Keith Martin

[Zimbabwe, February 27th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is the government's credibility that is as stake right now if it does not do the right thing and do it now. The fact of the matter is that 60% of the population in Zimbabwe are terrorized and too scared to vote. Our own Canadian election monitor, Bill Warden, who almost died in the last presidential election, said that there is very little chance that monitors will do anything.

Again, will the government do the right thing, call for the suspension of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth, freeze the personal assets of Mugabe and his cronies and call for a travel ban on the same group, and do it now?

[Zimbabwe, February 27th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Robert Mugabe has ejected European election monitors, brutalized civilians by his state sponsored goon squad, terrorized opposition parties and the independent media. The fact is there is absolutely no chance for a free and fair election in Zimbabwe.

Given that the United States and the EU have imposed targeted sanctions, will the government do the right thing and next week at the Commonwealth ministers meeting call for the suspension of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth?

[Zimbabwe, February 22nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe has prevented EU monitors from doing their jobs. They have had to leave the country.

On February 4 the Minister of Foreign Affairs said:

...unless observers are accepted, our group will recommend that action be taken against Zimbabwe at the leaders' meeting in Australia at the beginning of March which would probably be mean removal of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth.

Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs live up to his word and call for the suspension of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth?

[Business of Supply, February 21st, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I will retract my statement and apologize to the member. I would never impugn her motivations whatsoever.

I will get to the point about the lack of democracy in the House. Viewers can judge for themselves how the situation functions and how we are all unable to function as well as we ought to for the people who elected us.

The motion is an effort to enable us to attain one of two major objectives. As members of parliament we have two major roles. First, we produce and analyze legislation. Second, we deal with issues of supply. The motion was presented in an effort to enable members of parliament to do the latter and look at how the government spends taxpayers' money.

Some $165 billion of the taxpayers' money is spent with very little analysis whatsoever. The former clerk of the House of Commons, the top bureaucrat of the House, said members of parliament had abrogated their responsibility to the public in analyzing the way taxpayer money is spent. He was absolutely right.

The $165 billion goes to committees which spend about two or three hours analyzing how we spend the money. The analysis takes so little time that it is barely recorded anywhere. The analysis which should be quite extensive is not done. Nor are benchmarks or performance measurements attached. That must happen. That is why the motion is important and why all members should support it. The motion would enable MPs to analyze government expenditures, question the expenditures thoroughly, and set aside performance estimates through a new committee that would enable this to happen on an ongoing basis.

One of the shocking things I find as a member of parliament is that many in the bureaucracy are unable to determine where money is being spent, what the objectives are and whether the objectives have been met over the previous year or years. Furthermore, long term planning is often paid little heed.

This cannot continue. How can we operate anything, let alone a large organization like this, without knowing where the money is going, knowing how it is being spent and measuring performance on an ongoing basis? We have no idea what is happening.

In my province of British Columbia it is starting to happen. Premier Campbell has set up benchmarks which is what we should be doing federally. Motion No. 296 put forward by my colleague would go a long way to accomplishing that. It would enable us to determine where and how money is spent by setting up performance measurements and measuring them on an ongoing basis. All of us, especially the public whose money we are spending, could know how it is spent.

I will also address the issue the NDP member mentioned earlier which is the big sleeper issue in Canadian politics today. It is the fact that the House of Commons is a house of illusions. It is not a democracy. We have been sleepwalking into a situation of virtual dictatorship.

I will explain why. Let us imagine we are cabinet ministers let alone members of parliament. Cabinet ministers are squeezed between the unholy alliance of senior bureaucrats and the Prime Minister's Office. If cabinet ministers want to innovate, can they? No, they cannot. If cabinet ministers are young, active, vigorous innovative individuals who want to make their ministries innovative places to deal with the big issues Canadians are affected by and interested in, can they do it? No, they cannot. They will be taken aside by someone from the Prime Minister's Office and told they cannot do it. If they say they must because it is the right and moral thing to do they will not be cabinet ministers much longer. They will be out. That is what happens.

The cabinet member is squeezed between senior bureaucrats, who are in many cases appointed by the Prime Minister's Office, and the Prime Minister's Office. They squeeze the minister and the minister becomes a mouthpiece for the Prime Minister's Office.

Does the public ever wonder why the large issues of today are actually not dealt with? No, because we have a government that is more interested in a legacy of racking up successive election wins than in using power for public good. I said this to the government not so long ago: What is the point of having power if the government is not prepared to use power for the public good? There is no legacy other than that of using power for the public good. Anything less is a sham.

As an example, let us look at the committee structure. Committees are make work projects for MPs. For health care we have umpteen committees: the Senate committee, the Romanow commission committee and more. However, does anyone remember the Prime Minister's blue ribbon panel on health care in 1995? Does anyone know what happened to that committee? Nothing. Or we could look at aboriginal affairs too.

With my last two minutes, let me say that the public should understand that we do not live in a democracy. We need to democratize the House. We need to make committees effective. Committee members must be able to be independent. Committees must work independently from the government to create legislation and send it back to the House.

We need to make the House a place of free votes, where we can have fixed election dates, where we can have electronic voting and where we can do work that is actually meaningful to the Canadian public. It must be a place where members of parliament, across party lines and including cabinet members, can have a say, can innovate and can give proper solutions that are meaningful to the Canadian public.

If we do not do that, we will not help all the people out there who are suffering in waiting lines for health care, who cannot get a job, who are suffering under environmental conditions that are less than acceptable or who are aboriginal people on and off reserve suffering third world conditions. Unless we are able to use the House for their public good, this place is useless. We have to make this a democracy.

In closing, I compliment my colleague from St. Albert for his excellent motion.

[Business of Supply, February 21st, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate my friend and colleague from St. Albert not only for putting out the report with the government whip but for his continued leadership as chair of the public accounts committee.

I also congratulate him for the superb work he is doing in rooting out corruption in government internationally. It is a superb act of leadership on his part that I hope the government and hon. members pay close attention to. He has been working internationally in an organization he started to help root out one of the prime causes of inefficiency in government: corruption.

I will talk about what we just saw. We saw the chief government whip, the co-author with my colleague for St. Albert, turn herself inside out like a pretzel. I mean this with all due respect to the government whip. She is a fine lady.

For the people watching above, the reason this happened is that the government whip, like all members of parliament in the government, is forced to do the bidding of the Prime Minister's Office. It is a profoundly tragic situation that a member of such high quality and credentials would be forced to turn herself inside out like a pretzel to vote against the good work she and my colleague have done to democratize the House of Commons.

[Species at Risk Act, February 21st, 2002]

Madam Speaker, here we go again. In the last parliament it was Bill C-33, the species at risk act. Did the government pass it? No it did not. We have come full circle to Bill C-5. The public should know the government fully intends not to make it work. This is a bill the government understands is clearly unworkable.

That is why my party and all of the opposition parties have introduced 136 amendments. Why? We want to make sure the bill is workable and that we have a bill that will protect endangered species.

The public would also be interested to know that the government has violated its own members. Many members on the committee from all sides, including the government side, proffered good, constructive solutions that if listened to would make the bill strong, workable and ensure that endangered species are protected. However the government has not done that. I read that the Prime Minister's Office and the minister's office have chosen to introduce amendments and changes that would emasculate the bill, so we will have a bill that cannot work.

I was appalled when I went up to the environment committee once and took a look at the bill which is about 3 cm thick. This is a 3 cm thick bill that is so unworkable that it begs for legal problems that will only tie up the courts and will not in the end protect endangered species. There are three areas that we want to focus on in the bill: mandatory compensation, penalties for the intentional destruction of habitats and jurisdiction.

On the issue of mandatory compensation many of us have been proffering that this is the way to go and yet the government has not done that. It has left it up to the jurisdiction of the minister. We cannot save species without enabling mandatory compensation. What has worked in many other parts of the world is they have sat down with the different stakeholders. In fact in Saskatchewan, with respect to the black footed ferret, the provincial government has done an outstanding job by working with farmers and ranchers to set up methods of compensation to ensure farmers would not be done hard by and that critical habitat would be protected. That is a model the federal government should be looking at because it works.

The second issue is one of jurisdiction. We have a bill here that would deal with federal lands which is a small percentage of our total landmass. Endangered species do not know jurisdictions. A bird, a plant, or an animal will go where it wants to with no care of jurisdictions. We have a bill that will not protect endangered species at all.

Why is this important? We have 198 species that are at risk. Those numbers are not going down they are going up. If we rolled back time 50 years we would see the variety of species, the biodiversity of animals and plants that we had then. We are in the worst possible time in the history of the planet. Species are going extinct at a rate that is astronomical. The species we have today will be very different from what we will have in our children's or grandchildren's lives. They will be far more restricted and constricted.

How do we deal with this? First we must list species and habitat on the basis of scientific evidence not on the basis of political expediency. The way to do that is to deal with COSEWIC, committee on the status of endangered wildlife in Canada. This is a group of esteemed scientists who have put forth an articulate, scientifically based analysis of the species that are at risk. That is what the species at risk should be based on.

There is the issue of protection. The government should work with the provinces and municipalities to protect critical habitat. In that way we protect all of the habitat not a small sliver, which the bill attempts to do but fails in doing. As I explained earlier we should look at the example of Saskatchewan in regard to compensation.

I wish to talk about CITES, the convention on the international trade in endangered species. The public would be shocked to know that the trafficking of endangered species is the second largest trafficking product in the world behind drugs. It is a multibillion dollar industry. Canada is one of the top three centres for trafficking in endangered species in the world. This has been known for years, yet in my eight years of being here I have not once heard from the government any effort to make sure that our obligations as a signatory to CITES would be upheld. In fact, we are known as a country that is completely violating our obligations under this important convention.

The last part deals penalties. A person recently was found trafficking in one of the largest consignments of ivory ever found and received a $10,000 fine. That is absolutely pathetic. We need penalties that are strong, tough and apply to those individuals who wilfully cut the gallbladders out of black bears, destroy herds of endangered ungulates and damage, destroy and pick plants of medicinal value that are threatened or becoming extinct. Heavy penalties must be applied because the profits from the trafficking of these species is huge.

I have two private member's bills that deal with all of these issues. The government needs to look at them and I hope adopt those bills. They would enable us to accomplish good, strong endangered species legislation.

There are two last points on which I wish to speak. First is our international obligation. We have to ensure that Canadian companies working abroad are not wilfully destroying the environment.

There is a situation right now in Belize where a Canadian company, Fortis, is involved in building the Chalillo dam on the Macal River. This dam would destroy the largest area of pristine habitat in Central America. This is being done by a Canadian company through environmental studies that were sponsored by CIDA. When we try to get an answer from CIDA, it twists every which way like a pretzel to not allow the House to have information as to where taxpayers' money was or will be spent regarding environmental studies on this particular project.

The public would be appalled to think that the government is wilfully ignoring evidence that this dam would destroy critical habitat for jaguars, tapirs and numerous tropical birds in Central America. Why should taxpayers fund studies that would not be released but may show evidence that a Canadian company is destroying the largest undisturbed habitat in Central America? Canadians would be shocked if they knew that. Yet the government obfuscates and obstructs any kind of effort to find out that information.

The last area deals with balancing off the interests of the public in terms of endangered species. During my time working in Africa I spent a lot of time in the African bush looking at ways in which the environment could be protected. After my 17 trips there and hundreds of hours in the bush, the best evidence that I have ever seen comes from a place in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Officials married up private interests with habitat protection. They came to the conclusion that animals, plants and habitat must pay for themselves if they are to survive. Wanting these things to survive will not work because these areas need value, and indeed this can be done. Funds can be generated from habitat through culling for protein, hunting for game, and charging large amounts of money as a certain number of game is actually taken out. This can also be done for medicinal plants which can be grown to generate money.

The money generated from this as well as from ecotourism and other opportunities must be shared by two areas. First, some of that money has to go back into the environment, to the game wardens and the parks people that are there to protect the environment. Second, it has to be shared by the people in the surrounding areas. If the people in the surrounding areas do not see value in a particular reserve or park, that reserve or park will be destroyed.

There is a model that I would like to see the government use when it is at the G-8 summit. It is part of the new plan for African development that it is working on. By linking up the Johannesburg summit, the Rio summit and the G-8 summit, and by triangulating those three things we would be able to involve poverty reduction, primary education along with the protection of endangered species and critical habitat.

If we are able to do that we will accomplish the objective of the bill which is to protect endangered species in Canada.

[Foreign Affairs, February 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the whole point is that there will not be any fair elections in Zimbabwe. Since the ministers met, Robert Mugabe has been gagging the press, brutalizing his own people and hiring thugs to murder his own civilians.

Will the government do the right thing to ensure a fair election by unilaterally imposing sanctions including dismissing Zimbabwe's high commissioner to Canada now?

[Zimbabwe, February 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe continues to brutalize his citizens despite the Commonwealth ministers meeting last week. Mugabe will continue to play games with the lives of his own people until we stand up and make a strong stand.

Will the government stand up, do the right things, save lives and impose unilateral sanctions on Robert Mugabe and his henchmen?

[Supply, February 5th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, for the benefit of the House let me indicate that a discussion paper was prepared by Health Canada and Justice Canada on child sex offenders information systems which explicitly describes how a sexual offender registry would work.

The member mentioned a very important issue. The government has been hell bent on producing a national registry for guns. It is a system, as many know, that will not work, will not protect people and is costing about $500 million. If we took a fraction of that money and put it on the sharp edge of justice which would involve a national registry for sexual offenders, we would save people's lives. We would protect innocent civilians and do our job as legislators. That is something the Minister of Justice should take to task and implement right away.

[Supply, February 5th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I do not see any conflicts within the current system or the proposal inherent within the national registry. We need to go to the experts and the experts are the police officers. The Canadian Police Association has given the government and the public a very eloquent document which describes in detail how a national registry would work and the elements of that registry.

I would only hope the member and other members go to the police association. Police officers across the country are very desirous of leadership at a national level to accomplish this objective.

If the Minister of Justice were able to sit down with her counterparts across the country and say we will develop a national registry and ask them to work with her, she would find a very open ear. Certainly our police forces would be very grateful for it and, most important, the Canadian public would be very grateful. Perhaps, if the minister did this, she would prevent some people from being sexually abused in the future.