Pat Martin

[Access to Information, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court calls access to information laws quasi-constitutional in their weight and import, and the public's right to know what their government is doing is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy, but the access to information system in this country is broken. It is a farce. It is completely dysfunctional. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments have refused to fix it.

It was the culture of secrecy that allowed corruption to flourish in the Liberal years. The Conservative government is even worse. The government is obsessed with secrecy. The Conservatives habitually abuse the use of section 15 exemptions under the act and they virtually deny access through unreasonable delays.

I am holding here one letter from National Defence headquarters that gives itself an extension of 300 days to fill a basic request for information. This is absurd.

The government is obsessed with secrecy. If we do nothing else in this minority Parliament, we must reform the Access to Information Act. The public has a right to know.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the public's right to know is one of those fundamental cornerstones in any western democracy. The freedom of information and the flow of information is one of those checks and balances by which we ensure our government is operating the way that we want it. It provides scrutiny and shines the light of day on the operations of government.

I suppose the idea of this newly struck committee is to hopefully pry from the government some of the information about how the Afghan mission is being carried out, to wrestle some of that information from the government that it has been so reluctant to share with Canadians through the normal avenues of recourse, such as the access to information laws.

I wonder if my colleague agrees with me that this particular government seems obsessed with secrecy about the Afghan mission.

I am holding a letter here from the Department of National Defence, an access to information coordinator's letter, telling our critic here that the department wants another 300 days to answer a fairly straightforward question about a press release it sent out recently. This is an additional 300 days to fill a fairly ATI straightforward request.

Will my colleague share his views on the culture of secrecy that the government has adopted?

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, there are two things I took note of when my colleague from Scarborough was speaking. The first was that he pointed out a fact put forward by my colleague, the defence critic for the NDP, which is that in this country at this time there is a freedom of information chill associated with the Afghan war.

There is a saying that freedom of information is the oxygen democracy breathes. If that is the case, we are having a smog day in Ottawa in everything associated with the Afghan mission, and my colleague was right to point this out. If for no other reason, it is justified to create this committee. Perhaps that committee will be able to pry free the information that is otherwise being denied to people through the ordinary system. My colleague received just today a letter stating that it will be another 300 days to answer a fairly straightforward access to information request submitted months ago. That is one thing I would ask my colleague to comment on.

Second, he stood and started talking about the contracts associated with the Afghan war and a chill ran up and down my spine, because there is always a business case for war. If we look at the Hansard debates during the second world war and the Korean war, we will see that a great deal of time was spent worrying about who was getting these lucrative, juicy contracts associated with profiteering from the war. I was disappointed to hear my colleague start talking about “me too, we want some of those juicy contracts associated with killing--

[Currency Act, April 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, that is right. This bill is about the abolition of the penny and I will keep it to that.

I am proud to introduce this bill. Many Canadians believe the penny is an expensive nuisance. They believe that we are spending $130 million a year to produce something that no one wants or needs. Therefore, this bill would phase it out of circulation. It would make it so that the penny would no longer be legal tender as of January 1, 2009 and it would introduce a rounding system whereby prices would be adjusted to the nearest nickel.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Currency Act, April 2nd, 2008]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-531, An Act to amend the Currency Act and the Royal Canadian Mint Act (abolition of the cent).

Mr. Speaker, let me clear. This is the abolition of the cent, not the abolition of the Senate.

This bill is based on the premise that the penny is of no commercial value. It does not circulate and it costs more to produce than it is worth. I guess there are some parallels to the Senate. There are approximately 20 billion pennies--

[Committees of the House, March 14th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the chair of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, for moving concurrence in the report from our committee today. As I remember, it was a very straightforward and simple report. It simply announced to the House of Commons that our committee had concluded the witness phase of the study into the Airbus Mulroney-Schreiber scandal, as it has come to be known.

First, I want to thank my colleague, the member from Mississauga, for the work he has done on that committee and for having the fortitude and the wisdom that it takes to be a good chair juggling a very difficult issue of national importance and of interest to the whole country. I think he has done a great service to Canadians by keeping an even keel on this study and making sure that it moved forward to its logical conclusion.

I would like to remark on a few of the points he made.

First, there is no excuse any more for the Government of Canada to postpone the full public inquiry that this report calls for. The Prime Minister said he did not want to begin the public inquiry because there might be overlap between witnesses that the ethics committee calls and witnesses that the public inquiry calls. We have finished with witnesses. We have announced that formally. Our chair stood in the House of Commons and made a public declaration. We are done. There is really no excuse or reason not to begin the public inquiry.

I will also say that there is no excuse for the Government of Canada to announce a very narrow public inquiry, limited, for instance, to just the cash payments given in hotel rooms to the former prime minister, because as recently as today, as my colleague points out, this ground that Dr. Johnston said has been well-tilled and adequately researched is still revealing new truths.

Just today, a senator in the current Parliament of Canada has revealed how important that Bear Head file was to the former prime minister, Mr. Mulroney, how it was key and paramount, and how it was the very first file given to him in the newly struck ACOA portfolio that he was given.

I have a simple question for my colleague. It is my view that no amount of bafflegab will ever take the stink off those sacks full of cash and secret hotel room meetings. There is no amount of excuses that the former prime minister can offer Canadians to defend that, but let me ask my colleague if it is not just as important that we go beyond the sacks full of cash and research the genesis of the scandal, which is Karlheinz Schreiber, an unrepentant Nazi, which is what the German media calls him, interfering with Canadian politics by buying our next prime minister.

That is shocking: the CEO of Airbus creating a prime minister and then having that prime minister buy airplanes from him. If that is not worth investigating, I do not know what is.

[Points of Order, March 14th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I do rise on the same point just briefly, if you will allow me a moment, as it was the leader of my party who asked the question yesterday that seems to have set this off.

We too are speaking on behalf of Mr. Wells who, as a private citizen and as a personal individual, had his personal and private information dragged before the House of Commons in a way that only someone with privileged inside access could have knowledge of.

I would just remind the Chair of one ruling in Marleau and Montpetit that speaks to this. I hope the parliamentary secretary is taking note and that he will pass this on to the minister from yesterday.

On page 77, under “Privileges and Immunities”, dealing with the right to free speech in the House of Commons, Speaker Parent is quoted as saying:

“...paramount to our political and parliamentary systems is the principle of freedom of speech, a member's right to stand in this House unhindered to speak his or her mind. However when debate in the House centres on sensitive issues, as it often does, I would expect that members would always bear in mind the possible effects of their statements and hence be prudent in their tone and choice of words”.

Speakers have also stated that although there is a need for Members to express their opinions openly in a direct fashion, it is also important that citizens' reputations are not unfairly attacked. In a ruling on a question of privilege, Speaker Fraser expressed his concern that an individual who was not a Member of the House had been referred to by name and noted that this concern had also been shared by some Members who had participated in the discussion....

When we drag the personal, confidential, commercial information of a private individual before this House of Commons in a way that could easily be taken as a politically slanted and biased opinion, because let us face it, the government of the day is virtually at war with the friends of the Canadian Wheat Board, the National Farmers Union and all farmers who are opposed to its ideological crusade to smash and undermine the Canadian Wheat Board, when the minister uses that information to sully the reputation or to try to smear the reputation of a private citizen, they have abused their privileges of the right to free speech in the House and left no avenue of recourse for the individual.

The flip side of the coin, of members' privilege to say whatever they want in the House, is the right of citizens to be able to defend themselves. However, they have no such recourse when those comments are made within the parliamentary privilege. That is why the Speaker has to take care that members do not abuse that privilege and malign private citizens.

[Canadian Content in Public Transportation Projects, March 12th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to join briefly in the debate to lend my support to this noble idea, this worthy initiative to revisit the made in Canada procurement policies generally.

In this case, the motion is specific to municipalities and their purchase of transit buses and transit systems, but we need to take this opportunity to contemplate our appalling made in Canada procurement system, which fails us in so many ways. I rise just briefly to interject, because something happened in the province of Manitoba in my home city of Winnipeg and, Mr. Speaker, in your home riding, just this last year, something of which everybody in the House should take note.

If we want to talk about a made in Canada procurement policy collapsing, falling down and failing to protect Canadian jobs and workers, there is the example of Motor Coach Industries. I believe we make the best buses in the world here in Canada, but when our army, our military, wanted to buy troop carrier buses, they ended up buying German ones.

Motor Coach Industries, in the heart of Winnipeg and the heart of your riding, Mr. Speaker--and this should frost your socks too--put in a bid that was $2,000 per unit more expensive than the German price. On buses worth $500,000 each, and there were 34 of these buses, the difference in price was $2,000 each and the Canadian military bought the German bus instead. That difference is less than the cost of a set of tires for those buses.

Our tax dollars are now creating jobs for that bus company in Germany. Perhaps the worst thing of all, and the reason that we should reconsider all of this made in Canada procurement, is that our NATO allies see Canadian troops getting ferried around in German buses, so the Canadians might as well say that if anyone wants a good troop carrier bus they should buy the German one.

That is what we did, even though in our own backyard and your own riding, Mr. Speaker, we make the best buses in the world, I would argue. Frankly, the Canadian military mostly runs MCI buses. The military now has to bring in new mechanics, new training, a new parts inventory and new warehousing just to accommodate this little cluster of foreign made buses instead of buying Canadian.

I am heartened and encouraged when the House of Commons is seized of an issue like a made in Canada procurement policy, but I had to reinforce the need for my colleague's bill by this graphic example in the heart of the city of Winnipeg and the heart of your riding, Mr. Speaker.

I hope that my colleague's motion will have a ripple effect and that we will revisit our made in Canada procurement policy generally for all of our government procurement.

[Petitions, March 12th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition from thousands of Canadians from right across the country. They note that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known, yet Canada remains one of the largest producers and exporters of asbestos in the world. Canada spends millions subsidizing the asbestos industry and blocking international efforts to curb its use all around the world.

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

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, would my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre take a message to the leadership of her party, as she asks us to do in our party?

Has she ever, in the period of time that the Liberals were in government, raised with her party the fact that they were the most right-wing, neo-Conservative government in the history of Canada and that their idea of social policy, their idea of addressing poverty in the inner city of the city that we share, was to cut, hack and slash every social program by which we define ourselves as Canadians?

The Canadian people tossed her party out of government, ran them out of government on a rail, virtually tarred and feathered them on the way out because they broke faith with the Canadian people. They not only broke their word and broke their social contract with Canadians to act in their best interests, they stole from them. They were corrupt.

I have listened to this self-serving opposition day motion of the Liberals today and it boggles my mind that they have the temerity to stand up with some revisionist history, and try to paint themselves as the champions of social justice and poverty fighters when they, who had it in their ability to do so, chose to do nothing.

I do not know if it was Dante, but somebody reserved a special corner of hell for those who had the ability to prevent evil, and chose not to do so and not to act.

The Liberals had the ability to make a big impact on child poverty, social inequity, women's rights and child care. Instead, when they were faced with surplus budget after surplus budget, they cut and hacked social programs, and chose to give tax cuts to their buddies on Bay Street and nothing to Main Street.

The area I represent in Winnipeg is the poorest zone in all of Canada. Believe me, in the 13 year tenure that the Liberal Party ruled this land it went from bad to worse. Child poverty: 52% of all the children in my riding live below the poverty line. It was 40% when the Liberals took over. Instead of using--