John Duncan

[Coast Guard, February 16th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this story has been on the west coast news for the last five nights running. The government should be embarrassed that it has to take the question under advisement.

The value of these divers is recognized by the RCMP and by other police forces in the lower mainland that call on them for underwater rescue. Their diving capabilities have saved lives and are essential for any aircraft mishap in the waters off Vancouver airport.

Will the minister stop this wrongheaded, bureaucratic initiative now?

[Canada Customs And Revenue Agency, February 16th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, now that the finance minister has announced some teeny tiny tax cuts, the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency is trying to fill those little holes. It has harassed employers who are now ferreting out taxable benefits.

B.C. Ferries has implemented new parking rules as a result. I will quote from a bulletin to its employees:

The terminal managers will record the period of time you parked...You will accumulate a taxable benefit for each day worked based on the daily parking rate of ten cents...based on a personal tax rate of 40%, the cost to you is eighty cents per month...Please note: Employee parking lots will be monitored by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

This reads like a Monty Python skit. Total revenue will be exceeded by new administration costs. Is it any wonder people think the bureaucracy has gone mad?

[Eldorado Nuclear Limited Reorganization And Divestiture Act, February 16th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we are speaking on Bill C-3 this morning, which pertains to the Eldorado Nuclear Limited Reorganization and Divestiture Act and also to the Petro-Canada Public Participation Act. The enactment relates to the mandatory provisions in the articles of Cameco Corporation and Petro-Canada. Cameco was formerly Eldorado Nuclear Limited, to which many Canadians can relate.

This enactment provides that the articles of Cameco Corporation will have to contain a 15% individual non-resident share ownership limit for voting shares as well as a cap of 25% on aggregate non-resident share ownership voting rights. The enactment also provides that the articles of Petro-Canada will have to be amended to allow for a 20% individual share ownership limit, while the aggregate non-resident share ownership limits will be eliminated.

In addition, the prohibition on the sale, transfer or disposal of all or substantially all of Petro-Canada's upstream and downstream assets will be replaced with a similar prohibition on the sale, transfer or disposal of all or substantially all of its assets, without distinguishing between upstream and downstream sectors of activity.

That is a pretty concise legislative summary.

I think what is important to many Canadians is that, one, we are dealing with two assets that Canadians, either historically or today, have considered strategic assets. One of course is uranium and that is why we had special rules for Eldorado Nuclear. The other is the grand experiment known as Petro-Canada, which was brought in by the Trudeau government in 1975. This all became part of the national energy program of the early 1980s, so as a consequence it has been very controversial.

We have heard much discussion recently about the possibility that Petro-Canada could be on the chopping block in terms of the remaining ownership of shares held by the Government of Canada. That is in the amount of 49.4 million shares. As of a week ago, at an ownership or market price of $36.70, the shares would be valued at approximately $1.8 billion.

The question is, is this the platform to sell off the remaining shares in Petro-Canada? Bottom line, that would still not recoup the government's investment in Petro-Canada, but I think many Canadians, the international community and certainly the business community would be satisfied if the government was finally out of this business.

It is important if we are going to take that step that the government does the right thing in terms of what it does with those moneys that would be accrued at that time. My personal view is that seeing as how the taxpayer subsidized this and it has contributed to our previous deficits and our debt and is currently the subject of interest payments coming from all of us, the moneys should go to debt retirement automatically, without debate.

As for Cameco, this bill ensures that foreign ownership is capped, thereby eliminating the risk of foreign ownership of uranium resources.

On this question I believe Canadians think very differently than they do about our oil, gas and other resources. The main reason is the fact that uranium, obviously, is involved in nuclear energy and nuclear fuel. That whole area is one that we want to tightly regulate and highly regulate, which is appropriate. There is a big difference. If we look at the oil and gas sector, for example, when this whole national energy program was put into place Canadians were told by the government that we had less than 20 years' worth of recoverable oil reserves and that a high gasoline tax burden was justified in order to conserve for future energy needs.

Canada is in a unique position. We know now that was an incorrect statement. We now know that in northern Alberta alone we have 400 years' worth of recoverable oil reserves in the tar sands, which will obviously supply our needs well into the future, and that changes everything. We are very skeptical about the need for government to retain any ownership in Petro-Canada for any purpose.

In 1991 the government decided that Canada no longer needed a crown corporation in the energy business and began the privatization process. We all know that. That is why current ownership is at 18%, not something much higher. In the end it became clear that after fluctuations in the markets, business setbacks and the ever present political struggles, Petro-Canada ended up basically as an oil company, much like any other in Canada except that the taxpayer still owned 18% of the company and was the single largest holder of the stock. No one but the government could own more than 10%.

In 1994 we questioned why the government would not sell off its national oil company while the industry was strong to recoup some of the billions of taxpayer dollars that were used to create Petro-Canada in the first place. In 1994 we asked the government why it would not do something significant and use the revenue from the sale of Petro-Canada to reduce Canada's debt burden. We know there was a crushing debt burden in 1994. It is still a crushing debt burden, but it was much worse in 1994 because we were still incurring annual deficits at that time.

In 1995 a Liberal budget promised to totally privatize Petro-Canada. We can see how reliable Liberal budget promises or even red book promises are. Indeed, that is something we should consider deeply, particularly after the events of this week which saw the government say that if its members voted for a red book promise it would be a confidence motion and the government could fall if its own members voted to keep a government promise. This turns parliament and parliamentary principle upside down.

The fact remains that Petro-Canada cost Canadians over $5 billion. Petro-Canada has never provided a benefit to Canadians that could not have been provided by the private sector, and when it was finally privatized, guess what? Petro-Canada started making a profit and competing effectively.

Governments since Petro-Canada was established have never had the courage to admit to Canadians that they will be able to recover less than $2 billion, 40% of the original cost of Petro-Canada. If Bill C-3 is indeed, as we think it is, the first step in the process of the government selling off its remaining shares of Petro-Canada, my only response can be that it is finally time, long past time.

I am curious about why we are getting this bill now. Petro-Canada's share prices have moved up in anticipation of the government selling off its shares. The shares have gone up by at least 50% this year and there is potential for the price to go higher. Also, with the bill in place, foreign ownership restrictions are removed, which will allow for an expanded market and that theoretically should expand the price once again.

As a business proposition this was a poor one. We are recovering less than 40% of what we put into the exercise and that is with rather inflated dollar revenues and non-inflated costs. This has basically been a disastrous business transaction. Since taxpayer dollars originally paid for Petro-Canada, I have already explained that the best way to go would be to put it into debt reduction.

There are other things that might be considered, such as our looming crisis in transportation needs and the need for transportation improvements. Or we could actually be really revolutionary. I know when it comes to these kinds of initiatives that the government has great difficulty prying its fingers away from these revenues, but we could be really revolutionary and use these moneys to cut taxes. However, that is a rather clear cut, simple, direct way to deal with the problem, so as a consequence it may not occur.

The bill does some things I can support. Referring to Petro-Canada, it does move toward opening up ownership of the company to national and international interests while still ensuring that the majority of the company is Canadian. The legislation clearly states that resident Canadians must still make up the majority of the board of directors. It also stipulates that the head office will remain in Calgary. The Canadian Alliance supports the removal of restrictions on Canadian businesses to allow for both domestic and foreign investing. We expect to see that Petro-Canada, once it is no longer manipulated by the government, will continue to show profits and growth.

Of course the legislation does not just address issues surrounding Petro-Canada. It addresses issues relating to the sale of shares in Cameco, Canada's largest uranium producer.

Canada's Kyoto commitments have increased the need for Canada to find green energy. One option of course is nuclear energy. That needs to be examined. At this point today I do not want to get into a debate about the merits or lack thereof of nuclear energy. However, the fact remains that uranium is a resource that, should nuclear energy be a factor in the world's efforts to reduce CO2 levels, will become a very important resource.

We all intrinsically know this. Nuclear energy has become a very controversial way of providing for our energy needs, but we have some nations in the world that are almost singularly reliant upon nuclear energy. We do not think about that from time to time.

France, for example, in the European community is over 70% dependent upon nuclear energy for its needs. That has all occurred over a long period of time. It continues to be the way that it functions. Its operations have never created an incident that has been worthy of international comment. That is a wonderful track record. We need to keep our minds open and our options open in terms of that whole field of endeavour.

The bill regarding Cameco raises foreign and individual ownership limits. Individual non-resident ownership increases from 5% to 15%. The limit on the total amount of non-resident ownership of shares increases from 20% to 25%.

I am pleased to see that the legislation is still mindful of the possible consequences of high levels of foreign ownership of our uranium resources. The lower limits on Cameco shares reflect across the board government restrictions on foreign activity in uranium mining.

While the Canadian Alliance is all for Canadian businesses having the opportunity to succeed, we must also be conscious of the need to keep such a potentially volatile resource within Canadian control. The bill in effect allows for greater flexibility in the selling of shares in Canadian companies. We can certainly support that effort.

As I have already stated, if the legislation leads to the government finally selling off its remaining shares of Petro-Canada, it would be legislation that is long overdue. We will just have to see what initiative will come next from the government.

At this point in time the government and many parts of the public have long since forgotten what the original purpose of Petro-Canada, emanating from the government of the day, was actually supposed to be. Unfortunately, many taxpayers have also forgotten how much money was sunk into this enterprise, never ever to be recovered.

Our policy document in regard to this whole initiative says:

We will foster a healthy economic environment for the benefit of consumers by pursuing free and open trade at home and abroad, including the elimination of inter-provincial trade barriers. We will withdraw government from areas of the economy where the private sector could deliver the same services more efficiently and will end the unfair practice of providing subsidies to industries, businesses and special interest groups.

There is a lot of wisdom in that statement. If the government of the day had subscribed to that policy statement we would not have sunk money into a sinkhole. We would not be looking at a multibillion dollar loss at a time when the country had a debt. That added to our debt and contributed to our interest payments today.

Even today with all the health care debate that we are going through on an almost daily basis, we are paying twice as much federally to service interest on the debt as we are in contributing to health care transfers to the provinces. That is a very strong indictment of mismanagement of the first order and just displays what a country Canada could have been if we would have had appropriate fiscal management throughout the years.

The people know it. That is why they endorsed this policy when it was created. As a matter of fact they were instrumental in creating this policy.

We are in favour of privatizing Petro-Canada. This bill does set the stage for doing that. The legislation ensures that foreign ownership of uranium resources will be monitored and capped. It is important for us to make sure that our support of free market competition and access does not however give away our uranium resources to foreign ownership. I want to be very clear on that and I think I have been consistent throughout my statements today that that is a direction we are simply not coming from.

I recognize that I have not used up all the valuable time of the House but I certainly put across the points that I wanted to get across today on Bill C-3.

[Lumber Industry, February 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the softwood lumber agreement is about to expire eight weeks from now. Until recently the position of the federal Liberals was unclear.

We wanted the assurance, and I think we have now it, that we will have one voice coming from cabinet on the issue. May we also receive assurance that the federal government will not be pitting one province against another in this discussion?

[Lumber Industry, February 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Alliance position on softwood lumber has been well known for eight months and reflects the current industry position. The recently formed Canadian Lumber Trade Alliance with co-chairs from Quebec and British Columbia is speaking with one voice.

Yesterday we heard ill-informed and unfortunate comments by the Bloc Quebecois and by the Minister of Industry. Will the Prime Minister assure Canadians that there will be one voice speaking for Canada on this issue?

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to give a 10 minute speech. Let me put it this way: we do not have an ethics counsellor who reports to parliament, but we have a privacy commissioner and an access to information commissioner who do. Those relationships have worked well. We want it to work even better and so do they. They welcome the creation of a new parliamentary committee to look after privacy, access and ethics. That in a nutshell is what I think should be done.

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of common ground between my thoughts and those of the hon. member. I will say that we have people on the CPP disability program that I do not think should be funded by CPP. There are people who fall between the cracks, between the CPP disability and EI and the provincial social assistance programs. There is room to do something about that rather than play within the current rules of the EI system. We need to think in a different way about people who are falling between the cracks. That has been very clear to me for some time.

Yes, the government is treating the EI system as a cash cow, and employers and employees are all being hurt as a consequence.

[Speech From The Throne, February 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment. I do not know how many have done that but I am happy to do so. This is my third parliament, so we have obviously spent some time together as I think this is your fourth.

I want to respond to the throne speech. I was here, as hon. members were, on the day the throne speech was read. The first thing I did was, as everyone did, go for the area of the speech I thought would be most important for my constituents.

I ran for politics because I believed parliament needed some very basic reforms. I thought I might moderate or somehow change my views, but I have not. The longer I am here, the more I recognize that such reforms are needed.

Those changes are still very important to me and many of my constituents. Even now the lack of progress on basic parliamentary and democratic reforms is creating problems in Canada from a regional standpoint and is diminishing our stature internationally.

How would I know this? It is partly from being in the job for so long. I have met ambassadors, ministers from other nations, senators and congressmen from our neighbour to the south, people who have seen and experienced how it works in other places. One of the natural things we do is make comparisons.

It is overdue. I would say that if Canada were a more populous nation with more than the 30 million people we have, our system really would not work. What we have today only works because of our relatively small population.

Too much power resides with the Prime Minister and the Office of the Prime Minister. Members of parliament and other government and democratic institutions are neutered to some degree because of it.

I must return to the throne speech. I had to go to the very last page of the throne speech to find anything at all on democratic reforms. Guess what it says? We will look at electronic voting maybe and there will be more dollars for the library of parliament.

Those are both simple, straightforward initiatives that I do not think anyone in the House will disagree with but that is not democratic reform. Plain and simple, that is not what anyone who is interested in democratic reform was looking for, including an awful lot of government backbench members of parliament.

So where are we? In January, the Canadian Alliance House leader proposed a set of democratic reforms. These democratic reforms had a lot of support from the other opposition parties. They are not built out of thin air. These had been building for some time.

I would like to quote from the beginning of the document called “Building Trust”. It is a quotation from the Leader of the Opposition who said:

Canadians are justly proud of our heritage of responsible government. But our parliamentary democracy is not all that it should be. To much power is exercised by the Prime Minister instead of being shared by our elected representatives. Excessive party discipline stifles open discussion and debate. Grassroots citizens and community groups feel that their opinions are not respected or heard.

That is the Leader of the Opposition in his introduction to the document.

There were several things focused on in the document: free votes in the House of Commons; some changes to the standing committees; a call for a new standing committee on privacy access and ethics; and making the ethics counsellor or officer a true officer of parliament. I want to focus just on two of those reforms; free votes in the House of Commons and the ethics counsellor.

When we talk about free votes, there is an attempt to cloud what we are saying, so it is not clearly understood. That is why I want to focus on that.

Now, to best get at the free vote issue, I have to quote once again. I will quote the previous leader of the opposition during a debate on April 21, 1998. The one thing I have learned after three years in this place is the last time that one thinks one can say something is often the first time somebody is listening, so I am going to say it again.

There is a myth in the House that lurking out there somewhere is the fiery dragon of the confidence convention, the erroneous belief studiously cultivated by the government that if a government bill or motion is defeated, or an opposition bill, motion or amendment is passed, this obliges the government to resign. This myth is used to coerce government members, especially backbenchers, to vote for government bills and motions with which they and their constituents disagree and to vote against opposition bills, motions and amendments with which they substantially agree. The reality is that the fiery dragon of the confidence convention in its traditional form is dead. The sooner the House officially recognizes that fact, the better for all.

We are calling for an official commitment by the House to conduct votes freely without jeopardizing our parliamentary positions. That would be very simple.

The second issue I would like to talk about is the ethics counsellor becoming a true officer of parliament. Many of the members in the House will remember the Liberal red book from 1993. It states:

A Liberal government will appoint an independent Ethics Counsellor to advise both public officials and lobbyists in the day-to-day application of the Code of Conduct for Public Officials. The Ethics Counsellor will be appointed after consultation with the leaders of all parties in the House of Commons and will report directly to Parliament.

That has not happened. He reports to the Prime Minister. He is appointed by the Prime Minister. It is a conflict, plain and simple.

All these reforms are analogous to the little boy with his finger in the dike. There is a flood out there and instead of a wall of water we have a wall of opinion saying “we want changes”. It is coming from the public and from members of parliament in all parties. We have a very select few who are resisting all of that.

I tell my constituents that we have to look at this not from a personal history standpoint but from the standpoint of the broader history of the political landscape. These changes will happen. It is just a matter of when.

In summary, the Prime Minister could be known for what he did, but he will probably be known for what he did not do.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, September 28th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to this bill before when it was called Bill C-48, in 1998-99. I have attended some of the committee meetings where the bill was discussed. I have ensured that we had some witnesses from the west coast because essentially their voices were not being heard and had not been heard in the so-called consultation process.

I thought that somehow I could help to have their voices heard in the committee process, but I still have a thing or two to learn about the process. Even though I had witnesses from the west coast at committee, they certainly were not treated with the deference that I thought witnesses should be treated with. Their input basically was rejected as being inadequate for the process the government had set up, which is a ridiculous posture and a ridiculous point of view to take.

That point of view was promoted by the chair of the committee. I took issue with the chair of the committee with regard to how the witnesses were being treated. Rather than achieving what I thought was neutrality from the chair, I ended up being lectured as well. I have not had happy experiences with the bill.

The last time I talked about the bill I complained about the fact that 29 regions in the country were going to get these trophy marine conservation areas under the Minister of Heritage, previously the environment minister. This is an environmental bill, not a heritage bill. We did not know where these 29 areas were.

How can we respond to the government? How can industry groups and other groups respond to a piece of legislation without knowing the specifics?

When I challenged the government to do that, the parliamentary secretary suggested that I was somehow being very controversial and asked if I could name a single area where I would object to a marine conservation area. My response at that time was that if the parliamentary secretary could tell me which industry would be targeted by the Americans as a result of the government's then split run legislation which was so ill considered, I would be able to return in kind and that would be a good barter. Of course neither myself or the parliamentary secretary were prepared to take that any further.

At this point we have received a lot of information from the coastal perspective. A marine conservation bill obviously has to consider the coastal stakeholders. We have heard from some stakeholders from Nunavut, from the Atlantic provinces and from the Pacific coast. Overwhelmingly they talk about the negative consequences of this proposed legislation.

I can talk about mining, for example. We cannot create areas that restrict activity except by special permit when we have not even done an inventory to see what is there. As one of the proponents for undersea harvesting said, if we had had this kind of legislation a long time ago Columbus would have never sailed to America, because it is so exclusionary in terms of what activities are allowed and what activities are not.

When we look at the potential mineral resources and other resources on the seabed, it is not right to restrict activity. One of the proposals has taken some shape since the last debate in the House of Commons. We are talking about 9,000 square kilometres of lake bed in this case, I think, in the Great Lakes. Without an inventory we do not even know what we are locking up. Locking it up pre-empts an inventory in a sense, because why would anyone bother? This has been pointed out.

I want to very quickly make reference to some of the witnesses we heard from in committee. Mr. Ainsworth from the west coast is the one I was referring to in my Columbus point. He said:

Columbus would never have left port if constrained by this principle. We would never embark on an airplane to soar en route to Ottawa with ozone-eating exhaust gases, injected right into the base of the stratosphere, if we really believed in the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle is behind the way the legislation has been brought forward.

We heard from the mayor of Prince Rupert at the time, who said that west coast residents were not aware of any areas that required conservation on the north coast. He said that there was only consideration of an extension of South Moresby Park on the Queen Charlotte Islands, and that without adequate consultation the federal government has made north coast residents very suspicious. The park the mayor mentioned was created without the need for proposed legislation.

We heard from Pat Green, who is with the regional district in that area. Despite very good intelligence in terms of what the government was thinking of proposing in the way of marine conservation areas there, despite the fact that Mr. Green tried to give some shape to that in the discussions, despite the fact that the very bureaucrats responsible for administering this were available to the committee, there was a complete denial that there was any shape or form or contemplation of a marine conservation area for that part of the world.

That marine conservation area, if it proceeds in the way this legislation conceives of it, would pre-empt what has been a traditional fishery, the gillnetters and some of the other fishing activities in that area, without special permit. It would pre-empt what is looking to be more and more like a project that British Columbians will decide is a viable and worthwhile project, that is, north coast oil and gas.

This is very large area of concern. The concerns that have been expressed by industry, by local politicians and by the stakeholders really have not been brought into this whole discussion. They need to be. Here is a statement from the testimony at committee, which illustrates what I am talking about. This is from somebody with the International Council on Metals and the Environment:

To my knowledge, in western Canada in the industry, I'm the only person I've found who knows Bill C-48 [the predecessor to Bill C-8] in any way, shape or form. It's interesting to note as well that I don't see anybody from the Maritimes here on the witness stand. I don't know if that reflects the selection of witnesses at all, but I know there is concern in the Maritimes for the use of mineral potential in the offshore environment.

There has been undue haste, on the one hand, to make sure that this piece of legislation goes through this place without criticism. On the other hand, the government has been very slow to push it ahead because it knows there is a lot of opposition to it.

[Criminal Code, September 27th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to talk about Bill C-409 put forward by the member for Yorkton—Melville, which is an act to provide for the expiry of gun control legislation that has not proven effective within five years of coming into force.

I am going to read some policy. We believe there should be severe mandatory penalties for the criminal use of any weapon. We are committed to keeping guns out the hands of violent criminals as a necessary part of making our communities safer. We will replace the current firearms law with a practical firearms control system that is cost effective and respects the rights of Canadians to own and use firearms responsibly. This policy was approved in January at the national convention and was adopted on March 25.

When I became a member of parliament in 1993 firearms regulations were in place from the previous administration which were to come into effect on January 1, 1994. For long guns, that included very specific storage provisions. I took those responsibilities very seriously and, prior to arriving here on January 1, 1994, I had my firearms in safe storage within my residence. I was happy to do that.

There is a prevalent opinion among most firearm owners that there are a lot of acceptable and appropriate ways to regulate but by any objective test the registry that has been put into effect by Bill C-68 is a boondoggle and would not meet any objective test.

Legislation and government operations are held accountable in two ways. The first way is through the provision of information to the public and the other is accountability through such devices as the auditor general. In the federal arena it operates through access to information requests, through the auditor general and through this place, if we can access what we need to access.

In the case of the Canadian Firearms Centre, what we have in this legislation is one individual, the member for Yorkton—Melville, who has his hands full trying, through access to information, to access very necessary information to hold this whole exercise accountable. He is fighting all the resources of the government.

We have a minister who brought this legislation in, the current Minister of Health. We have the current Minister of Justice and all the apparatus of the Liberal government that is more than prepared to use its propaganda, its public relations and its pressure tactics on police organizations and the provinces when it is thought they are getting out of line. We only have to look at the example in New Brunswick. There are 250 jobs at stake at the firearms centre in Miramichi. According to a briefing note from the Department of Justice, pressure has been put on the centre to go along with this registry or employees might be in danger of losing their jobs.

We have had a non-controversial handgun registry in effect since 1934 at a cost of $2.5 million a year and requires only 30 employees. We now have well over 1,000 employees and $300 million in costs this year alone. The system is not cost effective. There is no minister who wants to be in charge when the final accounting for the firearms registry boondoggle comes due.