Joe Volpe

[Proactive Enforcement and Defect Accountability Legislation (PEDAL) Act, June 3rd, 2010]

moved that Bill C-511, An Act respecting the reporting of motor vehicle information and to amend the Motor Vehicle Safety Act (improving public safety), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to move the bill in the House. One might ask why Bill C-511, which I refer to a the PEDAL act, the proactive enforcement and defect accountability legislation, would it be so necessary today.

Many of us can speak eloquently about the logistical issues associated with any bill, all the finances associated with them, all the technology, all the procedural reasons for them. However, there is really only one reason and that is consumer safety, the safety of all the citizens who use the roadways that are filled by vehicles, produced by manufacturers in Canada and abroad, re-imported here, sold here and in part supplied by auto parts manufacturers here. Every one of those men and women deserves the comfort and the knowledge of assurance that comes with the fact that there would be laws compel such providers of vehicles to put on the marketplace a vehicle that would be safe for operation.

I have to reflect a little on this. A lot of the issues we have seen over the course of the last six to seven months have to deal with one particular company, but in fact we are talking about all automobile manufacturers. We are talking about the reasons why people have gone to the extreme levels of going to congressional hearings in the United States, other congressional hearings around the world and even parliamentary hearings in Canada. They want to get some satisfaction and some answers from the manufacturers that have put vehicles on the market that have proven to be defective in such a fashion that they have put the lives and safety of the users and those who share the road with them at risk.

Perhaps this would make it a little too personal, but it struck me very seriously the other day, even though I presented the bill many weeks ago. I was a very proud grandfather a couple of days ago when my daughter-in-law, Maccarena, my grandson and my son Massimo brought a second baby into the world, Leandro. He made Amedeo an older brother. I thought about all those kids like my two grandsons. If the House will allow this digression, one is watching this on television right now. He name is Matteo and he is 17 months old. He is looking at his other cousins, all of them under the age of 7, Isabella, Alessandro, Tazio, Gianluca and Stefano.

I am a legislator and I look at these grandchildren. They are so completely vulnerable, so completely dependent on what a driver might do on the road. Imagine the parents of all children, including those of my policy adviser who helped shape the bill. Simon and Leo are at home watching to see whether dad's member of Parliament is thinking about them when we are talking about vehicle safety and well they should as should all of us. Everything we do here has an implication and a consequence for those who are most vulnerable.

The reason we were motivated to come forward with this legislation was during our study of what was going on worldwide and in Canada with motor vehicles, it struck us that perhaps we had not given it that human touch. This human touch dictated something that had been going on since 2002. We are partisan. We talk about one government party doing one thing and another government party doing another, but in 2002 the Liberal Party initiated a study of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act because automobiles had changed so drastically since the last time the act had been amended.

Some people say that these vehicles on the roads are almost like rolling robots. They are completely computerized. They go beyond the ability of most drivers to determine anything that they can do. Other than pressing an accelerator, pressing a brake pedal and steering, there is very little else that can happen. There are computerized mechanisms inside the vehicle that will act in fashions that our drivers may be unable to handle.

Therefore, we decided to look at this Motor Vehicle Safety Act. We did not want to vilify Toyota even though it had been in the middle of hearings in the United States, here and worldwide and accepted to pay fines on the basis of the findings of the American congressional hearings. We wanted to see if we could bring manufacturers to the table to do what would be right for their customers, the consumers. We wanted to ensure that consumers would be protected against those who were indifferent to the issues in an aftermarket environment. In other words, once the vehicle is sold and it is in the hands of the drivers, companies walk away. Everything is a complaint, it is a quality issue, it is not a safety defect related issue, but some are.

What we propose to do is ensure that we bring into legislation a couple of very basic elements. The first is to give the Minister of Transport, who is the regulator of these vehicles, the legislative authority to call for, to receive, to analyze, to digest and then to act on the information associated with any one of these vehicles, whether they be in Canada or abroad. If they are a part of a company's fleet and there are complaints associated with those vehicles and they are safety-related, then they need to be reported to the Minister of Transport for action.

We lay out in the legislation a very thorough and specific methodology. We do not ask the minister to be willy-nilly, whimsical in his or her approach to what the complaints might be. However, we require a quarterly reporting mechanism by the manufacturers, through their dealer networks, to Transport Canada. Through this proposed legislation, we give the minister the authority to analyze these in the context of safety-related defects.

The second feature of the legislation is we provide a definition for “safety-related defect” that goes specifically to whether the problem is incurred while driving, or not, is associated with a preventable situation or an anticipated situation by the driver. If it is not, then it has nothing to do with the driver or the quality of the vehicle. It has everything to do with safety-related issues.

Having analyzed the information, and maybe requiring more, the minister can then, under the legislation, initiate a recall to get those vehicles off the road until such time as the manufacturer comes up with a solution to the problem and addresses it vigorously and in a timely fashion.

These two innovations do not currently exist in the Motor Vehicle Safety Act.

The Minister of Transport a little while ago said, in respect to Toyota specifically, that the Motor Vehicle Safety Act had a lot of good teeth and clubs in it and if the department found that a company was not compliant, it could engage in criminal proceedings. It seems that part was rhetorical. The Government of Canada and no minister can direct a criminal investigation. They can, if they have the will, ask some of the law enforcement authorities to investigate. We have seen that with the Prime Minister.

The government has not done that with Toyota or anyone else, in part because the legislation does not give the minister the authority that we think the minister ought to have. Right now, the minister and his department can attempt to influence a company to comply, to provide information and to provide other issues to give them a history of the vehicle's performance.

However, they cannot ask for anything. They cannot ask for the lists of the complaints received by the dealerships or by the company centrally. They cannot ask for accident reports, the nature of the injuries or the deaths that might have occurred. They cannot even talk about the level of the property damage. None of these things are currently inherent in the legislation. However, under the PEDAL act, the minister can demand those and more information if so required and then, through a very methodical process, initiate the recall.

Today, the minister has to hope that a company or manufacturer will accede to his request and influence to issue a recall or some such notice. One company has a very unique euphemism for a recall. It is called a voluntary product improvement notification. It essentially says, “You have a bad vehicle. We do not know what the problem is, but next time we call you, we will bring you in and we will solve the problem. Happy motoring”.

That company is now facing 100 class action suits in the United States alone. Fifty-nine deaths are attributed to the safety defects associated with the vehicles and entire fleets have been recalled. We want to get beyond that point. We wanted to make a very positive, immediate amendment related to technology in the legislation. The amendment involves the brake override system for all of those vehicles that have an electronically controlled throttle.

These are new terms and technologies. In the generation of cars that we had when I was much younger, we could become our own mechanics and fix our own vehicles, but we cannot override the commands in a computer-driven automobile. With the proposed legislation, we ensure that every manufacturer, as of a particular date, builds that into every vehicle that they put on the market. Some of them are already doing it voluntarily. Others are a little more recalcitrant and slower. We are telling them that, as of a particular date, they have to do that.

I know that you, Madam Speaker, will want to encourage all colleagues in the House to support legislation that is really proactive, because that is what this is. It does not say that the government must spend X number of dollars to do anything. It establishes a regime that gives the minister authority to call in the manufacturers, to demand information, to utilize that information, to urge them to do their recall and, if not, to issue a recall himself or herself.

It really gives the regulators a proactive role. It gives them the substance they need to ensure our roads are safe. It gives them the authority they need to ensure that consumers are well protected when they purchase vehicles in which they will trust their lives and the lives of their children and dependents. It goes further. It tells the manufacturers that this is coming down the road. It tells them to get ready for it, to be prepared and to be compliant.

Finally, it provides everybody with the parameters of what does not exist in the current Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and that is a definition for a safety-related defect. The legislation is very specific. It outlines what it is. It gives everybody the parameters under which to operate. Everybody can and ought to, in this instance, obey the law, especially the Minister of Transport.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, June 3rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, there is a little competition in this House about who can speak loudest and most eloquently, and I think the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore is in the running.

I know that he actually read, unlike everybody else on the government side, the 880 pages of the bill. I would like him to use some of his experience, some of his expertise, to help the government members opposite answer one very simple question, lest they fall prey to the accusation that he suggested already, which is that the government side is a group of tax-and-squander members.

Will he tell us, to help the Conservatives out, because they are in need of assistance, what page in the government's action plan and budget includes the $3.2 billion tax on air travellers in this country?

Second, will he also refer them to the page in that action plan/budget plan, Bill C-9, that shows where the $550 million bribe to the State of Michigan Legislature is located so that we can know how the bridge is going to be built?

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I listened carefully to my hon. colleague's speech. I know that he is very familiar with parliamentary procedure, because in a case like this, we would usually hear from the government representatives in charge of care of finance or international trade. He said that this is the procedure today.

I would like to know whether he has any advice for the members and ministers who will be examining this Senate bill. Since senators cannot sit in this House, the ministers or members who currently take care of financial and trade matters will probably be able to explain to us how Bill S-3 will close the loopholes he mentioned in his speech.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona speaks to the essence of the government's presentation. Is it believable or is it just going for low-hanging fruit on tax treaties and economic activities? I think it is going for the low-hanging fruit.

Of course it is difficult, but the government is not about to make difficult decisions. The difficult decisions require work. The government must be able to go to the large corporate investors in many of these offshore accounts that are free of taxation and tell them that they can make all the money in the world in our country but that some of it must stay here. It must tell them that they cannot hide the money, that they cannot take it with them when they go to the other world and, therefore, they should not take it with them when they go across the ocean.

What he wants, of course, is something that the government is not prepared to do, which is to face up to the big boys and say that we should build this country together and that no one should just come, take, pillage and then leave. That sounds a little socialist but it is a question of responsibility and community involvement, and the Conservative government opposite does not understand what that means.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Scarborough Centre will know that one of the significant demographic developments over the course of the last generation and going forward is that we cannot talk about seniors as people we put on display in a museum. We are talking about 15% of the population. These are people who have already made great contributions to the country and took seriously the government's recommendation that they begin to save for this period in their life by making investments in companies that would structure themselves in a fashion that they would provide a reliable source of income for seniors in their later years.

Over the course of this last generation, not only has the percentage of seniors in our society increased, but the number of people making contributions to the growth of the GDP has, by reflection, diminished. They now find themselves in a situation where the Government of Canada made specific promises to provide them with certain stability in their later years and then, with one wretched, sneaky move, took $35 billion out from under them.

Can anyone imagine being in one's 70s or 80s and watching one's life-savings snatched away, dismissed by the Minister of Finance and the Conservative Prime Minister who said that his government was doing this because it had to make a tough decision? It was too bad for seniors who were at the most vulnerable period of their life. It was more important for the government to spin the message that it could make the tough decisions, although stupid, but it demonstrated its toughness, although heartless. The government was absolutely disinterested in the future of the Canadian collective.

Welcome to the Conservative world that erodes away the values that make us a cohesive society, that erodes away all of the values that make us a thriving economic unit and that thumbs its nose at the mock parliamentary process that permitted people to get to where they are.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Elmwood—Transcona addressed the main issue to which I had already spoken, which is what the objective is of this bill. What do we want to do when we engage in tax treaties with countries like Turkey, Greece and Colombia? We need to have an objective. What is our strategy?

I hear the minister for war and peace in the Middle East saying that we need to have a strategy. I do not know what the strategy of the government is. When our government engaged in a tax treaty like this, it had very specific objectives and tactics in place, which were to stimulate increased activity, to attract companies to those places and to invite companies from those countries to the Canadian environment. We tabulated specifically over a five and ten year period the amount of increased economic activity that would be governed by this kind of legislation.

I, too, am as surprised as the member for Elmwood—Transcona is that the parliamentary secretary could not give him an indication or even a ballpark number. If the member looks at the estimates and the budget, he will find the line that indicates other sources of income from the Government of Canada and he will see that it goes into the hundreds of millions of dollars as opposed to the $250 billion that is part of the budget.

The member can then divide those three countries by 80 and come up with his own figures because I am not sure the government knows, which is why it did not write them down. Not only that, it does not care.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to speak to this bill today.

Those of us in the Liberal Party are into what is called nation-building. Nation-building is a bit different from what the parliamentary secretary said a moment ago is the primary function of parliamentarians, that is, to make sure they conduct things the way a businessman would run his corner shop. That is not to diminish the fact there always needs to be economic probity, financial probity in everything that we do, but there is a different action.

In this place, all members of Parliament, whether their background is in business, law, academic teaching, small business, or worker, are interested in building this nation. They do it through the economic stimuli available to a Parliament like our own to ensure that all men, women and children have the opportunity to fashion out a future for themselves in this country, to avail themselves of all of the natural resources that are here and the human resources that come with the interaction of people who live in a collective, and all of the entrepreneurial skills that are developed either through some of the institutions that are funded by government in part on the one hand and stimulated by those who see the value in research and development on the other.

Bill S-3 addresses one component of that social economic development that comes with nation-building. One would expect that I as a Liberal and those of us in the Liberal caucus would be supportive of any initiative that would render the free flow of capital for investment to allow enterprise to capitalize on its ingenuity and create wealth as a result, and to do it not just here in our country but elsewhere. It is called the exporting of our intellectual property, of our entrepreneurial skills, indeed of our culture.

Those of us who are nation-builders, those of us who are members of the Liberal Party, understand that government is not only about operating a balance sheet. We understand that balance sheet has to include the ambition and the dreams of all Canadians in whatever fashion they are developed around the country.

The reason taxation treaties are important and why Liberal governments in the past have sought them in the context of the OECD and the model tax convention that has driven it is that we believe in fairness, the fairness that comes with making an investment and recovering revenue from that investment, but not an investment or return that would be double taxed. In other words, we do not have to make a contribution twice to the infrastructure of a culture, economy and society that may be thousands of kilometres away.

That does not mean our corporate culture would go in and ransack and pillage and walk away without any responsibilities. We believe in a mutual co-operation with legitimate authorities in other locations that welcome our entrepreneurs, our investors and co-operate with them in developing the local economy while allowing ours to come back with the merited profits without being taxed there and here.

When we have to tax here and we have to tax back, the first casualty is probity, i.e., it is replaced by corruption. The second of course is people look for ways to avoid tax and that obviously leads to tax evasion.

That does not work well for the development of any country, because the underlying weakness is one that says the individuals, or the corporate individuals who make an investment, who garner wealth from the activity in whatever place that activity is resident, no longer have a responsibility to their community.

In the Liberal Party we believe in a collective responsibility. We believe there should be profit and capitalization of all intervention and investment that is made in a territory or a collective, but we believe that something must be left behind: growth. Growth is what we leave behind, and a respect for the individuals that allowed us to move along.

We have developed a series of treaties with many countries. I am glad to see that we are now moving ahead with Greece, Turkey and Colombia. I understand that we are already in negotiations with other countries like Cuba. The idea is that those countries and their legitimate authorities help our own investors to secure a proper investment environment and at the same time leave behind an additional investment through taxation that is not so onerous as to generate avoidance, evasion and corruption.

Legislation like this seeks to impress upon the international stage that one can be a responsible and active democracy and still be very dynamic economically. One can be socially oriented, i.e., have a sense of responsibility to the collective and at the same time pursue a very dynamic and rewarding bottom line. We wonder why legislation like this, which purports to do that, would not have been presented earlier and would not have been initiated in the House of Commons, where all money bills, tax initiatives and fiscal responsibilities are developed, debated and promulgated.

We would have thought that. Not to be light on this, but it seems to me that it did happen in the past, but prorogation came along and killed it. Now it has returned again through the Senate. It has come back here. Maybe there will be another prorogation. I must think about it a moment. Why? Because the parliamentary secretary talked with such great earnestness about the government's commitment to all of these bottom lines and fiscal responsibility issues and about how this is almost indispensable to everything in the world.

I agree, but I am not sure that the issue of commitment can be attached to that speech. The legislation was presented, debated, prorogued and killed. Now it has been raised in the other place and brought here. We will make a few interventions. There is no indication that things are going to be moving with any speed. It is important for our businesses to understand that the government is actually in a position where it wants to help and prepare the road so that foreign governments are at least as sensitive to the dynamics of the marketplace as our own might be.

It struck me as well that the parliamentary secretary talked about the greatness of the Canadian financial system and the basis upon which it is founded, how solid it might be, how much of a beacon it is for the rest of the world, how the marketplace is solid and how there is an appropriate balance between business and government, between society and business and between what must be invested and what must be taxed. In other words, how do we make a contribution to renewal and growth?

The parliamentary secretary said that all of these things are part of the Canadian culture. In saying that, he is paying a compliment to the governments of former prime minister Jean Chrétien and former prime minister Paul Martin, who were able to establish a system of balanced budgets.

Someone is going to say, “Oh yes, but somebody had to pay for it”. Canada had balanced budgets and surpluses, in the western world, so that we had the most solid financial system, financial administration, anywhere among the G8. In the OECD countries, Canada was seen as a country that reduced taxes. Of course we had a reduction in the national debt from roughly $600 billion to about $500 billion and an elimination of the deficit, from $43 billion to zero. No, I am sorry, it did not go to zero; it actually went to a $12 billion surplus, at last count, which was then reinvested in our collective, our community, Canada. It was invested in the taxpayers. It was invested in those Canadians who wanted to make this country grow.

Every country lusted at our model. They asked how it could be that Canadian administrators, Canadian legislators, could make investments in research, in human resources, in universities and colleges, could produce a federal system that allowed for two levels of government to be able to make investments in their young people, in the infrastructure to take care of the old, in the hospitals and medical systems that are required to give a quality of life that is the envy of the world? How can this be? What do they do?

Well, they took a look at the tax system. The two governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, over a 15 year period, produced the kinds of results I mention. They were able to initiate all these treaties that were reciprocal arrangements with countries, with the business environment in other places and the expectations of our business community.

The Government of Canada and the governments of the provinces were able to go into countries around the world in support of their businesses and receive the red carpet treatment. Why? Because when they struck those deals, those reciprocal arrangements, like those proposed by Bill S-3 right now where two countries are talking about recognizing which of the two has the residual authority to tax an activity, to tax an income, they do it on the basis of fairness. The Canadian government has demonstrated a culture of probity, a culture of continuity, a culture of respect for those who contribute the earning and those who withdraw from that earning to reinvest with their partner.

That is why countries around the world approached us and asked “Can we get an arrangement with you, because you can be trusted?”. People do business with those whom they know, with those who have established a record of continuity, those who have established a record of trust.

That is why I mentioned a moment ago the issue of income trusts. The justification for it was that there was tax leakage here. We needed to get a little bit more. We could not lose that $300 million. The parliamentary secretary said, “That's old hat”, three years ago. But it is not old hat to refer to the environmental standards that were set, perhaps not met, by previous governments of 10 to 15 years ago and replaced by no standards. Therefore, there is no judgment.

The issue of income trusts is extremely important because it goes to the heart of internal tax treaties. Those are the arrangements the Government of Canada, i.e. the people, the collective, makes with those who engage in economic activity to produce wealth and to share it, to fund programs.

When the Conservative Government of Canada made a big deal of saying, “We are making the tough decision; we are going to cancel these income trusts because that is $300 million”, it said that these guys through a legal tax loophole were avoiding paying $300 million. That is going to be replaced by a circumstance that sees 85% of those activities bought by American and foreign-owned enterprises. As my colleague from Scarborough Centre mentioned a moment or two ago, what happens is they get all the benefits and advantages out of the Canadian tax system and ours do not.

Of those companies that became the target of that $300 million tax leakage, 85% are now in the hands of foreigners. By the way, they are not paying taxes here. They are paying taxes there.

What is worse is that those Canadians who had made an investment in their own future and in their own retirement lost $35 billion overnight. They saw their savings melted away like rare snow on a hot June day. They just melted away because the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, both Conservatives, said “We need to make a tough decision. You pay for it. You have got $35 billion to burn. You pay for it so that we can save $300 million”. We save $300 million and we are losing whatever is the balance to all those Americans who took the 85% of the income trusts that still exist. That is great.

Let us go back to these tax treaties. Foreign countries are looking at us; now it is tougher to negotiate with them. We are negotiating with them and happily there are people who still want to sit at the table with us, but they are wondering about our right-wing government, I am sorry, an extreme right-wing government. It does not pay attention to that dynamic I mentioned a few moments ago, the dynamic with the individual citizen, the individual taxpayer, engaged either as a worker, a subcontractor, an entrepreneur, an administrator in a large enterprise, or indeed, an administrator in one of those social institutions that make us the great country we are. That relationship of trust and mutual service is being eroded, if not snapped. They look at us and say, “If they have a country whose government has so little respect for all of the elements that go toward wealth creation, that go toward the development of a society that is an economic model for the world, what can we expect? If the Government of Canada has little regard for its own citizens, if the Government of Canada is busy in the process of eroding all of those programs and institutions that have got it to this place of such elevation, what can we expect in any agreement we sign with them?” We should think about that.

Sometimes we listen to people like the parliamentary secretary, who say to us that this is good, that is good and this is good, then take a look at each item of the puzzle and go out and say, “Look at how many pieces we have in the puzzle”. Put it together and see what it looks like.

We want to support a system, and we will support Bill S-3. We find that those initiatives are a logical outflow of those initiatives we had as a Liberal government. They have to flow from the logic of nation-building that we established in this place and that we still adhere to very proudly, despite the mudslinging that is thrown at us for all of the achievements we made through all those years. Those achievements no longer belong to the Liberal Party. They belong to the country of Canada. They belong to every province. They belong to every municipality. They belong to every citizen.

We have a responsibility in this place to ensure that all the interests of all Canadians, be they workers, small entrepreneurs, administrators or large corporate citizens, are always weighed in an equilibrium, a balance that sees them first as members of Canada, and Canada always.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010, May 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of questions that arose out of comments a few moments ago.

Of course, one is that with such a valuable piece of legislation, especially with all of its tax implications, one might have thought it would have been addressed by the government here in this House first. I would like to ask the member why the government chose the route of the Senate in order to get this kind of legislation here.

The second question is around his statement that his government has made courageous decisions. I am just wondering about the definition of courage that sees the government making a promise during an election regarding income trusts, then reversing itself because there was about a $300 million tax leakage. That correction caused an overnight collapse of $35 billion in the assets of all of those people who had put money into those income trusts. By the way, 85% of those companies that had turned themselves into income trusts are now owned by Americans, so they pay no taxes here.

I am just wondering whether the member thought that the tax treaties we had arranged in respect of the income trusts worked to Canadians' advantage. Canadians lost $35 billion as opposed to giving up $300 million in taxation. Did he think that was a good exchange to reduce taxes by $300 million so that taxpayers could lose $35 billion in assets?

[Petitions, May 12th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present a petition presented to me for the consideration of the House by several hundred constituents from not only Eglinton--Lawrence but the greater Toronto area.

The petitioners point out that there is scientific consensus and public acknowledgement that animals can feel pain and can suffer and that all effort should be made to prevent animal cruelty and reduce animal suffering. They also point out that over one billion people around the world rely on animals for their livelihood and many others rely on animals for companionship.

As residents of Canada, the petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to support a universal declaration on animal welfare.

[Business of Supply, May 11th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a comment. The member expressed herself quite well. She defined democracy in a new way. But before speaking about democracy, I would like to ask her if members of the Bloc Québécois have a monopoly on passion. Passion means dedication, the desire and the energy to defend what one has and to push for what one would like to have. Members of the Liberal Party, myself included, also have passion for a country in which Quebec is an equal partner.

The member wants us to recognize the Bloc Québécois' passion, but I believe that she is overlooking the passion others feel for Canada and Quebec. Will she indicate once and for all that other Canadians also feel passion for their country?