Monique Guay

[Official Languages, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister for la Francophonie and Official Languages congratulated her colleague, the Minister of National Defence, for having drawn up a plan that supposedly demonstrates the government's intention to promote official languages in the military.

How can any minister, let alone a francophone minister, be a party to a plan that, upon closer inspection, will set bilingualism in the Canadian armed forces back by 40 years?

[Maurice Huard, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, shortly before the House resumed, one of our colleagues passed away following a brief illness.

Moe, as he was known to most of us, fulfilled his Assistant Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms duties with pride and was blessed with a sense of humour that we will all miss.

For 21 years, he was a nurse with the Canadian Armed Forces before joining the House of Commons family in 1993.

Sadly, it is when members of this family leave us that we recognize how tightly knit we are, all allegiances and partisanship aside. We work together every day in this place and the loss of one of our own reminds us that we must respect one another.

The Bloc Québécois extends its condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Assistant Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Maurice Huard.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague must know that we now have a new commuter train in Saint-Jérôme. This is the result of long-term efforts, but we finally succeeded, thanks to the AMT and the Quebec government. We are proud to have this new means of transport, which is already extremely popular. We even have shuttles carrying passengers from municipalities around Saint-Jérôme to ride the train to Montreal. Of course, this is a minor step, if we consider our extensive territory. Does my colleague think we should go on investing in research on an electrical car? In Saint-Jérôme, the CEVEQ is doing some research on an electrical vehicle. Would the hon. member care to comment?

[Aerospace Industry, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, Quebec was entitled to receive its due, that is the lion's share of the spinoffs. However to advance their careers, at least in the short term, the Conservative ministers from Quebec chose to abdicate their responsibilities to Quebeckers. The image is striking: in Trenton, Ontario, two Quebeckers will sign the contract and make official the surrender of the Quebec Conservatives.

Is the Minister of Transport and the political lieutenant for Quebec not ashamed to be part of such a regrettable spectacle, one that Quebeckers will surely remember in the next election?

[Aerospace Industry, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, during the election campaign, the Prime Minister kept saying that he needed ministers to represent Quebec. However, what he forgot to tell Quebeckers—and the Boeing contract is a blatant example— is that he needed Quebec ministers to work against Quebec. New government, but same old Canadian formula for putting Quebec in its place.

Will the Minister of Transport and the political lieutenant for Quebec admit that by refusing to demand that Quebec be given its fair share, or about 60% of the contract spinoffs, the Quebec ministers, with an eye to their jobs, chose to put Canada ahead of Quebec's interests?

[The Environment, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the minister told the Senate Committee on the Environment that the government had not reviewed environmental programs. Yet the minister subsequently admitted that the Privy Council Office had conducted such an evaluation.

Will the minister agree that she could have avoided making such contradictory statements if, before abolishing the former programs, she had considered the evaluation her own officials had conducted, which concluded that the existing programs were effective?

[The Environment, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Minister of the Environment said that she will soon be announcing environmental programs that will involve public participation. Yet against her own officials' advice, her government slashed programs, such as EnerGuide, that were working.

Given that she herself created this program vacuum, will the Minister of the Environment acknowledge that her ideological stubbornness and rash actions have wasted a great deal of time and now force her to start back at square one by announcing new programs?

[Federal Accountability Act, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging my colleague, Benoît Sauvageau. I worked with him on Bill C-2 and assisted him throughout the process. I want to make sure everyone knows what extraordinary work he did. We must all recognize that.

All parties in this House worked very hard on this. Never before has a committee sat for so many hours and so many days in so few weeks to produce a bill of great importance about accountability.

We all gained something; some of us lost something. Some of the things we wanted to see in the bill are not there, but I want to emphasize that we did gain some ground.

Among other things, we, the members of the Bloc Québécois, succeeded in getting an independent appointment process for Elections Canada returning officers. This is very important. Such a process has already been in place in Quebec for a number of years, and now we have it at the federal level.

In fact, consultation has already been undertaken to find out if returning officers in each riding were competent, if their work was well done, if there was any partisanship, and if they had the necessary qualifications to do the job. All parliamentarians were consulted and a report was tabled. That was a huge step forward. I would like to congratulate the committee on its support for this part of the bill.

We also succeeded in eliminating rewards for whistleblowers. We found that proposal completely unacceptable. It might even have prompted some people to make false accusations in order to receive the reward. That provision was removed from the bill. I would like to thank the secretary of the Treasury Board because we discussed this and he agreed to make the change.

The parties worked together on this, in a fairly respectful manner. We also obtained the assurance that this legislation will be reviewed in five years. Typically, legislation is reviewed every 10 years. We asked that this be reviewed after five years, because the legislation is so complex that we are not entirely sure how it will be implemented. It affects so many other acts that our concern regarding the implementation of Bill C-2 has to do with the time frame and costs of its implementation.

As we know, this bill amends several other acts, but we do not know how long this will all take. Over time, we will see how this bill moves forward.

We needed an accountability act. Given the sponsorship scandal and the Gomery Commission, this House needed legislation to ensure the probity of parliamentarians. We are all honest people. We all want to represent our constituents well. There can be temptations, however, through bad influences, to act dishonestly. We saw this with the sponsorship scandal. Bill C-2 corrects part of the problem.

However, we deplore the Conservative government's decision to give in to the ultimatum given by the Senate, in order to stop the constant back and forth between the House of Commons and the Senate, and to ensure that Bill C-2 is passed quickly.

We rejected the idea of a separate Senate ethics officer, because such an officer would not be as effective as Bill C-2 could have allowed. However, as I mentioned, there has been some give and take.

The Bloc Québécois made concessions and compromises; the Liberal Party made compromises; the NDP did so as well, and the government made many compromises, to our great surprise. We always said that we would not delay the committee's work unduly, and we kept our promise by making solid proposals. But we regret that many people who would have liked to testify and submit briefs to the committee were unable to do so because of impossible time constraints. They were given barely 24 hours to write a brief and come to testify. It is very unfortunate that witnesses often had just two minutes to speak. This is unreasonable, and the work suffered as a result. When seven or eight witnesses take the time to travel together and only one or two have the chance to testify before the committee for two minutes, and when the question period is also limited to two or three minutes, this does not promote very good relations. In that sense, it was very difficult.

Many Quebeckers would have liked to testify before the committee, but were unable to do so. However, some people later testified before the Senate committee, which was a good thing. But it was also difficult in the Senate, because the hearing process moved along very quickly there as well. A bill was needed and, in my opinion, it will be passed on division. We will monitor the application of the legislation very closely, because it affects many other existing laws and makes significant changes.

We do not know whether it will be possible to make improvements to certain laws. It may be that a bill to amend each law will have to be introduced in the House of Commons. But we do not know how much time, energy and money that will involve. We hope that there will be as much collegiality among the parties and that the work will be as well done as when Bill C-2 was drafted. As I said at the start, we never held up the process. We will therefore support the bill, but we hope that this bill will truly make a difference and not just be a bogus bill.

Do hon. members recall Bill C-11, Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act? From the outset, we called for Bill C-11 to be implemented immediately since it was ready, having gone through the Senate and received royal assent. Still, approval was denied supposedly because Bill C-2 was about to be introduced. Nine months were wasted with that. Because they had no protection, whistleblowers were not able to make the disclosures they wanted to make or should have made. Moreover, Bill C-11 was not in conflict with Bill C-2, not at all. In fact, once Bill C-2 was in effect, Bill C-11 would have been complementary.

We in the Bloc Québécois cannot understand why the government would not implement Bill C-11. It would not have cost the government anything, yet protection would have been afforded to whistleblowers, allowing them to start immediately doing their jobs. Of course, that is unfortunate, but now we are at the stage of implementing Bill C-2. This will ensure that we can count on our civil servants being able to do their jobs. If disclosures have to be made, they will be made honestly. That is actually a job requirement. They will not get paid for making disclosures. That would be unthinkable. It is the duty of civil servants to report on what is not working in their departments and on any wrongdoers who are up to no good. This marks an important victory for us.

I thank all my colleagues on the legislative committee on Bill C-2, both from the government side and the opposition. I think we did good work together, and my wish is that the legislation will be effective and will come into force as soon as possible.

[Statutes Repeal Act, December 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that we support the principle underlying this bill. As my colleague said earlier, 57 bills gathering dust is a lot.

I would like to go back to Bill C-11, The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. As you may recall, during our study of Bill C-2, the Bloc Québécois asked that Bill C-11 be withdrawn immediately. If the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act had been enacted and implemented while we were studying Bill C-2, we would have been able to take the time we needed to study it thoroughly. If Bill C-11 had been passed before, we could have been certain that that much at least had been done rather than wait for Bill C-2 to be passed.

Bill C-2 is currently before the Senate. We do not know when it will be returned to the House of Commons. The Christmas break is approaching and we will not resume until January. It is unlikely that Bill C-2 will be adopted or withdrawn before that, and we will still have the problem of Bill C-11, which is ready and has received royal assent, but is not yet enacted. It is just one of many bills that are gathering dust on the shelf.

On the other hand, we will probably have to revise some bills, because they have been left on the shelf too long. Amendments may be needed. There will also likely be jurisdiction issues, because certain provinces, such as Quebec, have already established measures concerning some bills. We must therefore ensure that there is no duplication and that our jurisdictions are respected. Certain important changes may have already been made, which could undermine or duplicate existing legislation.

As I said, we support this bill. However, we would like to see it go to committee. We believe three amendments are important, and I will list them. We think that they will strengthen Bill S-202.

First of all, we think that the discretionary period for enacting a bill passed by Parliament could be shortened from ten years to five years. We would like to see this amended because we find ten years simply too long. We see this when we are studying a bill in committee. Indeed, most of our existing legislation is revised every five or ten years anyway. As we all know, if this measure is not in place, this could lead to some major changes. Things change with time. We must review our legislation, make it better and more modern. Furthermore, things happen outside this House. Other legislative assemblies, including the National Assembly in Quebec and other parliaments, all carry out their own measures, which could lead to amendments to one of our 57 bills.

We would also like to require the government to explain to Parliament the reasons why it does not intend to implement legislation that has received royal assent. This is unimaginable, when witnesses have been called to appear and people have worked on a bill, sometimes for as much as two years. I remember that when we revised the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, it took us two and a half years. It would make no sense to wait 10 years before looking at it again. The government therefore should report to Parliament and explain why it has decided to give royal assent to legislation but then has opted to shelve it instead of implementing it.

This also does not reflect well on parliamentarians. People say that we pass legislation but then shelve it. They find the system very cumbersome, very slow and very long. When legislation receives royal assent, the government has to be able to implement it as soon as possible.

It starts in Parliament, then is referred to a committee, where it is amended before going to the Senate, where more witnesses are called. It goes through all the steps needed to receive royal assent, then it is shelved. This makes no sense to us.

The third amendment we would like to make pertains to clause 3 and reflects the fact that members of the Senate are not elected. We therefore propose to amend clause 3, which reads as follows:

3. Every Act or provision listed in the annual report is repealed on December 31 of the year in which the report is laid unless it comes into force on or before that December 31 or during that year either House of Parliament adopts a resolution that the Act or provision not be repealed.

We would like to replace this clause with the following:

3. Every Act or provision listed in the annual report is repealed on December 31 of the year in which the report is laid unless it comes into force on or before that December 31 or during that year the House of Commons adopts a resolution that the Act or provision not be repealed.

These are amendments that the committee could discuss. It could look at whether it is possible to find common ground.

In general, Bill S-202 is good because these changes are needed. We cannot allow very important bills to be shelved.

I find that Bill C-11 was extremely important and there are currently people who will not disclose any wrongdoing as long as we have not resolved the problem with Bill C-2. Repealing Bill C-11 would not have taken any effort. The legislation was ready. We could have just continued with Bill C-2. The one was not in competition with the other. They were based on each other, in any event. I still do not understand why the government refused to implement Bill C-11, which was shelved.

I also wonder what becomes of these bills afterward. Bill C-2 will likely be passed eventually. I imagine it will come back from the Senate and we will pass it. However, what will become of Bill C-11? What happens to bills that are shelved? Will Bill C-11 become obsolete and have to be repealed? We have to ask these questions.

We will therefore support Bill S-202, but the reservations I expressed must be taken into account. I think that five years is better than 10 years. When we study some acts after 10 years, there are so many changes and amendments to make that it can take two or three years to go through committee. I saw it happen with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. I also saw it happen with Part II of the Canada Labour Code. We spent months and months amending Part II, which had not been reviewed for 15 years. We have to set limits so that, as we asked with Bill C-2, the act can be reviewed every five years to assess its effectiveness. We will strike a committee to determine whether it is working well. If it is not, we need the power to amend it quickly and ensure it does work well.

The Bloc Québécois supports sending Bill S-202 to committee, where members will discuss its application with witnesses.

[Petitions, November 24th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure to present a petition concerning the seal hunt. It contains a hundred or so signatures from residents of my riding.