Peter MacKay

[Supply, May 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, before the question period recess into rhetoric and retreat there was a question from the hon. member for Prince George--Buckley Valley. He asked if I could enlighten him. That is probably more than anyone in the House could do, myself included.

He wanted to know why the government would choose to send corrupt and disgraced cabinet ministers abroad. He made reference to the fact that the Prime Minister likes to boast about never having had a cabinet minister resign while in office and never having had to fire one. It is quite simply because he has lowered the bar so much one could not limbo under it.

The Prime Minister has completely done away with the principle of parliamentary responsibility, the Westminster principle that cabinet ministers take responsibility for their actions and actions that occur within their departments. That is why cabinet ministers do not resign. That is why they get dispatched to places like Denmark as a big reward in the midst of turmoil, allegations and possible RCMP investigations.

The hon. member made another reference. He talked about corruption in previous governments. I would remind him he need only look in the mirror when talking about monumental reversals of position. I remind him in particular of some of the positions his party took with respect to Stornoway, pensions, political perks and doing things differently. His party made a spectacle of bringing to parliament a new way of doing things. Its members danced outside the Senate with Mexican hats on, waved Canadian flags around and had wetsuit press conferences.

The Liberals love it when the hon. member resorts to the tactic of throwing mud at a government of 10 years ago. It plays right into their hands. However there are no lessons to be learned from the Progressive Conservative Party on reversing oneself. Thank goodness the hon. member and his party will never get into power. If they reverse themselves on these positions while in opposition let us think what they would do if they ever got a sniff of power.

[Petitions, May 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36 I have the pleasure to present a petition from the people of Canso and surrounding areas. The petitioners call on the government to take action, specifically the minister of fisheries whose denial of quota to the town of Canso has resulted in the closure of its plant.

The people of Canso are left without a livelihood. They are looking for a way to once again be contributors to their local economy and the national economy. They are calling on parliament and the minister to reconsider his decision or at the very least to come and meet with the people of Canso to discuss ways in which they can restore economic vigour.

Instead of focusing on patronage and rewarding friends the petitioners would like the government to revisit the resource centre economy in which they have been participants for almost 400 years. They call on the government to do something.

On behalf of the people of Canso and surrounding areas I am pleased to table this petition in their name. I hope the minister of fisheries will take it seriously as do the people of Canso, the mayor, the trawlermen's association, the people affected by schools and hospitals at risk of closing, and others in the town who are struggling.

On a day in which the subject matter of debate in parliament is centering on rural Canada it is time for the government to act with respect to the problems of people trying to make a living and earn respect in places like Canso, Nova Scotia in Guysborough County.

[Supply, May 6th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, my colleague's question as to whether this is a deliberate policy direction that the government has taken or whether this is sheerly by neglect is one that bears examining. I would argue that in many cases it comes down to a political direction that the government has taken, although it may be a combination of both.

The government has targeted putting in infrastructure, putting in the effort and putting in the political goodwill that it feels it has to invest in order to get re-elected.

The Liberal government reminds me a little bit of Elizabethans and sex. It claims to loathe it and protest against it but it secretly lusts for it and cannot live without it. The Liberals have made this a political issue. Instead of targeting rural Canada and saying that they need to put in the time, effort, money and infrastructure and come up with long term plans to help Canadians live and exist in communities like the hon. members and my own, they have targeted cities. They have targeted building up the areas of the country where they already hold the political power and the political base.

The Liberal vision that the hon. parliamentary secretary spoke about was the Liberal vision not the Canadian vision. Canadians are not looking to this government for inspiration or direction.

Another issue, which has not been touched on yet, is rural health care. Rural health care is a huge problem for Canadians. It impacts in a very direct and real way on the ability of Canadians to access quality health care. Do members know that 99.8% of Canada's 10 million square kilometres are rural by area and yet 31.4% of the population or roughly 9 million people live in predominantly rural areas? Towns under 10,000 account for 22% of the population and yet they are only served by 10% of the physicians. Canada's larger rural and regional centres of 10,000 to 100,000 constitute 15.9% of the population and have only 11% of the physicians.

Recruitment, retention of physicians, the ability for people living in rural Canada to access the most rudimentary medical services is waning and is in real jeopardy. In places like Canso and Guysborough they do not have the ability to get proper medical care. If it is more complicated, such as needing surgery or X-rays, they are forced to travel extensive distances. Thank goodness for the able paramedics who act as stopgaps for the fact that we are seeing many services in terms of medical procedures being done only in the urban centres. That is a huge problem for rural Canada.

I touched on the firearms registry and my colleague from Yorkton--Melville spoke at length about this issue. We talk about the priority of Canadians, particularly around policing in rural Canada, which is another big challenge because of the size of regions they have to patrol and the ability to get around to all the corners of large rural areas. Let us consider the billions of dollars being wasted by the government, with the firearms registry perhaps being the most prime example. Others that come quickly to mind were the cancellation of contracts such as Pearson and helicopters where there was no return. It was money burned. It was like driving down the Trans-Canada Highway, rolling down the window and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars out the window. That is what happened, only in that instance rural Canadians may have been able to pick it up on the side of the road. In this case it was thrown into a furnace.

We saw what happened during the HRDC scandal and the way in which that money was being funnelled into the hands of good supportive Liberals. We see it in Prince Edward Island today where the president of the Liberal Party for the island is getting hundreds of contracts and millions of dollars because of his loyalty.

That type of patronage is absolutely offensive to many Canadians. That leads to the cynicism and apathy that we are seeing in politics. Canadians are staying away in droves, which is of great benefit to the party in power because the lower the voter turnout, the lower the numbers that come out. It is the loyal Liberals who come out and vote. They win ridings with 38%. The hon. member opposite knows. He is good at it. He spreads the money around in his riding.

Rural Canada is not a priority for the government. It has not been and will not be until the voice is heard, until there is a feeling that there will be a political cost for ignoring this part of the country, for ignoring regions such as the west and the farmers with severe problems either due to drought or flooding. Members will recall the Prime Minister's visit out west in 1997. He went there and threw a couple of sandbags around. Then he headed back to Ottawa, pulled the plug and called the election. That was opportunism.

Politically motivated, corrupt and patronage is what Canadians are saying. The Prime Minister likes to brag because he has never had ministers resign. That is because he shuffles them off months later into obscurity or sends them off to a diplomatic post. Talk about corrupt. There was a good likelihood that there was going to be an RCMP investigation into the matter involving Alfonso Gagliano and all of a sudden he is representing Canada abroad in Denmark. What did the Danes do to deserve that?

That is the type of image Canadians are getting now of the government. That is the type of lasting impression and the legacy that the Prime Minister may be searching for so desperately as he reaches the end of his tenure and as the dogs around him start to close in. That is the image that Canada will have of the Prime Minister, particularly in rural parts of the country where people are suffering immensely, where students are burdened with a debt the size of a mortgage by the time they finish university or leave school to pursue a career. These are Canadians who are looking at the country and the government with a very jaded eye.

When we have these types of debates and talk about the challenges we must talk about how to be more productive. We must talk about sharing the wealth. We talk about getting money back into the hands of Canadians through incentives. We talk about getting companies to locate in rural parts of the country instead of always funneling them into the golden triangle here in Ontario. That is fine if we want to be a completely split rural-urban country.

It is ironic that we have two competing task forces, a rural task force and an urban task force. The parliamentary secretary talks about his vision for Canada and yet it has been divided up. The government has given the task forces little projects to go off and work on at separate times instead of having a national strategy or coming forward with real ideas that will allow Canadians to go back to work and be productive, to keep some of their hard earned money, to face the challenges in health care and education and to look at ways in which we can grow industries in rural Canada because the geographic challenges that used to exist are no longer there.

Technology allows Canadians to access health care via the Internet in certain instances. It allows them to participate from a rural location in the high tech industry. It allows rural Canada to benefit from greater use of natural resources like natural gas off the coast of Nova Scotia. It allows farmers to use greater technology in the implementation of their activities and access to markets. The government is an abysmal failure in terms of its response to the needs of rural Canada. It can talk all it likes and bring forward some miniscule examples but its record over time is the true test.

When Canadians ask themselves the basic, fundamental questions of whether their quality of life has improved, whether they see the Liberal government being responsible for helping them get ahead, for making sure their children have a brighter future and can live and grow, and continue to keep family and rural traditions in the country alive, do they look to the government with any sense of hope or optimism? Sadly not.

When the rhetorical question is asked from the opposite side: how will this change? There is only one way it will change and that is when the government is defeated and there is a government that is sensitive, open to ideas and prepared to act on behalf of rural Canada.

[Supply, May 6th, 2002]

The hon. member says that more people are working. Yes, more people are working because of free trade, a policy which the Liberals adamantly campaigned against. Members may remember the duplicitous flip-flop of the Prime Minister. He was going to rip it up along with the GST, another monumental olympian backflip done by the Prime Minister.

That is why Canadians feel that the government itself is corrupt and that it is deceiving people. Canadians are completely disgusted with the performance of the government and the Prime Minister. I would say that the percentage of Canadians who feel that way is even higher in rural Canada. If we were to look at the numbers representing how people in rural Canada view the government and its level of corruption, those numbers would be up at 80% to 90%. Canadians, rural and urban, are doing well in spite of the government, not because of it.

I will now turn my attention to an issue that has plagued a region within Nova Scotia for some time and that region is the town of Canso in Guysborough county. What is taking place in that historic little town is indicative of what has gone on, particularly in provinces like Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to some extent. The scenario playing out there is simply tragic. It is a perfect example of what happens when a government bails out and completely backs away from its responsibility to help people living in rural regions of Canada. It is happening in Burgeo, in Trepassey and in all kinds of communities.

The same argument could be made for what has happened to farmers and what is currently playing out in British Columbia with respect to the forestry issue. The government is simply walking away. It is simply saying that it is not its problem. It has failed in terms of its negotiations with the Americans on the softwood lumber deal in the same way that talks broke down with respect to the potato import issue in Prince Edward Island.

There was a time when the Prime Minister of Canada may have taken a personal initiative by calling the president of the United States to deal with an issue in an upfront, straightforward way. This Prime Minister used to berate the previous Conservative government by saying it was going fishing but now golf is the flavour of the day. We know how much President Clinton and the Prime Minister used to hit the links. We know the Prime Minister himself used to own a golf course so he has a specific interest in that area of real estate.

What is more important is that we address these particular challenges. We can go into a number of areas and a myriad of solutions could be found but it must happen soon, particularly in places where the infrastructure is struggling and crumbling. I am speaking of roads in rural parts of the country, the very lifeline that allows farmers, fishermen and forestry workers to get their products to market. How on earth can a farmer get his beef to a market if the roads do not allow passage? How can we get an oil and gas industry going on the east coast if it involves taking heavy equipment over bridges that do not have the capacity to hold that equipment?

We know the government abandoned the ports and the ports police. It pulled out all the supports for the upkeep, maintenance and safety of ports. That has been completely eviscerated by the government through the policies it has put in place.

I want to turn back to the town of Canso for a moment. A plant in Canso, which is currently closed, employed over half of the entire population of the village. People are now looking to the government, not only for access to resources but for assistance to ensure they will be able to live and prosper in what was once a very prosperous village.

The government can talk about these issues. It can talk about travelling, about hearing from people and about displaying all sorts of compassion but it needs to display some initiative. It needs to show that it is prepared to do something, not just come up with another study that quotes statistics on how bad it really is.

We need initiatives that will allow people to keep more of their money. We need initiatives that will allow students to handle their debt. We need the government to take some initiative and cancel programs that are not working, one being the gun registry which is a huge waste of money.

Time and again we hear the talk, the rhetoric and the political promises and yet the true record will show that those promises have been broken time and again, and all Canadians see it.

[Supply, May 6th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased and honoured to have an opportunity to speak to this supply day motion, this debate that has been brought forward by the Alliance. I think it is very timely. Coming from the rural riding of Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough, I am very pleased to say that I empathize greatly with the sense of frustration that many people are feeling in the rural parts of Canada.

I come from a riding where a great number of people still make their living in the fishery and they still make their living by getting up early every day and going to work in fields and in forests. These very same people in the riding I represent and in ridings across the country are feeling a sense of abandonment, in many cases a sense of hopelessness in pursuing their way of life in rural Canada, because of policies that the government has introduced and pursued.

The motion itself speaks of calling on the government to “cease and desist its sustained...political attacks on the lives and livelihoods of rural Canadians”. I would disagree with the motion only insofar as I do not think that this attack is intentional. I think it is a byproduct of rural Canada being ignored. I do not think it registers on the political radar screen of the government, for simple, terrible political reasons.

The concentration of the population of the country is increasingly being found in the urban centres. The last demographic surveys from Statistics Canada indicated that Canadians are headed in droves to big cities: Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. That is fine. That is the freedom of mobility. Yet they are being forced to do so because of lack of employment, lack of opportunities and lack of attention from the federal government.

The Liberals have been in office for almost 10 years. They have been in power for almost a decade to the detriment of rural Canada. I want to acknowledge that the parliamentary secretary comes from an rural area himself and has very clearly demonstrated a concern about this issue. I commend him for that. I commend him for taking the issue and trying to bring it forward, yet I cannot help but be disappointed with some of the political rhetoric that already we have heard in this debate. We will hear more of it. We will hear it from all sides. It will not help to address the fundamental problems and the challenges that rural Canadians are continually faced with.

The Progressive Conservative Party has consistently spoken out for rural Canada in this parliament and in previous parliaments. We have brought in policies that were aimed at infrastructure and aimed at helping rural Canadians. The Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island is a perfect example. It was aimed at helping transport goods to market. We helped bring in policies and took initiatives to get shipbuilding projects, like the frigates in Saint John. We helped bring in policies that allowed parts of rural Canada to access undersea resources the same way that underground resources are accessed in the west.

The hon. members opposite do not like to acknowledge that. They do not let truth get in the way when we are talking about issues such as this, but the record is there. It speaks for itself.

I want to take some time to talk about some of the specific issues that are challenging young people, people from families that have lived in rural Canada for generations. In the three counties I represent, Pictou, Antigonish and Guysborough, there are severe problems facing industries like the fisheries: Little Dover, Ecum Secum, River John and Merigomish, places where for centuries people have lived and worked and existed by virtue of relying on natural resources. It is not just fisheries. Clearly forestry and farming complete that three pronged pillar that has kept the country growing.

Let us not forget that the country was built out of rural Canada. The origins of the country completely sprung up from rural Canada and the hard work, sweat and strain of people, our ancestors, who recognized that they had to be productive, they had to be innovative and they had to work hard to build the country. They are still there. The ancestors of those original settlers are still very much engaged in that exercise. It is that passion, that difference in culture, I would suggest, that is sometimes what is challenging for the government. It has lost touch with that pioneering, frontiering attitude that exists in the rural parts of Canada.

We have to ask ourselves some basic questions when examining the government's performance. The questions are simple: Is our health care system getting better? Do we feel we are making more money now and keeping more of it? Do we feel the country is being more productive?

[Supply, May 6th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, in answer to the secretary of state's rhetorical question, what has to change obviously is the Government of Canada. When he speaks about partisanship, we have not seen a more partisan, poisoned, duplicitous government in the last century. This member should know that.

He talks about rural Canada in his condescending way and how somehow his government is speaking to rural issues. He heads up this committee and good for him. It is about time after a decade that the government turned its mind to Atlantic Canada, to other parts of the west, to Quebec and to the provinces that are really struggling because of his government's policies.

He wants solutions and wants to talk about what he could do. He could do away with some of the clawback provisions that are hurting provinces like Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador as they try to develop their offshore oil and gas. He could do a great deal to put money back into infrastructure such as roads and bridges. He could take initiatives aimed specifically at helping students in rural Canada so they can stay and work and live in their communities.

The member talks about his government somehow being a protector of Atlantic Canada or rural Canada with policies like gun registry that suck $700 million out of the pockets of people, specifically impacting on rural Canada. What specifically has the government done for rural Canada except another study? What a waste of time.

[Public Safety Act, May 2nd, 2002]

More tools, Mr. Speaker.

Unrest over Liberal bills such as species at risk, cruelty to animals and now Bill C-55 indicate that not all is well in the Liberal kingdom. Leadership candidates are beating the bushes. Backbenchers are restless and sabre rattling. The loyal subjects are not happy. They figured out their emperor has no clothes. Liberal colleagues relegated to the hinterland of the sultan of Shawinigan's caucus feel Bill C-55 in its entirety does not belong at the transport committee.

We know the Prime Minister will not listen to the opposition or his compliant watchdogs, but will he heed his caucus, divide up Bill C-55 and send it to the appropriate committees?

[Public Safety Act, May 2nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, even the Liberal appointed privacy commissioner strongly condemns Bill C-55, calling it totalitarian. It is also disturbing and draconian in nature, yet another example of a Liberal power grab. Once again parliament is becoming a clearing house for prime ministerial decrees. The concentration of unchecked arbitrary power will increase under Bill C-55.

Why does the Prime Minister feel it necessary to infringe on the rights of Canadians? Why is he so intent on having his legislation and his government avoid parliamentary scrutiny?

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, it is a very good question. I suspect that there is some nefarious means or purpose or perhaps it is just something arbitrary. We know the old expression about what dogs do to themselves and why they can.

This type of approach really defies logic. For example, there is no need to bring in this type of legislation at all or at least there is no need to bring it in in a fashion which usurps so many existing safeguards. Why would it go to transport given all of the unrelated elements of the bill? There is an entirely flawed argument to suggest that somehow the bill, even with its one-third percentage relating to transport, somehow lies under the jurisdiction of the transport department.

As the hon. member enunciated yesterday, it deals with issues that are certainly far better suited to be brought before the justice committee where there would be more access to scrutiny and experts who would have constitutional perspectives, which are important when examining this legislation. The watchdogs, the reports, the information that is available would allow for the stripping away of some of the most offensive elements of the legislation bringing the bill back to the centre where it should be when attempting to protect Canadians from intrusive, nefarious elements that might exist. There might also be an element of the upcoming summits in Halifax and in Kananaskis that--

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from Churchill who spoke yesterday in a very eloquent and very passionate way about the real dangers that exist in having procedures and processes in place that do not allow for the true scrutiny of the surrounding circumstances. We have interim orders. Those are temporary orders that suspend property rights, civil liberties and the protection of private information.

Simply with a stroke of a pen the minister can say that people's rights no longer exist. When allegations are made in a court of law, at least we have a forum to appear before. People can ask that the evidence be produced, habeas corpus, and that they be allowed to present their side of the story. For 45 days that is suspended. For 23 days the government does not even have to tell us why we may have had those civil liberties taken away.

Under the old Emergency Measures Act, the government had to come back to parliament within one week. It had to bear the scrutiny and the input of members of the Chamber who were elected constitutionally and elected by the people of this country.

This is a power grab. This is all about sidestepping important processes that have existed since this country began. The government again should hang its head in shame for trying to foist this type of legislation, slide it by Canadians and use all of its powers of media manipulation and use its spin doctors and its information massagers to suggest that somehow this would benefit Canadians and protect them. What this will do is infringe upon the rights of Canadians. It will pull the rug out from under them and leave them shaking their heads wondering how they could have voted this government into office and then have it turn around and use those powers with which it was entrusted against them in such an arbitrary and unchecked way?