Pat Martin

[Senate Reform Act, December 8th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, my first thought, as I came into the chamber today to enter into the debate on the bill, was that here we go again, tinkering with an outdated, obsolete vestige of colonialism, something that is unworthy in its makeup and in the institution itself of any legitimate western democracy.

We are wasting the time of Parliament debating, tinkering with the Senate when, as per the policy of the NDP since the 1930s, the Senate should be abolished. It has outlived any usefulness and now it is just an instrument of abuse, pure, political and partisan pork.

There has never been a prime minister who has so abused the Senate and taken partisan advantage as the current Prime Minister, with 32 appointments. After being the one who agreed that the Senate was an outdated and obsolete institution, he has been stacking the Senate for purely partisan reasons.

Let me give an example of this. The president of the Conservative Party, the campaign manager of the Conservative Party, the chief fundraiser of the Conservative Party, the director of communications for the Conservative Party, the entire Conservative war room is now sitting in the Senate, pulling down $130,000 a year of taxpayers money, with staff, travel privileges and resources.

Who was the campaign manager in the last provincial election in my home province of Manitoba? The Conservative Senator from Manitoba, and I do not know if I am allowed to use his name. The former president of the Conservative Party was power shooted into Manitoba on the taxpayer nickel to work full time in partisan activities. He never has to stand for an election because he is there for life to act as an agent of the Conservative Party, not as the chamber of sober second thought, and is salaried, staffed and paid for in a direct subsidy by the taxpayers of Canada. It is appalling and it is atrocious. The senate should be abolished. It is a disgrace that we are using up time in our chamber to even re-arrange the deckchairs on that ridiculous institution.

There must be some old Reformers who have a hard time looking at themselves in the mirror, considering the things they used to say about the Senate. Now they are one. They have become what they used to most criticize. They have tossed overboard every principle on which they were founded in the interest of political expediency. They have been jettisoned over side. It is a disgrace.

Even as we speak, the Senate is sabotaging the Canadian Wheat Board bill with extra sittings. Because the courts have ruled against it, and it is against the rule of law, it is, lickety split, ramming this through. How could the Senate, in all good conscience, pass a bill that the courts have ruled against? It is one of its very functions, or used to be at least, to catch and correct any time that this chamber somehow passes a law that offends the Charter of Rights, the Constitution or the rule of law. That bill offends the rule of law, yet those senators are ramming it through.

It is possible that the Governor General, at least, will refuse to grant royal assent to a bill that the courts have struck down. As another vestige of colonialism, we have to ask permission of the Crown. When there is a runaway freight train of political expediency, like the current gang, like a bunch of six-year-old bullies who take advantage of their power to ram things through and run roughshod over everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy, without even taking into account the rule of law, maybe those guys, if they are worth anything, will intercept the bill at the Senate stage, as will the Governor General at that stage, so the Conservatives cannot ram that bill through.

The other thing I want to speak about, in the brief time that we have, is this. It offends me to the core of my being that we end up having to deal with bills that originate in the Senate. In fact, those bills have primacy over the work of the chamber to which we members of Parliament have been elected.

We wait and wait our turn patiently to have our private members' bills heard. If our bill is lucky enough to get on the order of precedence, maybe we will be able to fulfill a dream of having our particular hobby horse heard in the House of Commons. The unelected chamber, senators generate bills, never mind reviewing legislation that we put together, and their bills come to this chamber and go to the top of the list, bumping the bills of members of Parliament. It is appalling. It makes my blood boil just thinking of it. I cannot believe there are people who call themselves democrats on that side of the House who put up with this ridiculous, almost embarrassing situation.

What Conservatives have proposed in the interests of democratic reform actually causes such a mess it will be pandemonium. There will be two and three different tiers of senators. We would have the elected senators and the senators who are there for life. Which ones have primacy then? Which ones have more weight? If we ever did go to a fully elected Senate, would that be the upper chamber? Would that be the senior chamber and how would the political dynamics work?

Every province in the federation of Canada wrestled with this issue and every province came to the same conclusion. They abolished their upper chamber and ensured there was adequate representation within the structure of their legislatures. We do not need a Senate.

There is an old joke about the radical diet. If one wants to lose 40 pounds of ugly fat, just cut off one's head. In this case, we could lose $200 million of utter waste just by chopping off the head of the Senate and eliminating it. We would keep the building. The chamber itself is a lovely place. I have no problem with the chamber. It is an architectural delight and it should be preserved and maintained, but the maintenance budget of the Senate chamber might be a couple of grand a year. The maintenance budget of each one of those political appointees, and I use that word in the politest way I could phrase it, costs us a fortune.

In actual fact, senators are hacks, flacks and bagmen and I do not just accuse the Conservatives. I am thinking of the most famous Liberal bagman in Manitoba who wound up in the Senate, and I will not mention his name. The most infamous Conservative bagman went right into the Senate so he could continue his partisan fundraising paid for by the taxpayer. While there, they were the architects of the biggest political election fraud in the history of Canada. Charged, tried, convicted, found guilty and they are sitting in the chamber as we speak, scheming their next election tricks.

I wish somebody watched these debates. If people only knew what we put up with by the other chamber, they would be appalled and would demand true reform in the form of abolishing that wasteful, archaic, outdated, obsolete relic of colonialism, that last vestige of colonialism that we wear around our necks like an albatross. It is like having an anchor dragging behind a boat, having the Canadian Senate as an obstacle to democracy. Senators do not enhance democracy. They sabotage and undermine democracy. Twice in the history of Canada—

[Senate Reform Act, December 8th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Liberal Party for his views on Bill C-7, the act respecting the selection of senators.

Earlier today, during routine proceedings, there were no fewer than three pieces of legislation introduced in the House of Commons that had their origins in the other place, the unelected, undemocratic Senate. I would like to ask him if he shares my view that it is completely inappropriate for the democratically elected House of Commons to be guided by and, in fact, have its business interrupted and interfered with by bills originating in the Senate, which take primacy and bump the business of the House of Commons.

Regardless of the fact whether he shares the NDP's view that the Senate should be abolished, does he at least concede that it is inappropriate and wrong for the Senate to be dictating the course of action and the debate in the elected chamber, the House of Commons?

[Canadian Wheat Board, December 7th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, during the federal election the Minister of Agriculture promised prairie farmers they would get a chance to vote on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board. We now know that the Conservatives not only broke their promise to farmers, the courts say they broke the law.

The Conservatives punted the member for Edmonton East out of their caucus for failing to blow a breathalyzer test. What is the big law and order party going to do to a minister who flagrantly breaks the law? They should send him to the showers.

[Asbestos, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, it is bad enough that the government will not ban asbestos, but do we have to be the number one cheerleader for the asbestos cartel? It is bad enough that Conservatives spend millions of dollars subsidizing the industry, but now they want India to take the tariff off this made-in-Canada epidemic so they can export their human misery duty-free.

It makes me wonder. They are always talking about siding with the victims. Why are they doing the asbestos cartel's dirty work? Why do Conservatives not stand up for the victims of asbestos both in this country and abroad?

[Fair Representation Act, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, it is true that we should be careful not to take too simplistic an approach toward representation in this country. It is not as simple as taking the population and simply dividing it and getting the number of seats. We have never been that way in this country.

A number of elements and factors need to be considered before the design of this chamber is agreed upon. P.E.I. and northern Canada have been used as examples. Providing reasonable representation is not as simple and straightforward as the Conservatives would have us believe.

[Fair Representation Act, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, we have put forward a private member's bill, after much thought and consultation with the constituent groups that form the official opposition, that would put in place a framework and a foundation that would underpin the consultation that would lead to the answer to the question that my colleague has put.

The difference between us and the Conservative Party in this matter is that it is important for us to get the fundamentals in place and build from the foundation up in a consultative approach instead of a prescriptive approach. We are proposing a consultative approach.

[Fair Representation Act, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, often we are told, when we enter into areas that may require constitutional reform, that there is no appetite on the part of Canadians to reopen the Constitution for any reason, that Canadians are tired of constitutional reform, that after that period in the late eighties with Meech Lake and the early nineties with the Charlottetown accord, that, and this is a term I always hear, there is no appetite to revisit it.

I think anybody who says that is actually misreading the will and the interests of the Canadian people. I think there is a great interest and a great appetite. In fact, there has been a generational change. It has been 20 years since the failure of the Charlottetown accord. There is a whole new generation of Canadians who have never had this debate. They have never been consulted.

This is why I believe that the patchwork quilt initiative of addressing one shortcoming, but without even any knowledge of how it might impact other shortcomings, is short-sighted.

[Fair Representation Act, December 6th, 2011]

They didn't know me very well. That's right.

Somehow I got through the screening process and was chosen as an ordinary Canadian to participate in a cross-country consultation of great value and great merit.

This was put on by the previous Conservative government, hosted by its minister of foreign affairs at the time, Joe Clark. The government went to great effort and great expense to truly consult Canadians on a number of pressing issues that we believed were necessary. We can imagine what was going on in Canadian history at that time, but it was based on the premise that our Canadian Federation and the Constitution that holds it together is a very fragile construct. It needs to be maintained, nourished and updated on an ongoing basis in order to maintain the fabric. It is a fragile thing that we have thrown together here.

I was surprised to learn that there are fewer than 20 federations in the world. Of all the countries in the world, less than 20 are federations because they are, by definition, difficult to knit together for a common purpose and a common goal.

At that time, three out of those 20 federations were at risk. One of them, the Soviet Union, is now gone. Another one, Yugoslavia, is now gone. The third one that was on the species at risk list was Canada. There was genuine concern at that time that we might not be able to keep this country together. The dynamics, the disparate, legitimate interests of the participating parties to our federation were not satisfied and were frustrated. They felt that the Confederation was not serving their needs as was the commitment made at Confederation.

Therefore, this bold, courageous enterprise took effect, and we had five meetings across the country. The 160 of us chosen as ordinary Canadians formed the nucleus. Then they invited about 1,000 or 2,000 more in each of the five cities in which we had these meetings. The 160 who were chosen were given a backgrounder in the complexity of the makeup of the Canadian Confederation and the reasoning behind why we have the two chambers, the efficacy of the two chambers, the representation in this chamber as opposed to the lack of representation in the other.

All of that was a great history lesson for a lot of ordinary Canadians so that we could make an informed recommendation as to what kind of changes were necessary to add value to Confederation and to amend the Constitution to ensure the viability of a great nation and to take us off the species at risk list for countries with federation as their makeup. We believed it was a sad thing that Canada was even on that list. However, the issue of representation by population was key and integral to our dialogue.

We had these five special meetings and, at the very end, it was decided we needed a sixth meeting because we forgot that there were not two founding nations that formed this country, that there were first nations, as well, and that somehow, perhaps due to tradition, we had left them out of the debate. We had another sixth round dealing with aboriginal people.

Since that time, I have travelled to and learned a great deal about the country of New Zealand, another Commonwealth country with which we have great relations. It has seats reserved in its house of commons for the Maori people. They are set aside, guaranteed. They are not limited to that number of seats but they are guaranteed that number of seats and, should they win more by the proportional representation system, so be it. but they are guaranteed representation in their house of commons.

That is the kind of debate and the type of consultation that we should have had going into such an important subject matter. One of the themes throughout all the speakers from the New Democratic Party in the context of this debate is that if we are going to do this now, we had better do it right. There is a bigger picture here than just the simplistic mathematics of ensuring that every seat represents 111,316 constituents. That is the easiest part of the debate. That does not even touch on the thornier issues that are at stake here if we are to reopen the debate on the type of democratic reform that is necessary in this country to maintain the integrity of a great nation with a great Constitution.

The one thing that we learned in the cross-country consultations leading up to the Charlottetown accord is that we need to be ever vigilant to maintain a constitution. A constitution is a living, breathing document. It is not rigid or carved in granite with a chisel. It is something that needs to be revisited on a regular basis, nurtured, watered and watered in a respectful way.

I am fully cognizant of and will acknowledge freely that it is difficult for members of Parliament when one is tasked with representing 88,000 constituents, as I represent, and another member of Parliament with the same budget, the same amount of staff and the same amount of resources representing 131,000, Just by ratio, one would think that the member will have more casework. I am critical, though, that while we do compensate members of Parliament with a greater constituency office budget if they represent a greater geographic area, and we do compensate members of Parliament with a supplementary budget if they represent larger numbers of people, we do not make any accommodation for members of Parliament who may represent areas of greater need.

I represent an area where 47% of all the families live below the poverty line and 52% of all the children in my riding live below the poverty line. Low income people, in fact poverty, puts people in a constant state of crisis and those people need a disproportionate amount of support. The average family income in my riding is less than $30,000 a year. If the average family income in a riding is $130,000, people are not likely to go knocking on the door of their member of Parliament nearly as often as when people are thrown out of an apartment, their social assistance cheque has not arrived or their children have been scooped up by child and family services. Poor people are in crisis on a regular basis. I wish we could acknowledge and recognize that some members of Parliament are dealt with far more pressing casework than people who want to go to the Bahamas for their Christmas holidays and their passport is late arriving.

We are dealing with an incredibly important issue here. I believe it is negligent of us not to be dealing with some of the larger issues regarding democratic reform in the context of doing the math on dividing up the seats in the House of Commons. This is one of those bills that has not gestated, not finished. It is being rushed through without due consideration and it would benefit from a broad cross-country consultation, perhaps not of the magnitude of the consultation that led to the Charlottetown accord, but surely more input from more groups, more organizations and more Canadians who could tell us what they want done with their democratic institutions.

We can point to the other chamber, the undemocratic, unelected Senate, which is burning up resources at breakneck speed. Perhaps ordinary Canadians now, in these times of budgetary restraint, would have some input and some guidance as to whether we really need a second chamber at all or whether that is just some place for senators to go globe-trotting around the world on parliamentary junkets.

[Fair Representation Act, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to join in the debate on Bill C-20 because, members might be interested to know, perhaps even before I got into politics, I was seized with the issue of constitutional reform, as it relates to democratic reform, in my days working as a carpenter. I answered an advertisement in The Globe and Mail back in 1991, I believe, looking for interested Canadians who may want to participate in what was at that time a very bold and unique venture, which was a cross-country consultation with Canadians, to have a discussion, a debate, about opening the Constitution to address a number of the irritants, as it were, that threatened the integrity of our Confederation.

As fate would have it, my name was chosen to be one of what they called “ordinary Canadians” who would form a citizen assembly.

[Petitions, December 6th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to present a petition signed by literally thousands of Canadians from all across Canada who call upon Parliament to take note that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer that the world has ever known and that more Canadians now die of asbestos than from all other occupational industrial causes combined. Yet, they point out, Canada remains one of the largest producers and exporters of asbestos in the world, spending millions of dollars subsidizing the asbestos industry and blocking international efforts to curb its use.

Therefore, these petitioners call upon the government to ban asbestos in all of its forms and institute a just transition program for the asbestos workers and the communities they live in; to end all government subsidies of asbestos, both in Canada and abroad; and to stop blocking international health and safety conventions designed to protect workers from asbestos, such as the Rotterdam Convention.