Jim Maloway

[Petitions, April 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is a call to stop the closure of the six Canadian prison farms in Canada. Dozens of Canadians have signed the petition demanding that the government reconsider this ill thought out decision.

All six prison farms, including Rockwood Institution in Manitoba, have been functioning farms for many decades providing food for the prisons and the community. Prison farm operations provide rehabilitation and training for prisoners through working with and caring for plants and animals. The work ethic and rehabilitation principle of waking up at 6 a.m. and working outdoors is a discipline that Canadians can appreciate. Closing these farms will mean the loss of that infrastructure which would make it too expensive to replace them in the future.

The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to stop the closure of the six Canadian prison farm operations across Canada and to produce a report on the work and rehabilitative benefit to prisoners of the farm operations and on how the program could be adapted to meet the agriculture needs of the 21st century.

[Petitions, April 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present this morning.

The first is signed by thousands of Canadians and calls on the Parliament of Canada to adopt Canada's first air passengers' bill of rights.

If passed, Bill C-310 would compensate air passengers with all carriers, including charters, anywhere they fly in the world. The bill would provide compensation for overbooked flights, cancelled flights and long tarmac delays. It would address issues such as late and misplaced baggage. It would require the airlines to provide all-inclusive pricing in their advertising.

The legislation has been in effect since 1991 in Europe but was revised five years ago. The question is why Air Canada and Air Transat passengers should receive better treatment in Europe than they do here in Canada.

Airlines would have to inform passengers of flight changes, either delays or cancellations. The new rules would have to be posted at airports. Airlines would have to inform passengers of their rights and the process to file for compensation. If the airlines followed the rules, it would cost them nothing.

The petitioners call on the government to support Bill C-310, which would introduce Canada's first air passengers' bill of rights.

[Business of Supply, April 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the member has identified himself as one of the good Liberals and not one of those bad Liberals from the past where, under successive Liberal majority governments, not a single foreign takeover was blocked or even came under review. However, I am glad they are onside on this motion and I really did enjoy the member's comments.

In 2007, for the first time since 1999, foreign control of companies operating in Canada held more than half, 52.8%, of the manufacturing assets, up from 46.8% in 2006. Statistics Canada says that the increase was due largely to foreign acquisitions of Canadian-controlled firms, especially in the primary metals and wood and paper.

Does the hon. member believe that this is a matter of strategic importance for Canada and that this trend would ultimately have a hugely detrimental effect on this country's key industries and its future economic growth?

[Quebec Bridge, April 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the motion this evening, and I certainly was prepared to speak to the motion on previous occasions. On December 1, 2009, and March 24, 2010, we had robust debate in the House on this particular issue.

This is a common problem throughout this country. Unlike European countries, Canada seems to build infrastructure that has a very, very limited lifespan. We are halfway between European structures, which seem to last hundreds of years, and Las Vegas, where buildings that are only 20 or 30 years old are demolished.

A new Winnipeg airport is being built at the moment. I would think any other country would have found a use for the old airport. Instead, the old one is to be torn down. An arena that was torn down four or five years ago would have been perfect for use by poorer areas of the city that are always short of recreational facilities, but the government simply tore the structure down.

This is a similar situation. The bridge was built a number of years ago. There was a story that it was referred to as one of the eight wonders of the world at one time, when the construction was completed in 1919. The history of this bridge is quite interesting, and I will get into it in a couple of minutes. I just wanted to comment that defective and deteriorating infrastructure seems to be a very common theme in this country.

There is a bridge in my own riding that is only 50 years old, which has been getting a lot of publicity over the last couple of years. A truck hit it and caused enough damage to it that now the entire structure has to be replaced at a cost of a couple of hundred million dollars. The Minneapolis bridge was another example, and I think it had even been inspected prior to its sudden collapse.

I did note that the government minister in charge of the infrastructure program, on one occasion last fall and again when I asked him a question this spring, indicated that now is the time to do infrastructure projects because the cost of construction has dropped drastically, particularly on big projects. We might not notice it on the home repairs we get quotes on, but certainly when we are into the millions and millions of dollars, if there ever was a time to get our construction projects done, it would be now.

To my mind, this is an infrastructure deficiency that needs to be looked at. The infrastructure funds should be used for things like this. One of the previous speakers, in reply to a question I had asked on the safety of the bridge, maintained it was 100% safe and we should not be fearmongering that the bridge could collapse. Well, come on. There has been a number of collapses of bridges, bridges in fairly good shape. Inspected bridges do collapse, so to let our infrastructure deteriorate does not make sense at all.

In this particular case, Canadian National Railways got a sweetheart deal. We could get into the specifics of the deal, but a deal was made by the previous Liberal government, which turned over a fairly substantial portion of land, worth I forget how many millions of dollars, on condition that CN take care of the bridge. Now that it is a private corporation, it is seeking to hide from its responsibility. The whole issue appears in court and, convenience of conveniences, the government can now hide under the fact that it is before the courts and there is nothing it can do. CN gets away with all the government's real estate and it is not fulfilling its contract and the condition of the bridge is getting worse.

That is a situation we find ourselves in many times when we are dealing with private entrepreneurs. We see this with private stadiums and sporting facilities. Any time there are private owners, they tend to take the government money and the incentives the government gives. It never seems to fail that, halfway through construction, they are there with their hands out for more. Things did not go the way they planned. They have new information and now they need more money. They demand that we pay up and if we do not pay up, then they are going to shut the structure down. They know they have the government in a bad situation here.

We are offering to buy the bridge back. We want the bridge to be bought back for a dollar, but what is going to happen with all these lands? CN is now a privately owned company, run more by Americans. Is it going to be returning that land, or is it going to be compensating for the value of the land?

These are all issues that will have to be resolved in the court case. As our critic from Outremont explained in his speech, the only people who are going to benefit from all this are the lawyers, at the end of the day. That is the sad part of it. Whenever we involve lawyers in the equation, all the money ends up being used up by the lawyers and none is left for the people.

My staff found some information about this bridge that I found very interesting. In 1907, in Quebec the biggest cantilever bridge in the world was being built. Little did people know that on August 29 they would also experience one of the biggest bridge collapses in history. The bridge across the St. Lawrence, six miles above Quebec City, was a brainchild of the Quebec Bridge Company, which was a group of local business people. Until then, goods were brought up from the south shore to Quebec City by ferry.

In 1903, the Quebec Bridge Company gave the job of designing the bridge to the Phoenix Bridge Company. It also contracted a renowned bridge builder from New York by the name of Theodore Cooper to oversee the design and construction of the bridge. The peculiarities of the site evidently made the design of the bridge very difficult. The St. Lawrence was a shipping lane and the 2,800-foot bridge had to have an 1,800-foot single span almost 150 feet above the water to allow the ocean-going vessels to pass.

The bridge was to be multi-functional and was to be 67 feet wide to accommodate two railway tracks, two streetcar tracks and two roadways. For those who are not familiar with the design, they have to think of it in terms of a continuous beam anchored at both ends to pillars. The key to the bridge design was the weight of the centre span. This kind of design is also used in large buildings where interior pillars cannot be used to support the roof, for example, in the case of aircraft hangers.

In late 1903, the Phoenix Bridge Company laid out the initial drawings of the bridge. The design was approved with very few changes by Cooper. The estimated weight of the span was to be calculated based on the initial drawings. In 1905, the working drawings were completed and the first steel girders were bolted into place. These working drawings took more than seven months to reach Cooper for final approval. In the meantime, the work had already begun. It was not until Cooper received the drawings that he noticed that the estimated weight of the span was off on the low side by almost eight million pounds.

Cooper had one of two choices. He could condemn the design and start over or take the risk that there would be no problem. He told himself that the eight million pounds was within engineering tolerances and he let the work continue because he wanted to be known as the designer of the greatest bridge in the world. Also factored into Cooper's decision was the fact that the Prince of Wales was scheduled to open the bridge in 1908 and any delay would upset his plans.

That was a very fateful decision. I do not have enough time left to finish all the details of this story, but as the members know, the bridge did in fact collapse. I believe it took about 12 years before the bridge was finally brought into use and completed in August 1919. I just wanted to share that with members. If anyone is interested in more details about this, they can certainly contact me.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I was essentially going to comment that I sat through all of the speeches yesterday. I know the minister was here, which was a bit of a surprise and certainly welcomed. He was complimented in the House many times yesterday for being here. In fact, he took the first question with all of the speakers.

There were some points in the member's speech that I wanted to clarify in light of what the minister said yesterday, but I am certain that he can clarify them for the member by perusing Hansard.

The whole issue of the safe country of origin is also a concern to our critic, and we talked about that yesterday. The minister was straight up front in saying that he welcomed amendments to the bill at committee and that even in the area of safe country of origin, there were aspects to that particular mechanism that perhaps should be explored a little bit further. That certainly could be done at committee. If the two members talk to each other, the member will get some of his questions answered.

He is blaming the backlog exclusively on the government, but it was reported yesterday by several speakers that in fact 20,000 people were in the line under the previous Liberal government, so we have to get a balance here. It is unfair to say the Conservatives are 100% responsible. The Liberals should take their fair share of responsibility for the current situation, and I want to leave it at that.

[Bill C-3--Gender Equity in Indian Registration Act, April 27th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the members for Abitibi—Témiscamingue and Labrador for their excellent speeches regarding Bill C-3.

I want to ask a question dealing with the government's motivation for acting the way it is at committee. I think the last member who spoke got into that a little bit.

The question is, why would a government not seize the opportunity to deal with the whole area of discrimination, rather than focusing the bill on just the very minimum that it has to as a result of the court decision? It seems to me, as several members have mentioned already, that this issue is going to be around and is going to come back 10 or 20 years from now, and we are going to have deal with it then anyway, so why not deal with this issue properly and correctly in the initial period that we are in right now, while it is before committee?

We have heard from the witnesses. We know what the witnesses have said. Why do we not deal with this correctly today?

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. The reason they do it is so they can put it in their press releases. They should simply write the press release and send it out. They do not have to include it in the bill.

Having said that, we have had two private members' bills on the whole issue of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act in the last seven days in this House. I have to admit to a bit of a weakness here because when my staff read that the member for Eglinton—Lawrence had introduced the pedal act, my staff insisted that I introduce the car act. As much as I fought the idea, I was persuaded at the end of the day that the car act had a particular ring to it and I went with that. I must apologize to my friend, but I caught the same disease that the government has.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the member does have a point. When I read the information about how it can take five years to follow through this process, I could not believe that could be a healthy situation to be in. Clearly, it just makes sense for all concerned to have the process done more quickly.

I am not sure whether it was a refugee situation, but there was a family in Newfoundland and it was the exactly the case the member for Yukon described. The family had been involved in the community. The entire community was behind the family in trying to keep the family from being sent back to Russia. For people to live with that uncertainty over their heads for even one year would be enough, but for five years would be excessively long in my opinion. I think we all agree that we should shorten the time period considerably.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I thank the minister for his clarification.

I want to take this opportunity to point out the merits of the bill as seen by our critic. Our critic thinks that one of the positives in the bill is the speed, as refugees are desperate to seek the reunification of their loved ones, especially those who are languishing in refugee camps or slums. She thinks that is a positive part of the bill. She also thinks that the establishment of an appeal process for some refugee claimants is another good part of the minister's bill. She also thought that more funding to the refugee board to clear up the backlog is very forward looking and positive.

We do see some positives in this legislation, but when we are dealing with different political parties, as with any bill, there are going to be differences in opinion. We are trying to find a way to resolve whatever differences there are. At the end of the day, if we cannot resolve those differences, then the minister's party will vote one way and we will vote the other way.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-11. At the outset I, too, want to make note and compliment the minister for getting his bill this far and the fact that he has been here for all of the presentations is a big plus for him. I know that in the provincial legislature, and the only one that I am familiar with is the Manitoba legislature, that is an expected practice. The minister is always there to listen attentively to the speeches of the members. Therefore, I am really impressed that he would do that.

Also, I think there is a bigger issue here. The government is in another iteration as a minority government and it has taken this long for the government to figure out that that is what it is in, a minority government and that majority government possibilities are not guaranteed. Therefore, it has to make the best of the situation it is in.

We look to people like the minister, and he is not alone because there are one or two others over there who show a similar kind of appreciation for how they fit into the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, there are many people on the government side, members and ministers, who do not appreciate that and it makes it much more difficult to work in a situation like this.

I think that under certain circumstances the government may last the full five years. I know I have said this before but if no one party moves up substantially in support, what would be the point of forcing Canadians to spend millions of dollars for an election that will probably produce the same results.

The fact is that our voters are out there and they want to see results. Whether it is that particular minister, another minister or the government who wants to make accommodations with opposition parties, I think that should be encouraged because it will hold us all in a better stead at the end of the day.

I have always said that there are advantages to minority parliaments. I am a fan of minority governments because I think that they do produce results. We had a very successful run in a minority Parliament of Lester Pearson from 1962 to 1968 where we got the unification of the armed forces. People would have thought that would be impossible to do. We got a new Canadian flag which also at the time seemed like an impossibility. All of that happened during minority situations. I am very positive that this minority situation can produce really good results.

Another point is that all we need to do is look at where this party started, where it warped from. Can we imagine the old Reform Party members looking ahead? I think they would be in a state of shock if they could see what some of their ministers are actually doing. This was a party that was very rigid and extreme in its views and, in some ways, it has come a long way.

I am actually fearful of a majority Conservative government because then we would see the ministers marching in here, dropping the bills on the desk and using a take it or leave it approach.

This particular bill has a lot of potential because of the minority situation. If the government truly wants to get it through, which I think it does, then it is prepared to make some amendments at committee.

One of my colleagues earlier talked about the idea that we should have sent the bill directly to committee and that would have given the committee more authority and more leeway to make more radical changes to the structures of the bill. The government did not agree to do that, which is fine. We now need to work with what is in front of us

I think all the representatives of the opposition parties have indicated that they look forward to the bill going to committee. Therefore, the issue becomes how the bill will play out at the committee stage. That remains to be seen because our critic has some positive things to say about the bill and some negative things to say about the bill. Perhaps some of her concerns can be dealt with and allayed at the committee.

I also want to note that our critic is a very hard worker in this area and understands her critic area very well. More important, she actually gets along with the minister. It is very important in a legislative environment that the critic and the minister get along, to the point where the minister himself mentioned that she had been invited and had attended a briefing session on the bill before it was introduced. That is a battle we had with the previous member. The member for Souris and I, in a past life, sat in sessions at the provincial level. Some ministers would provide information. The ministers who were considered the best and got the best results were the ministers who invited the opposition into their offices and gave them a briefing on the bill. There were other ministers, on the other hand, who just flatly refused and would not allow it at all. At the end of the day, they got poorer results, a rougher ride and a lot more stress than they would have had, had they adopted the more open approach.

I now want to deal with some of the issues in the bill. The refugee issue has been a cause for trouble and concern under previous Conservative and Liberal governments for many years. I remember both the Mulroney government and then the Chrétien government making political appointments to these board and then running into trouble with their decisions. We understand that political parties win elections and become government and it is accepted that they have the right to appoint some of their own people into positions, but this was one area where making blatant political appointments did not work out very well.

We have some stories in Winnipeg where people were literally abusing their positions with the refugee board. We also dealt with the area of immigration consultants, which is just a terrible area. We have had in Manitoba multiple times where immigration consultants have been called on the carpet for charging ridiculous fees, taking advantage of not only poor people and people who are refugees, but on the immigrant investor program, highly educated, intelligent, fairly wealthy immigrants being hoodwinked by shady people in the area of immigration consultants.

I am not sure what the answer is. Manitoba has some laws dealing with the issue provincially that I believe have some merit and work reasonably well, but I am all in favour, and I think all of us probably would be, of trying to rid the landscape of these immigration consultants, because more often than not they are tied into other businesses. They have a travel agency on the side or do income tax on the side. They essentially grab people in a web and control them, capture them and hand them off to one another. It is not the type of environment we want to be in.

Canada has an honourable past but it also has a speckled past in dealing with refugee issues. It is true that we have accepted a higher proportion of refugees, one of the previous speakers mentioned the numbers, relative to our size than any other country in the world, so that is to our credit, but we have other examples in our past for which we are currently not overly proud.

There is a long-standing tradition in many cultures of offering refuge to those fleeing persecution. In Europe, people during the middle ages could seek sanctuary in a church. In fact, there are cases in Winnipeg right now where people are in a church. Giving sanctuary was considered a sacred act.

Americans fleeing slavery were given protection in Canada in the days before the U.S. Civil War. Although there have always been people fleeing oppression, it was not until after World War II that world governments recognized the need to create formal legal obligations for countries to accept refugees. Prior to World War II, there was no legal distinction between immigrants and refugees. Even today, many people are unsure of the difference between the two.

In 1951, the refugee convention defined a refugee as someone who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership, social group or political opinion. When we apply a definition like that to what the minister is trying to do, I wonder whether he can see how people might be concerned about the whole issue of a safe countries of origin list. He has a lot of good things in the bill but this is one of the stumbling blocks.

It makes sense administratively and it would be quick and easy to just put a country on a list and say that everybody from that country should be seen in a certain light. However, I think we have moved beyond that in our thinking and want to look at the individual. I know it is hard for people to comprehend that somebody from France, England or the United States could be considered a refugee but the reality is that, even using the definition going back to 1951, there could be people practically under our noses who would qualify because at that point in time there was no list of countries.

I am not on the committee but I can appreciate that there are probably reasons why the minister feels this list of countries is required. He has gone the extra step to let opposition parties know today that he is prepared to work with that list and explained that it was not as black and white and arbitrary as we think.

Now we get into the regulations. Anybody who follows legislation knows that the bill provides the tombstone information that is not going to change but the regulations provide all of the details of how the bill is really going to work in practice. Those are changeable by the minister. If the government or the minister does not like something that requires a regulation change, they can simply go ahead and do it.

In opposition, we are always very careful that we do not give away too much. When we pass a bill, in our own minds we are pretty clear about it, but the reality is that once the regulations get promulgated we find out there are a lot of things in it that we did not really like. That may be part of the problem. If the minister could somehow convince the critics that he is not out to do bad things and has solid arguments, they may be convinced at the end of the day.

At the end of the day we know that no matter what we do we can always make changes. One of the beauties of the democratic system that we have in our country is that if we make mistakes, and we do make them, we have the ability to correct them and try to make them right.

I have some hope, unlike some of the other ministers over there, that in his case it may be possible to do something. It seems to me to be very arbitrary that we could say that people coming out of Hungary must be on that list or they will not qualify as refugees.

That may be true. Let us grant the minister that that may be 100% true. However, we should not be doing it on the basis of putting the country on a list. We should be looking at each individual applicant separately. If the individual does not qualify, then by all means he or she does not qualify.

Major regional bodies have attempted to refine and extend the concept of refugee. In 1969, the Organization of African Unity and in 1984, the Organization of American States, OAS, extended the refugee definition to people fleeing generalized violence in these regions. Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international organization that safeguards the rights of refugees, estimates that there are 12 million refugees and over 6.3 million internally displaced people who are in need of protection.

There are people living in refugee camps in the Middle East who are probably into the second generation. I could be wrong. I do not think anybody is third generation. In my mind, that is where we should be putting a lot of our attention and concern. People are living in tent cities and they are stuck there for years and years. To me, it would be very easy to decide that they would qualify as refugees.

I would assume that is where church groups are really important in this whole process. They have been historically and have done a fabulous job. I remember that churches were involved in bringing the Vietnamese boat people over to Canada. Churches were very involved in that whole area. They should be encouraged. They have a sense of where the problems are in the world. They know that the people living in the refugee camps are people who need help right away. I trust their compass and direction in how to deal with the refugee situation.

Today, there are 12 million refugees and 6.3 million people who are internally displaced. Those are huge numbers. I do not have the statistic at my fingertips, but we are only dealing with 100,000 out of those 12 million per year. By the time we work our way through that group of people, there will probably be more people on the list.

Somebody was adding up the number of wars in the world and came up with 30 to 50 wars that the average person would not even know existed. We could ask the average constituent questions about whether there is a war going on in the Congo or elsewhere and they would be totally unaware of it. The fact of the matter is that people are only aware of issues when they see them on the television news on a particular night. They are quite aware of what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, but beyond that, the awareness just is not there.

Madam Speaker, did you indicate one minute? I do not see that well. Time certainly does fly. I have not even started on this. Maybe I will have to go to committee and see how the committee process works.

I did want to talk about the bad experiences we have had here in Canada. Anti-Semitic immigration policy proved deadly in the years leading up to World War II, when European Jews were refused entrance into Canada.

In 1939 the ship St. Louis left Germany carrying over 900 European Jews seeking refuge and protection on the other side of the Atlantic. They were refused everywhere they went. They had to return to Europe and most of those people died in concentration camps. That is an example of a very bad situation in our history.