Pat Martin

[Canada National Parks Act, April 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, on the one point that the hon. member made regarding consultation, there is no momentum building in any kind of opposition to this bill in the affected region; I will put it that way. The consultation was not with the official opposition and it was not with the NDP, but we are satisfied. Our information is that consultation has taken place in a way that has satisfied local residents. They are not viewing this as any threat or any reason to get all cranked up.

As far as traditional aboriginal and treaty rights go as they pertain to hunting, I should not try to quote Delgamuukw or Powley or Sparrow or any of the recent Supreme Court rulings. I can leave that to the member to read on his own. My point is simply that the more the government is unwilling to give definition to section 35 of the Constitution and to define what aboriginal treaty rights mean, the more the courts will make those determinations for us. That undermines the role of members of Parliament. It undermines the role of the House of Commons to allow the Supreme Court, whether one agrees or disagrees with its rulings, to make those rulings for us.

I think we should be exercising our role as members of Parliament and in the powers we have and once and for all sit down on this; it may be that we as members of Parliament are more narrow in our definition of aboriginal treaty rights than the courts have been, which may please the member in regard to the example he raised.

[Canada National Parks Act, April 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. As the aboriginal affairs critic for my party, I am very interested in how this series of events came about and the crossover interests. I know my colleague from Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore has a vested interested in this issue as well, as it pertains to national parks and the environmental impact sensitivities associated with it, especially with the west coast of Canada which, as we know, is one of the areas affected by the bill.

Coming from Manitoba, I particularly wanted to add my voice as well to the debate. I understand that one aspect of the bill deals with Riding Mountain National Park and a small amount of area that will be dedicated to Riding Mountain Park to withdraw lands from the park for the purposes of dealing with an historic injustice, I suppose, in the boundaries of the reserves. The portion with the following change then for the Province of Manitoba would be simply sections 5, 6, 7 and 8, the west half of section 4 and the portion of the east half of section 4 lying west of Clear Lake Indian Reserve No. 61A and the southwest quarter of section 18. That is the specific definition of the change made to Riding Mountain National Park.

Of more concern or perhaps of greater interest to the people here and anyone listening may be the impact on the west coast, which deals with the Pacific coast and the parks there. It is an acutely sensitive environmental area and a very worrisome development with the local provincial government recently. We believe it will be expanding oil and gas exploration in that area and the area just north of the area specified in the bill.

Aboriginal people in the area are very apprehensive of these pending changes which we believe will be coming about. They have made their opinions known in no uncertain terms that they do not support especially super tankers going through the inside passage and the relatively narrow straits, and the offshore oil and gas exploration associated with the new interest of the Liberal government in B.C. There has been particular attention to the preservation of park land and marine parks on the west coast in anticipation of this burning desire to exploit these natural resources. We are always concerned whenever we hear of any national park being eroded or diminished in any way.

When the bill first came along, it was the view of some of us in our caucus that we would oppose the erosion of the national parks in anyway, even if it were to satisfy the legitimate claims of a first nation that had an historic right to that property by virtue of traditional use or a land claim or a specific land claim dealing with what was in fact an error made in the survey of assessment of the first nation affected, as is the case of the Riding Mountain National Park.

We are really most interested in speaking about the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve of Canada in the context of this debate.

To strip away all the chafe from the wheat, and in its rawest form, this debate is about section 35 of the Constitution. Some members may wonder how we could arrive that. Quite simply, section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982 deals with aboriginal and treaty rights but fails to give any definition to those rights. That is why the government of Canada has spent the last 22 years in court, since 1982, to give meaning and definition to section 35 of the Constitution. While the Constitution recognizes aboriginal and treaty rights, it does not say what those aboriginal and treaty rights are.

It is the position of first nations that aboriginal and treaty rights mean some right, some legitimate claim to some sharing of land and resources on their traditional land base, not just the narrow, finite boundaries of reserves which are not in any way traditional or naturally occurring. They are constructs of the federal government and the Indian Act.

I am talking about the traditional area of land use as demonstrated through traditional land use maps. From time immemorial the aboriginal people up and down the west coast, whether it is the coast Salish or the any number of Tsimshian west coast Salish tribes up and down the west coast of Vancouver Island, have been using this area for hunting, gathering, settlement and traditional. They never ceded that territory through the Douglas treaties, which predated the rest of the treaties throughout Canada, and certainly not through the treaty era of Treaties Nos. 1 through 8 in the rest of Canada.

Their aboriginal and treaty rights were never ceded or signed away in any formal agreement with the crown, and they remain intact. Therefore, it is fitting and appropriate, and we feel proud to support their claim today, that this area of the Pacific Rim National Reserve of Canada should rightfully be under the direct holding and title of first nations making that claim.

Obviously, there is vested interest on many claims. However, people are satisfied that there has been consultation and adequate consultation with local land owners, municipalities, town councils and rural municipalities in the immediate area and that their concerns have been taken into account. I do not think that anyone has strongly held views about recognizing the aboriginal and treaty rights in these cases.

As we deal with the bill, it is a lesson for us all that the Government of Canada and therefore the people of Canada could save themselves an enormous amount of grief, aggravation and cost in the future if we would simply take one step back and get our minds around giving meaning and definition to section 35 of the constitution.

Frankly, the Government of Canada is not faring too well in its court challenges in those regards. Virtually every time aboriginal people make claims for recognition of those rights, they are denied by the federal government. First nations have no avenue of recourse but to go to the courts. They go to the Federal Court and then to the Supreme Court ultimately, and they always win. Court cases have been going on for 10 years, 15 years and 20 years, but they are finally concluding in favour of aboriginal people.

We are letting the courts do the work of Parliament. It should be up to Parliament to give meaning and definition to section 35. We have been afraid to or reluctant to do this. I do not know what the reasoning is on the federal government's part, but it has never tackled that thorny issue. It has never embraced that as a priority.

We came close in Charlottetown in 1992. The promise was made during the aboriginal round of the Charlottetown accord that if we passed Charlottetown, we would finally convene a national assembly of affected persons and would give definition to what aboriginal and treaty rights meant.

People may not like it. No one side will get everything it wants, but at least a fair consultation and negotiation will take place and we will not need to seek out the courts as an avenue of recourse. There will be some defined parameters as to what we mean by aboriginal rights because it seems to vary from person to person no matter who we asked.

Some non-aboriginal people are willing to concede that it only applies to hunting, gathering and fishing, traditional activities that people have always done for thousands of years. They are willing to let the Indians hunt on their land out of season as it will do no harm. Others go much broader in interpretation saying that people in an area called an Indian reserve have the exclusive right to resources on that property, all else is to be shared. That would mean the first nations people have a legitimate right to share in the land and resources such as mineral resources, lumber rights and logging and to share in the resources of their other traditional areas of use, which is essentially the rest of Canada.

There would be no poverty among aboriginal people if we took that interpretation. Even if we agreed that 1% of all the wealth from natural resources in mining, logging and hydroelectricity would be shared with first nations people, there would be no chronic third world poverty conditions. There would be economic development. There would be full participation by aboriginal people in the Canadian experience. That is the full range of interpretation of section 35 of the Constitution.

There are elements that say no special rights or privileges should be recognized, that is history, that this is 2004 and that they will not get into that debate. Then there are some grudgingly and some willingly who admit that fishing, hunting, and gathering berries are traditional activities.

The Indian Act specifically says that first nations people have a right to share in gravel, soil, mud, sand and other rock, other than minerals. We very generously and specifically listed those resources they have a right to have a share in. Granted, gravel has an economic value, but not as much as gold, titanium, uranium, pearls, rubies, oil and other treasures that we chose to keep exclusively for our use and for our purposes. We willingly conceded that aboriginal people have a right to mud, clay, gravel and sand, and as much as they want. They can develop it in any way they want too, resourceful as they are. We have that broad range here in interpretations.

The fact that we have to bring forward a special bill dealing with national parks is very sensitive in that it affects aboriginal people and their rights. The Government of Canada could spend less time seized of this issue if it would dedicate the time, the resources and the energy to define what aboriginal and treaty rights are.

I think there is generosity and goodwill among most Canadian people. I think Canadians are finally ready to recognize that 140 years of social tragedy as it has pertained to aboriginal people is enough. Our relationship with aboriginal people is Canada's greatest failure and, some would say, Canada's greatest shame in that we allowed these third world conditions to foster within our midst, knowing full well that it was not at all necessary.

People on the west coast have to be ever cognizant of traditional aboriginal and treaty rights, unseeded and yet to be clearly defined. In this case, my colleagues and I in the NDP will support the bill.

[Aboriginal Affairs, April 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, in what may be the most expensive pre-election photo op in Canadian history, aboriginal leaders were summoned today and treated to a whole new array of vapid Liberal platitudes; no talk of meaningful sharing of land and resources, only vague promises about who gets to deliver their woefully inadequate social programs.

Will the government admit that all it has offered aboriginal people today is the right to manage their own poverty instead of having INAC manage their poverty for them, and what it really wanted was a pre-election photo with aboriginal leaders providing the backdrop?

[Income Tax Act, April 2nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak in favour of Bill C-246. I think a previous representative of the NDP, the member for Windsor—St. Clair, also expressed his support. He is a lawyer who practised family law for a great number of years and added some interesting insights to the bill. He certainly raised it with our caucus which agreed that this type of gesture or tax relief, to acknowledge the costs that adoptive parents face, should be recognized in our tax system.

For one simple reason, it is an equality issue in a sense because those parents who have children biologically, obviously many of their costs are picked up and subsidized by Canadian taxpayers through our medical system and through the social services that we provide for parents through hospitals. The many substantial costs incurred by parents who are adopting are not recognized in the same way. We want to treat adoptive parents with the same recognition and appreciation as we support parents who have their children biologically.

It is only common sense that we should also recognize that many of those who do adopt, and who want children, have already spent a great deal of money in attempts to have children biologically through medical interventions et cetera. It can add up to a great cost.

By the time adoptive parents actually do take the final step and adopt, in all likelihood it has been a great cash outlay even by the time they reach that point.

It is worth noting that this tax relief would not only be for parents who were adopting babies, it would also extend to families who were adopting family members, for example, nieces, nephews or children of friends who may have died in a tragedy and who need a family unit to attach to.

There was a recent case of an earthquake in Egypt where constituents of my colleague from Windsor—St. Clair became involved. The earthquake in Egypt killed both parents leaving three children in the family who were in their mid-teens, in late adolescence. The Canadian relatives took measures to provide a home for the orphaned older children.

One can imagine the costs associated with all of that. The financial burden for this Canadian family of goodwill, to open their home to these orphaned children as a result of that tragic event in another country, is clearly something that most Canadians would be willing to recognize and accommodate by providing some tax relief. As these families reach out in often traumatic situations, this is something that society should recognize and applaud.

Adoption is expensive. I will not draw this out by repeating the member who just spoke. It is expensive enough to adopt a child domestically within Canada but there is also overseas adoption. All of us as members of Parliament have probably tried to intervene on behalf of parents who were seeking to adopt children overseas. China is a common source. There are horrendous costs. We are talking sometimes $30,000 and $40,000 by the time the child is brought to Canada and becomes a member of the family. If we assist families with those horrendous costs, I think it is incumbent upon us to do so.

I, too, compliment the member from Prince George for a very worthy piece of legislation and for doing something that would be of benefit to the constituents who I represent, and to all Canadians. It is a fitting way to end the week on such a positive note. My compliments to the member and he has the enthusiastic support of the members of our caucus.

[Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, April 2nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, good managers welcome whistleblowing. Good managers want to know what is really going on in the enterprises over which they have control, and it is only people with something to hide who resist the introduction of whistleblowing protection measures.

As a way of introduction, the red book of 1993 specifically promised legislated whistleblowing protection, stemming from the outrageous scandals of the Mulroney government where a cabinet minister a week seemed to be hauled off to jail. In this case it was a Liberal government promising measures so that public servants could feel protected in coming forward with information about wrongdoing, and that was 11 years ago.

Now we have the minister with the gall, the temerity, to introduce Bill C-25. Then the Prime Minister in his latest ad scam, which are the television ads now running, has a banner running along the bottom of the ads stating that whistleblowers have legislative protection. It is misleading the public to think that whistleblowing legislation, as they contemplate it, will protect civil servants. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The bill should be called an act to protect ministers from whistleblowers, not an act to protect whistleblowers. It should be called an act to plug leaks, an act to stop civil servants telling what they know about what the government is doing with public finances. If there were any honesty associated with the bill, that is what is should be called.

The minister has a lot something to stand up and tell us today that he is sincerely committed to protection for whistleblowers. The bill blatantly contradicts the recommendations and findings of no fewer than three recent task forces, including the Keyserlingk task force. These are some of the most knowledgeable people on this subject in the country. The leading authorities in the country on whistleblowers have spoken and everyone of them unanimously have said whistleblowing protection will be meaningless unless the whistleblower commissioner or officer reports directly to Parliament.

If nothing else is clear in the bill, it should have been that the newly commissioned whistleblowing protection officer has to report to Parliament. To report to or through a minister, as is the language in the bill, is reporting to the executive of government. It is a 180° contradiction from what was unanimously recommended by no fewer than three independent task forces on the subject, which they have ignored. It is contradictory to no fewer than 12, I believe it is, private members' bills that have been put forward in good faith by members of all parties in the past 11 years, since the Liberal government promised this.

Everyone agrees that there has to be that arm's length independence to give confidence to civil servants who may have knowledge of the maladministration of funds or wrongdoing.

This is a travesty, and it is so clearly just an illusion. This is smoke and mirrors so the Liberals can say to the people of Canada, “We embrace real whistleblower protection,” and they can honestly say to the public, “We have introduced legislation regarding whistleblowers.” They cannot say that they are offering whistleblowers in the civil service true legislative protection because that would be a lie. What they are saying is that they have introduced whistleblowing legislation.

I can tell the Canadian public that this whistleblowing legislation is so flawed that public servants are better off with no legislation than with this bad legislation because it gives the illusion of safety. In actual fact, with the narrow prescribed route that whistleblowers would have to take, they would be better off with no protection at all. They would be better off with the status quo than with this flawed bill. There were so many models from which to choose.

In 1996 a member from the Bloc Quebecois put forward a very good private member's bill on whistleblowing protection. His name escapes me. His model was borrowed from a previous private member's bill. Subsequently, a member from the Alliance and myself both introduced whistleblowing legislation modelled after the same essentially agreed upon process that the leading authorities are now point out was the correct way to go.

Therefore, we did not need another bill to protect ministers from whistleblowers. They enjoy that already. However, now we are given this busy work to keep our committee occupied in trying to craft garbage into something useful. I do not think it can be done. We are not Rumplestiltskins. We cannot weave gold out of straw. We do not have time. This Parliament is in its twilight hours, and frankly it is unnecessary because we all know what needs to be done.

Ask Mr. Keyserlingk, ask the leading authorities around the country how to craft good whistleblowing legislation. They can tell us clearly in 10 minutes. Read any national newspaper in the country. They have done assessments, and in the narrow confines of a simple one column article, they have pointed out everything that is wrong with this bill and everything that could be done to fix it.

I encourage the minister to have his staff read the Regina Leader Post, The Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail. Every one of the authorities who have reviewed this legislation point out that it is so fatally flawed it is not only meaningless, it is actually harmful. It is actually detrimental because civil servants will be worse off. It excludes the RCMP.

I think my colleague who will speak later will point out some of the flaws there. We know there are whistleblowers waiting within the RCMP with information that they wish to bring forward, but they do not feel safe under this bill or under the status quo.

I lived through the Radwanski scandal, as a member of the government operations committee. It really drove the message home to me the need for comprehensive whistleblowing legislation when the good people who came forward with information about Radwanski, who came to our committee, showed up with their lawyers.

Honest civil servants in the public service, who come forward and do the right thing by sharing their information with the committee of members of Parliament, feel it necessary to bring their own privately hired legal counsel with them for their own protection. That is so fundamentally wrong. It just breaks my heart to think that is what we have stooped to around here.

Here was a golden opportunity. Finally there was an opportunity to flesh out and to give meaning and definition to what we have been calling for so long. The minister has chosen not to in the most cynical of ways. Not only has he failed to introduce meaningful legislation, he is trying to mislead the Canadian public in the television ads that are running in the country. In the ad the Prime Minister is talking to a group of people in some kitchen. Along the bottom a little banner, like CNN has, says “Whistleblowers now protected by legislation”. That is not true.

The bill will not pass in this Parliament. Even if the bill did pass, whistleblowers would not be protected by legislation. In fact the inverse is actually true. It is a ruse. It is a well orchestrated deception. It is electioneering. It is smoke and mirrors. It is anything but legitimate whistleblower protection.

If the minister is being honest, he will withdraw this bill. He would listen to the Canadian public and to all the authorities across the country who have the answer. He could frankly take good legislation right off the shelf, introduce it and table it before the end of this Parliament, if he were serious.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, a new term has drifted into the public lexicon. The new term is the Romanow gap. Anyone who follows health policy in this country understands what the Romanow gap is. The federal government's share of the stable core funding of the health system was dramatically reduced and never brought back to where it was. There is a gap between the current federal participation of between 14% and 16% and the recommended level of federal participation of 25%.

We do not want to see that come in a one time lump sum payment that the premiers asked for. We want to see stable core funding. We do not hire nurses with one time funding unless we just want to hire them for one year and let them go at the end of the year. We cannot plan and run a health care system with one time funding. We need stable core funding. That was abundantly clear in the Romanow report and the government ignored it.

Finally, the Prime Minister for the first time ever in talking about the health care system mentioned Romanow in a recent announcement. Maybe he is finally acknowledging that his government has failed to heed the Romanow report and has failed to comply with the recommendations in the Romanow report. If he is ready to do so, I will be the first one to acknowledge it, if and when that happens, but it has not happened yet.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to comment on the issues raised by my colleague from Sackville--Musquodoboit Valley--Eastern Shore.

There are such glaring contrasts in the taxation policy in Canada. One would think that our tax policy would be designed to be in the best interests of Canadians, but it seems to be always in the best interests of only a few Canadians, not the rest of us.

As my colleague knows, I am a carpenter by trade. I have had to criss-cross the country literally dozens of times to follow the work. I could not write off a single penny of the expenses that I incurred driving across the country following the building jobs. My colleague is right when he says there are others who can write off things that we think should not be allowed. Corporations, for example, can write off expenses such as skyboxes and so on.

The member raised one thing that I think is a real shame. Yesterday the House dealt with a private member's bill put forward by my colleague from Sackville--Musquodoboit Valley--Eastern Shore, through which the costs associated with children playing amateur sports and taking part in physical activity would have been made tax deductible, thereby allowing more low income families to have their kids participate in sports.

His bill was summarily disregarded by all parties in the House with the exception of the Bloc Québécois, I believe, and the NDP. Had it passed, that would having been using tax policy to encourage good, positive physical activity and a healthier generation. It was a missed opportunity.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his sympathetic comments and his appreciation of the issues that we raised. Actually, I also thank him for the opportunity to point out a glaring contradiction. The hon. member is right: in this day and age it is simply a manifestation of bad social planning that we have 52% of the children in my riding living below the poverty line. In my view it is a failure and it is Canada's greatest shame.

I am glad the hon. member at least raised the contrast between the Governor General's excessive spending and the plight of some of the underprivileged children in my riding, because I have a graphic illustration and example for him.

I recently lost in an effort to save one early childhood development program in my riding. The total budget of this program was $5,000. It was an eight week program to teach low income mothers early childhood development skills and proper nutrition skills, et cetera, to help them get their children, this generation, off to a better start. For the want of $5,000, that program failed.

The Governor General's circumpolar party cost of $5.3 million would have paid for a thousand of these programs. We could have run one of those early childhood development programs in every village and city in the country. That is perhaps a graphic illustration of what a misspent $5.3 million translates into when we talk about a good and proper use for that money.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to have an opportunity to join in the debate on the budget on behalf of the people in my riding of Winnipeg Centre.

Where I come from, people watch the budget very earnestly, mostly because they have a real vested interest in how the government chooses to spend our hard-earned tax dollars, even more so in my riding than some others. I am not proud to say that my riding is the third poorest riding in all Canada. Not many people are aware that right in the heart of downtown Winnipeg, by whatever poverty or income measurement we use, whether it is average family income or incidents of poverty, unfortunately ranks as the third poorest riding in the country.

The people who I represent rely heavily on the social programs that the federal government operates and pays for in our welfare state. They look to the government for relief in many ways, and they are particularly vulnerable to policy changes. When people are already low income, marginalized people living at the edge, it does not take much for them to be pushed over the edge. It does not take much to go from working poor to poverty, and that unfortunately is the case.

Members may be shocked to hear that 47% of the families in my riding live below the poverty line, as calculated by Statistics Canada as the low income cut-off; 52% of all the children in my riding live below the poverty line. Given statistics like that, members can forgive perhaps the zeal with which I sometimes undertake some of these issues. I witness, day to day, people trying to get by on marginal incomes and trying to make do when they do not even have the basic needs.

I do not say that for any romantic effect. I am simply informing the House that pockets of Canada are not doing well. They are being left behind. If we do not revitalize our commitment to equal opportunity, we run the risk of creating a permanent underclass and we run the risk of another generation being left behind, and none of us can afford that.

As we speak about the dollars and cents associated with our federal budget, let us also contemplate the costs of a social deficit which is growing and escalating in reverse of what I believe the goals and intentions are of a country like Canada.

If we are committed to equality as an objective, then why do we see policies like those which we have seen since the Liberal government took over? If we are committed to giving a hand up rather than a handout, then why are the very programs that enable people to come out, better themselves and to join the burgeoning middle class at risk?

By way of prefacing my remarks, I want to remind people of the true personal impact of some of the policy choices that this government has made. The Liberals bragged that they balanced the budget for seven years in a row. I approve of balanced budgets. Let us dispel the myth right here and now that the NDP is somehow opposed to balancing budgets.

I come from the province of Manitoba where under the Gary Doer government we have had five balanced budgets. In the province of Saskatchewan next door, the Blakeney government had nine balanced budgets in a row. Tommy Douglas himself said that one could not run a government when it was beholden to foreign bond holders. These are the points, these are the very foundations of our political party. The I approve balanced budgets. I am very critical of how they balance the budgets.

The previous speaker with the Bloc Quebecois mentioned that one way the Liberals balanced the budget was with the EI fund. Let us inform Canadians, let us be upfront with Canadians about the EI fund. The federal government does not put one penny into the EI fund. It is made up solely of contributions by employers and employees. Ergo, any surplus stemming from that fund should go to employers and employees, and I would argue favouring the employees. It was designed to provide benefits for people who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in between jobs. One of the designated uses of the EI fund is not to pay down the debt, or to build roads, or to give tax cuts or any of the other general revenue functions and purposes for which the government uses that money.

Let me simply summarize my criticism of the EI fund with this one message. To deduct something from a person's pay cheque for a specific purpose and then to use it for something else entirely different is, in the best of scenarios, a breach of trust and, in the worst scenario, out and out fraud. People are told the money that taken off their paycheques will be held in case they become unemployed at which time they will receive income maintenance until they can find another job. However, if they are deceived and if that money is used for something else entirely and those people are denied the very benefits they thought they were buying, I call it fraud.

I am glad to see you have assumed the chair, Mr. Speaker. It is an honour to have you with us in that lofty position. What would you think, Mr. Speaker, if you were forced to pay fire insurance on your home because you had no choice and the money came off of your cheque every week? Then your home burned down and you tried to collect on the insurance but you were told you did not qualify because your premiums had been spent on x, y or z? I think you would feel cheated. That is how working Canadians feel about the EI fund.

When we asked the current Prime Minister, when he was finance minister, about this huge growing surplus in the EI fund, he said, “Let me make it clear. There is no EI fund”. He said that plain as the nose on my face. He said that the members should understand that there was no EI fund, that it all went into general revenue. We may as well call it another tax on Canadians then. If that money is to be taken off the paycheques of people and used for whatever the government wants, that is a tax. That is not an insurance fund any more. Let us dispel that myth altogether.

There was another way that the Liberals balanced the budget, and people forget this. When Marcel Masse's was the president of the Treasury Board, he passed a bill without very much fanfare in the House. It took $30 billion out of the surplus of the public service employees' pension plan. Their pension plan was in surplus because their wages were frozen for seven years in a row and, as a result, people were not eligible for the same kind of benefits they thought they would be when they retired. For a number of reasons, their pension plan went into surplus by $30 billion .

I used to be a trustee on a union pension plan. In the real world, in the private sector, the employer and the employees would sit down and probably negotiate some kind of a settlement on that surplus. Part of it would go back to the employer and part of it would go to improving the benefits for the beneficiaries of the plan. However, not in this case. Even Bell Canada, which from a trade union point of view was a difficult employer, cut 60:40 with its pension service employees. The Government of Canada took 100%, every nickel, of that $30 billion. It said that the money belonged to it. This is a quote, “The employees have no proprietary right to the surplus in their pension plan”.

Surpluses in pension plans are wages being kept for employees until they need the money when they retire. That is money they have earned as part of their wage package. The pension surplus is deferred wages. The government had no right to do that, but it passed a specific bill that gave it that right. It passed unnoticed, and it should be exposed. That was not the government's money, just like the EI fund is not the government's money. It is Canadian working people's money being held in trust by the government. It has no right to put its hand in the jar and take the money out.

The third way the government has balanced the budget is by cutbacks to the very social services that are so necessary and needed in a low income riding like mine. The parliamentary secretary argued with our Bloc colleague and said that health care had risen 8% per year over the past four years. In actual fact we are only just getting back now to where we were in 1995 when the government drastically cut the Canada health and social transfer. It went from $19 billion to $11 billion, and it is gradually incrementally inching its way back up as the economy increases.

Therefore, it is completely disingenuous for the hon. member to say that in all this period of time of budgetary cutbacks and restraint the government has been raising contributions to the Canada health plan. We are only now to the point where we were in 1995.

Those three steps, the EI surplus pushing $50 billion, the public service pension plan of $30 billion, a gift the government just helped itself to, and the cutbacks to the Canada health and social transfer over the last nine years have made it possible for the Liberals to not only balance the books but it cut too far, resulting in surpluses.

On the treatment of those surpluses, we argue that we should be reinvesting them in our social deficit so we do not leave another generation of kids behind and our crumbling infrastructure. There is a huge deficit. Ask our municipalities. Sidewalks are falling apart under our feet out of negligence.

I come from the building trades in the construction industry. It does not matter how magnificent a building we build. If we do not maintain it, it will collapse around our ears. That is the situation with our crumbling infrastructure around the country.

I argue the government cut too far and too deep. The manifestation of that is the surplus it has. The government has not told us the truth about the surplus. From year to year, it has deliberately lowballed it. It has consciously misled Canadians, if I can say that. Maybe I can get away with pushing the limits with a new pinch hitter in the Chair. However, I believe there has been a deliberate misinformation associated with its budgetary estimates from year to year to the point where provinces cannot plan from year to year. Every year ministers of finance, especially our current Prime Minister, have been very adept at misleading the provinces.

We have in our presence today a former provincial minister of finance who probably found himself in that situation with the federal government playing its cards very close to its chest saying that there could not be any transfer payment increases to the province for that year, and it looked pretty grim. It is like asking a prairie farmer what kind of crop he will have this year. It is always pretty grim.

I believe the government knew full it would have a windfall at the end of the year. It denies and denies and then happy coincidence it finds $6 billion or $8 billion. How can we be out by $6 billion or $8 billion? I do not believe that in today's advanced accounting practices that we can make a mistake like that, not seven years in a row.

It has the effect of tying the hands of the provinces. They cannot plan. We cannot grow a province on one time funding. After begging, pleading and negotiating the government says that it will throw a few crumbs, a one time billion dollars here or there. That is not how we grow a country. We need a long range plan. We need stable core funding to plan and project our needs down the road.

Perhaps the biggest scandal associated with the Liberal government in my view is its deliberate and conscious under representing the budget surpluses that it has had from year to year. Never mind, the treatment of those surpluses. I would argue that is a scandal too. It all goes to debt reduction and none of it goes to reinvesting in the country, to redevelop the country.

About three or four years ago there was a time when the Liberal government said that if there were a surplus, and again the big if because it would not say there would be, it would divide that surplus three ways. One-third would go to tax cuts, one-third would go to debt reduction and one-third would go to program spending.

That promise went out the window. I do not know why we cannot hold the Liberals to task on that because that was a clear commitment they made, and that simply has not happened. One year $11 billion went straight to debt reduction and not a penny to increased program development even in a needy area like mine, Winnipeg Centre.

I gave the statistic that 52% of the children in my riding live below the poverty line. There is an urgent need for early childhood development and a national child care program in this country.

I have seen the website and I read the paper that the Liberal Party's social policy committee developed on an early childhood national child care program, in which all children between the ages of three and five would have access to full time, all day long day care. Again another budget has gone by without any commitment to that lofty principle.

Instead of a long awaited national child care program, this budget adds no new money. It only accelerates the already promised funds for child care from the last budget. Again it is the shell game of announcing and re-announcing the same dollars.

The one thing in the budget that I can actually speak positively about is that the federal government has finally listened to five years of pleas on our part, five years of admonitions on our part about the fact that this country is the only country in the western world in which businesses can deduct their fines as tax deductions. Fines and penalties were tax deductible until March 23 of this year.

I do not know why it took five years. Since a 1999 Supreme Court ruling, businesses in this country could deduct their fines. We asked the ministers of finance about it. We said that surely it undermines the deterrent value of a fine if businesses can write it off as a tax deduction. It seems ludicrous. Then it became clear why Liberals were reluctant to plug this outrageous tax loophole. The current Prime Minister, the former minister of finance, received the largest fine in Canadian history for ship source pollution when one of his ships owned by the company Canada Steamship Lines dumped its bilges in the Halifax harbour and polluted the harbour.

That was the single largest environmental fine for ship source pollution in Canadian history. Presumably Canada Steamship Lines wrote off that fine as a tax deduction and had it automatically reduced. We do not know that it did because we do not have privileged access to the company's taxation, but it would have been within its rights to do so and its accountant should be fired if he did not do it for them, so we can assume that this is what happened.

Why did that take five years? It is absolutely irritating, of course, to the sensibilities of any ordinary Canadian. It was an absurd situation.

The budget again is preoccupied with debt reduction. I again am the first to admit that we have to get out from under the crippling debt, a crippling debt that developed largely under the Trudeau years and the Mulroney years. Frankly, it grew and expanded and exploded, and it was not just over-spending that led to the accumulation of this $500 billion plus debt. Part of it was the fact that we do not hold or carry our own debt internally and domestically like we once did.

In fact, our debt was farmed out to foreign banks and foreign bond holders, so we were paying interest at a much higher rate than we used to. Essentially we were paying interest on the open market. As we all know, we went through a period when there were interest rates of 12%, 14% and 18%. That debt was just compounding and spiralling out of control, partly because of our own bad policy choice, I would argue.

It is part of our campaign platform this time around to repatriate some of that debt at least, to refinance so that we do not have to make these choices of paying down the debt or providing basic needs to Canadians. We believe we can do both. We can have a sensible debt reduction program and we can still reinvest in Canadians to deal with the social deficit, reinvest in our infrastructure to deal with the infrastructure deficit in municipalities, and do any other number of other good things.

[Whistleblower Protection, April 1st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I watched the Prime Minister's latest ad scam on TV last night where he had the gall to tell Canadians that whistleblowers are now protected by legislation. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, Bill C-25 should be called an act to protect ministers from whistleblowers.

Will the government come clean and admit that its feckless idea of whistleblowing legislation is more about plugging leaks than about protecting honest civil servants?