Joe Comartin

[Ballistic Missile Defence, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Chair, since we have been invited by the minister to engage in facts, could we have some from him as to what his defence department has done. Has it issued these contracts worth about $700,000, and I am quoting now from the Ottawa Citizen , “to try out Canadian radar technology in U.S.-run trials of the missile shield this summer”? Have we in fact committed $700,000 to that? Who is in control of those tests? If we have committed, then I have a supplementary question.

The radar system is one that was developed by Raytheon here in Canada. I think it was mentioned earlier by my colleague from the Bloc that Mr. Jim Graaskamp is quoted as saying, “We have no idea what this is about, whether it can carry out this task”. Then he went on to say, “The specific product designed for Canada is not designed for missile detection. There is no demonstrated capability that this technology can be used for ballistic missile defence”.

If we have committed to it, how does the minister justify it when in fact the producer of this product is saying it has no capability to do what is proposed to be done?

[Black History Month, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, as many know, February is Black History Month, a month in which we officially acknowledge the important contributions black Canadians have made and continue to make to the national mosaic.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the 2004 Black Community Leadership Award banquet in Windsor. This year, the award, sponsored by the Windsor and District Black Coalition, honoured the contributions to the community of Dr. Charles Quist-Adade, a former professor at the University of Windsor.

In Windsor and across the country Canadians of black heritage have made significant contributions in the fields of academics, law, medicine and government. My predecessor and fellow New Democrat, Howard McCurdy, was one of the first black members of Parliament.

Indeed, in all walks of life, the black community has helped to make our communities and our country better places to live.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition is in regard to the destruction of a forest and the building of an opera house here in Ontario. I am filing this petition on behalf of residents residing in that region of the province.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

The third petition is in regard to the use of sonar, and the disruption and damage it causes to wildlife in the ocean. This petition has come from a good number of signatories in the province of British Columbia.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the second one is again from the City of Windsor regarding the definition of marriage.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have several petitions. The first one is mostly from members of my riding in the City of Windsor with a couple hundred signatures in support of Bill C-10B, which is the bill providing further protection to animals in our society by way of amendments to the Criminal Code.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I anticipated this opportunity because of the response that I, like a number of other members of my caucus, have received as we have taken these proposals to our constituents and the citizens of Canada more generally.

It was interesting that as we all came back we were comparing our experiences, having reached out to the community in this fashion, of the very similar responses that we got. I have to say that it was one of those occasions when as members of Parliament we were deeply touched by the sensitive nature and expressions that we got from family members.

Two categories stand out in my mind. One was the number of parents, and I have to say mothers in particular, who talked about the need that they had to reunify their families. It often was a situation where the family had come but one of the children, being an adult child, could not be sponsored under the definition in the act. Therefore they would bring two or three of their children but one had to be left behind with other family members in the country of origin. It was telling, the number of times parents broke down in tears when they told of having to make that decision, but for the good of the whole family they came.

The other category where we heard these expressions of sorrow in many cases were the siblings of those children who had been left behind. This situation that I am talking about is not an isolated case. This has occurred numerous times with families who are here, who are citizens and good, solid members of our communities. It was just very emotional.

I have to say that when I hear some of what I will call the nitpicky rationalizations that we are hearing from the government and from some of the speakers in the opposition, I wish they would go out and listen to some of those stories. They may then set aside some of these almost technical arguments that they are producing and say that we have a major problem with the reunification of families in this country.

To suggest that the existing provision in the act says that if they do not have any family here, they can bring somebody, does not answer the issue at all and, in fact, does not address the issue of reunification whatsoever in those situations that I have described.

The other indication, which we have heard both from the official opposition and the government, is that this just is not workable. The reality is that this was looked at very extensively by the immigration committee back in 2002.

In the spring of 2002, albeit it was a definition of extended families that was smaller than what we produced and proposed, we were proposing in an amendment before the committee, as we were moving to amend the bill, that grandparents and brothers and sisters would be defined as family members and could be sponsored. That vote, after a great deal of discussion and analysis by the committee, failed by only one vote. It was moved by the NDP and it got the support of six of the members. Seven voted against it, and, of course, at that time all those members were government members.

I believe the proposal we are making addresses some other issues that badly need to be addressed, such as the backlog, which has been mentioned by a number of the other speakers. We are well aware of it. However what is being ignored in the debate, particularly from the government's side, is that a good number of the people who are in that backlog now are family members as we would define them, that is, they are brothers and sisters and children of people who are already citizens and residents of Canada.

If in fact we move them into the sponsorship category, that is, they could be sponsored once in a lifetime by a family member, we actually would reduce that backlog. We also would reduce the amount of work that would be needed, because the sponsorship process is a faster one. It requires less work on the part of our civil service to process the application. I can give an estimate that somewhere between 25% and 50% less time is spent on the sponsorship program than is spent on the regular applicant.

So there would be a substantial reduction in the backlog and there would be a substantial reduction in the amount of time that our civil service would have to work on these applications. That would go some distance to then reduce the amount of the backlog for the rest of the people who have been waiting for their applications to be processed, as we have heard, for as long as five years, oftentimes successfully at the end of that period of time.

There is another point I would like to make this evening. It is something that I do not think we had anticipated, but it came out regularly at the sessions that we held across the country when we were speaking to family members who would be interested in taking advantage of this sponsorship program. That was the number of times that family members stood up and said that there is also a dollar issue here, not just the humanitarian issue of reunifying siblings or parents and children. There is also a financial issue, because the reality is that in many cases the family members who are here are sending money back to that country of origin. In a great many cases, the family members who are left behind in that other country are in very poor financial shape and need the assistance that flows from the family members who are here.

We know about this. It came up recently at one of the G-7 meetings. We know about the amount of money that is sent out of the country for family members.

I can recall one man at the session we had in my city of Windsor. He was the first one to mention this. He indicated that he was sending back in excess of $5,000 a year. As he said that, it was interesting to see the number of other hands that went up for people wanting to say the same thing. This was not a large crowd. We had about 100 people at that meeting. There were at least 10 families in that room who were sending back in excess of $5,000 a year. There were several who were sending back in excess of $10,000 a year.

That is money that is flowing out of Canada. We can multiply that by the tens of thousands because of the responsibility that the family members who are here feel for those family members who are back in the country of origin. That is a substantial drain of cash out of this country, which would not be occurring if Parliament took advantage of the proposal that we are making to reunify those families to bring them here.

Another point has been missed by the government. We are finding that the number of people who have been coming here in the last decade shows a significant difference in regard to the two patterns we can look at. If we look at the new immigrants or newcomers who came here between 1981 and 1991, they were hired into employment situations that were in keeping with their experiences and their academic backgrounds at a much higher rate than those who came between 1991 and 2001. The reports on this are out there. It is a well established fact now.

This is one of the reasons I would suggest that we could move to deal with that problem. If we did reunify families, if we did allow them to sponsor, that rate of people not being able to find appropriate employment would drop dramatically because the family would be here in the country to back them up and to provide them with assistance.

There are numerous reasons why the bill should be accepted at second reading and passed on to committee so that further investigation can be made and we can move dramatically in a direction that will reunify families in this country.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

The difficulty we have, Mr. Speaker, is that we cannot get a commitment from the government, specifically from the government House leader, to indicate that Bills C-7 and C-19, which are the two bills that are outstanding, would not be brought back. The government is not prepared to say that in spite of what the Prime Minister has said across the country.

With regard to the percentage of support, I have not run across anyone from the first nations who is prepared to support Bill C-7. Bill C-19 is different. There is a split on that one within the community, although last November or thereabouts there was another vote taken specifically on Bill C-19 by the national association and it was opposed by a substantial majority, at least two-thirds were against it.

Bill C-7, the governance bill, is so offensive. I would be surprised if the member could bring me anyone who is in support of Bill C-7.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the question is not all that pertinent to the amendment and subamendment with regard to the potential for legislation to be brought back. The issue of whether we will spend more money on the gun registry will be more a part of the budgetary process that we will see develop over the next few weeks and the issue will be resolved then.

I must say to my colleague from the west, from the Conservative Party, that I am sympathetic to the position he has taken. It mirrors a number of other pieces of legislation that have the potential to come back before the House in the next few weeks.

Members of the government, and particularly the Prime Minister, have in fact led people to believe that changes would take place. What we are being told in the motion by the government is that the legislation is coming back with the same wording at the same stage that it was, so there is no change at all.

The spin that the government is putting on it that somehow there has been a change in government is really a farce.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to pick up on the points that were made by the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, the former House leader. It begs the question, why are we faced with the government motion and the amendments from the opposition? The reason is simply because the government, under the former prime minister, and I have to say in full cooperation of the current Prime Minister, prorogued the House when it had a great deal of work that needed to be done, and the country's interest demanded government attention.

The Liberals were more interested in carrying on the internal battle between the then sitting prime minister and the about to be prime minister. That was much more important for the government and for that political party than the overall interests of this country. That is why we are here today and why we started this debate on Friday, and we will continue it at least through the day tomorrow. The Liberals put their interests, as a political party, and to some degree the personal political interests of the two men ahead of the interests of this country.

To suggest, as the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell just did, that this is a normal procedure is debatable in the extreme. The reality is the legislation as it has come back has not been changed at all. This is not a signal by the new government under the new Prime Minister that we will have major changes. This is simply a continuation of bills that were before the House at various stages in November when the Liberals decided to prorogue the House. We are not seeing any new bills or any changes in the bills. They are coming back holus-bolus just as they were before the legislature was stopped.

The abuse of the process that this represents is compounded by the financial impact of all the extra work that has to be done now, extra work by individual members and their staff on private members' bills and extra work by staff of the House of Commons. The prorogation, which occurred in November, has cost the country substantial amounts of extra dollars, extra staff time and extra effort, all of which was unnecessary if the government had simply taken its responsibility to the country seriously.

The position of the NDP, with regard to the government motion for reinstatement of the legislation, is we are not prepared to give it a blank cheque. Had the motion listed specific bills that the government would be bringing back, certainly some of them we would have been agreed to out of respect for the country. However, others should not be brought back, and I will go on to that in a few moments.

The difficulty we have is simply telling the government to go ahead, do whatever it wants with regard to these bills in terms of bringing them back and we will be prepared to stand back. That is a complete abdication of our responsibility as opposition members. When we hear the former House leader talk about democracy and democratic deficit and that somehow we are contributing to that, he is just dead wrong.

The opposition's role is to speak out when there is abuse, and that motion is abusive when we look at the history and how it came to be in front of the House at this time.

However, there are some points I want to make with regard, in particular, to the subamendment by the opposition to its amendment to the main motion. I am not sure if anybody understood that, but it is the subamendment that deals with Bill C-49 that would allow the Prime Minister to call an election as of April 1, if the Liberals can get this bill through the House of Commons and the Senate.

To some significant degree, I am going to be accusatory of members of the official opposition about the amendment and subamendment. They are trying to prevent the government from being in a position to call an election this spring because they know full well that they are not going to be in a position to fight that election very effectively. Given that their leadership convention is in the latter part of March, they will not be in a position to have its platform in any kind of shape. They probably will not have a lot of their candidates prepared to run in an election that everyone thinks will be called in April and held in the early part of May. That is really what this is about.

I think it is accentuated by the fact that when the bill was originally before the House the former Alliance, now part of the Conservative Party, in fact supported what I think was Bill C-52 at that time, and now in the form of Bill C-49. That position was unequivocal on its part. I can remember some of the speeches its members gave in the House at that time saying that we had to recognize the need for Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta to get those additional seats and that they should definitely be in place and ready to be part of the electoral process in the next election.

Events have overtaken the members of the official opposition and they now appear to be opposed to the bill going through. I can tell everyone on behalf of my party, although we think that the election should be held some further in the future, we are ready for the election at any time.

The other point I want to go back to is the process that has also brought us to this point, and that is the role the Senate has played on the bill, as well as Bill C-34, the ethics commissioner's bill. I think the country generally knows, and we are certainly aware of it as members of Parliament, that both pieces of legislation, the bill to change the date for the boundaries to come into effect and the bill dealing with the implementation in a broader way of the use of the ethics commissioner for both the House and the Senate, were before the Senate the first week of November when the House adjourned. Rather than staying, working on those bills and passing them, the bill that dealt with the boundary issue was ignored and the other one was sent back.

There are a couple of points that need to be made about this. We did some checking on this and in all of the sessions we have had since the start of Parliament in 1867, this Parliament has seen the most bills either sent back or not dealt with by the Senate. We have set a record in that respect. Interestingly, the previous record was in the very first session in 1867, and I have to assume it was because they were still learning the ropes.

We have not even come particularly close. There were a couple of sessions in the 1920s when there were about 11 or 12 bills sent back or not dealt with by the Senate. There were 15 in the first session. So far we have had 18 bills not dealt with or turned back by the Senate.

Being a bit of a student of history of the country and of the role the Senate has played and should play, it begs the question, how many more does it have to turn down, send back or ignore before we are in a constitutional crisis? We have had a large number bills this time, and those two bills were part of that. The Senators simply went home. They were upset with the prime minister over the ethics commissioner's bill and a couple of other bills and they said, “To heck with it, we are going home”, and they did. As a result, the legislation that would have allowed the redistribution of the ridings to take place at an earlier date has been forced to be brought back once again.

We are in a situation where the government wants to do something. The House of Commons has passed the bill and the Senate has thwarted it. The question will be, once it does come before this House, and it will one way or the other in the next week or two, and then goes back to the Senate, will the Senate again try to thwart the will of the elected representatives in the country?

It begs the question regarding the role the NDP has played for a long time in advocating the abolition of the Senate. Are we getting closer to the rest of the parties, realizing we can no longer tolerate that type of interference with the democratic process. We cannot ignore the costs of having the Senate around, which runs at about $60 million a year, doing work that is generally undemocratic and useless.

The other point I would like to make is with regard to the position that we hear from the government. This again comes back to the democratic deficit. We are now faced with the notice that closure will be invoked sometime later today or early tomorrow and this debate will be closed down. Again, we are faced with the reality that the new government, as it keeps wanting to call itself, is following exactly the same pattern as the old government.

We had in the prior sessions more motions for closure from the government than we had at any time in our history, and we will compound that tomorrow when it invokes closure.

With regard to the legislation itself, I want to be somewhat critical of the comments from the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, the former House leader. He said that the government was bringing back the same bills on which members had voted. He said that we were interfering with the democratic process in which we had already participated.

Of these bills, I want to mention some bills that jump to the fore in my mind because I had some involvement with them along with our member for Winnipeg Centre. These are the bills that deal with the aboriginal governance legislation, Bill C-7 and Bill C-19, but Bill C-7 in particular. The member suggested nothing really had changed, that the democratic process worked. The reality is the current sitting Prime Minister undermined that legislation, undermined his own party and undermined the ministers of natural resources and aboriginal affairs on that legislation.

It is very clear that the first nations were dramatically opposed to the legislation, and we know that. We had issues brought back to the House on how controversial the hearings were in committee after second reading. This Prime Minister, sitting as a member of Parliament, sent out a very clear message to his supporters within the Liberal Party, who are members of this House, to the first nations and to the country generally that he did not support the legislation. Now we hear that at the very least it is possible the government will bring it back unchanged.

There was a democratic process that went on in that period of time. The first nations said that it was 100% opposed, adamantly opposed, to the legislation, Bill C-7 in particular, because it perpetuated the patriarchal attitude that underlies the current Indian Act.

The now sitting Prime Minister took advantage of that and said that he agreed the legislation was not very good and that all of it would have to reviewed. Now we hear that the government wants to bring it back at the same stage, as originally passed by the House. It has gone through second reading, been approved in principle, been through exhaustive hearings in committee, then back to this House. I believe its been through report stage and is just awaiting debate at third reading.

In spite of what the Prime Minister told first nations, that he was opposed to the legislation and that if he were prime minister it would not go through as is, the legislation could be back in front of the House in the next week or two at third reading. There would be minimal debate at that point and it could be passed.

Things have changed in the country since that legislation went through. I use that as an example of why the NDP is not prepared to give the government a blank cheque. We are not prepared to let all the legislation come back simply by having the ministers stand up in the House and say that they want legislation back at the same stage it was at when the House was prorogued back in November. We are not prepared to do that, and we are adamantly opposed to the motion.