Peter Stoffer

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, the only brownie points to be gained here are by that member trying to get into the cabinet one day.

He wanted to know where we can save money: $211 million is being spent on a new Gothic building in the National Capital region; $100 million was spent on Challenger jets which DND said were not needed; and almost $1 billion on Bill C-68, the gun legislation, which was only supposed to cost $85 million.

The former Liberal minister of health, the hon. Monique Bégin, was in our caucus this morning and said that if the federal and provincial administrative aspects of the health care system were organized better, then 15% could be saved on costs. That means billions of dollars could be saved.

If the hon. member wants to know where the money could from without raising taxes, the government could do a much better job of managing the federal departments. It could then ensure that departments like the Coast Guard would get the funding they needed.

We are not here to score brownie points. We are here to convince that minister and this member that the argument is valid and true and that the men and women of the Coast Guard require more resources and better direction than they are getting now.

Could the member comment on that?

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, my hon. colleague from the Canadian Alliance is the official DFO critic for his party. I must say that he brings a wealth of knowledge as a commercial fisherman in the past to the Coast Guard and DFO debate. I thank him and members of his party very much for the continuous work they do in committee.

He mentioned what Mr. Adams said. I did not say that; Mr. Adams said that. If the minister is not willing to listen to us, is he willing to listen to his own commissioner? The fact is there is a sneaking suspicion not only within the union but with many other people that DFO eventually would like to eliminate the full time and regular employees of the Coast Guard and replace them with the volunteers. That is the suspicion. I cannot say that is actually happening, but it leads one to believe that may be the final objective.

In looking at the serious funding cuts, the lack of attention to detail in the Coast Guard, will it just let it go and let the volunteer sector pick it up? That may very well happen. We hope it will not and we will fight against it. We believe, as the hon. member said, that the full time Coast Guard and the auxiliary complement one another and have a very good working relationship.

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, I for one have never objected to working with outside partners in order to achieve efficiencies within a particular department, but if those efficiencies mean one is going to lose $150,000 or $170,000 worth of equipment on a yearly basis, then I question the efficiency of that. I come from the Halifax area where they are always concerned about the threat of ice-breaking charges and fees for an ice-free port. These are some the things that we have to raise.

He talked about the stagecoach revival. Well, it has been proven that manning those lighthouses is just as cost effective as if they are allowed to die down with all the environmental concerns and the fact that someone has to be sent out to repair the lights, if we bother to do that at all. The neglect is incredible. It is almost to the point that working in a lighthouse is thought to be a passé job and it should not have to be there, but I beg to differ.

In many areas of the country, those eyes and the physical presence of a human being could be saving lives when mariners are in trouble. Automatic light stations cannot do that. Having a human there could very well save people's lives. We simply do not know. If they are not manned we will not know if they are able to save lives. However, if somebody is there to survey the waters and check everything out and has knowledge of the local area, that could indeed save lives. If we are using the precautionary concern, why not?

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, I thank my hon. colleague from Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough for his intervention.

He is absolutely right. It would be remiss for any of us to ignore the concerns and also the valuable work that the Coast Guard Auxiliary does across the country. These are volunteers who have in many ways picked up the slack from the lack of government attention.

The lighthouse keepers and many groups in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia and other places have spent thousands of hours trying to get the attention of the government to say that these lighthouses are of historical value. They are not just nice and pretty for tourists to look at, but they also have a function and a role to play. We cannot rely on GPS alone. We must have these lights out there. I for one have always opposed the destaffing of lighthouses.

I also oppose alternate service delivery. The Coast Guard or DFO does not have the resources or personnel to ensure that private companies are doing the job they say they are going to do. A lot of the nav-aids and buoys disappear when the ice comes in. They are gone.

This is a waste of taxpayers' money. Taxpayers pay money for those buoys. DFO or the Coast Guard just says that they did not get it this year. There is some more money gone. It is simply unacceptable.

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, through you to the minister, how can one official there, in a senior position, be so ignorant of what is going on in his region? That is just one person we spoke to. We do not have the taxpayer dollars to go to every single person in the Coast Guard across the country to ask these questions but that was just one. If that is an indication of the management of the Coast Guard and reflects what is going on in that region, then we are in serious trouble.

We ask now, and I support the call for the inquiry, to ensure that the government has a clear understanding of what is going on in this valuable department in the country.

Nobody on this side, and I suspect nobody on that side, is condemning the work that the men and women of our Coast Guard do. We are proud of our men and women of the Coast Guard. As the minister said, they are ready to answer the bell. The fact is the bell is not ringing because they simply do not have the resources to do the job that we ask them to do. That is a serious problem.

We can go on all night on this debate. The reality is that Cap Rouge II was a serious incident. We have serious questions to ask about that. We will never know if somebody could have been saved. There were warnings. Just a while before that happened a person ran off a bridge in his car and there was no dive team to respond. There were warnings that something of this nature could happen and Coast Guard officials refused to respond in the proper manner.

We are asking the minister to go to cabinet and say that he has the support of the opposition as well as the support of Canadians to ask for more resources and a clear direction for the future of the men and women of our Coast Guard.

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, I wish to thank the hon. government House leader for allowing the debate to take place this evening. It is a debate we do not have very often in the House, in central Canada. The debate is about the serious issue of the Coast Guard which more or less affects the three oceans we have. Many people fail to remember that the Coast Guard is also very effective in the Great Lakes region, Lake Winnipeg and in the Arctic. I wish to thank all members for participating in this debate.

Hopefully through this debate and dialogue we can give support to the minister when he goes to cabinet asking for more resources, because we hope that is what he will be doing. We assume that is what he said in his speech tonight although he did not come out as clear as the Minister of National Defence. We are hoping indeed that he will be doing that.

If we listen to the minister's speech he makes it sound like everything is just great and wonderful. In fact, why are we even having a debate tonight? We should go home, have dinner and be with our families, but the reality is that there are serious concerns within the Coast Guard.

Mr. Mike Wing, the head of the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees, Mr. John Fox from Nova Scotia representing the regions, Senator Pat Carney, Senator Mike Forrestall and many members of Parliament would not be holding press conferences and addressing the serious issues of the Coast Guard if everything was just fine. The fact is that it is the absolute opposite. Not only the men and women of the Coast Guard, but coastal communities across and within the country as well as many shippers in cities along the St. Lawrence, for example, have raised serious issues about the Coast Guard, its fee structure and how it collects its fees, as my hon. friend from the Bloc mentioned.

It is not only the opposition who has noticed the deficiencies within the Coast Guard. The member for Beauséjour--Petitcodiac is the son of a former fisheries minister. We were in Prince Edward Island and saw countless numbers of buoys on the ground. They should have been in the water doing the job of a nav-aid, but they were on the ground. The hon. member from the Liberal Party asked what they were doing there. The officials said they simply did not have the budget to take them out. They went on to elaborate that approximately $150,000 worth of nav-aids were lost due to the ice the previous year because they did not have the budget to go out and bring them in. They were just lost. They get damaged and they are gone. That $150,000 is just what we know of from one little visit by the committee to Prince Edward Island.

We were in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. My colleagues behind me will know this very well as will the Liberals. We were there meeting with Coast Guard officials. The coastline of Newfoundland and Labrador is very large. There is lots of oil and gas activity, commercial activity for fishing, and lots of recreation fishing, et cetera. We asked them how many Coast Guard vessels were patrolling the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador at that moment. The reply was that they had one. It was sitting in the harbour. I am not making this up. That came from one of the managers of the Coast Guard in DFO in Newfoundland and Labrador. They had one vessel.

Why do we have thousands of shore birds and sea birds washed up on the shores of Newfoundland and Labrador because of oil spills? Why do we have illegal fishing off our coastlines? Why do we have illegal immigrants coming into the country? Why do we have drugs coming into the country? We are simply not doing the job. The Coast Guard, because of lack of resources and clear direction by the government, is not able to do the job it wants to do.

One would assume that post-9/11 we would have beefed up security, but the reality is that we have lessened security. It is unacceptable that has happened.

Mr. Mike Wing, the head of the union, would not be standing in the House, or anywhere else for that matter, mentioning the serious concerns of morale among the men and women he represents if he did not have facts and clear arguments for his case. This is what is happening. Morale in the Coast Guard is at an all-time low.

Those who talked to Coast Guard officials and DFO officials when the merger took place in 1995 know of the internal battle between the Coast Guard and DFO officials. In many cases that battle still continues as they fight for their share of the pie.

Moving the Coast Guard to DFO sounded fairly good in theory. They both did the same sort of work so maybe it might have worked. When Senator Pat Carney, Senator Mike Forrestall, and the union asked for an inquiry into the Coast Guard, one of the biggest questions they wanted to ask was: How is that merger working? In their opinion it had failed. It was simply not effective.

When I first became fisheries and oceans critic for the NDP a Coast Guard official, the acting director at the time, came to our committee. My colleague from the Alliance was there. I asked him questions about funding. I did not ask him about this in particular but he came out and said that $200 million of the Coast Guard budget was diverted into the regular DFO budget for other purposes.

We know that with downsizing in 1995 a lot of money was cut from the Coast Guard. The minister said we put so much back in. We have not put back what we have taken out already.

We understand there are other spending requirements for the government. We know we need to be fiscally accountable and responsible for taxpayer dollars. An investment in the Coast Guard is an investment in our country. That is a fact. The men and women of the Coast Guard are willing to risk their lives for the protection of our interests. They are willing to go into certain conditions out on the ocean at the worst time of year that you and I would not even dream of, Mr. Speaker. They are proud and they want to do their job. What is most important is that they have the confidence and the support of not only the fisheries minister but the government as well, and for that matter all members of Parliament, that what they do is valuable and important.

One of the most telling things about what was going on in the Coast Guard and how the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing was when we were in Vancouver. I asked Mr. Mike Henderson of the Coast Guard: “How is it going with the resources? How is the money? Is there any problem with money?” He said, “Money is not a problem”. We had to take the man for his word. We were not going to accuse him of something until we got the facts. Then we went to the regions. We went to Victoria, Ucluelet and Tofino. It was a completely different story.

Those who know Vancouver and Victoria know that it is not that far apart. There are phones and, with technology, e-mail. We would assume that the head of the Coast Guard on the west coast would know what the heck is going on in his department. Every single person on the west coast said money was the number one problem. I ask the minister, how can your official, who--

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, I thank my hon. colleague from the Alliance for his comments.

The member knows that at one of our committee hearings we had in Vancouver with Coast Guard management, when I asked one of the gentlemen, Mr. Mike Henderson, directly what the financial situation was of the Coast Guard and DFO on the west coast, he clearly said “Money is not a problem”.

We went out to all the regions, Tofino, Ucluelet, and all those other areas. Every single one of the managers and the people there said that money was so tight that one woman worked every day in August. They did not have enough people for the training. There were serious financial concerns. The manager in Vancouver said that money was not a problem and in his jurisdiction every one of his people said it was the number one problem.

My hon. colleague was there at that time and I would like him to comment on that.

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Yes, Mr. Chairman, I will retract the last part of that.

My question for the minister is quite simple. The Minister of National Defence was quite right when he stated in his speech in Toronto that his department was short of resources. He stated publicly that he would go to the finance minister and his cabinet colleagues and ask for more resources for the men and women of the military.

I would like the minister to stand on his feet and state that the men and women of the Coast Guard will have his support in fighting for more resources through his cabinet colleagues prior to the next federal budget. Will he at least tell the men and women that he is prepared to fight for them to get additional resources so they can do the job that he so eloquently quoted here tonight?

[Canadian Coast Guard, November 6th, 2002]

Mr. Chairman, while the minister is saying that Mr. Adams said that the Coast Guard would answer the bell, the difficulty is that the bell is not ringing. A lot of the ships in Halifax harbour cannot leave because there is no budget for fuel. The military is being asked more and more to do search and rescue. For the minister to tie the purchase of the Cormorants into the Coast Guard debate is intellectually dishonest and simply is not correct.

[Supply, November 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, one of my concerns is that the Minister of National Defence has said in the House that, yes, he is looking forward to more resources in the next federal budget but at the same time he is going to give something back. My question to the hon. member is, what is the military supposed to give up in order to maintain those extra resources? Will it be the supply chain? Will it be the tanks? Will it be CF-18s? Will it be Goose Bay and Labrador? What will be cut in order to ascertain additional resources? In essence there may not be any additional resources at all. The government may cut off so much of the military in order to meet so-called new financial resources from the government.

The hon. member is a very learned gentleman when it comes to military affairs in the country and I appreciate his comments, but what is the government going to cut from the military in order to ascertain so-called additional resources?