John Duncan

[Excise Tax Act, February 10th, 1997]

Read our fresh start program and you will know what we are going to spend it on.

The western world is moving in new directions. The public is demanding balanced budgets and the provinces are getting there much faster than the feds. There will be a reduced incentive for provincial sales tax relief with the BST. There will be more leverage from the federal government on the provinces.

We have seen 36 tax increases from this government, taking $24 billion more from the taxpayers. If the feds really want to come to grips with a rational, focused, central government, they could indeed contemplate the end of GST. At least let us not put roadblocks in the way of eliminating the GST, and that is what the BST does.

[Excise Tax Act, February 10th, 1997]

I would like to know what it is also.

The Retail Council of Canada estimates that by forcing stores to bury the tax the harmonization tax regime will cost retailers $100 million a year. What on earth is the government trying to do? I heard Liberals in this House say it will make business more competitive.

I will tell the House what will make businesses more competitive. A $95 billion federal government, not a Liberal $110 billion government. The Reform Party proposes $95 billion spending, excluding interest on the debt.

[Excise Tax Act, February 10th, 1997]

I am not sure what that comment was, but I am not making fun of anybody. I am stating a fact about two pieces of aboriginal legislation before the House.

The other bill before the House that has the same balkanization trend is the First Nations Land Act. Once again, it is national legislation from a national government that will deal with 14 bands only.

What do we do the next time there are 12 or 14 bands that want something different? We have over 600 bands in the country. Are we going to have 35 pieces of legislation to deal with all of them? This is a very worrisome trend.

We have had a whole set of negotiations in this country dealing with an attempt to get rid of interprovincial trade barriers. In my view this BST bill is actually contributing to interprovincial trade barriers. It is adding to the cost of businesses in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland in doing business with other provinces. Why we would want to go in this direction is absolutely beyond me. There is only one overriding reason, and we know what it is. The government got in trouble, it got hung on its own statements and in order to extricate itself it entered into this special agreement. Why else did the government have to come up with $1 billion to encourage people in those three provinces to participate?

The three provinces which are the net contributors to equalization in the country are B.C., Alberta and Ontario. Those three provinces do not want to have anything to do with this proposal. That is interesting.

The minister of finance for the province of Ontario has said that this way of arranging things would cost the province $3 billion in extra taxes. It is comforting to see that there is someone who cannot be bought.

There is a circumstance in the bill which would force federally regulated industries like the airlines and the banks to bury GST in their pricing across the country. I find that most interesting with the current transparency of taxation.

I have relatives who live in the United States. They have looked at ticketing from the United States through Canadian airspace to Canadian destinations. Travel agents in the U.S. are absolutely horrified at the level of taxation in Canadian air travel as compared to U.S. air travel. At least they know it is taxation which is creating the pricing. With this kind of provision no one will know. Is that not wonderful for the government's agenda of out of sight, out of mind?

There is another parallel. If they cannot blend it, then maybe they can obfuscate it. We can always see in the actions of this government where it is trying to maintain federal leverage but it wants to obfuscate how it achieves the leverage because it wants to do it at minimum cost. We have seen that in the blending of the transfers to the provinces for health, education and welfare during the term of this government. They were rolled into one transfer. It is much harder to delineate what is going where. Then the $18 billion transfer was reduced by $7 billion, but it cannot be tracked because it has a new name and it is blended. That is quite a parallel.

We have the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and scores of Liberal cabinet and caucus members who all made election pledges to eliminate and not blend the GST. We have a Deputy Prime Minister who said on this issue: "A promise made by a politician seeking election is not really a promise". Is that not wonderful?

[Excise Tax Act, February 10th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am always amazed as I watch the government when it gets itself into a sticky political situation. To find its way out, it creates a scenario and then all members can unabashedly go out with a straight face and sell that story line.

What we have with this legislation is reflective of a very worrisome trend that we are seeing in legislation coming forward from this administration. Some words that come to mind are: responding to political events, balkanization, dividing the country, willy-nilly, knee-jerk, no vision, no principles, ad hoc.

The reason I say that is because this is not the only bill where the government is responding to a political situation, responding to a half-baked promise, responding to special interests that are promoting a particular point of view with the government.

I have been looking at two pieces of legislation that are going to be coming before the House. They have both been tabled. We have what has been called by some, Indian Act II. This is parallel legislation, if members have ever heard of such a thing, where people can opt in but they cannot opt out.

[Program For Older Worker Adjustment, February 3rd, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, POWA, the program for older worker adjustment, provides monthly financial support for older workers unable to find work a year after a major permanent layoff.

The mine in Port Hardy, B.C. closed in 1995. Seventy older workers in good faith and after years of hard work and faced with no job prospects in the North Island immediately made application for program assistance. They qualified as a group.

In October 1996 it was announced that federal support would end for any new applicant. However, now it is unclear that the funding commitment to approved applicants from 1995 and early 1996 is in play.

I want to put the government and the Minister of Human Resources Development on notice that retroactive cancellation of financial support is unacceptable. These older miners qualify for and have a longstanding expectation to receive the benefits of the program. If the government offers a program it must fund it.

[Fisheries Act, December 6th, 1996]

But this is an amendment so it is quite in order.

I would like to reiterate that this bill is still dressed up as modernization. This bill gives the minister and thus the senior bureaucracy all the power they could ever possibly want to reward their friends and consolidate their strength and powers. This is known on the west coast for certain and in other jurisdictions as the most top heavy and arrogant bureaucracy in the federal government. It is amazing to me to see how the consolidation of powers in this bill can be characterized as modernization.

There is a major collision of events happening right now on the west coast. There is a federal-provincial set of negotiations going on in an attempt to translate some of the current jurisdictions of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans into a provincial mandate. We have a federal-provincial fisheries impact review board that is probably reporting today as we speak. We have the results from a very precedent setting federal court case in Vancouver that is very interesting. I would like to speak a little about that in a few minutes.

The halibut advisory committee process that dealt with halibut licensing on the B.C. coast several years ago was under scrutiny. Department of Fisheries and Oceans personnel came out looking very bad indeed. They confirmed what many in the industry, many people familiar with the actions of the senior bureaucracy have believed for some time and now we have it in black and white.

At a time when all these events are happening we have the implementation of what is known as the Mifflin plan on the west coast. This has been a major disaster for outlying communities in British Columbia in the way it was implemented and the buy back scheme that was put in place. There is a growing perception that we have an out of control, uncaring bureaucracy and department really doing a disservice to the west coast.

We already know what management has led to on the east coast. With that example as a precedent, the people in British Columbia want to avoid that at all costs. It is a very important industry, recreational, commercial and sport fishing.

I would like to state very clearly for the record that there is nothing in this new fisheries act that the minister and the department cannot do under the existing act except extinguish the public right to fish. The central and deplorable change with respect to fisheries management is that the minister gains new unfettered powers to do what currently requires the specific authorization of Parliament or cabinet. For a minister and department that have singlehandedly mismanaged this resource so completely to be handed even more absolute power would be a derogation of the trust placed in us as Parliamentarians.

It is further testimony to the government's inability to manage and allocate a resource and to honour its historic common law regarding the public right to fish.

It replaces the public right to fish with private fishing agreements or what the bill calls partnership agreements. These fishing agreements would be similar to the aboriginal fishing agreements the government currently enters into with native bands. The native only commercial fishery was recently undermined by the supreme court's decision on Van der Peet in 1996, NTC Smokehouse in 1996 and the Gladstone decision in 1996.

The court ruled specifically against an aboriginal commercial right to fish, saying they had no right to an exclusive fishery: "B.C. natives do not have a constitutional right to catch and sell fish commercially". Here we go again, more appealed decisions leading to supreme court rulings in order to bring the bureaucrats and their captive minister to their senses.

Bill C-62 does not address the real problems in the fishery, for example declining stocks, problems with Alaskan interceptions and the need for strict enforcement for conservation measures.

There is a growing awareness in the public that the present fisheries act does not give the minister the authority to enter into exclusive fishing arrangements. There are some simple solutions to the problem. Clear criteria ought to be established for the transfer of fisheries management to the provinces should the provinces want that authority. Fish do tend not to notice political boundaries.

I would like to mention some specifics about a very important case that really has not received much attention. On November 14 in Vancouver Judge Campbell finally came down with a decision. The plaintiffs in this case were halibut fishermen who felt they had been aggrieved by the process and that the minister had exceeded his authority in respect to the way in which halibut licences were reallocated from what is called a shotgun fishery, where all licence holders know the season and everyone goes out to catch what they can in the allotted time. It was changed from a shotgun fishery to an individual transferable quota. In the process of consultation leading up to the issuance of these individual transferable quotas there were a lot of things which came to light in the court case.

The plaintiffs are really saying that this was a rigged exercise, that the department had a predetermined agenda and that there were going to be winners and losers and that the personnel in DFO in charge of this exercise were totally uncaring as to who were the winners and who were the losers. It actually utilized this process to predetermine to some degree who the losers would be, but it would all be done under the guise of consultation and it would all be orchestrated in such a way that this initiative would look like it came from the halibut fishermen when in actual fact it was an initiative of personnel in the senior bureaucracy. This is a very interesting document. It is only about 50 pages long.

Some of the things that are in it are indeed things of which I do not think any federal department could possibly be proud. It is my estimate that the taxpayers of Canada will be responsible for, if not hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in damages to these aggrieved licence holders that were shut out.

I will quote a few things from page 37 of the document. For example, the judge finds that the implementation of this process was an authorized decision of the administration of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Then on page 39 the same judge determines that he will consider the decision to be that of the minister. Then on page 43 he concludes that the plaintiffs were entitled to procedural fairness and on the following page determines-

[Fisheries Act, December 6th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, this is the second time that I have spoken on Bill C-62.

[Fisheries, December 4th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, on November 14 Judge Campbell of the federal court in Vancouver ruled against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in a question of jurisdiction and fairness in allocating halibut licences.

The written decisions confirm in this case what many west coasters believe to be widespread, that DFO pursues a senior bureaucracy driven agenda under the cloak of consultation and does not care how many people it hurts in the process.

This week there is a gill net mail-in ballot for fishermen holding north coast licences with a deadline to reach Vancouver by this Friday. This mailed ballot still has not reached many outlying area gill netters. These fishermen are concerned about losing their vote as part of another bureaucracy manipulated design.

I call on the minister to do two things today: one, extend the deadline on this vote; and two, ensure that faxed responses are allowed.

[Fisheries Act, November 5th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, very briefly, I do not really know where to begin other than to say that one of the most often asked questions that I am asked when I am at home on the west coast is what I think about provincial authority to take over the fishery.

The reason people are asking me that question is clearly that they are so dissatisfied with what has happened under the jurisdiction of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. What my colleague from Delta is talking about is the need for the federal agency to fix what is wrong, not go about consolidating a whole bunch of power and authority that really abrogates the public right to fish and other things.

[Fisheries Act, November 5th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I did not bring forward Henry VIII, Queen Victoria or the Magna Carta. The fact that my colleague from Vancouver Quadra brought them forward is fine with me.

I do not want to argue about the fineries of technical detail. The broad detail and the broad thrust of this bill are the public right to fish which has been around forever. It is a very strongly held public right and something the public feels very close to. This bill replaces it with ministerial fiat and ministerial order. This bill will be challenged.

The problem is the government has exceeded its authority time after time. It created native only commercial fishery agreements which also exceeded its authority. There has been challenge after challenge. We now have a circumstance where because the challenges have come to the point of succeeding, the federal government now wants to change the legislation to allow it to do what it has been doing which is inappropriate anyway.

Why do we want to create another piece of legislation, Bill C-62, that will be challenged by an even wider range of groups? Do we want to get into a multiple year challenge that tests the Supreme Court once again only to see the potential for a government to finally get itself in such a jam that it wants to create another piece of legislation? Let us get back to basics, let us get back to square one and let us get back to what is actually good for the resource.