Keith Martin

[Modernization Of The Standing Orders Of The House Of Commons, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Chairman, there is constructive discourse and destructive discourse. I support freelancing.

Freelancing implies that an individual, at least in the terms I used, is putting forth views, ideas and solutions that will be beneficial to the people of his or her community, the country and perhaps even the world.

Why should members not be allowed to do that? Why is it discouraged? Why has rigor mortis set in in terms of innovation? Why are cabinet members not allowed to innovate? What a tragedy for individuals who have perhaps hoped through their professional career as a politician to get into the Holy Grail of cabinetdom. If they get there, they might be lucky to get a cabinet post that is commensurate with their talents. Why not allow talented individuals to move forward to push for ideas and changes that will enable that ministry to function better for Canadians?

We do not have that right now. People are scratching their heads and asking: why are we studying the health care system again; why have we not dealt with the environmental problems which are significant yet are untouched; why are we not dealing with endangered species legislation; and why is the tax system not more efficient, effective, reasonable and user friendly?

I could go down every single cabinet member's post, as any other MP could, think of some big problems and some solutions, which the minister I am sure knows, to address those problems.

Why are these problems not dealt with? It is May 1 and we have a situation where the government is trying to keep the opposition fractured. It is a political game. The Liberals will not raise their heads and do something innovative, so no fire is drawn to them.

What is the point of having power if it is not used for the public good? If one wants to sit on the government benches and not use it then it is useless. We may as well go home.

What a tragedy for the members of cabinet and members of the government, or anyone in that position, to be forced and shoehorned into that kind of behaviour. What a tragedy for us. What a tragedy for the people in Canada, particularly those who are really hurting in our society.

We have only made a Faustian bargain, if we allow ourselves to make that bargain. We can do much to change that. We can make a bargain with our souls and with our community that is far better.

[Modernization Of The Standing Orders Of The House Of Commons, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Chairman, it is an honour to speak on this topic. I will preface my remarks by saying that if we looked at all the problems we have in the country today, if we talked about health care, about jobs, what is the one that is the most prominent, the one that is actually the most important, the route that actually can effect change and help the people of our country? That problem is the problem of democratizing this House. In my view, there is no challenge or problem in our country today greater than that of making this parliament a democracy.

In 1993, like many members of the House here today, I was elected. We came here motivated by largely the same reason: to improve the health and welfare of Canadians. What motivated us to come here, to leave our personal lives aside and to maybe take a financial hit, was to improve the health and welfare of the people we dealt with on a daily basis.

Maybe we saw people living in their cars because they were homeless. Maybe we were struck by individuals who needed health care and were waiting months to get a test to determine whether or not they had cancer, waiting for far too long. Perhaps we saw the conditions that aboriginal people live in, squalid conditions in many cases, that are unthinkable in a country like Canada. Perhaps we saw an education system that did not provide the education our children need. Perhaps we saw an economy that was declining and slipping far below those of our competitors.

Whatever our motivation, every person, to a man or to a woman, came here to make our country a better place. We came here with that in our hearts. We knew this was not a democracy. We came to change that. We came with hope. However, instead of finding a House of Commons we found a house of illusions. With the large change in the numbers of people that we had in 1993 and the hope that engendered in all of us, rather than making the changes which we had a narrow chance of doing, we saw this place, rather than getting more democratic, becoming less democratic.

This speech is not for the members in the House but for the public out there. It is for the few hearty souls out there who I hope are tuning into CPAC and listening to what my colleagues are saying here today, and I hope they bring it forward to their MPs, to the Prime Minister and to every single elected person that they know in this institution.

For those changes required in the House are changes that will enable us to help them. Those changes will enable us to reform our health care system, to improve our economy and to make this a land of opportunity, a place where we could start to achieve our potential rather than being hit below the belt.

The public may or may not understand that the House of Commons is not a democracy. It is a place that is controlled with a viselike grip, where the members from political parties are controlled by leaderships, where they are used as little more than voting machines and as bodies that attend committees, and hopefully we have a palpable pulse when we do that.

What a waste. What an abysmal waste of the incredible talent that exists within the House, for every man and woman in the House has talent, skills and passions that they came here to apply for the betterment of the people in their communities.

Can it be done? Absolutely. What needs to be done? First of all, let us look at the structure. Bills basically come in a standard form right into committees. Minor changes are made and they are rubber stamped all the way through.

In regard to private members' business, the public would find it extraordinary that an MP puts forth a bill and works very hard on it but only if his or her name is selected out of a big vat with 300 other names in it will he or she be lucky enough to be able to introduce that bill. Whether it is votable or not is the jurisdiction and the choice and the decision of a number of fellow committee members. Why we have private members' bills that are not votable is extraordinary and completely absurd. That is what is happening now.

MPs are not allowed to innovate because innovation is called freelancing, freelancing being a pejorative term to suggest that the individual who is trying to use his or her skill to build a plan is a maverick, a lone wolf, a rebel, not part of the team. When a member is accused of not being part of the team, a member unfortunately becomes polarized in regard to his colleagues. A member who tries to work with members from different political parties is again frowned on as being perhaps not one of us.

At the end of the day, how do we make change? How do we actually do our job? The most important aspect of that job is to help the people on the ground who may not have a home, who may not have health care, who may be unemployed, who are not eating well or who live in squalid conditions. The only way we can change that is if we reform this place so that we can use the collective talent in the House and apply it to those areas.

Why have we seen the death of innovation, particularly over the last two years? Why has this place been so restrained and constricted that individual members are frowned on if they work together? It is frowned on if they try to innovate, if they try to step ahead, if they lead from the front. Why do we have a structure like that?

Why do we not tap into the extraordinary potential that we have in the people in our country who are not members of parliament? Few of us in the House are experts on anything, just as I am an expert on nothing, but all of us are wise enough to find the best people in the country and find the best solutions not only within Canada but outside Canada and apply them to the problems of the nation.

When I spoke to my constituents a week and a half ago about this, they found it extraordinary that there were so many obstacles to trying to innovate and bring ideas to bear on the problems that are important at their dinner tables.

We need to allow innovation in the House, so what can we do? First, and I am probably repeating things that have been said before, free votes have to take place. Second, free votes have to take place but if the government loses a vote it should not be a vote of non-confidence in the government. That would require a very simple rule to be implemented by the government. It could be done overnight. No bill, other than a money bill, should be matters of a vote of confidence in the government. On all other bills if the government loses a vote, then the government had a bad bill and it can take it back and fix the problem. It should not have to lose power.

In regard to committee structure, I was at a committee meeting about the free trade of the Americas and spoke to a person who was putting forward a very heartfelt intervention on the free trade agreement. She asked me why the committee was studying the free trade agreement weeks before the actual meeting in Quebec City. I said to her that surely she did not expect the committee meeting to have any meaning. I told her that her assessment was perfectly right. The purpose of the committee was to keep MPs busy. That was what it was for. It was not meant to use her considerable talents in a meaningful way. What a tragedy.

It breaks my heart, as I am sure it breaks the hearts of all members in the House, to sit on a committee listening to brilliant suggestions and solutions and heartfelt interventions on the part of members of the public in regard to fixing an important problem in our country and to know full well that it at best will become a report that will get one day of press coverage and then be tossed on a shelf with thousands of other reports to collect dust.

Health care is a case in point. We are to study it again after having studied it in 1995. Nothing has happened since then. There was a blue ribbon panel in 1995 that studied this most important issue affecting Canadians, a matter of life and death, and what happened to it? Nothing.

In regard to aboriginal affairs, there was an eloquent, lengthy $60 million study with umpteen constructive suggestions to help the group in our society that is most impoverished. Has anything been done about it? Nothing.

A solution would be to give committees more independence and get parliamentary secretaries who are really whips for the government off committees. Bills should go to committee in draft form so that the public making interventions can actually mould and craft the bill into something effective and reasonable. They should do this along with members of parliament from across party lines. We could use our collective talents and collective wisdom to build a really effective bill rather than having bills come from the ministry and made by the minister's lawyers. That would make a good bill. The bill would go back to the minister and he or she and his or her people could carve it up. However, ultimately in this process the bill would be superior because it would have tapped into a greater potential within our country and within the House.

All private members' business should be made votable. Every individual MP should have at least one bill votable per term, bar none. Each MP should also have one private member's motion votable, although that is of less importance. Also with respect to private members' business, why has the government gutted our legal tools? We have only four lawyers compared to the more than 80 provided to the government to deal with bills. The 250 plus MPs who are not in cabinet need more than four lawyers to help them with private members' business. We need to invest in this so individual MPs can have access to these legal tools. This would do much to improve the House of Commons.

In closing I can only ask the members of the public who are listening tonight to please get involved in this process. I can only ask them to come to the front of the House of Commons and demand change, demand that we make the House a democracy. With the same vigour and zeal, in a non-violent way, that people protested the FTAA in Quebec, although that was misguided, Canadians should be coming to the House and demanding that we make private members' business votable.

I challenge members of the public to do that because if they work with us then we will make a change that will benefit not only the people of Canada but will certainly benefit the House and make it a nimble, vigorous institution that will make our country in the 21st century much better than it is today.

[Modernization Of The Standing Orders Of The House Of Commons, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Chairman, I would love to have my friend from the government define incremental, but I will not ask.

The current government House leader in 1992, along with a number of other former cabinet ministers who are not here today, put out a document that was an unbelievable tome on specific solutions on how to reform the House. It contained everything from voting procedures and committee structures to how people are selected to sit on committees. It was a fantastic piece of work and an expression of the frustration that the current government felt when in opposition.

I ask my friend from the government whether he will ask the current government House leader to resurrect the document he wrote in 1992 so eloquently describing changes to democratize the House and implement the changes in that document.

[Modernization Of The Standing Orders Of The House Of Commons, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Chairman, I compliment the government member on his eloquent suggestions.

My question is really quite simple. Will his government listen and implement the constructive solutions that he just spoke about?

[Foreign Affairs, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, as a nation we took the lead with South Africa. It is not good enough to wait months while people in Zimbabwe are being killed and the whole structure in southern African is poised to crumble. We have an opportunity to lead.

While President Mugabe is throwing members of the judiciary in prison and is actually threatening them, will the Minister of Foreign Affairs say to our representatives at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that they will push for a withholding of all grants and loans to Zimbabwe until the rule of law is once again restored?

[Foreign Affairs, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe is a vicious dictator who is a threat to the stability of southern Africa. Under his regime, its inflation rate is up 60%. He is throwing opposition people in jail and is even giving amnesty to those who have killed opposition supporters.

My question for the minister is very simple. Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs stop all Canadian government to government aid to Zimbabwe?

[Foreign Affairs, April 30th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Zimbabwe has the fastest collapsing economy in the world and human rights abuses are rampant, all because Robert Mugabe is trying to stay in power.

My question for the Minister of Foreign Affairs is simple. Will he bring this issue up with the security council? Will he mobilize an international response to put pressure on the Zimbabwe government to stop these human rights abuses and let democracy rule?

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, April 27th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate the member for Hamilton West. The reason the bill came about is that his own government has not acted upon cleaning up these sites. That is why the man has done it. Had it already been done, the bill would not have seen the light of day.

I compliment the gentleman from Hamilton West on his foresight in trying to move this issue forward. Unfortunately Bill C-19 was dropped from the legislative calendar. Maybe it will come forward in September; maybe it will not. The government will do what it usually does, which is to sit on its hands, in particular on environmental issues.

We live in an extraordinarily beautiful country. What the public may be interested to know is that despite the beauty around us, it is only a shell. Underneath we have a government that is known worldwide as a serious polluter, one that ignores its own rules and regulations domestically and internationally, one that willfully pollutes, one that does this through the actions of government and does not regulate properly the actions of the private sector.

The member for Hamilton West has put forth an articulate, simple plan suggesting that what the government should do is say yes, this is a good idea. It is a good idea to identify these brownfield sites. It is a good idea to put forth a plan of action. It is an even better idea to implement solutions to change the sites that have been contaminated. The public wants that and most members in the House want that. Why does the government not act?

It has been quite unfathomable to us on this side why the government has failed to act on so many issues of environmental importance. Let us talk about some solutions that stem from Bill C-305, things that we can certainly support as a House.

First is the assessment phase. The public would be fascinated to know that today most environmental assessments are done after projects are completed. Does that make sense? It violates the government's own policies. It violates the government's 1995 red book which said it wanted all environmental assessments to happen at the early stages of plans and programs.

A 1998 survey by the environmental agency revealed very clearly that only 20% of screenings occur at a conceptual stage and that 40% of environmental assessments occur late in the project or after the project is complete. What is the benefit of that? It makes no difference doing it at the end.

For example, some huge energy projects have been proposed under NAFTA which could benefit people. Unfortunately most of the oil will go to the United States and no assessment has been done on the far ranging energy projects that will extract oil from tar. It is a good idea, but it should be done under the guise of sound environmental policies.

It is also essential that consideration be given to the need for alternatives in every project. Why do we go through a project and not consider other alternatives, ones that would be better? This can happen.

Sustainable development is the goal. We should have a list of credible indicators of sustainable development such as no net loss to habitat, ensuring renewable resources are used at sustainable levels, and no net increase in air or water pollution. There needs to be a duly elected duty on the part of the government to do just that. There also needs to be a follow up process.

There are the transboundary responsibilities that fall clearly upon the shoulders of the federal government. It is up to the government to ensure that projects which take place across boundaries, affecting not only our country but others, adhere to sound domestic and international environmental standards.

There has been hypocrisy in our actions outside Canada. The public would be fascinated to know that Canada's own Export Development Corporation is using public money to fund development projects abroad which pollute rivers from Borneo to Central America, which dump mine tailings into rivers and into the ground and which clear-cut. These projects are funded by Canadian taxpayer dollars and are being carried out by Canadian companies from Borneo to New Guinea to Central and South America.

They are violating not only the basic norms of international environmental standards, but they are also violating our own laws and the environmental standards set up by the Export Development Corporation. Why is Canada known through the EDC as a pillager of the environment? Why does the government, after being here since 1993, not have a handle on this? It happens far away, thousands of miles away, unseen and unheard by the Canadian public.

Would the public also be interested to know that the cultures of indigenous peoples are being laid to waste by these actions, that they have been turfed out and that they have been marginalized, all to allow Canadian companies to go in and pillage in an irresponsible fashion areas that have been pristine for a long period of time?

The environmental commissioner has said time and time again that the Canadian government has failed miserably, not only in the actions it takes as a government but its actions as a polluter. Standards were set and targets were set, but no assessment or action has been taken to deal with pollution by the Canadian government through its actions.

The environmental commissioner puts out an eloquent report every year or so which contains effective, concise and doable solutions to deal with environmental challenges in Canada. What happens to that report? That report gets tossed on a shelf like the myriad of reports out of the House.

Even the youth in the gallery are crying and lamenting over the terrible situation in our country. Just mere words are causing them to shake and cry with despair. Let us imagine what the public is doing out there. It is very true.

We are asking the government to listen to the environment commissioner and to implement and adhere to the rules set out by that commissioner. The government should also adhere to the principles that we wave like a flag in our own country but fail to adhere to.

It is unthinkable for us not to do that. Part of the reason, I think, is that there has been a death of innovation within this House. It seems that innovation within the House of Commons is wilfully crushed on the altar of this game that we play where we bash each other over the head about issues the public does not care about.

That is in part why the hon. member for Hamilton West is having his bill defeated by his own government. The man is trying to put forth something intelligent and meaningful, something that Canadians from coast to coast are interested in and that will help our environment and help their livelihoods. Yet it is being defeated, all in order to deal with this at a later time. If I had a dime for every time I have heard that we will do this later, I would be a very affluent man.

We also need transparency and public participation in all we do. That is not taking place.

In short, this bill is an original and worthwhile addition to the CEAA. It is built on a win-win situation, environmental cleanup, revitalization of downtown cores and job creation, all in a meaningful way. It could also—and should, if the government were wise—talk about the polluter pay principle, the principle that if a company goes into an area in our country or outside it and wilfully extracts resources or does some development, it is the company's responsibility to clean up the area. That is the principle that exists.

The problem is that there is no enforcement. The government turns a blind eye and says that it is not going to actually look at what that company has done. Rather, it says that it is just going to leave it there and the people who live in the area can pay the price for it, and indeed they do pay a price.

We can look at the people who live around the Sydney tar ponds, who pay a terrible price in terms of birth defects and in terms of levels of cancer we do not find in other parts of the country. We can look at the price paid by the flora and fauna of our country. We can look at the beluga whales that live in the St. Lawrence. The flesh of a beluga whale would be considered a toxic substance because of the high levels of cancer causing agents it contains.

In closing, I compliment the member and ask today for unanimous consent for the bill to go to committee for study.

[Health, April 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, if the Minister of Health feels frustration, imagine what the victims are feeling right now. That is not good enough. This has been on the minister's plate from the beginning. Good people from around the country have asked the government to do the right thing, the fair thing.

The Minister has one chance. On May 1 there is a conference in Montreal bringing together the victims of hepatitis C as well as medical professionals. Will the minister do the right thing and compensate the people on May 1 who contracted hepatitis C through no fault of their own? We do not want to have any more of these mealy-mouthed answers.

[Health, April 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, three years ago in the House the government voted to deny compensation to those unfortunate individuals who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood. As we are here today these people are languishing. Even those who were promised money have not received it because most of the money has gone to lawyers.

Will he do the right thing and give those individuals who contracted hepatitis C through no fault of their own the compensation that they so justly deserve?