Jason Kenney

[Supply, February 23rd, 1998]

He was in favour of it. I guess he did not tell Mr. Turner that. Was he in favour of NAFTA in 1993? We do not know where the Liberals are coming from. At least Reform has been consistent.

[Supply, February 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to not knowing much about socialism, I plead guilty. I have never been in a jacuzzi but my limousine Liberal friend across the way will know that we have not engaged in the sky is falling chicken littleism of the loony left.

Let us be clear. Obviously the member came in after I was done my remarks because he did not hear what I said. The Reform Party does support and always has supported the principle of free trade. I talked about why it is necessary for our investors to get national treatment overseas.

Where is the hon. member coming from? Is he in favour? Was he in favour of the FTA in 1988?

[Supply, February 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, let me correct the record in two important respects.

First, we were not silent during the election campaign on this issue. We spoke about it in public forums. We had a clear position. We supported the negotiations, not the agreement, because there is no agreement. We do not support an agreement that does not yet exist. That is why we want to be able to debate it in this place. We do support negotiating instead of pulling out of the negotiations unilaterally and hiding our heads in the sand, as our friends from the New Democratic Party would want us to do.

We will go through the negotiations. We support the government's presence at such negotiations. Canadians will be able to debate the agreement that is finalized there.

We have been very willing to discuss the issue all along and during the election campaign. When I debated the New Democratic candidate in my constituency he never raised the matter, but I did talk about our support in principle for free trade. I do not know what the hon. member is talking about.

[Supply, February 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of the motion before the House. The motion reads:

That this House condemn the government for: (1) failing to explain why it is negotiating the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (the MAI), (2) failing to explain what benefits and costs it foresees for the Canadian people, and (3) failing to take part in public discussion on the Agreement.

At the outset I would like to say that it is really quite remarkable to hear the hon. Minister of International Trade speak on this motion. We have presented this motion in part to give this minister a platform to explain to this House and, through it, to Canadians why there is a need for the national treatment of investment as is proposed under the MAI. Why would Canada benefit from the further liberalization of trade laws?

Instead of taking the opportunity and seizing the moment, he used most of his time for partisan politics, for taking cheap shots as opposition parties.

There is a principle at the heart of parliamentary democracy which this government sometimes seems to lose sight, the principle of ministerial responsibility. We on this side of the House are merely legislators. The minister is a legislator as a member of Parliament and is a minister of the crown, a member of the executive branch of government responsible for negotiating and implementing foreign treaties. It is his responsibility, not that of opposition legislators, to explain and articulate the need or lack thereof for Canada to enter into certain foreign agreements, the MAI in this case. The government has yet once more failed in that respect.

That is not surprising coming from this minister and this government given that this is a minister and this is a party which in 1988 launched a vicious attack on the free trade agreement with the United States, which committed that it would tear up the free trade agreement, that it would retroactively veto the free trade agreement.

There are members sitting on the opposite side of this House who argued in 1988 that free trade would lead to the end of Canadian sovereignty. I remember a Liberal commercial on television with a map of North America where somehow magically the border of the 49th parallel was erased on the television screen. They said that Canada was going to become the fifty-first state, that this would lead to untold economic misery, that our universal publicly administered health care program would be doomed. That is what they said, people sitting over there right now, including the Minister of International Trade.

In 1993 they said they were going to renegotiate the NAFTA. The last time I checked, they did not change the North American Free Trade Agreement one iota. The reason why this minister has a huge credibility deficit addressing the MAI, the reason why so many Canadians are so cynical and suspicious about the real motives and outcome here is precisely because they have never admitted the kind of radical change of philosophy that they have undergone in government with respect to free trade.

I would suggest that the minister do just that, that he and his colleagues do some stock-taking and apologize for how they tried to engage in precisely the same kind of fearmongering and misrepresentation that our friends in the New Democratic Party and the party to our left are wont to do.

The Reform Party has always supported the principle of free trade. We support the principle of national treatment of investment. We support it not because we want to give more than we get, but because we realize that Canada as an enormous exporter, as a country whose economic engine is export industries and services, would benefit enormously from allowing our companies, our investors, greater freedom of trade in foreign jurisdictions.

Late last year I was invited by the hon. Minister of Finance to take part in a Canadian delegation at the American Hemispheric Free Trade Discussions in Santiago, Chile, with all of the governments of North, South and Central America. I had an opportunity at that conference to speak with Canadian companies with major investments in South America. Let me give one example in Chile.

A Canadian mining company based in British Columbia has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and training in mining operations in Chile that have generated handsome profits for this Canadian company, for its Canadian shareholders, for its Canadian employees. It has brought new wealth to this country like so many other Canadian export oriented companies.

This very same company was considering whether it would be able to continue its operations in Chile or would have to suspend its operations at some point because there is a dual tax scheme in Chile, a tax regime which imposes a much higher tax on the corporate profits of companies that are foreign owned. By allowing certain countries to discriminate against foreign-held companies, that company and its Canadian employees are not only penalized but are at risk of losing the hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars that they have invested there.

There are dozens and dozens of similar instances not only in this hemisphere but throughout the world where Canadian investments are put at peril by these kinds of discriminatory protectionist policy regimes which make everybody poor and nobody richer.

We want with this motion to focus on this government's inability or unwillingness to lodge a major national debate. The minister says that we had committee hearings on it. That is wonderful. Three weeks. I do not know how many business days the committee actually met in Ottawa, 10 or 11 business days. It stayed here in Ottawa and the only people they heard from were the usual talking heads from interest groups.

Whatever that committee did, whatever its report said, I can assure members that it did not get out to the constituents of every member of this place, some of whom are being mislead by the propaganda of radical left wing conspiracy theorists to believe that the MAI will lead to another end of Canadian sovereignty, another end to our health care programs and so on.

What does this government do? Absolutely nothing. In the red book, the MAI was not even mentioned as an election issue. We are talking about a significant international investment agreement that was not even raised as an election issue by this government. It has been under negotiation for two years. They had done virtually nothing in those two years to present it to this House or to Canadians. Then they blame the opposition for not articulating the government's policy.

I really do not understand. As one of my colleagues says, it really is audacious. We have asked one simple question of the minister who spoke not long ago, whether or not he would commit to having this House debate and perhaps ratify—imagine that—any agreement that is signed by the Canadian negotiators in Paris at the OECD.

He could not give us a straight answer on that very simple question. As somebody who is about as free trade as someone can get, even I start to wonder what is going on here, what is being hidden.

Why can the minister not just give a simple straightforward commitment that the democratically elected representatives of the people of Canada will have an opportunity to get to the bottom of the agreement, to look at the details, to see how broad or how narrow the exemptions are, to see whether or not Canada will benefit, to see what the economic costs and benefits are.

Why can he not make that commitment in this place today? It is not a big deal. It does not cost the government anything politically or financially to allow members and Canadians to debate this.

For those reasons, I really strongly believe that this minister needs to make a fundamental reassessment about how he has managed this file. There is a great deal of hysteria building up out there and he has done virtually nothing to tell Canadians the truth about this agreement and its implications.

We hope this motion tonight will be the beginning of just such a debate.

[Taxation, February 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, earlier the Deputy Prime Minister said that the opposition did not care about young Canadians. It is no mistake that there are more young Canadians on this side of the House than there are on that side of the House in a government which is giving young Canadians an additional $100 billion in debt, a $600 billion debt, 17% youth unemployment and $25,000 in average student debt. Now the government is assessing the investment of Canadians in their own education as a taxable benefit.

Will the minister of revenue tell us whether or not it is the policy of the government that Canadians whose companies invest in their training should actually be penalized through the tax system?

[Supply, February 18th, 1998]

That is a difficult question, Mr. Speaker. I will just briefly point to history as evidence that tax relief produces more jobs.

In 1962 when John Kennedy dramatically cut marginal rates, employment and disposable income skyrocketed. When Ronald Reagan did it in the early 1980s, revenues skyrocketed as did real incomes. When Mike Harris did it in the last two years in Ontario, revenues grew faster. When Bob Rae and the Liberal Government of Ontario raised tax rates, revenues went down. When Mike Harris cut tax rates revenues went and with them came tens of thousands of new jobs.

[Supply, February 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, a brain drain is voluntary and a lobotomy is imposed. That is what happened to the Tory caucus in 1993.

With respect to student loans, we propose that student loan interest should immediately become tax deductible to reduce the burden. We also support the immediate adoption of a income contingent student loan repayment program.

The hon. Leader of the Opposition tabled a private member's bill to that effect in 1994. We have long been on the record as taking concrete steps to adopt the kind of flexibility in student financing we need to relieve the enormous burden many young people face.

[Supply, February 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the very same poll from which the member cites asked the question “What do you think should be the federal government's main priority in deciding what to do with any future surplus money?” Reducing accumulated debt, 45%; cutting taxes, 29%; spending more in government programs, 23%. The numbers he was reading were from the 23% who think we ought to spend more.

With respect to Statistics Canada, I simply do not buy the idea that we have a net increase in skilled workers. We have a very high level of immigration, relatively speaking, and many immigrants are quite well skilled.

However many Canadians who have gone through our post-secondary and university education programs are leaving the country. I defy members of the House to stand and say they do not know people or are not related to people with post-secondary education who have left the country for brighter economic opportunities elsewhere.

[Supply, February 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's question. I can understand the member is confused in the same way as the member from Ontario was.

We are proposing that new spending can be found for such areas as research and development, higher education and health care transfers, but not net new spending. That new spending ought to be found by reducing other programs.

We have enumerated the areas we think deserve reinvestment and the areas we think should be cut in order to fund those reinvestments in our excellent document “Securing Your Future” which is available on the Internet at www.reform.ca.

[Supply, February 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my party and I do not support any new net spending, but we believe we can repriorize overall spending.

We spend $103 billion in program spending. There is no reason we could not take billions out of grants and handouts to businesses, crown corporations, regional development programs and useless grants and redirect them to where they would be far more productive in research and development and higher education.