Joe Comartin

[The Environment, March 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of the Environment.

After eleven years of Liberal reign, food containing GMOs is still not labelled as such. Today, the Auditor General's report is additional proof of the Liberals' blind support of genetic manipulation. We learn that genetically modified plants are free-growing in the wild, and we know nothing about the long-term effects on the environment.

Can the minister explain why the Liberals let this situation get out of hand?

[The Environment, March 29th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the environment minister.

After 11 years of endless Liberal rhetoric, let us look at the results. One, greenhouse gas emissions are up 18%. Two, there is no renewable energy plan. Three, there is no mandatory plan for vehicle fuel efficiency. Four, there is no energy retrofit plan of any consequence for federal buildings. Five, Kyoto was not even mentioned in the budget or throne speech.

Can the minister tell the House why the Liberals are abandoning the Kyoto protocol?

[Supply, March 22nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset, I did not find anything in my Winnipeg colleague's comments with which I could disagree. However, it is worrisome, when we see the self-righteousness that embodies the background of the motion, that there is not some acknowledgement on the part of the Conservatives that they are also at risk.

I want to say to them and to the government that we need not so much the protestations of substance that we got from the House leader earlier this afternoon around democracy and the democratization of this institution. One of the greatest protections we have is if there is full democracy here, if the members of Parliament can in fact perform their duties fully, whichever government is in power at any given time. That is our greatest protection from this type of scandal being allowed to evolve to any degree.

[Supply, March 22nd, 2004]

The insignificance was that we got 25% of the vote in that riding at that time; all 25% of that vote was insignificant to that leader and to his party.

The other point I want to make is that he initiated the debate. He attacked us. He attacked our leader and our party as also-rans. I have to ask the leader of the official opposition, if that was the case when Ms. Stronach would not debate him, was she treating him as an also-ran?

[Supply, March 22nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a bit of a problem with that position taken by my colleague from the Conservatives. We need to go back a bit before this particular history of last week to when the leader of the official opposition was running for his seat in Calgary. He refused not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but five times, to debate the NDP candidate in that riding, Reverend Bill Phipps.

[Supply, March 22nd, 2004]

I am getting some support from one of our members from Winnipeg who remembers that situation very well, as does the whole Province of Manitoba. It is unwilling to forgive that Conservative government for doing that. There was the Oerlikon affair, just outright graft in that case.

Also, who can ever forget Michel Cogger and his shenanigans over an extended period within the Conservative government at that time? I have to say that there is a real level of hypocrisy in this motion from the Conservative Party when one takes that history into context.

I could mention others. Probably the most scandal ridden government ever in this country was the Grant Devine government in Saskatchewan. More than a dozen--I think it was 15 or 16--members of that government ultimately were convicted on criminal charges and sent to prison. The list goes on.

I want to say a bit more about the hypocrisy of the Conservatives in this regard. I want to challenge the new leader, the leader once again of this new party growing out of the old party. There is a real hypocrisy going on there. I want to challenge the new leader on his position because of his attack this past week on our party. He took a shot at us as being some kind of a major threat to the future of this country, but then refused to engage in a debate.

I think my colleague from Vancouver has pointed out that there really is a level of fear on the part of the new leader, but there is hypocrisy as well. How many times during the leadership campaign did we hear him and his supporters attack Ms. Stronach for refusing to take part in a debate? I say rightfully so, because someone who is going to be involved in the politics of this country has to be prepared to have his or her policies scrutinized and debate is one of the ways of doing that.

So when the leader of the official opposition, elected this past weekend, refuses to debate after attacking a leader of one of the other opposition parties, it really undermines his position. It shows the level of hypocrisy of that position and it shows a real lack of appreciation of what democracy is and should be about in this country.

Let me turn now to the motion as it applies to this current government. It is just a standard vote on confidence that we are seeking. As I said earlier, we are quite prepared, given the conduct of the government under both the former prime minister and the current Prime Minister, to say we do not have confidence in the government to lead this country and to provide governance to this country.

I should say, Mr. Speaker, that I am using the full 20 minutes. I am not dividing my time.

We have that dynamic going on, so let me for a moment fall into the trap that has been prepared and speak about the old Liberals, the government under the former prime minister. The sponsorship scandal we are currently confronted with and which is taking up so much of the time of the House and of this Parliament, to the detriment of other major national issues that should be addressed, is one in a series. We can talk about the gross mismanagement of HRDC or the computer scandals, which we saw first with the gun registry and the amount of money we lost on that and now with what appears to be more than just mismanagement and perhaps outright corruption around computer software and computer systems in the defence department.

We have, in addition to that, the scandal that is going on around the Fontaine health centre in Manitoba. As well, we have pending--we are still waiting to hear from the government on it--a scandal that is potentially about to erupt around the conflict of interest, if not outright criminality, in the environmental assessment division as it affects the work that the division is responsible for doing in the Yukon. We are still waiting for that report. We have not heard from the government. I do not know how much more it can take in the way of scandals. I assume the government is sitting on the report right now.

On the sponsorship scandal, clearly what has happened is that the Canadian people have said this is it. We have this other list, of which I have only mentioned a few that are around mismanagement if not outright corruption, but the sponsorship scandal was the final one for the electorate in this country.

Last week when the House was down I spent time canvassing some of my riding. It was interesting to hear how the government is viewed. For a number of people, but not a lot, there was very high anger and there were very harsh words. Most people said that they are over the anger now, but I come from an Irish background and it is that model of not getting angry but getting even. Certainly in my riding they are at the stage where they are going to get even. They are asking us to have that election and to get even with the government for all the corruption it has perpetrated upon the country.

It is interesting that we are hearing, as my colleague from the Bloc mentioned earlier, some rationalizations. We heard it in the public accounts committee from the member for Toronto—Danforth. He said it was not really that bad. He said that a good deal of the $100 million that was taken from the $250 million was in products and other things; he said that there is something there. Of course as more evidence came out, we saw how lacking in credibility that position was.

This past weekend we heard from the current heritage minister. What did she have to say? She said that this is a tempest in a teapot, that it is not really that important, that it is being blown out of proportion, or words to that effect. I have to ask the minister, what does it take for it to be important and significant? If this is blowing it out of proportion, how bad does the situation have to get on that side of the House before Canadians are able to say the government went too far?

I can tell members that at this point the Canadian public has made the decision and is saying that the government has in fact gone too far, that this incident is not being blown out of proportion.

I will deal with one final point, again falling into this trap that the Liberal government wants us to fall into even though I think it is at the point of not even wanting to talk about being Liberal. I will talk about the current administration. We constantly hear from any number of the cabinet members, from the Prime Minister himself, and from other members and apologists for this current administration, that they have changed. They say that this will not happen anymore.

In that regard, I have pulled out some of the appointments of some of the people who were involved with the Prime Minister's run for the leadership of the Liberal Party, people who have now become part of the administration in the PMO. I have a list of about 12 or 15 names here. A number of these people who are now in the PMO have ties to and were registered lobbyists. Some of them have very clear conflicts in terms of their position in advising and providing services to the Prime Minister and the PMO in general.

For instance, there is Bruce Young, out of British Columbia, who has been registered as a lobbyist. One of his clients before he became senior special adviser to the Prime Minister was a group of private health clinics, whose position very clearly was to undermine the existing health care system in this country and move us toward a full two tiered system. That person is now in the Prime Minister's Office advising him as a senior special adviser.

My background as critic is the environment and now we have the deputy chief of staff who was registered as a lobbyist before she was placed in the Prime Minister's Office after he took over. What was she a lobbyist for? She was a lobbyist for the Forest Products Association of Canada, which has a great deal of interest in how this federal government develops and delivers that policy around our forests in this country. I should point out that one of those associations--I believe this is accurate--is being sued for the ads being run across the country about the fact that the forests are actually getting larger in Canada when the reality is just the opposite: that they are shrinking at quite a rapid rate.

The list goes on. Of eight people who are in that office, all of them were registered lobbyists before they went in. Then there are the other people who worked directly on the leadership campaign, all of whom have close ties to or were registered lobbyists while they were working for him and are now back working full time. Of course Earnscliffe is the one that comes up all the time.

The point of all this is that we are faced with the situation where they are pretending that it was the other government, that they were and are not part of it. I am not sure who was there at the time, but certainly some of them were. Anyway, they want us to believe they were not part of that. That is what they want the country to believe. The country has already said it does not.

What I want to say for Canadians and the government as a whole is that if this is the way it developed over the first 10 years of the Liberal administration after 1993, when we look at these names and the people who are around the current Prime Minister, why would we have any expectation but that a similar set of circumstances would evolve if the government were to stay in power with these people advising the Prime Minister?

Let me go back to one point that I find troubling as an individual member of Parliament. Again, that is the amount of time we have been forced to spend--and I do not think we had a choice--on this scandal. We have major issues confronting us. Whether it is the environment, health, defence or education, the list goes on. Any number of public policy issues have to be addressed, but so much of our time is taken up with this scandal that the country is suffering as a result. That suffering our country is going through at this point lies directly at the feet of this government, whether it is under the current Prime Minister, the former prime minister or both.

[Supply, March 22nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, today we are debating a motion by the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, asking that:

—this House recognize that the current government is not new, but rather one that is intricately linked to the past decade of mismanagement, corruption and incompetence, and has accordingly lost the confidence of this House.

I think we can just say that the opposition parties are in favour of this motion.

I think also that the party from Quebec in particular has a big problem with this government, because of what went on with Groupaction and the others.

It is interesting though to watch both the opposition day motion and the government response. There is a dynamic going on that I find quite interesting from an historical perspective. I am not sure this has happened very often in the past, maybe never in this chamber. The dynamic that I see is that on one hand we have a government party that is pretending it has not been here for the last decade or been involved in any of the scandal around the sponsorship, that it was somebody else who did that. We see the Prime Minister going around the country, not even mentioning the name of his party, again pretending that the Liberal Party did not exist when he was part of the government, that he was not part of that. He is distancing himself as much as possible.

I must say that with my constituents, and from what we are seeing around the country by way of opinion polls, it is not selling very well. The Canadian public has not bought it and in the Province of Quebec, it is not being accepted at all.

While that dynamic is going on, if I can move over to this side of the House and the official opposition, the official opposition is pretending that somehow its history never occurred, that which got it to where it is now.

We see that element of the Conservative Party, which came out of the Progressive Conservative Party, pretending as if the former Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, did not exist, and that all of the scandals that that government perpetrated on this country over a nine year period did not really happen. Or if it did--and here those members are taking a page out of the Liberal government's playbook--that it was not them, that they were not there and were not part of it, even though the former Prime Minister was very much involved in this last campaign for the leadership. Unfortunately for him, it was for a candidate who was not ultimately successful.

They do not want to acknowledge either the scandals that seem to be erupting out of the provincial Conservative Party in Ontario involving the former premier there and some of the money that he and his close associates were paid, which very much mimics what we saw in the sponsorship scheme and scandal. It concerns services being paid for and not delivered, or delivered at a scale that was inconsequential in proportion to the amount of money paid, whether it was to the former premier or to a number of his close associates who helped run the government when he was premier. There is a very similar pattern there, but again the mover of this motion and the party of which he is part is pretending that those situations did not exist at all.

We see this party pretending that it was somehow born like a virgin birth, that it came from nowhere with no background and no ancestry, but in fact it does. We need only to think of some of those scandals--as I was reading some of the material in preparation for this debate--like Justice Parker finding, in the case of Sinclair Stevens, 14 separate conflicts of interest over a relatively short political career. We saw things like the scandal around the movement of the airplane maintenance contract. It was well deserved to be placed in Winnipeg but was moved to Montreal.

[Supply, March 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have two answers for my hon. colleague. First, when they talk about 41%, they are playing with the numbers.

We can say that the taxpayer is one taxpayer. When the Liberals in the government play with that, they are just talking about money coming out of different parts of the pocket, but it is coming out at the provincial level.

The Liberals keep saying it is not 16%, it is really 41%. I go back to Mr. Romanow's report which said, as have a number of other studies, that the federal government--ignoring the playing with the tax credits, the tax transfers and all the complexities that are part of that--is only directly paying 16% at this point and that 16% must be moved to 25% as quickly as possible. Mr. Romanow said that should be phased in over the next five years.

We are saying to the government that it should stop playing with those numbers. Everybody agrees the government is only paying the 16%. It is fine if it wants to tax some credit for tax transfers, we will let it have that. However, we are saying that in absolute accurate dollars it must move from the 16% to the 25%. It is beyond debate at this point.

[Supply, March 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to take part in today's debate and support the Bloc motion.

It has been a longstanding policy of the NDP to press governments at both the provincial and federal level to provide adequate funding for our health care system. We as a political party have a proud tradition of supporting a public medicare system, one that the former premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas, initiated in Canada. Had it not been for the work done by that government, we believe Canada would not have a national medicare program. We are very proud of that fact.

We have proposals and suggestions as to how to reform the system. A good deal of those were seen in the Romanow report. Mr. Romanow, another former premier of Saskatchewan, worked extensively on dealing with medical costs and the provision of medical services while he was premier. He conducted a massive study and one that clearly showed a way forward for the government and the country with regard to dealing with the costs of medicare and with the issue of quality within the medicare system.

Canada has a position in the world for which we can all be proud. We do not have to apologize to anybody in the world in terms of the quality of care that we provide. However it is not perfect and there is a need for improvement. I think everybody working in the system acknowledges that.

I would like to deal with a couple of issues and specifically address the resolution before the House today urging the government to finally step forward.

Before I was elected to the House of Commons, in the 1990s I watched the push for the privatization of the health care system in Canada. It was interesting that back when the NDP had no status as a political party in the House of Commons, the issue of health care rarely came up in the House. It was not until our party received status again in 1997 that the issue of health care was pushed back on to the political agenda, which led ultimately to the Liberal government being forced to advance funds to the system, to stop downloading the cost to the provinces and to take on, to a full degree, its responsibility.

We saw the government, in the late summer to early fall of 2000, scramble to declare that money would be put into the system. However it was not what the provinces wanted and needed, and the government still has not met those demands.

The resolution that we see before us today is a reflection of the need for the government to take on its proportional responsibility for medicare costs in Canada, which it still has not accomplished. That is why the resolution is before the House today and it is one that we are happy to support.

If we go back in history, it was quite clear that when the original arrangements between the provinces and the federal government were made as to who would bear what costs, the federal government would bear 50% of the costs. That is no longer what we are asking for because the government has not come near that.

It was interesting to listen to the last speaker playing with numbers again. The Romanow report set out in a very clear manner that the federal government was not meeting its proportional responsibility for the cost of medicare. That was the largest and most complete study we have ever had and it was one that clearly pointed the finger at the federal government by stating that it had to meet its responsibilities but that it was not at this point.

As a result of the Romanow report, and as this resolution proposes, we are telling the federal government that it must meet the 25% quota. We can play with the tax credits and the shifting of tax benefits down to the provinces but we should ignore that. That will take up the other 25% to get the government back to its 50%. It has to move from the 16% of actual dollars being spent up to 25%. The government has to phase that in and do it as rapidly as possible.

We could spend some time debating where those funds could come from. We will hear the government's plea of poverty, as we have so many times, but, of course, we get to the end of the year and into the next budgetary period and we find out that the surplus is three, four, five, six times what the government said it would be.

We heard from the current finance minister that there would only be a $2 billion surplus and that maybe it could be given to the provinces. We now know, at the end of the third quarter, that it is over $5 billion and that it will be close to an $8 billion surplus for the 2003-04 year.

The funds are there. If we look at the budgetary projections for the next number of years, that type of surplus will be available and a portion of it needs to be spent on health care.

Mr. Speaker, I forget to mention that I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Churchill.

I want to move on to the whole issue of pharmacare. One of the former finance ministers under the Conservative government was recently quoted in a newspaper article talking about the escalating costs of health care. I do not know if he addressed it at all but a good deal of the escalating costs, way above the inflationary rates in other budgetary items, are because of the escalating costs that we have in pharmacare.

Several things can be done with regard to pharmacare. From our experience, both in Canada and elsewhere, we know there is a substantial over-prescribing of medication, which does affect the quality of care. When people are over-prescribed medications there can be a direct negative result to their health.

We also know that if we did not have the patent protection that we provide and if we were able to do more bulk buying, those could be ways to bring the cost of drugs more under control. We should be looking at the patent legislation as a way of reducing the cost. We could be looking at bulk buying in a much more efficient way. I would point to Australia and its experience in the way it has driven some of its drug costs down, perhaps the most effective on the globe.

Finally, there is the whole issue of providing additional assistance to the doctors and the pharmacies in prescribing medication and to try to get that under control.

I want to address one final point before I run out of time. Again this goes back to the article by Mr. Wilson in the newspaper recently. We have heard from others about the escalating costs. One of the ways of getting around that is to go with what they call the PPP, the public-private partnership arrangement. It has been addressed a number of times and particularly in the Romanow report that the PPP is not the answer. In the end it will cost the system more because it costs private partnerships more to borrow money and, of course, it costs more because there is a profit motive in the delivery of those services and a percentage taken off for that. That is right around the globe.

We can go to any number of places, not just health care, but to a number of other public services where PPP has been attempted and has consistency been shown to be more expensive than government taking on the responsibility directly.

[Haiti, March 10th, 2004]

Mr. Chair, the problem I have with the quick reaction of the UN was that it was overnight. He resigned and it passed a resolution within less than 24 hours. When the UN passed that resolution, it had not heard from President Aristide. All it knew was that he had signed a letter of resignation. I do not think we can draw too much from the position taken by the UN since it did not have the information of his position as he has now taken.