Keith Martin

[World Aids Day, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this Saturday is World AIDS Day. Last year, nearly 3 million people died from HIV-AIDS, with 2.1 million of those victims in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is a disease that is preventable and manageable and yet it ravages Africa. Its numbers are escalating in Eastern Europe, China and India also. Worldwide, 33 million people are infected and a shocking 5,700 people die every day from this disease, leaving a staggering 14 million orphans.

However, despite the sheer magnitude of this crisis, the government has shown no sense of urgency. The previous Liberal government committed $619 million in 2005-06 for health initiatives to combat HIV-AIDS in the developing world. Alas, yesterday's government announcement on international health would have been fine except that those moneys were earmarked at last year's G-8 summit.

Here at home, the government is putting people's lives at risk by undermining the life-saving Insite program in Vancouver and not allowing the NAOMI project and other Insite supervised injection projects to be more widely available.

I say to the government, bury that ideology--

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I was only in the previous government. I cannot answer for governments before that, but I can certainly speak about the evidence. The evidence shows that, in the bills that we have and I will go back to my previous comments, on the age of consent, on October 26, 2006, we pushed the existing government and offered to fast-track the age of consent legislation. At that time it was Bill C-22 but the government refused to do that. The government can answer that question as to why it did not push that forward over a year ago and allow it to go at that time.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For my friend's information, if I were going to be filibustering, I would be using more than 20 minutes, but I have 20 minutes and he can certainly ask questions after that.

However, these issues are extremely important because this bill has to do with tackling violent crime. The relevance to what I am saying is that organized crime is actually a purveyor of an awful lot of violent crime in our country. What the member should do, with his government, is to work with us in developing a comprehensive plan to deal with organized crime. It is the real parasite in our society that we have to address.

In dealing with this, I also want to talk about a drug policy that works because it is attached to organized crime and putting up posters, as the government wants to do, is not going to affect change.

I can tell members, from working in many clinics where violence and drug use is endemic, that simply putting up posters on clinic walls or in communities is not going to stop people from taking drugs.

What works? I have said probably 100 times in the House that if the government wanted to prevent drug use and reduce youth crime, as an example, it would support the headstart program for children.

The headstart program for children is something the police have asked for. It is essentially a program where children and parents come together in a classroom once every week for a couple of hours to talk about the harm of drugs, the harm of alcohol, and to talk about literacy, and about proper eating and proper parenting. All of that can be done and should be done. The headstart program for children would save the taxpayers $7 for every dollar invested and reduce youth crime by 60%.

I implore the government to adopt the headstart program, have a rational drug policy, listen to the scientists, follow the facts and bury its ideology, and we will have a safer country for all.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin to speak to Bill C-2, I have to address my hon. colleague's contradictory comments about the lack of mandatory minimums. On the one hand, he lambasted the Liberal Party for not wanting mandatory minimums. On the other hand, he said very clearly that we had them and we called for a strengthening of them.

When the member for Mount Royal was the justice minister, he introduced mandatory minimums for weapons offences. That was a good thing. That is why we support Bill C-2. We have been trying to drive forward much of what is in the legislation. Ironically, we have been obstructed by the government.

I will go through the facts. Unfortunately, in the House one could look at the old adage that “in war, truth is the first casualty”. What we have here is war by another name. Sometimes truth is the first casualty in the House of Commons, and that is sad for the public.

Let me talk about the facts for a minute and give viewers a bit of history on the bill.

Bill C-2 is an omnibus bill involving a combination of five bills, including mandatory minimum penalties. We support mandatory minimum penalties. I caution the government, however, to ensure that the mandatory minimum penalties for weapons offences, violent offences and sexual offences cannot be plea bargained away and that they run consecutively and not concurrently. Too many times people who have committed serious offences receive penalties that get plea bargained away, so there is no effective penalty.

We also support an increase in mandatory minimums for weapons trafficking. My colleague from Mount Royal introduced many mandatory minimums for these offences in the last Parliament.

The Liberal Party supports the provisions for dangerous offenders, impaired driving and reverse onus in firearms offences. Many years ago there really was no penalty for a person using a weapon in the commission of an offence. That was changed by the last government. The Liberal Party supports the changes in Bill C-2.

Let me talk for a few moments about a few facts around the passage of the bill.

On October 26, 2006, our Liberal leader made a first offer to fast track a package of justice bills in the House, including Bill C-9, as it had been amended, Bill C-18, the DNA identification legislation, Bill C-19, the street racing legislation, Bill C-22, the age of consent legislation, Bill C-23, the animal cruelty legislation and Bill C-26, respecting payday loans. We also added Bill C-35, on March 14 of this year, a bill for bail reform, and we support that.

On March 21, we attempted to use our opposition day to pass the government's four justice bills: Bill C-18, Bill C-22, Bill C-23 and Bill C-35. The Conservative House leader raised a procedural point of order to block the motion. Those four government bills would have been fast tracked through this place in the same day, yet the government House leader, for reasons unknown to us and the public, blocked this. Those are facts.

What has been the path of government justice bills through the Senate? Of the six justice bills that had been passed before the summer break, only four went to the Senate. How on earth could the Senate pass bills that it just received prior to the government proroguing Parliament? It could not do that. It is disingenuous for government members to stand and suggest that the Senate was trying to block their bills. By the time the Senate received the bills, the government closed Parliament. Those are the facts. Anybody can check them out if they wish.

We support Bill C-2. However, I want to bore down on a few dangerous issues that the government is pursuing. One deals with the issue of drug trafficking. The government has said that it will increase the penalties for those who traffic in drugs.

There are two populations of traffickers.

There are those parasites in society who are involved in commercial grow operations, frequently attached to organized crime. We should throw the book at them. Those people are a cancer in our society and they deserve to be in jail.

There is another population that will be swept up in the government's anti-trafficking bill. It is the low level dealers who sell small amounts of illegal drugs to people, but they themselves are addicts. In essence, they are selling drugs to pay for their addictions.

If we criminalize people who have addiction problems and throw them in jail, they come out being hardened criminals. We also do not deal with the underlying problem, which we will have at the end of the day when they come out. In effect, we increase public insecurity and costs to the taxpayer. We do not address the underlying problem and we make our streets less safe. That is stupid, not to put too fine a point on it.

If the government goes through with the bill to criminalize people who are addicts, the low level people buying and selling drugs, it will end up with the situation we see south of the border, which has used a war on drugs approach. It has proven to be an abysmal failure.

What we see south of the border is a view of the future for us if the government pursues its course of action. There have been increased rates of both soft and hard drugs use, increased numbers of people have been incarcerated, increased costs to the taxpayer and more violent crime. Society loses.

The government ought to work with the provinces to implement solutions that address some of the underlying problems.

I will get to the organized crime aspects in a moment.

For the drug problems, I cannot overemphasize what a disaster this will be. The government has been warned of this by people across the country.

Let us take two projects, in particular, that have been extremely effective in dealing with people who have intravenous drug use problems. Both of them are found in Vancouver and championed by Dr. Julio Montaner and Dr. Thomas Kerr, superb physicians and research scientists, who have underneath them the Insite supervised injection program and the NAOMI project.

The supervised injection program is a place where addicts can go to a supervised setting and take the drugs they are given. What has that done? It has reduced harm, put more people into treatment, reduced crime and saved the taxpayer money. Fewer people have gone to emergency and there has been less dependence on our health care system. It works.

The other project I would recommend we pursue is the NAOMI project. Before I get to it, I point out that in the eleventh hour the government extended Insite's ability to engage in its program up until June 2008.

All the evidence published from The Lancet to The New England Journal of Medicine shows, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Insite supervised injection program saves lives, reduces crime and gets people into treatment. It is good for public security and it saves the taxpayer money. Why extend it to only eight months?

If the government gets a majority, it will kill the program. That, in short, will be murder. The government knows full well the program saves lives. To remove that program, would result in, essentially, the killing of people.

A program that works better, which the government does not support but ought to expand, is the NAOMI project. The NAOMI project deals with hard-core narcotics abusers. These people are over the age of 26. They have had five years of drug addictions and two failed attempts at treatment. They are the hard nuts of intravenous drug use.

The NAOMI project took 243 addicts and randomized them into three populations. One population received intravenous heroine, the other one received intravenous dilaudid, which is a prescription narcotic that is legal, and the third was to take oral methadone, which is a weak narcotic.

What happened to those populations? Of the population on IV drugs, more than 85% of people were still taking those drugs, receiving treatment and counselling, getting their lives together, obtaining skills training and being able to live while not being on the street and not engaging in criminal behaviour to feed their addictions. Of the third population, the ones in the methadone program, 50% of people were still in treatment after a year. It works.

What the government should be doing for both Insite as well as NAOMI, is expanding those programs across our country. Our urban centres need it.

In Victoria there are 1,243 people living on the street, 60% of which have what we call dual diagnoses, which means some of them have both a drug problem and a psychiatric problem. I would also add that some people within that population have had brain injuries in the past and have fallen into the terrible spiral of drug use by being on the street. Those people could be you or I, Mr. Speaker, who one day fall off a ladder or get into a car accident, sustain a significant closed head injury, have major cerebral trauma and as a result their lives are affected forever.

Some of those people are on the street and take drugs. Do we throw those people in jail? Do we throw the psychiatric patient, who is dealing to pay for his or her addiction, in jail? That is what would happen with the bill that the government has introduced. Those people need medical treatment. They do not need to be in jail.

My plea to the government, to the Minister of Health, the Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister is to bury their ideology, follow the facts and implement the solutions that will help people with addictions, keep our streets safe, and reduce costs to the taxpayers. It is a win-win situation for all concerned.

The interesting thing about the NAOMI project is that because NAOMI actually gave the drug to an individual who was proven to be an addict, that person did not have to go on the street to get the drugs. If that were done in a broader sense, it would be horrific to organized crime that benefits from this situation because the NAOMI project severs the tie between the addict and organized crime. That is what we need to do.

Organized crime would be horrified if a forward thinking government one day were to enable drug addicts to receive their drugs. Doing that enables addicts to get into the treatment programs that they need. It enables them to detoxify, obtain addiction counselling, skills training and the psychiatric therapy they need. If we do not do that, we will not make a dent in what we see on the ground. There will not be any affect on addictions and it will actually increase the criminal population in our country.

The other side of this coin, of course, deals with organized crime gangs, as I mentioned, the parasites and cancer in our society. These parasites are essentially people in $3,000 suits who benefit from a substance that is nearly worthless but has a value well beyond what it ought to have because it is illegal.

I have a bill on the order paper that would decriminalize the simple possession of marijuana. No one condones anybody using marijuana, everybody wants to prevent people from using it, and everyone certainly encourages children not to use this or any other illegal drug. The fact of the matter is that people do use it and a significant percentage of Canadians have used it at one time in their lives, particularly when they were very young.

Do we throw those people in jail? Do we throw an 18-year-old who has a joint in his or her back pocket in jail? Do we throw an 18-year-old in jail who exchanges or sells or gives a couple of marijuana cigarettes to a friend? That would be trafficking under the government's bill. Do we throw that 18-year-old in jail? Do we give an 18-year-old a criminal record, which is what we have today, affecting his or her ability to work or gain employment and have access to professional facilities for the rest of his or her life? Is that a humane way to deal with our population? It is not.

The worst news for organized crime, in my personal view, would be that marijuana is legal and regulated. It is not to say that marijuana is safe. It is not. It is dangerous, but so are alcohol and cigarettes.

If we can imagine today that cigarettes were going to come onto the market and were proposed as being something that ought to be sold today, do we think for a moment that they would be allowed, with all the cancer, respiratory and cardiac problems that cigarettes cause? No, they would not be, and neither in fact would alcohol. Alcohol would not be allowed today either, for all of the damage it does, but the fact of the matter is that cigarettes and alcohol are legal today.

The groups that benefit the most from the status quo, from marijuana being illegal, and it is just a weed with its value elevated well beyond what it ought to be because it is illegal, are the organized crime gangs. They are making billions of dollars off the status quo, and those billions are used to do any number of things including: trafficking of weapons and people, prostitution, embezzlement, fraud and murder. That is what organized crime is involved with.

What the government should be doing is coming up with a more comprehensive plan to deal with the biker gangs and organized criminal gangs who are--

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the other side said that the bill was bogged down in the Senate. I just want to set the record straight. Of the six bills that were not passed by the summer break, four reached the Senate but only in May, and two reached the Senate in June. It was impossible for the Senate to pass the bills in a matter of a couple of weeks at the most.

Therefore, It is really not correct to say that these bills were held up in the Senate. The member's government prorogued Parliament and the Senate did not have any time to deal with these bills.

Would the hon. member agree that the record shows that of the six bills the government had on justice in the last Parliament, four went to the Senate but only at the end of the session and that his government prorogued Parliament?

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Globe and Mail has informed me of that personally. All of us know that one editorial piece can be strewn around dozens of papers across the country. We also know there is cross control over different forms of the mainstream media between radio and television in particular.

The fact that there is such control does not serve the public well. One article by one journalist will be spread across the country which means fewer journalists are working, fewer ideas are out there, and fewer of our ideas are out there. That does not serve the public well at all.

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I know that the government is under orders to do certain things and so be it. I would hope that it would look beyond the narrow, gotcha type of environment that we have here. I would hope that all of us could look beyond criticizing one another on issues that people in the public really do not care about.

We need to put ourselves in the shoes of the most vulnerable people in our communities. We have to ask ourselves what they care about. What do they want? Let us ask ourselves how we can bring ideas forward to address their concerns. We have to ask ourselves how we can make this House work for the betterment of the public, for the folks who struggle day to day, sometimes living lives of quiet desperation.

We can do it. Let us get on with it. Let us make this place work better.

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that the issue that I am talking about, the centralization of media in the hands of a few, the inability of the public to be allowed to experience a diverse series of ideas, is much more fundamental than any bill.

In fact, whether we are talking about justice issues, environmental issues, or health care issues, the ability for us to open up the doors to allow diversity in the media to enable all of us to do our job would strengthen the issues that my hon. colleague is talking about and all the other issues that we want to and ought to be dealing with in the House.

The centralization of media in the hands of a few is a much more powerful and important issue because it affects the pillars of our democracy. This lack of diversity undermines our democracy because it undermines the ability of elected officials to do their jobs.

So, if the member is talking about judicial issues, which are critically important to Canadians, or the environment, economics, infrastructure, health care, education, foreign policy, or our military, the ability for us to put forward the best solutions to these important issues gets to the heart of our ability to engage the public through a free and open media. I ask the hon. member to put pressure on his minister to enable us to do that.

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will deal with two issues raised by my hon. colleague. The first is the issue of equity. Does my hon. friend not acknowledge, and he has to acknowledge, the fact that Ottawa, the federal government, has poured money into Quebec for decades supporting Quebec culture and language.

More money has gone into the province of Quebec than the rest of the provinces summated. The whole western collection of provinces in our country receive year in and year out less money for culture and language than Quebec does. If anybody is dealing with an inequitous situation, I would suggest it is the rest of the country, not Quebec. Those are the facts.

On the issue of culture, does he not think that the people immigrating to Quebec and the linguistic and cultural milieu they bring to Quebec is something that would enrich all of us? Why on earth would we put barriers up and define ourselves in such a narrow way and expect the milieu of people who will come to the province will somehow be deletirious to that culture and language, deletirious to the lives that people live? Would the diversity not actually strengthen everybody?

I would ask the member to open the doors, open his language and culture, allow people to come in, and at the end of the day Quebec and Quebeckers will be enriched by staying in Canada, not out of Canada.

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this motion. It goes to the heart of something that affects all of us in our country.

A strong democracy is the ability of the people of a country to freely elect individuals who can represent the interests of the public, and for those individuals to come to a democratic house such as this one and fight for those issues that are important to the people who elected them. That is our responsibility, but suppose something happened to sever that. Our ability to drive an idea forward into action is predicated in part on a free and open media, where diverse ideas are allowed to be put out in the public, to be lauded or excoriated, depending on the quality of the idea and its synchroneity with the desires and wishes of a free public.

What happens when that triangle is affected negatively? What happens if we do not have a media that is open, free and with diverse ideas? What happens if elected members are unable to do their job in driving ideas forward into action?

Sadly, that is what has happened in our country. Part of the blame I believe goes to the CRTC in its inability to prevent the media centralization and concentration that has occurred over the last several years. There are four large groups that control all the mainstream media in Canada. We can pick up newspapers from any areas in the country and we will find the exact same story. There may be a series of media outlets but the stories are identical. A story written by one reporter who works for a corporation which owns a series of the mainstream media will be put in all the media outlets and therefore, the public will only be exposed to that one idea.

That is not healthy for the country. It is not healthy for journalism. In fact, the Canadian Association of Journalists has said very clearly that journalistic independence has been affected and that consolidation in the media has created a culture that demands that journalists file the same story over the airwaves. One story will go to large areas of the public, and the public does not have access to other ideas.

There has also been a shift in the quality. Rather than dealing with hard issues that affect Canadians' day to day lives, we are living in an era of infotainment, which is what the public is fed. This presupposes that the public is dumb and bovine, which is actually ridiculous. The public thirsts for ideas. They want people to fight for what they want in various areas. Not being able to do that erodes the morale of the public and makes people understandably jaded. If members of the public do not feel they are able to effect change, then they will pull back and will not engage the pillars of our democracy.

The government must get a handle on this. It cannot allow the concentration of the media to continue. It must put into place avenues that allow a broad diversity of views. It cannot allow this narrowness that takes place.

With respect to the infotainment that is pushed forward, we hear about Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or a rapper's mother who sadly has died. However, I do not believe that those issues which are trotted out in the press at length are more important to Canadians than a senior who cannot get medical care, the mid-level, middle aged couple who cannot find a place for their elderly parents in a seniors home, the addict on the street who cannot find care, the psychiatric patient who cannot find mental health care, and individuals who live in poverty, the low income people who are struggling to put food on the table to feed their children and themselves.

Putting food on the table, getting education for their children, having money in their pockets, having a brighter future, access to health care, and good infrastructure are concerns that Canadians have. Those things are more important to them than reading about Britney Spears' latest adventure.

The inability to put ideas in front of the public and engage the public to move those ideas forward is a significant detriment to the future of our country. It makes us all less than what we could be.

It is heartbreaking. As elected officials we see people across party lines who have a plethora of great ideas to help Canadians. Nobody has a hammerlock on good or bad ideas. We all have ideas. The tragedy of the House and the structure in our country is that we as elected officials do not have the ability to drive those ideas forward as the public expects.

In my province of British Columbia the three leading dailies are owned by one group. The Globe and Mail editorial board, for example, made a decision five years ago not to publish editorial pieces by members of Parliament, except under extraordinary circumstances. A newspaper cannot criticize MPs for not having ideas on one hand, but on the other hand not publish their ideas when they are given.

A case in point: A very thoughtful journalist wrote a piece asking why we are not seeing more ideas about the mission in Afghanistan. I wrote a piece that same day which by two o'clock was in the hands of the Globe and Mail. It did not publish the piece because it does not publish opinion editorials by members of Parliament.

I called and reminded the Globe and Mail that that was the eleventh op ed piece the paper had received in the last year on solutions for the mission in Afghanistan. I asked how in good conscience the paper on one hand could criticize us as members of Parliament for not having ideas, but on the other hand not allow us to have those ideas published in the paper when we are working hard to offer the best solutions.

In the end, maybe they are not the best solutions, but if we have a proper system, it will inspire people to come up with better ideas, to justifiably criticize those ideas and say, “I have a better idea to put into the mix”. Ultimately we would be able to bind the best ideas we have in our country, feed them through the system and implement them for the betterment of our public. That is our job. That is how the system should work, but the system is not working in that way. It should. A government should work with all parties to enable that to happen, not for the interest of any specific government at hand, but for the larger objective to enable us to fight for the issues, ideas and solutions that our public needs.

Every one of us knows people in our ridings who struggle day to day to put food on the table, to build a future, to have some hope, to get medical care, to live. All of us know people like that. People ask us why they are not seeing ideas and action in these areas and why we are not able to put forward solutions and get them implemented when it makes sense to them. We need a system that allows that. We can work together in that area to make it happen for the good of the House, for the good of our democracy and for the good of our nation, most importantly.

All of us have heard some wonderful ideas from very smart people in the public. They come to our committees and offer those solutions. People in the public service have great ideas and yet those ideas sit in a sinkhole not to go anywhere. That is not in the public interest. That does not serve the public well.

The government can work to enable the CRTC to allow a broad diversity of ideas. It would not only be healthy for our democracy but it would be healthy for journalists. All of us know the heart-wrenching environment that journalists work in today. Journalists themselves would say they would love to put fascinating ideas forward but their editors would not tolerate it. There is a notion that the media has to put forth issues that either bleed or have some other horrific conflict laden issues surrounding them. Why?

In Al Gore's book Assault on Reason there is a great quote. He lamented that if the issue bleeds it leads, and if it thinks it stinks. That is not a very good assessment of our world. It is not the way it should be, it is not the way it ought to be and it is not the way it has to be.

We can build something better. We can build something stronger. We can have a House that enables Canadians to work through their elected officials to implement those solutions that affect the day to day lives of the people we serve. That is our job and our duty. We can only do it if we have an environment in this House where ideas are taken seriously, where those ideas can be moved into action rather than sitting forever in a swamp and going nowhere. We also need a media which, at times, is prepared to print the ideas that are out there for what they are and let the public judge whether those ideas are good, bad or mediocre.

We will live and stand by what we put forward. We will live and stand by what we do. That is a healthy democracy. People will or will not elect us based on the quality of our actions and the quality of ideas that we implement to serve the interests of our communities and the interests of our great nation. That is what our duty is. That is the system we ought to have.

I would implore that the government work to enable the CRTC to have that diversity of views. If we do not arrest this constriction of the media now, we will not be able to have the nation we could have. Our Canada would be less than what it could be. I would implore the government to do that. If ever there were a legacy that would serve the country for decades to come, it would be that.

In the interests of the public, in the interests of the House of Commons, in the interests of journalists who enter that profession to serve and to put ideas forward so that those ideas could have an effect and a public that would benefit from that, the government needs to implement those solutions. A failure to do that would make our country less than what it could be.

Last, with regard to the comments made by the Bloc, as the Canadians that they are and we are, I would hope that they would look into their souls and see that the culture and language of Quebec as the cultures and languages that we have in all our provinces are better as a sum than what we are as individuals. Together we are a stronger nation. All our cultures and languages are stronger and protected and enrich us all if we are able to live and work together in an environment of tolerance and understanding. To look at this as a them versus us environment would weaken all of us. It would weaken Quebec. It would weaken British Columbia. It would weaken every province. The importance of a federal government is to enable cultures and languages to thrive.

The member from the Bloc Québécois said that Quebec is not a bilingual province, and I assume she meant that it is a francophone province. Does she not forget the Cree who live in the northern regions of Quebec? Does she not account for the anglophones who live in Quebec? Or the immigrants who come to Quebec for many reasons? What about them?

Every province has a milieu of different cultures and languages. It is obvious to say that French is the dominant language in Quebec, but why would she take an exclusionary attitude toward the people of her province by saying that Quebec is only one narrow thing and it is only defined in one narrow way.

Is it not stronger for us all to be defined in a broader way, with a greater diversity and a greater milieu of cultures and languages? Of course it is.

If Quebec were to separate and become an independent country, as the member suggests, and engage with the United States, as previous leaders of the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois have said, do they really think that the culture of their language would be strengthened?

Ottawa and the Canadian people put more money into the province of Quebec than into any other province for the protection of language and culture. Nothing compares to that whatsoever.

If Quebec were independent, it would engage with the United States. Does the member from the Bloc, or the Bloc Québécois or the Parti Québécois leaders, or the people of Quebec truly think that the people of the United States would care whether or not they are going to speak in French? They are not going to speak in French. They will speak in English.

The discourse that would take place between Quebec and the United States would not be francophone based, not based on the Quebec French culture, it would be based on using the English language and a culture that would be primarily that which we see south of the border.

The reality of it is that the culture and language of Quebec would actually be weakened through independence than if it were to stay in the milieu of Canada that strengthens all of us.

I want to say to the government in closing that there is the issue of a lack of media diversity and the lack of the ability of MPs to do their jobs that all of us desire with full hearts. We must be able to do our jobs. By not being able to do our jobs, we weaken our democracy, weaken our country, and we do not serve the Canadian public well at all.