on the Hill today.

For that reason I want to very pointedly argue that this has led to a kind of cynicism about this institution and, as my colleague before said, political institutions in general. Cynicism is a very corrosive thing when applied to institutions in a political culture that require trust and active involvement on the part of the citizenry.

As long as people, voters, taxpayers and citizens regard this institution as a futile talking shop, a de facto electoral college for the executive branch, their faith in democracy and democratic institutions will be undermined and we will see the consequences of that.

In other words, we cannot take democracy for granted. It is a system that has evolved. This constitutional monarchy, with a democratic legislature and a representative legislature, is a system that has evolved over centuries of struggle. It did not arrive overnight.

There is nothing to guarantee that it will exist in perpetuity. Neither a written constitution nor a judiciary filled with good intentions will preserve the democratic spirit of this constitutional monarchy. All that will guarantee that in perpetuity is the will of the citizenry, and we corrode that with the kind of centralization of power which exists today.

In an historical perspective, for centuries the commoners in this tradition fought the crown to obtain the power to represent their interests, particularly the power of the purse. Over centuries, from the 14th century right through to the 20th century, that power was devolved from the crown into the legislature, into the Commons.

In the latter half of the last century in this parliament we have seen the delineation between the crown and the legislature blurred. Essentially the ancient power and prerogatives of the medieval crown which were exercised with great authoritarian zeal in British monarchies have now been usurped by the prime minister. The prime minister, who acts in the name of the crown, has become a modern monarch for all intents and purposes.

For that reason I am very concerned about the terms of reference and the title of this committee which calls for recommendations on the modernization and improvement of the procedures of the House of Commons.

Virtually all changes in the standing orders over the years which have diminished the prerogatives and powers of individual members and the opposition parties to delay bills, to force further consideration of them, to add amendments, have occurred in the name of modernization, efficiency and improvement.

The one mention in the throne speech of modernizing parliamentary practice was electronic voting. What I heard was the government whip, a position with which you, Mr. Speaker, have some familiarity, wanting to reduce the time it takes for members to vote so as to remove from the opposition parties one of the few opportunities they yet have to filibuster government bills to which they are strenuously opposed, a tactic which has been employed by this and other opposition parties.

With electronic voting, a modernization, an efficiency measure, we would take less time to vote. That is precisely the problem. Time is one of the very few levers at the disposal of the opposition to slow down the otherwise unrestrained juggernaut of government legislation.

I send out a very strong caution to my colleagues at the outset of this committee. We do not need to modernize this place. We need to rediscover the ancient prerogatives which reside in this place that we have allowed to be diminished by the executive branch amending the standing orders year after year, decade after decade, and by convention centralizing power in the hands of the executive at the expense of this legislature.

We do not need to modernize this place. We need to reform it, and reform it in a radical way. The Latin root of radical is actually roots. We need to go back to our roots. Radical reform means going back to our history, and that means understanding that we are individual actors, individual moral actors in this place as legislators, and not cogs in some wheel created by the executive branch.

One of the principal ways we could do this is by ending the absurd charade of the confidence convention. I heard the government House leader say that it would require an amendment to the constitution. That is absolute nonsense.

The topical issue even in today's National Post by professor emeritus of political science Jack McLeod, says:

It is a mistake to believe the power of party discipline is carved in constitutional stone. Parties were not mentioned in the original BNA Act of 1867. For that matter, neither was the nature of the Cabinet, the powers of the prime minister, or in fact the basic principle of responsible government.

There is absolutely no reason why the government could not, as previous governments have in the past 20 years, regard motions or bills defeated as simply motions and bills defeated, and not as measures of confidence in the government. It is a ruse by which the whip maintains otherwise total control of his or her caucus and it is an aberration amongst the parliamentary forms of government, our sister parliaments in the Commonwealth. Even our mother parliament allows far greater latitude in freedom of voting than we do in this place.

My colleagues and the official opposition have outlined a whole series of potential reforms, 21 to be precise. I will not be exhaustive in listing all those, except to say that the power of the free vote would be the most significant to wield.

In closing, I also hope that the special committee will not limit its purview so narrowly as to preclude consideration of broader democratic reforms which would require the involvement of the House, such as the adoption of recall measures, citizen initiated referenda measures and electoral reform, so that we could have a lower house that would actually reflect the plurality and diversity of political views in the country.

If we seize this opportunity with courage, we may actually be able to see a revival of the democratic spirit in this place. That is my hope. Unfortunately, based on history, that is not my expectation.