Jason Kenney

[Human Rights, April 3rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Supreme Court of Canada launched an unprecedented attack on democracy and on our constitutional order in what can only be described as an exercise of raw judicial power.

In the name of the charter of rights and freedoms the court ruled that Albertans do not have the right or freedom to govern themselves. In the name of the Constitution the unaccountable justices created a law that had been explicitly rejected by Alberta's elected officials and they did so basing this judgment on a right that cannot be found in the Constitution and one which was explicitly rejected by this parliament and the legislatures when the charter of rights was ratified.

In the name of protecting basic rights, the court has violated the rights of people to freely associate around common values in a private religious institution.

The Vriend decision was not about interpreting the Constitution. It was not about protecting rights. It was about unelected and unaccountable justices taking upon themselves the position of elected legislators and legislating from the bench.

Abraham Lincoln said that the candid citizen must confess that if—

[Hepatitis C, April 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, that is not an answer. What we are getting is just more and more of this kind of stonewalling. The minister is in the middle of a political firestorm because Canadians want the government to show compassion, not more rhetoric.

Instead of repeating the lines he has been given by his health department lawyers, why does he not do what the victims want and give them justice and the kind of rewards they deserve after the incompetence of the government's management of the blood system?

[Hepatitis C, April 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is instructive that the Liberal backbenchers are not asking their ministers here about hepatitis C. We know they were doing it in caucus yesterday and afterwards.

When the government decided 10 years ago to compensate AIDS victims no one was more supportive than the Liberal opposition. The current heritage minister called it a national tragedy back then. That was when the Liberals were in opposition. That was when they had principles.

I have a question for the Prime Minister. Why does he do exactly the opposite when he is in government than he said he would do when he was in opposition?

[Euthanasia And Assisted Suicide, March 25th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, some of the pertinent and important technical aspects of the debate that have been addressed by some of my hon. colleagues, questions such as the Senate committee hearings on these matters and the availability of palliative care, are all important issues and ought to have a bearing on the judgment we make here today.

However, ultimately what is before us today is a question fundamental to the nature of liberal democracy, a question that drives to the heart of what it is to be a citizen, a question of how we exercise personal liberty, and a question of the fundamental rights vested in parliament to protect on behalf of its citizens.

The preamble to the Constitution of Canada states that “whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. This was no accident. Its placement in the charter reflects a long and central tradition in the theory of liberal democracy, the notion that we do not grant rights unto ourselves. We do not create ourselves and we therefore do not create our own rights, but we are created and rights are bestowed upon us. Fundamental human rights such as the right to life are inalienable. Even individuals cannot through the exercise of some radical personal autonomy alienate rights which cleave to the human nature of individuals because they were granted to us by our Creator.

This is what the preamble of our constitution suggests. This is what the first section of our constitution suggests where it enumerates fundamental rights, the very first of which is the right to life.

This is an echo of the foundational document of liberal democracy, the American Declaration of Independence which states that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these is the right to life.

Certain inalienable rights are rights that cannot be alienated by a legislature, rights that cannot be alienated by a doctor whose business is killing and rights that cannot be alienated even by ourselves.

In this motion we are ultimately discussing whether or not parliament will grant to people the right to destroy themselves and the right to destroy the inviolable dignity stamped on them by the Creator of which our constitution speaks.

I say that we must never, in this society animated by a profound understanding of the inviolable dignity of the human person, allow a radical notion of personal autonomy or a disordered understanding of human liberty to overcome our most profound obligation as people, as creatures and as legislators to protect human life.

If parliament were to consider the motion and were consequently to pass legislation legalizing euthanasia and what is euphemistically referred to as physician assisted suicide, parliament would be entering the final taboo which would permit the wilful killing of the human person.

This century, the 20th century, what Pope John Paul II referred to as the century of tears, is tragically filled with a history of political movements based on the disordered notion of the authority of the state or of the authority of the individual which has resulted in the deaths of thousands and millions of human persons and sometimes the death of those persons based on physician assisted suicide and on euthanasia.

We must as legislators look seriously at the history of this century and understand that when the inviolable value of human life becomes compromised we all stand at risk.

I call on my hon. colleagues this evening to vote against what I think is a very dangerous motion.

[Taxation, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in debate on Motion No. 306. I want to commend the hon. member for Winnipeg Transcona for what is a well intentioned and commendable effort.

His objective clearly is to provide some form of tax relief for families in need to assist them in making choices for their families with respect to youth activities.

First of all, I see several technical flaws with the motion. For instance, the motion fails to define what constitutes youth activities, fails to define youth. There is no standard definition of youth in any of the tax statutes.

The cost of this tax expenditure is nowhere defined in the motion. Therefore while I think it is well intentioned, the motion itself has not been well thought out.

My principal objection is that the motion seeks to make choices for parents by defining exactly what kind of activities they can use to reduce their taxes payable. I think this is entirely the wrong approach.

The hon. member has touched on a very real problem. Families with children have experienced a shrinking disposable income now for over 15 years in this country.

Year after year they find there is less money at the end of the day in their bank accounts, in their wallets and in their cheque books to fund the kinds of important activities for their children and families, activities that supplement the basic education of children in the school system.

He is right in pointing out the plethora of fundraising activities which families find themselves participating in to finance recreational programs and other educational athletic programs and so forth. But the hon. member for Winnipeg—Transcona suggested during his remarks that instead of Girl Guides and minor hockey teams going out and raising these moneys by selling chocolate bars and cookies, the funding for these programs should come from the public treasury.

With all due respect to the hon. member, there actually is some value in young people learning that there is no such thing as a free lunch. To suggest that Girl Guides should apply to the federal government for a grant as opposed to going out and trying to sell their wares, to learn about the free enterprise system, to learn about charity and learn about the reliance on other people's good will is misguided indeed.

My principal objection is that the motion seeks to apply a band-aid where radical surgery is needed with respect to the taxation faced by Canadian families. Canadian families on average now spend more on taxation than they do on food, shelter and clothing combined. As I have said in this place many times, I think quite frankly such a tax burden is morally questionable, a burden that consumes more than the basic necessities of an average family. The family tax index which calculates the total burden of all direct and indirect taxes on average families suggests that the average Canadian family spends over 40% of its annual income on taxation to the three levels of government.

Just last week the C.D. Howe Institute released a new study which suggested that the average marginal tax rate faced by Canadian families was over 53%. Essentially what we have done in this Parliament and in this country is create a situation where families are working harder and harder. We have more two income families leaving children at home alone in the young formative years in order to go out into the workforce to pay for the taxes that have been levied on them by politicians in this place.

The solution to that problem, the solution to the frustration faced by so many families in financing the basic needs of their children is not to use the tax code as an instrument of social engineering. It is not for politicians in this legislature or any other legislative assembly to pick and choose which activities are more deserving of exemption from taxation than others. Picking and choosing certain activities is a form of social engineering. What we ought to strive to do in this Parliament is to let families make the choices that they need to make according to their own priorities. It is the principle of choice, it is the principle of freedom which ought to animate all the decisions we make in this place, particularly with respect to the tax system.

The Income Tax Act was introduced in this place as a temporary war tax act in 1917 to finance the needs of the then Dominion of Canada during the great war. It was a temporary act which totalled 12 pages. It read 12 pages in length. Today's Income Tax Act now numbers over 1,300 pages and includes several hundred more pages of associated regulations which deal with the application of this hugely complicated tax code.

We now employ over 43,000 bureaucrats in the Department of National Revenue to administer that 13,000 page tax code.

It took 43,000 bureaucrats to administer a tax code so complex and so lengthy that no person in this country understands it. I dare say those of us here who write those tax laws have never read a substantial portion let along the entire Income Tax Act. I suggest that even the most expert tax authorities in this country do not have a comprehensive understanding of the behemoth, the monster we have created in the Income Tax Act.

The reason this tax code grows and grows is well intentioned but ultimately shortsighted efforts like the motion before us today. Parliamentarians and governments have sought to use the tax code as an instrument of social engineering, placing level on level and layer on layer of complexity to create innumerable deductions, exemptions, credits, write-offs and loopholes in the system. Each one of these creates new complexities within the legislation which requires more bureaucrats to administer it. This creates a greater need for private sector tax practitioners to interpret it and apply it. Meanwhile the poor bedraggled taxpayer at the end of the year is faced with an incomprehensible requirement.

It is interesting that we are discussing this as we approach the end of the tax year. Millions of Canadian families are going to be sitting around their kitchen tables late at night with their pocket calculators, pencils and their reams of paper trying to understand this byzantine, incomprehensible, opaque tax code we have imposed on them because of the innumerable regulations, exemptions, deductions and credits which have been inspired by motions like the one before us today.

What my colleagues and I in the Reform caucus propose to do is rather than carving out little loopholes in the tax code, as the hon. member for Winnipeg Transcona proposes, we propose to deliver general tax relief to all Canadian families. This will enable them to make choices about how to dispose of their scarce income. We would do this by raising the basic personal exemption to $7,900 not for some families like this government has proposed but for all families. We would raise the spousal amount to $7,900.

We would convert the current child care tax deduction which discriminates against traditional families to a refundable credit available to all families. In sum, we would deliver $2,000 of tax relief for the average Canadian family. This would be appreciably greater for low income families with children at home. Let families make the decisions by allowing them to keep more of the money they have earned rather than taking it from them and using the tax code to engineer social outcomes.

[Liberal Party, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the list of Liberal patronage appointees goes on: the son of a prominent Liberal organizer and fundraiser for André Ouellet the former president of the Longueuil Liberal Riding Association; the former vice-president for eastern Quebec Liberals; a Trudeau era minister and the godfather of the Atlantic; a former legislative assistant to several Ontario Liberal MPPs; a close associate of the Clerk of the Privy Council, Madam Bourgon; the former vice-president, French, for the Liberal Party; a former Liberal Party president and cabinet minister; a prominent Liberal backroom boy and defeated Liberal MP; the defeated Liberal candidate in Kindersley-Lloydminister from 1988; the former western vice-president of the Liberal Party; the former president of the Vancouver Quadra Liberal Riding Association; the former president of the Liberal National Women's Commission and a failed candidate; a key Manitoba organizer for the Prime Minister's leadership race; the president of the Saint Maurice Liberal Riding Association; a friend of former Liberal minister Doug Young from New Brunswick; the 1984 Ontario campaign chairman for the Prime Minister; and the former president of the Manicouagan Liberal Riding.

The list goes on.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Motion No. 3 regarding the proposal to establish an annual report from the Minister of Finance on the adequacy of the cash portion of the Canada health and social transfer to sustain the principles of the Canada Health Act.

As the hon. member for Medicine Hat indicated, the Reform caucus, the official opposition, is opposed to this motion. I recognize there is a worthwhile principle at play here, namely an attempt to increase transparency and accountability in the federal government's management of the CHST cash transfers. Ultimately however we are concerned that this motion would increase the federal government's meddling ability in what is an area of exclusive provincial jurisdiction under our constitutional framework, namely health care.

I do think it is an opportune motion for us to reflect, as the member who spoke just before me did, on the way in which the government has managed the cash transfers to the provinces under the health and social transfer.

In the leaders debate during the 1993 election the current Leader of the Opposition asked the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister specifically what the Liberal Party's commitment was to the level of federal transfer payments for health care. He asked the now Prime Minister if he would keep transfers at the current level and the now Prime Minister responded “I said yesterday in replying to Monsieur Bouchard that I promise that they will not go down and I hope that we will be able to increase them”.

The current Prime Minister running for office in 1993 representing the entire Liberal Party of Canada and all of its candidates said that he hoped that they would be able to increase them and the health care transfers would not go down. Those were the words he said then, words that were echoed in Liberal red book one which spoke about maintaining the health care transfers at their current level. That came from the leader of a party that spent four and a half years in the House, from 1988 to 1993, relentlessly criticizing the then government for having cut the very same health transfers.

This government has excelled in its acts of political hypocrisy. Among those many acts of political hypocrisy, from the GST to free trade, to NAFTA, perhaps the greatest one of all was for the Liberals to trumpet their traditional Liberal commitment to health care funding but then proceed, once having taken the reins of power, to ruthlessly slash those transfers not by 5% or 10% but by 35%. It was done unilaterally and without consultation or input from the provinces that have to deliver those programs. The $7 billion cut in those transfer payments was passed on to the provincial premiers, governments and legislatures who have to administer those programs.

Very few things get me more upset than hearing Liberal MPs and ministers rise in this House and criticize people like Premier Harris of Ontario for his management of health care. I hear Liberal MP after Liberal MP criticize Premier Harris for having increased health care funding by $1 billion, all the while reducing taxes for Ontarians, while absorbing $2 billion in transfer cuts for health care imposed by the federal government. The hypocrisy is truly shocking.

Hon. members opposite know that it is shocking. I had the great misfortune of attending the Liberal Party of Canada convention down the street. I sat and listened to the resolutions brought before the floor. Very few of them were debated of course. After all, the delegates to that convention know that policy for the Liberal Party is made in the dark backrooms of the Prime Minister's office and not in the front rooms of any convention where the public could actually monitor it.

Liberals were asking “Why did we cut these health care transfers?” That is a good question because there are very few members of this House who are more in favour of cutting government spending than I and my colleagues in the Reform Party.

We believe that when it comes to cutting government spending we have to create priorities. This government chose to make the wrong priorities. When it came to the cash transfers from the CHST the government cut $7 billion instead of cutting $7 billion out of subsidies to crown corporations, out of subsidies to businesses, out of regional development programs, out of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and handouts to the Liberal Party's favourite special interest groups.

That is the choice the Liberal Party made. Yes, it had to cut spending, but no it did not have to cut it from what was the highest priority program area of all Canadians, which is public health care. This government should really hang its head in shame when it comes to considering what it has done to health care in this country.

The other thing I find so remarkably galling is to hear the Minister of Health and his cabinet and caucus colleagues pontificate about the great Liberal commitment to the federal role in health care and that they are going to penalize those provinces if they do not keep in compliance with the Canada Health Act. They are going to protect health care they say.

What have the Liberals done? They and the previous government together have managed to cut the federal government's role in cash transfers for health care from 50% of total acute health care spending to under 20%. The Liberals talk tough but they have taken away the only leverage they have with the provinces to ensure compliance with the Canada Health Act.

I am not sure that that is necessarily a bad thing. I believe as I said in speaking to Motion No. 1, in the principle of subsidiarity, in the principle that says the level of government which is the lowest and the closest to the people is generally the best order of government to deliver services. Senior levels of government, more distant and remote levels of government such as the federal government ought only to be involved in the direct delivery of programs when such delivery needs to be done on a national basis.

I think that MLAs, MPPs and MNAs and provincial governments elected by provincial voters and provincial taxpayers know better than we do in this remote place in Ottawa how to deliver quality health care, public access to universal health care than we do. We ought to give them the flexibility to make the choices they need to reform health care, to ensure quality health care for all Canadians. That is why this motion would simply extend the meddling influence of the federal government in a field which the Fathers of Confederation in their wisdom properly attributed to the provinces.

In closing I hope that if any of the Liberals speak on this motion they will explain to us, to their constituents and to all Canadians how it is they can talk about increasing health care transfers in this budget by $1.5 billion when in fact it is not an increase at all. It is a reduction in the decrease.

It reminds me of the old days when the Tory government would say that it was cutting spending when in fact all it was doing was reducing the increase. Now the Liberals say they are increasing spending on health care when all they are doing is reducing the decrease.

Why can we not just look at these numbers straight and simple? After the so-called $1.5 billion reinvestment in health care in this recent budget, health care transfers, cash transfers to the provinces will still be less than they were four years ago when the Liberals took power in 1993. The Liberals have abdicated their ability to dictate health care policy to the provinces. We say let the provinces be responsible and accountable to their taxpayers, to the real consumers of health care.

That is why I call on my hon. colleagues to defeat this motion.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

It was crooks as well. Perhaps she could withdraw both of those words.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I think the operative word that the member used was tax evasion. If she withdrew the term “evasion”—

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

I do not know why hon. members are heckling. This is how Parliament functions. The opposition raises questions. They are supposed to answer.

In closing, I want to say that we need to reinforce the tradition of ministerial accountability and stop these conflicts of interest which are undermining Parliament and its institutions.