Keith Martin

[Criminal Code, April 16th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate my colleague, the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge for putting this bill forward. This individual has repeatedly put forth private members' bills and motions to this House that are constructive, which have advanced the debate and are for the benefit of the public at large. I take my hat off to him for once again putting forth a welcome bill. It deals with a very serious situation which he articulated so well in his speech.

Death is never welcome, but never more so when it happens in a senseless form and takes away an innocent person. My colleague mentioned it has been a massive problem in his province in particular, but also in the rest of the country. Many people have been killed or maimed when somebody fleeing from the police has caused a crash.

To put the cold hard statistics on the table, between 1991 and 1997, there were 39 people killed, six of whom were innocent people, and 198 people were injured. I can say as an emergency room physician that people get injured very badly in high speed accidents. Many of those people to this day still suffer. They are scarred by the trauma that has been inflicted upon them because of the high speed chases.

Let us put some names to the statistics. In February 1999, Sarah Bowman, 20, of Brampton was hit by a man fleeing from police on Queen Street and died of massive internal injuries. On November 15, 1998 Mr. John Gibbons, 47, of Oshawa, a father of four, died after his car was broadsided by a pick-up truck being chased by the police. On June 18, 1993, Patricia Cavanaugh, 23, of Markham died when a stolen mini-van being chased ran a light and crashed into her car. It would take me all day to go through this list, but I am not going to. The point has been made.

This situation needs to be rectified. The current penalties for committing such an offence are inadequate. I have worked in jail both as a correctional officer and as a physician. I can say that many of the people who commit traffic offences such as fleeing from police and drunk driving scoff at what they have done. There are people with offence lists as long as their arms for repeatedly committing offences for drunk driving and other traffic offences such as fleeing from police. They laugh because the penalties are not there.

Some may criticize this bill for dealing with punitive actions. Some may argue that punitive actions do not work, but I can say that if the penalty fit the crime, those people would not be wilfully and negligently jeopardizing the lives of innocent people.

There currently are penalties in the Criminal Code. A person who is sentenced to dangerous driving and is convicted is punishable by either imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years or a summary conviction. Summary convictions are nothing. If a person causes injury, the penalty for imprisonment is for a term not exceeding 10 years. If the act causes death, the penalty for imprisonment is a term not exceeding 14 years.

Certainly those are significant penalties. What the public may not understand is that when people are sentenced, they do not serve the actual time.

There is no truth in sentencing. In point of fact someone who is sentenced for committing an act, outside of first degree murder, serves only one-sixth of the sentence before they are eligible for parole. What kind of penalty is it for somebody to be sentenced to six years for killing someone and serves only one year for that offence? What kind of message does that send? If somebody takes a life, they need to pay with a commensurate penalty. And they need to pay that price in our jails.

Bill C-440 provides for good penalties. If someone is not injured, the maximum penalty is extended to two years but if someone is hurt, it is a maximum of 10 years. These are conservative and should run consecutively, not concurrently.

A concurrent sentence is one which runs in conjunction with another. The person receives no extra penalty. Absolutely none. Nothing. There is no penalty. Criminals know that. Furthermore criminals also recognize that in the commission of multiple offences the penalties are plea bargained away. What kind of message is that?

We do not want to lock everybody up but there are certain offences that show a wilful negligence for the health and welfare of the Canadian public. The minister needs to put herself in the shoes of those family members who are bereaved by the loss of a loved one. The minister has to look at this from both sides. That is all we ask.

Support comes from many quarters, from the public, from the solicitor general of Ontario and from the police. The police are asking for help. It is not their fault. The police are doing their duty yet in the commission of their duty their hands are often tied. The justice system is not supporting the police in this country today. It is causing an erosion of the morale of our police officers whom we rely upon and trust to keep us safe. We have to give them the same consideration they give us.

The penalties in Bill C-440 are needed. We would like increased penalties for drunk driving. We also want truth in sentencing. If a person is sentenced to two years, they should serve two years. If a person is sentenced to 10 years they should serve 10 years. If sentenced to life, the person should not get out after 15 years but after 25 years. This is why our party has been fighting for the removal of the so-called faint hope clause, section 745.

We want to make sure that the police have our support. This includes financial support. We have been seeing for a very long time that the RCMP and police forces are not getting the support to do their job.

The RCMP training facility has been closed. How can we close down the training facility for the RCMP? It is ridiculous. How can we have police officers trying to do their jobs if they are not given the hours to prosecute the people they are arresting? People are being arrested but then they are released. They cannot be prosecuted because the police forces do not have the manpower, the time nor the resources to do so.

Governments have repeatedly made our legal system so complicated. The conviction process and the process of doing police work are convoluted, complex and inefficient. It takes a police officer many hours to do a job that would have taken much less time years ago. It presently takes two to three times the time to formulate and process a conviction. It is estimated that it takes six hours of office work for a police officer to process a simple drunk driving conviction.

How can police officers do their work with the complexity the government and other governments have engineered? If the Minister of Justice wants to do something along with supporting Bill C-440 she needs to work with her provincial counterparts to simplify the system now.

Again, I compliment my colleague, the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge for taking a leadership role with this bill. It is a bill for personal safety. It is a bill for the public good. It is a bill that hopefully will end the carnage on our streets.

If it is acceptable, I seek unanimous consent to pass Bill C-440 at this point in time.

[Kosovo, April 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Reform Party would like to propose a constructive solution to the minister.

The Russians could be a very useful tool in this force. The inclusion of Russia would be more acceptable to the Serbs.

Does the minister agree that Russia is critical to any peacekeeping force and what efforts are being made to secure Russian involvement in the proposed peacekeeping force?

[Kosovo, April 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the international peacekeeping force proposed by Germany is getting increasing support from both NATO and non-NATO allies. However, there is very little on the public record about the view of the government.

I ask the minister responsible: Who is going to be in control of this force? Are we going to participate and what other countries are going to participate in this proposed peacekeeping force?

[Coastal Fisheries Protection Act, April 16th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today. I would like to say that it is very nice to see the hon. Minister of Fisheries and Oceans back and in good health after his accident.

As we speak, we are seeing an unprecedented situation. Never before in the history of mankind have we seen our fish stocks being decimated in such a rapid fashion. Not only have we seen them decimated, indeed they are becoming extinct. From the east coast of Canada to South Africa and to the west coast of Africa to southeast Asia we are seeing fish stocks all over the world damaged and destroyed by overfishing, habitat destruction and pollution.

Internationally, as the minister said in his speech, we have in front of us an enormous challenge. How do we provide fish and fish species not only for our families to enjoy but for future generations? From a morale perspective, how do we ensure that these creatures, which have been on the earth longer than people, continue to exist in the future? Therein lies the challenge.

To articulate the problem will take a long time, but we must start. We have seen the raping and pillaging of our fish stocks all over the world in an unprecedented fashion. International communities and governments have been unable to put together a framework with teeth to address this situation. That is what this bill was supposed to do. That is what the international agreement was for. Unfortunately, while this bill goes part of the way, it does not have teeth to properly address this issue.

We are seeing fish stocks diminishing and becoming extinct all over the world. This is a serious problem for all of us. We are also seeing radionuclide cancer causing agents, teratogenic agents, being increased through the food chain. We are finding them not only in small fish but also in larger fish and indeed large mammals. If we look at the beluga whale population in the eastern part of Canada, we see an unprecedented amount of cancer causing agents within their body masses. If we look to the north and see the aboriginal people who live there and consume a large amount of fish in their diet, we see an unprecedented amount of these cancer causing teratogenic agents.

Not many people are talking about this, as I know the member from the other side who is from the north will articulate, but the tragic manifestation of that is that we have found in their populations an unprecedented number of babies born with birth defects, people suffering from cancers at levels that we have not seen in other populations, and numbers which are a silent tragedy not only within our own country but in other countries that share the north.

Earlier this week there were representatives from Russia here, many of whom were from parts of northern Russia such as Siberia and Irkutsk. Their aboriginal communities are suffering from unprecedented levels of these cancer causing agents. Their people are suffering from these cancers and birth defects. It is a silent tragedy and is a direct result of the pollution that has been dumped in the oceans of the world, affecting all of us.

We see pillaging by large boats that are going around the world laying nets even in spite of international laws. These groups show a wilful disregard for the fish stocks that exist today. They will do whatever it takes to pillage and take whatever they want.

One of the challenges of Bill C-27 and one of the challenges of the UNCLOS was to put teeth into a document that will be able to address these pirates of the high seas. In no uncertain terms they will have penalties applied to them so that they cannot continue to engage in the rape of our oceans which affects all of us.

Destruction of the habitat is also occurring not only within the oceans but also on land. In my province of British Columbia we have a hodge-podge situation. The province is responsible for part of the environment and the feds for the other. There is very little co-ordination. As a result deforestation is taking place to the edge of the rivers, which is destroying crucial and critical salmon habitat.

Our response should be to create a system working with the provinces to ensure that it does not happen. We also have a situation on private lands where individuals have the ability to engage in, and do engage in, the wilful destruction of habitat on those lands, often high up in the river system. This has a profound and damaging effect on the entire river system, destroying habitat that is crucial for salmon species in particular to be able to breed. This serious situation has occurred for a long time and the minister has been unable or unwilling to address it.

The private sector would be very interested in working with the government to provide an equitable solution to ensure that the habit is protected and that the interest in personal land is respected. They are not mutually exclusive principles. We can have personal ownership and still have the ability to protect the land and the resources. When an individual's actions has a profound and damaging effect on the entire ecosystem, it should not be allowed but is going on right now.

It is one of the most important things that has led to the destruction of the salmon fishery on the west coast. It is not necessarily overfishing, which has had a profound effect, but it is the damage of the habit. The desecration of habitat is the single most profound factor in the destruction and decimation of our salmon species.

That is clearly within the purview of the federal government and the provincial government. My colleague, the critic for fisheries from Saanich—Gulf Islands, and my other colleague from Delta, both of whom have worked very hard to provide constructive solutions to the minister, need to be listened to. Their solutions need to be employed. The minister needs to work with his provincial counterparts to make this a reality.

There are things that can be done. Let us look at how fishermen are suffering. Right now the government has made promises and these promises have been broken. I will give the House some examples of what it has been doing.

I have a letter from a constituent which was written to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It articulates very clearly how the transitional job fund that has been put forth by the minister and promised by the minister is simply not doing its job. It reads in part as follows:

Despite the announcement made by the minister on June 19, 1998, very little has been resolved for displaced fisheries workers. Of the $100 million promised for licence buyback measures, only $23.4 million is accounted for.

A letter from the minister dated March 9, 1999, sent to me by my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands, states that of the $100 million for habitat protection laid out and promised by the minister only $6.5 million has actually been paid out. Some 6.5% of the total amount of money designated for the critical reclamation of habitat has been paid out.

The final $200 million as promised aid according to the minister's letter is only being paid out at $41.7 million or 20.8% of the money. The rest, nearly 80%, has not been paid out. This means that since the minister promised the money to be forthcoming to fisherman and their communities over nine months ago, less than 18% of the promised moneys has been paid out to fishermen, their families and their communities. These people are suffering. They are in his province. They are in my province. They need help. They do not want handouts but they certainly want to get back to work.

Many of the projects that are being put forth and funded by the transitional job fund are not very useful for ensuring that the people working in the fishing community will have another long term sustainable job to go to, not a short term make work project by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.

There are solutions, some of which I will articulate. These solutions would fulfil what we all want to see. We want to see the rejuvenation of fish and their habitat in a long term sustainable fashion.

One of the things for which we have been pushing for years is fish farming. Many years ago Canada was a leader in fish farming. What happened was that Chile and Norway usurped us and now are world leaders in fish farming. Norway in particular does it right.

We need to look at the example of Norway to see what it did right. Within fish farming lie jobs that people currently in the fishing communities who are unable to work at their traditional roles can go into instead of trying to make fishermen information technology specialists and computer specialist with an eight week course when they are in their forties and fifties and have over 20 years of experience fishing. As they say, it ain't going to happen.

We can train them and put them into jobs that may not be exactly what they have done before but would certainly be congruent with what they have traditionally done. To train them or to ask them to map rivers and streams that have been mapped a dozen times before is clearly an expensive make work project. Why not give them the skills to do the work within fish farming, which could create a lot of jobs.

In my riding we have proposed for years a hatchery on the Sooke River. This hatchery in a community with over a 20% unemployment rate could create over $90 million in spinoff benefits and hundreds of jobs. In the community of Sooke 200 or 300 jobs would have a profound, dramatic and positive impact on people's lives. They would be working in something close to the land. Both aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities would be provided a mesh or a linkage between them, which would do a lot for developing peace and harmony between communities that are fighting over a diminishing resource. We must look at that.

Another example is Iceland which has done a remarkable job of saving its fish. It has a long term sustainable fishing industry. When Iceland representatives approached Canada some years ago they came with open hands and said that they would work with us to rebuild our fishery on the east coast. What did they get? Indifference and a cold shoulder from a country that has been a leader in the fishing industry.

We as a country, particularly our east coast, desperately needed help. We desperately needed a plan to revise, revamp and rejuvenate the economy but got absolutely nothing. Now we see the payoff for that neglect. We see communities on the east coast suffering and relying more and more on government handouts and less and less on the ability to provide for themselves.

That has not only damaging effects on them as individuals but profound and damaging effects on their economy and communities. The social fabric of the communities on the east coast has been torn apart as it is being torn apart on the west coast.

There are solutions. I am not for a moment advocating what has taken place in southeast Asia which has engaged in fish farming that has been absolutely destructive to its environment. We do not need to adopt that, but we need to open our eyes and look at countries around the world which have done an excellent job of saving their fish and providing a long term sustainable fishery.

I will go back to Iceland for a second. It tries to focus on getting the maximum value per fish. As a result it has managed to ensure that each fish caught, particularly in a sports fishing capacity, generates an awful lot of money. I believe it is $80 to $100 per fish.

In the difficult times of today with the difficult decisions that have to be made what I will say is politically incorrect but in my view needs to be discussed. Less reliance has to be put on purse seiners, on those large fishing vessels that vacuum the ocean.

The minister wants to buy back. The process he is engaged in, the so-called Mifflin plan, will centralize fishing in a very small number of hands. Those hands will be the big boats. The argument they will put forth is that by having fewer boats fewer fish will be caught. That is not true and the reason is that the technology of today will merely expand to fit the boats. These boats can catch much more than they do. They just need the opportunity to do it.

The Mifflin plan is destroying and taking away the fishery from small individual operators and putting it into the hands of large fishing boats, many of which are owned by the large fishing corporations and packing groups. Does that do much for employment? No. Does it do much for increasing value added fish products? No, it does not. We should be striving for maximum value and maximum employment in a sustainable fashion for the fishing industry in Canada. That is not what the government's plan is doing and that is not what is happening now.

It can be done. The government has heard from from my colleagues from Saanich—Gulf Islands and from Delta—South Richmond constructive, effective and pragmatic solutions to deal with the problem. All we have had is basically a blind eye. I will give the minister credit. He had a lot of courage this year in closing down some fisheries and in the process saving some species. For that he ought to be congratulated.

If we are to protect our fish, which came to light a few years ago, enforcement is critical. DFO enforcement officers are beside themselves. They try to enforce the laws but people higher up in DFO have meddled in their affairs and prevented them from doing that. As a result the best enforcement officers, if they have been doing their jobs, have in fact been marginalized and those who have played the party game in the bureaucracy have advanced.

The DFO bureaucracy has been pulling the teeth of the enforcement officers preventing them from enforcing the law, which is a complete outrage. Strong enforcement of our present laws and the respect of the minister, deputy minister and the people high up in the echelon are needed so that the enforcement officers will be supported and protected in doing their jobs.

The scientists in DFO have to be supported and encouraged because whatever plans we have must be based on good science. Over the last few years in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and with this Liberal government politics has overridden good science.

A case in point is the cod fishery on the east coast. A couple of years ago cod stocks were shown to be increasing a bit. What did the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans do? The minister said he would open it up for a limited cod fishery in spite of the fact that the scientists had said we were having an increase in our cod but to do nothing and let it ride a bit so the numbers could increase. For purely political reasons prior to the last election the then minister opened up the fishery. He destroyed the ability of the cod fishery to sufficiently expand and have a long term sustainable fishery.

It speaks of a problem the scientists have been having in DFO for a long time. In spite of their hard work and diligence, in spite of their tenacity in finding the best solutions possible, the mucky-mucks on top and the politicos kept their answers and solutions under wrap. They forced the scientists not to say anything and rapped them on the knuckles when they did. That is idiotic.

Those studies are funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer has a right to know what they are. As a result I would submit to the minister that all scientific studies done by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans be made public. All interested parties could then look at them and know what is going on on the ocean floor. Everybody would know the number of fish there, the projected fish stocks, what we need to do to save them and what we might be able to do in terms of fishing them sustainably. These are things we have to determine.

The number of fish that are going to be pulled out have to be based on sustainable quotas and the quotas have to be based on good hard science. They cannot be based on politics. Politics has killed our fishery historically.

We have enormous challenges ahead of us not only within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans but also in the policies we enact domestically and internationally. The minister's speech indicates that he is very interested in this issue. I know he is very interested in stopping the habitat destruction, the pollution and the other elements of overfishing that have gone into destroying not only our fish stocks but the fish stocks of many others.

Polluters in our country and around the world are continuing to dump damaging toxic carcinogenic materials into our oceans. This has long term and profound effects not only on fish but also on mammals. The minister must work with the Minister of the Environment to implement tough laws, laws which have teeth, to penalize those individuals who are wilfully polluting our oceans, rivers and streams. At the present time many polluters at best get a rap on the knuckles and at worst nothing. Because of short staffing in both the Department of the Environment and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans these things are simply not enforced.

With respect to Bill C-27 and the UN convention on the law of the sea, one of our great challenges on both the east and west coasts is the foreign fishing vessels which come into our waters, pillage our fish and then escape outside the 200 mile zone. Unless some rigid specifications are met, our interdiction officers cannot apprehend these boats once they get outside the 200 mile zone. That should not happen.

Pirates of the sea should not have anywhere to escape to if they are pillaging the oceans. Oceans have no boundaries. There are no lines indicating “this is ours and that is yours”. The pollution and damage that takes place in the oceans affects all of us. We can no longer turn a blind eye and let it continue.

In closing, I implore the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to work with the Minister of the Environment and the provincial ministers to develop constructive plans, as he has heard here from across party lines, to address pollution, habitat destruction and overfishing. Without those, we will not have a fishery in the ocean and species will become extinct. All species will suffer. Not only will it be the fish in the sea that suffer, but we will suffer as well.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, April 15th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I fail to see the relevance of the hon. member's speech given the fact that we are discussing youth crime.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, that is a difficult question but I thank my hon. member for asking it. The litmus test in all this is our prime objective of saving the lives of innocent civilians.

Clearly Mr. Milosevic was engaging in a process of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps NATO was brought in late but it was brought in and saved the lives of some people. Not as many as it should have because of the tardiness involved. As I mentioned in my speech there are other things NATO could have been involved in. I do not think it has increased the hostilities. What we saw happen would have only happened in a more extreme fashion and we would have seen more innocent lives being taken.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. We are lacking in leadership in the world today. In the post cold war situation we have to develop a new framework within which to work.

Some people have made the mistake of believing that NATO can get involved in conflicts as far away as Africa and the Far East. NATO's obligation is within its name, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It deals with that area of Europe and North America.

As the member alluded to, we have to engage in ways to deal with conflict all over the world. There are three bodies that can do this. The first is the United Nations. Kosovo demonstrates the failure of the UN. The security council rooted in its 1945 organization needs to be revamped. The IMF and the World Bank are the other two organizations that make up the three organized at Bretton Woods in 1945. They can engage in economic actions against a country that is engaging in behaviours that compromise international and regional security.

The argument in support of that is that countries engaging in a flagrant abuse of human rights and local or international security are an economic threat to those areas. They are engaging in bad economics. Why should the international community put money into countries that might use that money to buy arms to abuse people or engage in or support a conflict in their area? They do not have to. Within the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations lies the tools that can be utilized. I might add that the United Nations is the toughest nut to crack.

While we are on the security council we need to have the courage to articulate the tough solutions that have to be put forward to enable the United Nations to change from being completely and utterly unable to deal with conflicts in a proactive manner to a body that can. There are many arguments to be made for that from a humanitarian argument to a cold-hearted economic argument.

The bottom line is that we have been on the security council for a year and a half. I implore the Minister of Foreign Affairs to talk very forcefully about revamping and restructuring the security council to broaden its number of members and to remove the veto from all of them.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, if history has taught us anything, it is that we have learned nothing. Across the world, from Angola, Sierra Leone to the Sudan we have seen countries implode and thousands of civilians killed. In fact 90% of the casualties that are borne in the wars of today are innocent civilians, unlike what happened in the first part of the century. What all these situations have in common is they demonstrate an abysmal failure on the part of the international community to get involved before thousands of people have been killed and countries have been laid to waste.

Kosovo is the latest of those countries, the one that is the apple of the eye of the media, the one that is drawing the most attention. It is by no means that which is going to be the greatest in terms of death and destruction in our world today.

As I said before, in Sierra Leone hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and thousands more are killed every day. In northern Uganda 10,000 child soldiers between the ages of eight and twelve are committing horrendous atrocities and thousands of young girls of the same age are used as sexual concubines. No one hears about that, no one talks about it and no one cares.

The situation in front of us is one where we had some very difficult choices to make, to act or not to act in the face of Kosovo. With the memory of Croatia and the memory of the atrocities of Banja Luka, Srebrenica, Bihac and Sarajevo fresh in our minds, we chose thankfully to act. And act we did, perhaps not in the best way, but we acted.

There were a number of obligations and end points we wanted to accomplish. The first was the most important, to save the innocent civilians' lives. The second was to bring Slobodan Milosevic to the table to engage in a diplomatic solution to this problem.

The fact is Milosevic is not at the table and while we were bombing Belgrade, the ethnic cleansing continued. The reason is simply that bombing will not stop ethnic cleansing, or should I use the proper term, mass murder, that takes place door to door, person to person, eyeball to eyeball. That will not stop it, although I must say that I applaud and support the government's support of NATO's bombing in the federal republic of Yugoslavia.

Our current objective has several goals. The moral obligation is to save people's lives. No one disagrees with that. The political obligation is to get Milosevic back to the table and stop further ethnic cleansing. It is also to engage in a diplomatic solution.

I would argue that the diplomatic solution put forward at Rambouillet, France is now a dead duck. The notion of an autonomous Kosovo will not happen. Too much blood has been shed, too many people have been killed and the memories last a very long time. These people, quite frankly, are not going to live together.

How are we going to deal with this problem? I would proffer the following solutions to deal with the situation in Kosovo; solutions which I put forth in a motion last October in the House, which unfortunately was not taken up.

The first solution is to protect innocent civilians. The way to do that is to organize a safe haven in the southern part of Kosovo. This can be accomplished with minimal or no casualties on the part of the west, but it will involve ground troops. Ground troops are required to engage in a safe haven in southern Kosovo and those ground troops, in my view, should be European Union troops. The reason is that they were tasked five years ago to deal with the impending implosion of the former Yugoslavia and they sat on their hands. They sat on their hands and thousands of people were killed, maimed and left homeless.

The European Union troops could engage in this, which would accomplish the following. First, it would protect the Kosovar Albanians. Second, it would enable humanitarian aid to get to these people safely and efficiently. Third, if these people are going to be repatriated at the end of a politically organized solution, then it is far easier for them to be repatriated while in their own backyard than for them to be repatriated while spread far afield. It will not do to send these people all over the world and expect that at some point in the future they will somehow wind up back in Kosovo. That simply is not going to happen.

It would involve the partition of Kosovo. As I said before, these people are not going to live together. Why I think this is doable is that Milosevic wants the northern half of Kosovo because that is where the Field of Black Birds is and that is where the seat of Serbian nationalism comes from. That is primarily what he wants, along with some mines which I think are less relevant.

If we try to bring the two together it will involve a ground war and a lot of allied troops being killed. At best, it will be apparent victory. At worst, NATO will back down because of the number of body bags returning home and, as a result, NATO will lose an enormous amount of credibility; credibility that it would take a very long time to regain. A ground war is not something that anybody has the stomach for.

The long term political solution must involve Serbians coming to the table, but how do we do this? One of our failures has been to assume that Mr. Milosevic deals with the same moral framework that we do. He does not. He is the one who is responsible for the slaughter in Bosnia. He is the one who instigated the slaughter which we saw in the towns of Srebrenica, Bihac and Banja Luka. He is the one who engaged in a ground war with Croatia. He is the one who is largely responsible, with his leadership, for the implosion of the former Yugoslavia.

We have to recognize that we are not dealing with a familiar creature. In fact, I would liken him to Hitler. Appeasement was attempted in the late 1930s when Hitler was committing atrocities. It did not work then and it certainly will not work today. We have to use a different framework to deal with a creature like Slobodan Milosevic.

First, to bring him to the table will mean engaging in bombing, but I think it has to happen.

Second, we could use economic levers through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Both of those groups have enormously powerful economic levers to apply to any country and they must be applied to the federal republic of Yugoslavia. If we choke off the money supply we greatly diminish the ability of Milosevic to carry out a war for any lengthy period of time.

Third is something we have not looked upon which is the propaganda war. Many people in Serbia are falling behind their leader partly as a result of the bombing we have engaged in. Any time a country is bombed it is more likely the people no matter how much they despise their leader, will fall behind their leader not out of support for the individual but out of support for their country.

Therefore we have to get into the propaganda game. We need to use short-wave radio. The UN and other groups have the capability of beaming in what is taking place in Kosovo. We need to use television to demonstrate what is taking place in Kosovo and also the atrocities that took place in Croatia and in Bosnia. The people in Serbia do not know what their leadership has been up to and it is high time they did. If we are going to undermine Mr. Milosevic we have to do it from within. The easiest and most efficient way is by informing the Serbian public of what he is responsible for.

It is important for us to demonstrate and articulate to the Serbian people that our problem is not with them but with their leadership. I am sure that the Serbian people, like other people of the former Yugoslavia, want peace, that they want to live in harmony. Let us not forget that 10% of the population of Kosovo is Serbian. They have no stomach for killing as I am sure the vast majority of Kosovar Albanians have no stomach for killing. Unfortunately we see the manipulation by political leaderships to engage in war or to compromise their people at any price.

At the end of the day we have the Kosovo situation and we will have more Kosovos as time passes. I have been in war situations. I have seen people with their legs blown off from land mines. I have seen teenagers hold their bowels in their hands after being eviscerated by guerrillas. They did not want their bowels to fall on the ground. These are innocent people who did not ask for this.

I implore the government to try to change its foreign policy from one of conflict management to one of conflict prevention. I introduced a motion which will come up for debate on Monday. It articulates a way in which we can move our foreign policy from one of conflict management to one of conflict prevention. It articulates a series of methods for identifying the precursors to conflict and pragmatic tools such as the use of diplomacy and economic levers that have not been explored to prevent conflict from occurring.

It has been encouraging to see people across this House work together for the common goal of peace. I look forward to the future debates we may have to make sure Canada stands in the forefront of saving people's lives. We have in the past and we will in the future.

[Government Services Act, 1999, March 23rd, 1999]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today to Bill C-76. Unfortunately this bill should never have been brought to the House.

If the government had done its job PSAC workers would not be on a strike platform right now. If it had treated PSAC workers fairly we would not have the imposition on the grain handlers and the economy taking place right now.

The government has not been negotiating in good faith with PSAC workers. It has not treated them fairly. When PSAC workers wanted to come to the table for discussion with the government, it turned its back on them. Why is that? This is the third time PSAC workers are to be legislated back to work. We understand the reasons why the government will do that.

We cannot have an economy that is held hostage to strikes. We cannot have situations such as those taking place now with grain handlers being unable to carry on with their jobs; 70 PSAC workers striking and holding up 112,000 grain handlers should not be allowed to occur. On the other hand, PSAC workers should have the right to get a fair resolution to their problems.

There is a way of resolving this issue. How do we ensure that people will not go on strike? How do we ensure the economy will not be hurt? How, on the other hand, do we enable workers to get a fair resolution?

The solution put forth by the Reform Party is an excellent one that is built into the contract of essential services and built into the contract of PSAC workers. I suggest that some of these workers such as prison guards be made essential. In the process of doing that, these individuals must have an out, an ability to get resolution to their grievances.

The way to do that is by binding arbitration or final offer arbitration. In other words, give workers in various disciplines the opportunity to negotiate a settlement. If after a certain period of time no settlement is arrived at, be it on the lack of good faith on the part of the government or the people who are negotiating from outside the government, then a situation will happen where resolution has to occur.

Rather than have people go out on strike and hurt the economy, hurt Canadians, hurt other workers, the solution is to write into the contract that both sides come together for binding offer arbitration or final offer arbitration.

Final offer arbitration would ensure that both sides, the government and in this case PSAC workers, would put forth the best solution they can possibly come to themselves. A third party, acceptable to both sides, would then make the decision.

The other option is binding arbitration. In that case a third party, again one acceptable to both sides, would deliberate on the situation, take the offers from both sides and construct an offer they find would be the best at that point.

That would enable workers to get a fair and quick resolution to their situation. PSAC workers, like other workers, just want to get back to work. They want to be treated fairly. On the other hand, it will prevent strikes from taking place and prevent the inconvenience and damage that is taking place to our economy, to other citizens and to the functioning of government. Therein lies the solution and we have put that solution forth to the government.

I will not be supporting Bill C-76 unless the clause of binding offer arbitration or final offer arbitration is accepted by the government. If it does not accept that, I cannot support the bill because members in my constituency of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca are very angry with the government and want a resolution.

What are they asking for? Are they asking for things that are unreasonable? No, they are not. Their pay has been frozen since 1992. They are asking for a fair wage increase. I submit that if PSAC workers were to get the same wage increase as members of parliament receive that would be fair.

On the issue of pay and equitable playing fields for people across the country, right now people are paid different amounts depending on where they live, and that is to take into consideration the fact that the cost of living in some places is different from that in others.

A better way of doing that would be to pay people the same for doing the same job. On the other hand, people are being forced to live in an environment where the cost of living is higher than in another. For example, in Victoria the cost of living is higher than in Halifax. The people working in Victoria would receive a supplement to what they are making at this point. That is done in the military with an accommodation assistance allowance.

A similar type of situation can be built into the contract. In that way we would not have the perception and the reality that people across the country are being paid different amounts for doing the same job. Pay them the same but give them the accommodation assistance allowance which would account for the differences in cost of living. That way everything would be very transparent and available to all concerned.

The other thing that we see happening is the issue of fairness in terms of labour-management relations. Labour unions have sometimes done a good job and sometimes have not. We need to clean up the labour situation and we need to ensure that the people working under labour union laws have the choice of whether to participate in the union.

Right now there are obligations for people in various jobs to participate. That is not fair. People should have a choice without being penalized for being a participant or not being a participant in the union.

Right to work legislation exists in some parts of the United States. Where that has taken place the income of those people is about $2,500 to $3,500 a year greater than for those people who are living in states where there is not right to work legislation.

Unions have to be in a position where they will be acting not in the best interests of the union leadership but in the best interests of the people they represent. That is extremely important.

In my riding we have quite a number of PSAC workers. One of the examples I would like to give is the non-military blue collar workers at the maritime forces base in Esquimalt. These people have been working for wages at or just slightly above welfare for a very long time. They have been asked to downsize significantly. Many of them have downsized 40%. They multitask. They have streamlined their jobs. They have streamlined their work. They have not asked for much at all. They have been working for rates far lower than what they could be making in other parts of the country doing the same job in other parts of the government. They stuck with it because they believed, out of a sense of duty, they were doing the right thing for the military.

After doing all this the government has kicked them in the teeth. It has not given them a level playing field to work on, and that is completely unfair. The workers in the base in Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca want to have a level playing field where they can compete with others fairly for their jobs and they want to be treated fairly.

The other issue, which I think is a very legitimate grievance, is that people doing the same job with the same skills working in PSAC are paid less than those individuals doing the same job with the same skills in the government, in other unions. Why is that? That should not happen. If a person is doing the job, if they have the same skills, they should be getting paid the same wage regardless of what union they are in within the government. That is called parity.

On the issue of employment equity, it is wise for us to understand what that means. Many people think it is for equal pay if people are doing the same job, with the same skills and the same experience regardless of their gender or any other characteristic we would like to name. That is not what employment equity is all about. Employment equity says that if person A is doing a job and person B is doing a different job, some arbitrary third person says those two people should be getting paid the same.

We do not believe that is fair. We do not support that. The reason we do not support that is we believe the market should decide what the value of those two jobs are. Should someone working in a clerical position get paid the same as someone working in a blue collar job because some arbitrary third person in the government says those two jobs are equivalent? We do not believe so. What we believe in having is a level playing field where people can compete fairly for the jobs they would like to pursue.

We also believe very strongly that people doing the same job with the same skills in the same way should get paid the same amount of money. We very much support that. That is not taking place right now in the unions and the government has not addressed that.

The amount of money the government has given these people is pathetically small, given the impositions it has imposed on these workers and the challenges they have met. The blue collar PSAC workers have tried very hard and have met the challenges that have been put in front of them. They are hardworking individuals who are the backbone of our country. Yet the government has not treated them fairly.

The longer the government does this, the longer it continues to treat PSAC workers in this way, the less and less it will get out of them as workers and the less faith these workers will have in the system they work in. Who will be hurt by that? The people who rely on these PSAC workers to do their job and the country.

Does it not make sense if we are to have a stronger economy, a more cohesive society, that these people are treated fairly? That is all they are asking. Yet the government will force these people back to work and engage in strong, punitive legislation with huge fines for people who will not agree to that.

The failure of the government to deal with the situation in a proactive fashion has brought us to the catastrophe we have today, a situation that no one relishes. Why it does not do this I do not understand.

I challenge the government to do the following with the PSAC workers. It should identify other workers it believes are essential. It should put into the contract with their agreement that if the negotiations are not concluded with a fair resolution on both sides, binding final offer arbitration is put into the system, into their contract. In that way strikes will not take place, the economy will not be compromised, people will not be compromised and quick resolutions to this thorny problem will occur in a fair and equitable fashion so that the government, the economy, the public and the union workers will ultimately be treated fairly. To do anything less is grossly unfair to all concerned.

[Division No. 359, March 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Chairman, these people have been legislated back to work four times. This is the fourth time we are attempting to do it.

In order to avoid these problems in the future, will the President of the Treasury Board include in the contract an opportunity to engage in either final offer arbitration or binding arbitration to prevent strike actions that have impaired our economy, or a solution that would get us out of the problem of ordering these workers back to work against their will while enabling them to have a legitimate out?

We could develop a solution that would be fair to the government, the taxpayers and the workers who are trying to get a fair resolution to their grievances.