Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak on Bill C-49, the administrative tribunals act.
Before speaking on the bill, I want to quote from the Liberal red book, the tome that was going to govern the actions, responsibilities and promises the government made to the Canadian people. The red book promise on Liberal patronage and patronage in general appears on page 92:
A Liberal government will take a series of initiatives to restore confidence in the institutions of government-.and make competence and diversity the criteria for federal appointments. Open government will be the watchword of the Liberal program.
What have we found instead? We have found that patronage is alive and well in the Liberal government. No fewer than 1,800 positions have been put forth. It is fairly wide ranging.
For example, the National Transportation Agency, which was reorganized this summer, was appointed with well connected Liberals, such as former MPs Richard Cashin from St. John's, Newfoundland and Keith Penner from Kapuskasing, Ontario. Let us look at some recent appointments to the bench. One appointment with a salary of roughly $140,000 per year went to the minister's sister, a former Liberal Party president. Another appointment went to an ex-Ontario Liberal MPP. Defeated MP Gary McCauley, Pierre Trudeau's former executive assistant, received an appointment to the Immigration and Refugee Board with a salary of over $86,000 per year.
These are but some of the hundreds of appointments that have gone to people whose only claim to fame, or whose primary claim to fame, is that they are members of the Liberal Party. That flies in the face of the Liberal red book promise of decreasing patronage.
Bill C-49 does not smack of the cavalier attitude that the former Conservative prime minister had. Rather it smacks of political hypocrisy.
A number of important issues affect this. The budget for consulting contracts should have been cut by at least 15 per cent but this has not been done. No chopping has occurred at all in
consulting contracts by the government even though it promised to do that.
Parliamentarians should have been given mechanisms to review senior cabinet appointments but have we seen that? Not at all and no excuse has been given as to why this important aspect of accountability has not entered into the process of ensuring that the best people are appointed to these important jobs. All appointments should have been made based on competence and merit and not because they hold a card to the Liberal Party in their back pocket. So far more than 1,800 appointments have been made, the vast majority of which have been longtime members in good standing of the Liberal Party, the party of the government in power.
The government said that individuals should be appointed to positions on the basis of merit and on the basis of competence, that those were the primary reasons. We have not seen that. We believe the most important aspects upon which a person should be deemed appropriate for a job should be merit and competence. It should not be the sociodemographic groups they represent, nor their gender, nor the colour of their skin, nor their racial group, nor their language, nor the province they come from. It should be on the basis of merit.
To judge anybody on a basis other than merit and competence is to be discriminatory. That is why affirmative action, in our view, is discriminatory. However, we must do all we can for underprivileged groups within our country, for those groups that have traditionally had a difficult time succeeding. We must do all we can to give them the tools and the opportunities to become the best that they can become.
We are opposed to determining outcomes. We cannot say in this House that we want 25 per cent of a certain group and 15 per cent of another group represented. The determination of outcomes by its very nature is discriminatory and disturbing. The process insults the people intended to be put forward in these positions. They are being judged not on the basis of their competence and merit but on the basis of the colour of their skin or their gender or any other criteria which really has no bearing on their ability to do the job.
It is one of the most disturbing issues for me as someone who is from a very mixed ethnic background. It is discriminatory for individual human beings to be judged by anything other than their merit and competence.
When the time comes in Canada that we can all be judged on our merit and competence but primarily as human beings, then we will have created a society based on equality, mutual respect and understanding. To do anything else and to judge people on any other criteria is to do a disservice to them. It is discriminatory.
I am sure the public would be very interested to find out that our charter of human rights, the document that is lauded as a tome for
equality which preserves the rights of people, is actually a discriminatory document. Much to my shock when I read this document, it says specifically that it is acceptable to discriminate against a group of people who have previously been advantaged in our society.
That has to be struck because it is a discriminatory statement by its very nature. It defeats the purpose of being Canadian. It defeats one of the many things that we are very proud of as Canadians; that we are for equality for all individuals regardless of their colour, their race, their nationality, their gender, or whatever other criteria we could define people by. At the end of the day those criteria do not matter at all. It matters what kind of a person one is and the merit and competency the person will bring to a job and all situations. This is not what the government has done.
The bill does a number of other things, or I should say that it fails to do a number of things. It does not affect cabinet's power to make appointments. It removes the ability of this House or any overseeing body to look at the appointments that cabinet makes.
The bill states that it will eliminate 271 jobs. Members should be interested to know that those 271 jobs are currently vacant. The government is being hypocritical in presenting legislation to the House, saying that it will eliminate jobs although those jobs are currently not in existence.
The bill also makes very few changes to existing travel and per diem perks. It also does not add an element of accountability.
The vast majority of people I know who work in this House or in the bureaucracy are honest individuals. They take their responsibility to the Canadian people very seriously. They are very concerned about the amount of money they spend because at the end of the day, that money comes out of the pockets of the hard working taxpayers.
There are individuals who choose not to recognize this and have shown irresponsibility in the travel that they do. They have abused their power as elected individuals within Parliament or appointed individuals. These individuals must be brought to heel. There must be an element of accountability and transparency in the way in which spending takes place by these individuals. Bill C-49 does not do that even though it provided the government with a great opportunity to do so.
Remedial and disciplinary measures also should have been standardized by the administrative tribunals. However, the power of the minister to interfere with disciplinary measures is not decreased but is increased. It is the minister who in all likelihood made the appointment who is now responsible for disciplining the very person the minister put in the position. This is not what the
Reform Party thinks should be done. Those responsibilities should be done in conjunction with other individuals. Increased transparency, reportability and accountability must be added into the system.
There are many other plum patronage jobs I could speak about. The list as I said amounted to 1,800 in total. I remind the House again of the red book promise and I would like to compare it with the promise the Reform Party is putting forth.
The Liberals promised to Canadians in 1993 that they would take a series of initiatives to restore confidence in the institutions of government and make competence and diversity the criteria for federal appointments. Open government would be the watchword.
Our promise to the Canadian people is as follows. The Reform Party supports restrictions and limitations on the number and types of orders in council permitted by government during its term of office. We also want to add that element of accountability into the system.
The government had an ideal opportunity when it came into power to restore the confidence of Canadians in this institution. We in this House and the Canadian public know very well that an extraordinary amount of apathy exists in the Canadian public about this House, about this institution and about the elected officials who are here. It is not without a great deal of truth historically.
The government had an opportunity to democratize this House. The government had an opportunity to bring back into this House the power of the people through their elected officials. Instead, the government chose not to. Even when the Liberals themselves were in opposition, they brought forth good documents and good ideas on how to democratize this House. We have not seen anything of that in this House.
With the new appointment to the Chair this week, we found that the government itself broke its promise. The government should have put forth a member from the opposition into the Chair, but it has put forth one of its own.
We can still do some things regarding the committee structure. Committees were put in this House to keep members busy and to keep them running around in circles. The vast majority of work that a committee does is often done at great expense not only to the members themselves in terms of their time, but also to the House and the ancillary staff who work very hard and conscientiously to put forth documents that they hope will make a difference.
What happens in committees? Committees sit and listen to the hard, earnest and learned opinions of members of the public. A committee document is put forth after many months of study and review. The document gets about a day of play in the media and then it is shelved with numerous other documents.
A poignant example of this took place in the health committee when the head of the Inuit Tapirisat society came before the committee. The House of Commons health committee was going to consider studying aboriginal health in Canada, which is a very serious problem that should have been dealt with decades ago, a profound tragedy in our midst.
The head of the Inuit Tapirisat society came to us with an armful of dockets. She said: "If you want to come up to Inuvik and study us, you are not welcome because these documents in my arms are just a small example of the dozens upon dozens of studies that I have on aboriginal health. We do not want any more studying. We need action".
It is action that the Canadian public wants to see come out of this House. But it is not action that we often see. The government could have taken it upon itself to give committees the power to introduce legislation, to give committees the power to put forth good solutions, to decrease the reins of the whip structure.
The whip structure cowers members of Parliament and prevents them from representing the public in a way that is effective in this House. For government members to speak against the government of the day is to bring forth the wrath of the whip. Members of Parliament could have their rights and responsibilities to speak in this House removed. They could be ostracized by their colleagues and removed from committees.
Two poignant examples occurred, one of which was on Bill C-68, the gun control bill. Members of Parliament, a half dozen or so from the government, courageously represented their constituents and spoke out against the bill, as they should have done, and were summarily hammered by their own government. They had their ability to speak in this House removed. They were removed from committees. They were ostracized and for a significant time were made defunct, superfluous and vestigial.
When a government does that it is not doing it only for the member. Most important it is doing it to the members of the public who elected that individual to represent them in the House. We do not live in a democracy; we live in a fiefdom and that is part of the problem.
On private members' bills, the government through Bill C-49 could have brought forward good solutions in making sure that private members' bills could be put forth in the House and become votable. We are the only nation in the world that calls itself a democracy and has non-votable private members' bills. Why do we bother to go through the hoops to bring forth private members' bills
that are going to be made non-votable and therefore can never become law? What a waste of the taxpayers' money.
We could empower the public through their members by ensuring that all private members' bills could become votable and therefore could become law. It would maximize the great talent that we have in this House by members across party lines. It would bring those talents to bear and would bring the good ideas that are in the public domain to bear in this House for debate so that we could have effective legislation being brought forth for Canadians.
If the public looked at the pea soup type of agenda that exists in the House, they would be appalled. They would be shocked to find that the legislation we have today does not affect by and large jobs, or the economy, or safety in the streets, or poverty in any meaningful way. It does not strengthen our social programs. It does not touch the hearts, souls and the lives of Canadians in any meaningful way.
The vast majority of legislation brought forward in the House is a pea soup agenda that will only affect a small number of people. The government should be ashamed. It should have brought forth good legislation to address the situation.
In closing, we will vote against the legislation because it demonstrates the hypocrisy of the government. It had an opportunity to strengthen the democratic institution of the House and once again it has chosen not to do so. It is just another broken promise.
