House of Commons photoLost his last election, in 2011, with 46% of the vote.
Committees of the House June 2nd, 2010
Mr. Speaker, clearly the government gives away the store in its negotiating. This is the same government that negotiated the Canada-Colombia free trade deal. It seems that every negotiation it gets involved with it ends up on the losing end of it.
I believe this program is largely over, and there was not a huge amount left while the negotiations were progressing. Would the member explain to us once again how much was given up in this process?
National Hunting, Trapping and Fishing Heritage Day Act June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be speaking to Bill C-465 this evening. I see that all of the parties in the House here are in favour of the bill, so we will be sending it off to committee in due course.
The bill is fairly simple in that it will designate September 23 or perhaps the third Saturday, I believe, in September, depending on how the committee develops, as a national hunting, trapping and fishing heritage day. We have to recognize that in the United States there has been such a heritage day in existence since 1972.
With the increased border changes over the last couple of years, with the United States requiring passports for their citizens to get back into the country and with the global recession still not quite resolved, there is a lot of pressure on the tourism industry right across Canada, and certainly in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario which is very close to Manitoba.
The camps are hurting. There are numerous camps, fishing and hunting camps, in northern Manitoba and in northwestern Ontario that rely very heavily on American tourists, cross-border tourism. We are finding that this business is down. I think the sponsor of the bill recognizes that, in effect, it is down around 30%. We have to do whatever we can to try to get the hunters and fishers back to Canada to keep our industry alive.
I listened to all of the speakers today, and each one of them made very good speeches on this topic. The immediate past speaker talked about how large an industry we are talking about. Canada is still a country that is rural based. We like to pretend in the city that somehow Canada is becoming increasingly urban, and that certainly is true.
I recall only 30 years ago, in the 1960s, Winnipeg was, I think, the third largest city in the country. I believe Montreal was first, Toronto was second, Winnipeg was third and Vancouver was fourth. That has all changed now. Toronto, becoming the huge city that it is, is number one. Montreal dropped in terms of the relativity. Other cities like Calgary and Edmonton are coming up.
Having said that, Winnipeg still has a percentage of the Manitoba population. It used to be 50% of the entire population and now it has grown to perhaps 70%. Having said that, and even though my riding is 100% urban, the fact of the matter is people are only one step removed from rural life and rural farms.
People go out in the thousands to cottages outside of Winnipeg and northwestern Ontario. They participate in fishing and hunting. It is a very substantial part of our economy. However, there are pressures with increased populations, with the animal rights movement and our young people increasingly becoming vegetarians, and taking a little bit different attitude toward the rural lifestyle. I find that to be particular to the urban setting.
People are gradually getting somewhat removed from their rural roots. I think it is very important for us to try in some way to get back to our past and recognize where we came from.
I did some research on the topic yesterday and the day before, looking into the history of the buffalo hunt as an example.
I think that the buffalo hunt is a really good example of an activity that had a lot of the worst signs of a hunt. Hunters went out and hunted and just killed enormous numbers of buffalo. The fact is that after a number of years, the buffalo population was almost extinct. However, the settlers of the day recognized that this could not be sustained. They worked to bring back the buffalo population to the point that in 2005, it was estimated that there were over 500,000, or half a million, bison on farms and ranches in North America.
To the pessimistic people among us, I want to say that the history of the buffalo is a good example of how we should be able to recover from our mistakes and create a balance.
The Bloc speakers mentioned that the number of accidents between cars and deer rises in Quebec when hunting activity drops. As in all things, there has to be a happy balance.
It is no different for a minority government. It has to recognize that to get things done, we have to co-operate. This is a good example to the member who brought this idea forward that he is going to have unanimous agreement to move this bill on to committee.
I want to thank him very much for--
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, nobody on this side of the House is questioning the need to have these conferences and to meet face to face. That is not the question.
If the tables were turned, and the Liberals were in government right now, and they were putting on a conference in downtown Toronto with a security bill of $930 million or almost $1 billion, the Conservatives would be going crazy. There is no question in my mind about that.
Why do the Conservatives not just admit that they made a mistake and promise to do better in the future?
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, I hesitate to rise on a point of order, but the member is a parliamentary secretary. I just think that his reference to Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as PIGS is not really appropriate. I would ask him to retract that.
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, we are clearly talking about a government that is setting up a conference in an urban environment and spending $1 billion on security. When the world economy is in a recession and the government is running a record $57 billion deficit, this is not the time to be spending this kind of money on security when other alternatives are available.
The member talked about the military. Why did the Conservatives not have the foresight to find a secure military facility where they would not have to disrupt an urban environment like Toronto with businesses that will lose money and there are the added risks? Why are they doing what is obviously not a good idea? Why could they not have had a better and simpler solution and saved a lot of money in the process?
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the member a follow-up question.
With this $1 billion that the government is spending on security, we could provide over 1,200 new hybrid buses for public transit in this country. In fact, we could stop the closure of six prison farms in the country for $4 million and actually do something positive to rehabilitate criminals in jails.
I would like to ask the member whether he would like to make a comment about what the government is doing with these six very successful long-time prison farms in this country that are going to be closed down as early as the end of June?
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his presentation today. I know he spoke yesterday as well about electronic health records.
We are talking about $1 billion here for security for this summit. Clearly, this member is very supportive of the idea of getting services right to the people without having the big conferences that cost $1 billion in security alone.
I would like to ask the member what he thinks of the idea of having future conferences on a military base, like the one in his own riding of Esquimalt, saving the cost of all the security and using the money for electronic health records or other types of medical research that he has talked about many times in this House?
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, clearly this is a huge amount of money here.
In fact, 159,000 Canadians could have received EI for the average period before finding employment; 189,000 undergraduate students could have received full funding for their tuition for the year; and as I indicated before, over 1,200 new hybrid buses could have been purchased for public transit systems in this country.
This is an enormous amount of money. Clearly there is a big problem here and the government has a public relations disaster on its hands.
Does the member not agree that the government should have looked at some other solution, such as a secure military base, away from an urban environment? Does that not make more sense than putting this summit into an urban environment, which compounds the problems of security?
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, once again, I want to thank the member for her answer.
Clearly, the Liberals are doing a public service today by bringing this opposition motion forward. While we cannot do anything about the existing boondoggle as we see it now, at least going forward we cannot make this mistake again. I would think that if there is enough of a public reaction to this, local residents in the countries where future G8 meetings will be held are going to look to what we are doing here today, as a reaction against a massive misspending of money.
We cannot have these summits in an urban environment. That is very clear. The security costs are just overwhelming. This cannot be compared to the Olympics because the Olympics are a different sort of situation.
In the future, these types of meetings are going to have to be held in more secure environments. Rural military bases are the types of environments we are going to have to be in. The costs would be minuscule.
I think the government is going to learn a very painful lesson through this process, but I see good going forward. I do not think it is going to want to make this mistake again.
Business of Supply June 1st, 2010
Mr. Speaker, this morning a government representative, the member for Edmonton—St. Albert, admitted that he does not read The Globe and Mail, so I will have to read it for him. I want to read a quotation from Robert Fox, the executive director of Oxfam Canada. In The Globe and Mail on May 28 of this year, he said:
It is painful to think a billion dollars is being spent on the security for a three-day event when we are capping commitments to international aid for the next several years because we can’t find the money...It just speaks to our priorities and the fact that when we choose to, we can mobilize resources and when there is a lack of political will, we fall short.
It is clear that this money, as the member just pointed out, could have been used to do a lot of very good things in this country. For example, we could have purchased 1,270 new hybrid buses for public transit systems in Canada. That is just one example of the things we could have done with this money.
Would the member like to comment further on this massive waste of money when the government is in a record deficit of $56 billion?