Keith Martin

[Agreement On Internal Trade Implementation Act, June 19th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his intervention. He certainly made some good points, but I would like to correct him.

Why do we now have an economy where our interest rates have essentially doubled since this government came into power? Why is that? Why has Moody's downgraded our bonds? The reason is that our economy right now is in the worst state of affairs it has ever been in. In point of fact, we are on a steep, slippery slope to economic dislocation and economic disaster.

Three years from now, if we pursue the economic principles of this government, we will have $100 billion more on our debt, our interest payments will climb from $40 billion to $50 billion and our expenditures for government programs will decline from $120 billion to $102 billion, an $18 billion shortfall.

What are we going to say to the Canadian public? What are we going to say to people who are sick and who need their health care? What are we going to say to the elderly who need their old age security and cannot take care of themselves? What are we going to say to needy people who through no fault of their own need welfare? What are we going to say to them in the future when that money is not there? That is the reality of the economic plan this government has put forth.

I correct the hon. member that our situation economically is a lot worse. However, the hon. member did put some good points forth on education. I agree with him that we do not need more money in education. The Reform Party has never supported that. If the government is going to decrease money to the provinces, which is what we said, then do it. However, it has to give the provinces the ability to raise funds themselves by giving them the tax points to do it.

This government has said: "We are taking money away from you, but we are not going to give you the ability to raise money without penalizing you". That is fundamentally and morally wrong.

The hon. member did make a couple of good points on the co-operative activities of education and how we should indeed bring forth and use our education dollar to more efficient standards to increase the standards within our schools today. We do not need to spend more. In fact we can spend less because there is a lot of money that is wasted within education.

He brought forth some interesting points about bringing parents into the educational circle, something I have spoken about on a number of occasions within this House. I would be very interested at some time in the future in listening to what the hon. member says this government is doing in this regard. It is very important and I would be more than happy to help them with this.

We in the Reform Party are very much in support of improving the standards of education within this country without spending more, making sure that our students in this country have the skills that are necessary in the future to become competitive in the 21st century. Many of our schools are failing to do this. The tragedy for the students in this country is when they get out in the working world and find out that when they are competing against students from the Pacific Rim countries they are up against some very hardnosed, highly competitive individuals.

I hope we will be able to change our system somewhat and give our students the information and skills necessary to be competitive for them to be employed in the future and for them to build the strong economy we need in this country.

[Agreement On Internal Trade Implementation Act, June 19th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, overtaxed, hampered by political red tape, our private sector is much beleaguered, especially nowadays in the era of economic uncertainty. Wherever they turn, the private sector finds very little recourse and no succour whatsoever.

With options limited, they have to cut jobs, decrease expenditures and infrastructure. Ultimately they find themselves pushed to the wall with very few options, one of which is to fold completely and go bankrupt. The other is to move to the United States. One only needs to look at Ottawa and Toronto, eastern Canada, and to a lesser extent western Canada to see the number of businesses which have been run by families for generations that are now closed and boarded up. It is very sad for me when I go home to Toronto and see businesses which have been operating for generations closing up.

Trade barriers hamper small businesses and the ability of the private sector to be competitive. They function to relocate scarce resources away from the efficient areas to inefficient areas of the economy. They cost business, they cost the consumer in increased prices and they cost the entire country. They impede the free movement of goods, services, people and capital all over this great country of ours.

Who are they supported by? They are supported by a small number of businesses, perhaps 5 per cent to 10 per cent, yet they

are paid for by the majority of the people in Canada. That is the cost of having internal trade barriers.

Section 121 of the Constitution states that all articles of the growth, produce or manufacture of any one of the provinces shall, from and after the union, be admitted free into each and every other province. That means that internal trade barriers are illegal. They are contrary to our Constitution. I find it amazing that we have not had a constitutional challenge, a judicial challenge in our Supreme Court to the internal trade barriers which exist in Canada. Clearly, if we try to abide by the Constitution we will find that the trade barriers transgress it. It is only a matter of time before that challenge is brought before the Supreme Court.

The cost of trade barriers is extreme. My colleague from the Reform Party mentioned that they cost $6.5 billion. The Treasury Board has mentioned it is costing us at least $50 billion a year to have these trade barriers, barriers which are benefiting a very small number of groups in our country, which are in existence only because successive governments have not been willing to go against the wrath of a very small number of companies. They have not been prepared to do that for the benefit of the majority because they do not want to create conflict. I would challenge the government to remove the trade barriers. If it does, clearly it will get the support of the majority of Canadians.

I find it passing strange that we have successfully managed to be a leader in removing the barriers to international trade. We have been a leader in bringing together the countries of the world in the World Trade Organization. It is truly a magnificent agreement and one which will clearly benefit our country, a country which relies so heavily on exports for its well-being. We did it with the WTO, with the FTA, with the NAFTA, and we are continually pursuing an aggressive export market and rightly so. Wherever we can we are trying to remove the barriers to external trade.

We are doing that on the one hand yet on the other hand we are not removing the internal barriers to trade. I find it absolutely ludicrous. While we are decreasing the barriers to external trade and supporting the persistence of internal barriers to trade, we are hamstringing the industrial complex within our country. I would submit that the government should take up the challenge and aggressively try to decrease the barriers which exist between the provinces.

In the eastern bloc with the iron curtain coming down we saw with our own eyes what barriers to trade do to countries. We saw what this did to Russia, Romania, Albania. We have seen that when trade barriers are put up it only seeks to restrict, hamstring and compromise the very economy they were intended to help. This type of behaviour, the persistent pursuit of barriers to trade, can only harm an economy regardless of whether we are speaking about Canada, Russia, the United States or Chile.

This government bill, so-called to remove internal barriers to trade, to decrease interprovincial trade barriers, has been a flop to put it mildly. It is just window dressing. It does not touch any of the major sections, such as alcohol, agriculture and many of the other innumerable barriers to trade which exist within our country.

The government should have taken the bull by the horns to capture the moment to make the substantive and substantial changes that are required to give our economy, our producers, our exporters and our manufacturers the leg up they require. Instead of doing this and significantly decreasing these internal barriers to trade, the government has only sought to nibble pathetically around the edges. Once again as we have seen in other bills, it is an opportunity lost.

The Reform Party advocates a much stronger position to decreasing the trade barriers in order to benefit this country and in order to maximize the economies of scale that we can have within Canada. By doing so we would decrease marketing costs, increase efficiency, decrease management costs, improve the speed and efficiency of the movement of goods, increase employment opportunities for all Canadians and decrease public procurement costs. In effect we would have a well needed benefit to our economy from coast to coast. I suggest therefore that post haste this government take it upon itself to rapidly eliminate all interprovincial trade barriers. The Reform Party would be glad to help the government if it needs any advice in this area.

We also need to create common standards across the provinces in licensing, certification and education. We need to focus on some very important factors in competitiveness that our country has failed to do, from provincial governments to the federal government. In order for us to increase our competitiveness there are a few things we must take hold of and address right away. One of those is education.

We need to vastly improve our educational system and we need to do it now. We need to turn out a student who is self-sufficient, educated, competent, self-assured and well versed in those skills that are going to be needed in the 21st century. In many areas our public school systems fail to do this. They are not all bad but certainly many of them are. That is evidenced by the huge exodus we are seeing of people desirous of putting their children into private schools. Why? Because they are not finding that their children are getting the education they deserve in this great country of ours.

A greater emphasis must be put on the basic sciences, reading, arithmetic, the basic skills that are required. We need to build on those the more technical skills that are going to be of value in the coming century.

Against this backdrop is a world that is becoming increasingly competitive. The mindset now in the schools is often to shield and to insulate the student from competitiveness. Competitiveness has a dirty name now. The reality in this globalized world is that competitiveness is the name of the game. It does our students a great disservice. It prevents them from actually coming to terms with how to cope and deal with competitiveness

themselves and how to develop the coping mechanisms that are going to be required in an ever increasing, ever more competitive world.

That is also evidenced in some very interesting and sad statistics that have come out of the OECD. Back in 1987 we were the third most competitive country of the 22 nations in the OECD. Sadly in 1992 we dropped to 11th. That is a telling statistic and one we are not proud of. It is one we need to address now if we are to give the students the opportunity they need to provide for themselves, their children and their grandchildren and to continue to build this great country. It is imperative that we continue to invest in education. It is the single most important determining factor for employability in the 21st century.

The government in its haste to try to balance its budget, which we certainly agree on and will try to help it do, unfortunately has decreased expenditures for education to the provinces. It can be done if it is prepared to give the provinces tax credits which would enable them to raise the money necessary to invest in education. Unfortunately that did not occur. I would implore the government, if it is going to take money away from the provinces to give them the opportunity to raise the money themselves to build the strong educational infrastructure needed to train students to build a strong provincial economy.

In my riding of Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, Royal Roads Military College was cut in the last budget. That is fine if we can make a better college and the opportunity is there. It has enormous potential in terms of faculty, staff and the infrastructure to train students in highly technical skills in which Canada is a leader. Unfortunately it was given over to the province and the province made it a dumping ground for Camosun College and the University of Victoria.

Furthermore, the federal government has removed the physical infrastructures. For example, the oceanographic training vessel that belonged to the university was removed. This basically guts and pillages the ability of the institution to train students in the oceanographic skills in which Canada is a known leader and which other countries desperately require. That is but one example of the shortsightedness.

I also implore the government to aggressively pursue international free trade agreements but again give our manufacturers the ability to be competitive in the future. Germany is an example of a country that has a very intriguing relationship with the private and public sectors and the banks.

I am neither a banker nor an economist but I know there are very bright people in this country who are well versed in this and who could advise us on how to learn from some of the interesting experiments in Germany. In particular, we could learn how to get seed capital from the banks and provide it to small and medium sized businesses that could aggressively capitalize on trade options in international markets.

There are great opportunities within our manufacturing and services sectors to capitalize on external trade opportunities. However they are not getting the intelligence and information necessary for them to capitalize on this. I put this idea forward to the government to work with the internal trade ministry to look at it as an area where we need improvement to give our exporters a leg up.

In closing I would like to continue to support the government in decreasing external trade barriers. However, I would implore it to decrease and rapidly eliminate the internal trade barriers that only seek to benefit a minority of businesses within the country and seek to hamper and penalize the majority of Canadians.

The government should take courage that by doing so it may have to succumb to the wrath of a small number of vocal businesses but I know it will have our support in doing this. The government will have the support of the majority of Canadians in pursuing this laudable goal. In doing so it will give exporters and manufacturers within our country the necessary wherewithal to pursue an aggressive economic and manufacturing policy that will benefit Canadians from coast to coast.

I would also lastly ask this government to please get our economic house in order and learn from our zero and three program. By doing so we will be able to provide the tax relief necessary for our companies in this country to again be competitive.

One of the things that hamstring companies in this country greatly is the overbearing tax burden that exists on their shoulders. They find it almost impossible to be competitive on the international stage with the tax burdens we have today.

I would again implore the government to get our economic house in order, decrease the tax burden on companies and Canadians and decrease the GST. Then we would not be 11th in the world in competitiveness, but we would improve our competitiveness in the world order to again regain the powerful position we can in the first world nations.

[Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, June 19th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, from the killing fields of Passchendaele to the bloated corpses of Kurdish people in Iraq, to the people we have seen dead and dying in the streets of Japan, chemical weapons have come to each and every one of us in our lives.

Bill C-87 is something we as Canadians should be very proud of as it enable us to implement our convention on the banning of these weapons of mass destruction. It also shows a unique amount of leadership that Canada and Canadians have demonstrated, a degree of leadership I might add that shows what we as Canadians can do in foreign policy if we put our minds to it.

I thank those members in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade who have worked extraordinarily hard to implement this very important piece of legislation, not only for Canada and Canadians but also for people across the world. As I hearken back to my original example, all of us in the House today and all Canadians hope that such tragedies will not occur in the future.

This is a landmark deal. I also thank a couple of members of the riding of Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, Mr. Bob McCrossen and Mr. Ken Conrad, who have given me invaluable information on these and other policy matters.

This convention had a number of sectors and dealt with schedules 1, 2 and 3 dealing with various chemicals. Schedule 1 deals with chemicals that are known to be chemical weapons such as tabun and sarin. Schedules 2 and 3 deal with precursors. There are varying degrees of compliance among them but it enables our country and other countries to monitor each other in a co-operative fashion to ensure that no country within the international community is building up chemicals or precursors to chemical weapons that can be used for aggressive and belligerent purposes.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the bill is the degree of co-operation. If we look at just one aspect of it, it enables countries to look at other countries and demand spot checks on the countries if they are suspected of developing, producing or stockpiling chemical weapons for aggressive and military purposes. It enables the international community to go in there, investigate and demand the chemicals be apprehended and destroyed as is.

The consequences of not doing so are significant for the country that chooses not to obey. In this instance when the implications of using chemical weapons are so severe it is important to see that the international community finally has its act together and is able to penalize countries that engage in these activities.

The industries that produce chemicals have appeared before the committee on foreign affairs, on which I sit, to give their wholehearted support for the bill. That is important to know. We in the House do not want to impede or compromise in any way, shape or form the ability of the chemical producers of Canada to engage in the peaceful production of chemicals for industrial purposes, a very important aspect of the industry.

There was a level of co-operation shown in the production of this convention that has not been seen since the end of the second world war. My hope is that we can learn something from this in the application to other aspects of threats to the international security that are occurring in the world now.

I have two examples on the aspect of the international stage that are a major threat to the international security not only for countries half a world away but also, believe it or not, for our country.

One example is the trafficking of small arms. The trafficking of small arms in this world of ours moving from one area of conflict to another has fanned the flames of ethnic discontent. It has given the fuel to enable people to fight ethnic conflicts where 90 per cent of the time it is the civilians who bear the brunt of these wars. They serve very little purpose.

Although people might say they have a right to buy and sell weapons, it is not the same as buying and selling wheat. These seemingly innocuous trades have an enormous impact not only on the conflicts in question but also on countries such as ours which are not directly involved in it. Why is that so? Because it causes the migration of individuals away from conflicts to areas that do not have conflict. It means that people are going to move to our country. I am sure if we put ourselves in those people's shoes we would see that they want to live in their homeland. They do not want to move to an area half a world away. These people in moving to our country will then cause an economic stress on our social programs.

The second thing is that conflicts half a world away put a stress on our military and on our foreign aid dollar. No matter what we do, if we go into a country and spend decades building up its infrastructure and a civil conflict occurs in that country, all of what we and other countries have done to build a peaceful and productive society will be dashed on the rocks for generations to come. We can see that now in the former Yugoslavia, in

Angola and in Mozambique. The list goes on and on. In fact the list is getting longer all the time.

There were over 40 ethnic conflicts in the world last year. The numbers are not getting lower they are getting higher. In part, small arms are what fuel the flames of that. I ask if Canada can take a leadership role, the same leadership role we demonstrated in producing the convention on banning chemical weapons, in developing some restrictions or framework in the trafficking of small arms for our benefit and for the benefit of countries the world over.

A disturbing thing came across my desk late last week. It shows that in Rwanda the French in collusion with the Government of Zaire have been selling arms to the former Hutu government living in the camps in Zaire. This means that the French are selling arms to the rebels and the rebels, over 50,000 strong, are getting ready to go into Rwanda to continue the killing.

I say that because it is very important. They are not only destabilizing Rwanda but they are destabilizing the eastern part of Zaire and are fuelling the flames of ethnic discontent in Burundi also. What we have seen for the last two years in central Africa is going to repeat itself unless we ask the international community through the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity to get involved and defuse the situation before it gets out of hand.

The other aspect in which I would like us to take a leadership role is the banning of land mines and anti-personnel devices. These devices have no significant role in fighting a war. They are primarily meant to destabilize the civilian population and are not meant to kill but to maim. Usually they are meant to maim civilians who work in the fields and children. Many of these anti-personnel devices are in fact designed to look like toys. When the children pick them up they get their arms or legs blown off. That is what they are used for.

I would ask that we take a leadership role in asking for the land mines and the anti-personnel devices to be put in the convention for conventional weapons and put in a similar category to chemical weapons. If we did that we would do a great service by saving hundreds of thousands of lives and preventing injuries. We would also be able to prevent the situation we see now which is that after a conflict finishes large areas of many countries are left completely uninhabitable. I will give a couple of recent examples.

In Chechnya there are literally millions of mines seeded around the country and absolutely nobody knows where they are. Therefore large tracts of land in Chechnya are going to be completely uninhabitable.

In Mozambique thousands and thousands of square kilometres of land are completely uninhabitable. People cannot go into the fields to grow crops to get their economic house in order because of the land mines. That completely diminishes the ability of a country to get on its economic feet after a civil conflict is over.

In Croatia the Croatians say that over a quarter of a million hectares are completely uninhabitable because they are seeded indiscriminately with land mines and anti-personnel devices.

The justification is as I have described before. Let us get together and work with the United Nations to look at those two areas. This is not only in our interests but in the interests of the international community as well.

As I said before, the model we can use is this convention, the convention on banning the stockpiling, use and production of chemical weapons and the degree of international co-operation we have seen here. It is a truly remarkable degree of co-operation. If we as a country can work with our Nordic compatriots to influence other multinational organizations, such as the United Nations, and the regional groups, such as the OAU, the OAS and the OSCE, and show them it is in their self-interests to put restrictions on the purchase, sale and production of small arms and look toward banning anti-personnel devices and mines, then we might be able to make some headway in this area.

I would also like to address the aspect of preventive diplomacy. I have spoken to the Minister of Foreign Affairs about this on a number of occasions. The minister said that yes, we will get involved by sending some of our diplomats across and that we will try to influence other countries and in co-operation with them send rapid deployment forces into areas where fighting has started. I would say that is too late. We usually find that the antecedents to conflict are on the boards at least two years before a conflict blows up.

There are things we can do to prevent these conflicts from occurring. Let us use the UN crisis centre more effectively. We need to build up a network all across the world of groups, individuals and NGOs that can funnel information into the UN crisis centre. The UN crisis centre could then produce briefs which would be made public every month as to what is occurring in the hot spots. The United Nations, which again would require a new level of co-operation, could then act on these situations to try to get a diplomatic solution rather than having them solved at the end of an assault rifle.

There are some things which we have not looked at aggressively. One of the things is to use the IFIs as an economic lever to bring belligerents to the table before they start fighting it out. These are things which have not been looked at before.

The other aspect is to withhold non-humanitarian aid from countries. By doing that we can force them to engage in behaviours consistent with common international norms. Again we try to offset the conflict by engaging in a diplomatic solution. If we allow a conflict to occur the seeds of ethnic hatred are sown for generations to come. It does not end at the end of the

conflict; rather, it continues for generations to come. We will all collectively pay for it in the future.

We cannot keep getting involved in conflict after conflict. We do not have the power, we do not have the will, and rightly so, and we do not have the money or the resources to do it. Perhaps through the leadership which we have demonstrated by implementing the convention on chemical weapons we can use the lessons we have learned here and bring Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway together to influence the multinational organizations. If multinational organizations are going to continue to function in the way they have been since the end of the second world war, we will get the same results we have been getting since that time which are totally unacceptable.

We need a paradigm shift in the way we deal with the new threats we are going to have in the international community in foreign policy. As one of the few countries in the world that can take a leadership role in this, I ask that we engage in this not only for the benefit of the international community but also for the benefit of Canadians.

[Income Tax Act, June 16th, 1995]

Yes, that is right, they owe it to the young people. This government and previous governments have mortgaged the future of Canadians to pay for what we have today. That is the height of irresponsibility. The young people of today and those who are not yet born are the ones who are going to bear the brunt of this most tragic situation.

The current tax situation is an unwieldy, ineffective system that is bogged down in bureaucratic largesse. All of us here pay taxes. All of us see the tax plans. All of us see the forms that have to be filled out. How can we see these every year and not ask: If we are having a problem with it, is not the rest of Canada?

Why does the government not simplify the tax system to ensure that it is fair and equitable across the whole spectrum of individuals earning money? We must ensure that everybody pays their fair share without going through loopholes and favouritism within the system.

To that end, my colleague from Calgary who is our finance critic has just mentioned the flat tax system that we in the Reform Party have been speaking about since we were elected. It was one of the pillars of our economic and fiscal plan.

Essentially the flat tax system would simplify the tax to ensure that all Canadians pay their fair share. That is extremely important. As we speak to businesses and individuals alike they shake their heads and ask: "How can we deal with this tax system, a system that is so unwieldy, so unforgiving and so complicated?" There are many simpler ways of doing it.

The GST is another aspect of the tax system that was supposed to be revisited. The Deputy Prime Minister stated that if the GST was not gone a year after she was elected, she would be gone. Unfortunately she is still here. I think she should live up to her promises.

That is another aspect of the tax system which needs to be revisited. I ask and implore members on the government side to please listen to business leaders in their communities, not leaders of the business community leaders who come to us. Go out and walk among the business community/leaders and ask them what it is that absolutely frustrates and prevents them from maximizing their potential as a business person. They will say, nine times out of ten, it is the GST.

The second thing they will mention nine times out of ten is the unbelievable red tape they have to go through to operate within this country. It eludes me why, in a country as rich and as potentially powerful as ours, we have to hamstring the business community with bureaucratic entanglements.

I implore the government to look at ways of simplifying the taxation system, the bureaucratic red tape and internal trade barriers which hamper Canada.

The trade barriers in our country hamstring and prevent businesses from being the best that they can become. We aggressively pursue, and rightly so, international free trade agreements like the WTO and previous to that the GATT. It is done to help our business communities. That is done on the international scene. However it eludes me why on our domestic scene we turn around and say: "No, you cannot do business here. We are going to put tariffs there. We are going to oblige you to follow these rules and engage in the same type of bureaucratic entanglements and anti-free trade rules that we do not follow in our export and international endeavours". It is hurting our businesses and people wonder why we are not doing better. In part it is because of these internal trade barriers which are hamstringing the ability of businesses to do that.

When it was elected the government said it was going to aggressively pursue the elimination of these interprovincial trade barriers. It has only nibbled around the edges and Bill C-88 will prove it to the Canadian public.

In closing, there are good parts to Bill C-70 and many bad parts. We must simplify the tax system. Let us look at the flat tax system we want to apply. Let us ensure that we simplify expenditures. Let us attack the deficit and bring it down to zero. Listen to the zero in three plan of the Reform Party and move forward to a strong economy for all Canadians.

[Income Tax Act, June 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak on Bill C-70. The purpose of the bill is to amend the Income Tax Act because of certain budgetary measures which were taken.

Members of the Reform Party vehemently opposed that budget. We opposed the budget because we felt it did not go far enough. It did not address the situations in the country which threaten every Canadian from coast to coast. Canadian jobs are

threatened, their homes are threatened and their social programs are threatened.

The reason the budget threatened each and every Canadian was due to the economic and fiscal irresponsibility of the government in not addressing the debt and the deficit which increased every year. Furthermore, the budget sought to compromise those in our society who are most vulnerable, those who cannot take care of themselves and those who are most dependent on government largesse.

We in the Reform Party proposed the zero in three plan. We gave the first half of that plan to the government. We said to the government: "Here is a how to plan". It was not something esoteric, it was a how to plan to bring the economic situation under control. We told the government how much to cut and where to cut. Did the government heed that? No.

We gave the second part of the plan to the government and said: "Here is the product of hard work. Here is the product of something which is followed by a great many Canadians. It is a plan which is fiscally responsible and sound. It is a plan which will address the debt and deficit problem". Did the government listen to us? No.

As a result we have the problems of today. Figures came out this week that showed the real income of Canadians has dropped significantly over the last two years. The Canadian dollar has dropped and inflation is rising. As well, the investors of the world have downgraded our bonds. Moody's has downgraded our bonds for the first time ever. If this is not a harbinger of things to come, I do not know what is.

It is unfortunate that the wool has been pulled over Canadians' eyes by a budget which is an illusion. The government told us that it is the first government to cut. That is true. This is the first government to actually make cuts. Let us analyse those cuts.

A third of the cuts which were made truly were cuts and the government deserves credit for that. However, two-thirds of the cuts were made to provincial transfer payments. Whose shoulders did they fall on? The provinces. The provinces also tax the same taxpayers and at the end of the day it is the taxpayers who have to pay.

Whether it is the federal government, the provincial government, or the municipal government people who work hard have a huge amount of their money taken away from them to go to the governments which are in difficult financial situations. Governments have not recognised the situation they are in and continue to spend taxpayers' dollars in an irresponsible fashion.

I plead on behalf of all Canadians that the government take heed and work with us on the problem to develop a sound, fiscally responsible solution which is going to help all Canadians from coast to coast. That is what everybody in the House wants to have. We need a strong, aggressive, forward thinking economy that is going to help all Canadians while preserving the core of our social programs to ensure that all those in Canada who need it will be taken care of.

[Firearms Act, June 12th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, the purpose of the bill as every bill is to make the country a safer place. I will indicate how the bill will do the exact opposite. It will make our streets less safe in the future.

As I only have two minutes I will be very brief. I will dispense with all the rhetoric and take the minister's argument a part piece by piece.

When passed the legislation will cost between $85 million and $500 million. That money has to come from somewhere and will be taken away from the functional arm of justice. There is something called opportunity cost. When it is pulled away from one arm of justice to another it should be put into an area with better efficiency. Unfortunately it has been proven that gun registration does not work and will not make our streets safer. Studies have been done in Australia, New Zealand and other countries.

The minister says that we will have less homicide. The reality is that of the 720 homicides in the country last year 220 were committed with firearms and 5 were committed with legally owned handguns. The minister says that we will have less suicide. Persons who are going to commit suicide do not go out to get a gun registration or an FAC. They do not go through all the loops necessary to get a gun. They kill themselves or attempt to kill themselves with whatever is available.

In short, that is why the registration aspect of Bill C-68 will not work. It will make our street less safe because it will take money away from the functional arm of justice.

[Indonesia, June 12th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Over the last three years our country has spent over $51 million funding post-secondary education in Indonesia. Why we are doing this when we have just stripped $6 billion out of post-secondary education in Canada? Why are we funding this when the Government of Indonesia said it would ask us to pay for its students to come over here?

[Criminal Code, June 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank everybody who made an intervention on the bill, wittingly or unwittingly, particularly my friend from Edmonton Southwest who was kind enough to second the bill and speak eloquently on it.

I will address some of the concerns. We hate to admit it but there are people who have a total and utter disrespect for life and other people. They offend and reoffend again and again. The purpose of this three strikes and you are out bill, Bill C-301, was to protect innocent civilians from those individuals who by their actions have shown a complete disregard for society.

These individuals are not rehabilitatable because they have had their chance. The hon. member from the government made some very good points. He said we have in our courts right now sentences for offences in this bill. However, these sentences are not being applied by our courts. That is one of the primary purposes of the bill.

If the courts were enacting these sentences, if they were applying the available sentences to the individuals who were committing these violent acts against innocent civilians, we would not need this bill. We would not have needed in the United States and we would not need it here. The reality of life is we do need it because the courts are failing to enact those laws already there.

Whether we are speaking about these violent offences or the use of firearms in committing offences, they are not being applied. People commit firearms offences and they have those offences plea bargained away to get an expeditious conviction on another offence. That is not law, that is not justice, that is not protecting innocent civilians, which is why I proposed this.

I also put forth reasons the bill is good for Canada why it would be cost effective. I hope the justice minister, members on the committee and members of the House take it upon themselves to look at enacting a three strikes and you are out bill or a modification thereof for the safety of all Canadians.

The member from the Bloc Quebecois mentioned throwing the key away. I ask her and anybody else who disagrees with it to go into jails to speak with individuals who have committed many offences and to speak to the victims of violent offences. They will have a different opinion.

I move:

That this bill be referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs and that accordingly the bill be withdrawn.

[Criminal Code, June 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I hope I will have the full 20 minutes due to me.

The purpose of my bill is to protect innocent civilians. Too often in our justice system, as we have seen over the last few years, the rights of innocent civilians have often been subjugated to the rights of the criminal. The bill will give firmer sentencing guidelines to the courts because they are not being acted on as they should be.

The definitions of the crimes involved in the bill are such that rape, attempted murder, sexual assault, manslaughter are all to be considered as serious offences committed if they are committed on three separate occasions in order to get a conviction and to have the three strikes and your are out bill applied.

I will state a few facts from the United States and why I thought the bill should be votable and show how effective it has been down there.

According to the FBI index high rate offenders commit almost 18 times as many crimes per year, including two violent offences per year. The typical low rate offender commits one serious crime very two and a half years as compared to seven per year for high rate offenders. Thus, it is easy to see how an enhanced repeat offender law would actually work to the benefit of all citizens in our country. I hope this will be enacted in the future. I will give the House the opportunity to do that.

Again, the benefits are for the protection of society, to deter repeat offenders and yes, to save money. The argument can be put forward in Canada that this is going to cost us more. I will show the House the bill will save the Canadian public a lot of money.

In the United States this bill was passed in over 26 states in various forms. The people have overwhelmingly voted for it, as they requested in my riding. They have shown an extreme cost benefit ratio in the order of $5 to $1. In other words, the cost of the bill and the management of it, has a cost saving of $5 to every $1 of implementation.

The benefits come from decreasing repeat offences, the lack of victims, the decrease in costs of prosecutions, the decrease in costs of appeals, not to mention the overwhelming humanitarian aspects of saving innocent people from being subjected to violent offences.

To this effect the preliminary reports from California and other states show that there has been a dramatic decrease in violent cases so far. I will give some examples.

Governor Pete Wilson in California signed its bill in early 1994. California has roughly the same number of people as we do in Canada. In the first nine months of its bill, California has shown a dramatic decrease in the number of violent offences.

The argument that it will cost us a lot of money I do not think fares well. These statistics come from the states. It would be a benefit to the justice committee to actually look at this, do an analysis in Canada and determine once and for all whether we are going to derive a cost benefit from enacting this bill.

The three strikes and you are out bill is not the only thing we can do because crime prevent is a multi-factorial endeavour. I will put forward some hard points, one after another. I hope the justice committee and the minister at least take heed of them.

Integral to crime is crime prevention. In my experience working in jails both as a correctional officer and as a physician and those who have worked in jails and who have been in them say that crime prevention does not work.

We have poured a lot of money into crime prevention but it has been ineffective. We have had a few cases when we have been effective in doing this but by and large, we do not get the best bang for our buck through this.

In order for us to build a healthy society in wich individuals will not commit crime, our best prevention is building the pillars of a normal psyche to ensure people will not commit crimes in the future. It is not a guarantee, I admit, but it certainly is an insurance.

We have to go back to early childhood education to ensure that children are being informed of what we consider to be normal understanding, what is normal conflict resolution. These things are very important.

They must also learn what drug abuse, sexual abuse and all these things are. It is very important to train these children early because once they get into the teenage years, it is virtually impossible to teach them self-respect, respect for other people and appropriate conflict resolution techniques. These must occur early. We take this for granted but I would submit that many children are not learning this. They are not getting it in the home because many times the parents themselves do not know it.

I hark back to an earlier speech that I made on an experiment performed at Columbia University where the parents were brought in with the children to teach them the building blocks of a normal psyche.

Second, it is work for incarceration. There is no reason why individuals who are incarcerated cannot work for their upkeep. Use this in conjunction with skills training and it would also help decrease the recidivism rate, which is extremely high in our penal institutions.

Third, we have worked in our party for putting capital punishment to a binding national referendum. Give people the choice whether they want capital punishment as a part of our society.

Fourth, I ask every member in the House to support the private members' bill of the member for Surrey-White Rock-South Langley. That bill would enable lawmakers to actually keep individuals incarcerated who are deemed a danger to society on release.

Right now I can tell the House from personal experience that there are individuals who are dangerous to society and they are let go because the current laws do not enable the jails to keep them incarcerated if they are mentally competent. They can be deemed a dangerous offender at the time of sentencing, but not subsequent to that. That is what the private member's bill of the hon. member for Surrey-White Rock-South Langley will correct. In the interest of public safety, every member of the House should vote for it.

I will mention some of the frustrations the police forces in the country have. I was speaking to a police officer not long ago and he said they should be telling every police officer who enters the force they have handcuffs and those handcuffs are the charter of rights and freedoms. The charter of rights and freedoms handcuffs our police officers from doing their job. I would ask that the House look at revoking the charter of rights and freedoms. We have a code of human rights, which protects the human rights of every individual, and that is adequate. It worked before the charter, it works now, and it will work in the future.

The charter of rights and freedoms merely lets criminals and lawyers look for loopholes so that criminals can be released. Justice is somehow lost in the equation. Right and wrong are lost. They are lost and subjugated to legal points of order.

For example, let us look at the Paul Bernardo case, which is now being heard. It never ceases to amaze me that in this case, where we have an individual who on videotape has been shown committing the most heinous of acts, we have to go through a four-month to six-month court case. Why are we doing it? Because the defence is looking for procedural irregularities that will let this individual off. Is that right? If it happens in this case it will happen in other cases.

This murder case is very interesting, because it brings a number of other issues to the fore. I again ask the minister to look at the aspects of the videotapes that have been presented in this case. Was it fair to the families? Was it fair for them to have to fight with their own money to prevent those videotapes from being shown publicly? It is not a right of the public or of the media to have access to those videotapes. They can only be used to hurt and harm the families, who have already been victimized. There is no law to protect them right now.

I ask the minister to look at this case and to enact legislation that would protect the victimized families in the future. We do not want a repeat of the situation being faced by the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.

I would look at revising procedures in the courtroom. Currently justice in our courtrooms grinds to a halt. Part of that has to do with adjournments. Defence and prosecution alike continually put forth adjournments that make court cases so long they are eventually dropped and the accused persons go free because too much time has passed. I ask the minister to look at this and determine how many adjournments are allowed for a person to have a fair case. We could look at limiting adjournments.

Another aspect is disclosure. We need fair and honest disclosure by both the defence and prosecution.

Another aspect is the use of preliminary hearings. They are much abused. Preliminary hearings in cases such as murder trials are not required. All that happens is that the same evidence is repeated. There would be a significant cost saving if preliminary hearings were eliminated in certain cases.

With respect to the Young Offenders Act, we should publish the names of young offenders. I know from working in a young offender penal institution that many of them think it is a joke. There is little or no deterrence to prevent young offenders from continuing to commit acts against innocent victims. There is very little punishment and there is very little deterrence. One simple thing that can be done is to publish the names of those young offenders who are committing these acts.

Another aspect I would like to bring out is that in my experience in working with young offenders the recidivism rate is extremely high. It costs us almost $100,000 per young offender per year to keep them incarcerated. Yet the recidivism rate is over one-third. That patently speaks for itself. It does not work. We need to look at a different model.

We need to pull young offenders out of these closed custody cases of putting them in for three months or six months. After that they go back to the same environment they were in before. We cannot undo 12, 14, 15 years of being in a situation that is patently self-destructive where they have witnessed sexual abuse or have been a victim of sexual abuse, violence, drugs, alcohol abuse, and expect them to be changed in three months or six months of closed custody. No matter how much counselling you put forth, it simply is not going to work.

Why do we not look at putting them in closed custody camps away from cities? There are some examples in northern British Columbia. We should put them away not for a few months but for a year or two years and focus on them working for their incarceration, focus on education, focus on skills, focus on discipline, focus on them learning the skills necessary for them to work as productive members of society. They are certainly not learning it now in the youth areas we have.

Legal aid is the fastest growing aspect of our justice system now. There are many abuses in it. I ask the justice committee to look at the legal aid situation we have now, look at the abuse that is taking place, and look of ways of changing that. If we are pouring money into this we are taking money away from the other functional aspects of justice.

Gun registration does not work. It has never worked anywhere. It is not going to work in the future. It will take money away from the functional aspects of justice and put it into an area that simply is proven not to work. This will be counter to what the minister intends; it will make our streets less safe than they are. That was not the intent. I plead with the hon. minister to not enact this legislation and please listen to what we have been saying in the Reform Party. Enact the good laws that are to be in that bill against those who are committing criminal acts with firearms, but please do not make our streets less safe by enacting gun registration. It will not work.

In summary, the three strikes and you are out bill is but one arm of what we can do to make our streets safer. The purpose of the bill is to get violent offenders, those individuals who have proven to show a flagrant disregard for innocent civilians, off the streets and protect society.

We in Parliament have to stand up for the innocent civilians. We have to stand up for their rights. We have to ensure their rights will not be subjugated to the rights of the criminal. That has been going on for too long. It cannot continue to go on. We must ensure innocent people will be protected. That is the purpose of justice now. It is the purpose of justice in the future.

With permission, Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent of the House to make my bill, Bill C-301, votable.

[Criminal Code, June 8th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to read some statistics from the United States. According to the FBI index, this is very interesting-