Rob Anders

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder what would happen in his neck of the woods, in Selkirk--Interlake, if he was to ask his constituents how they would spend that $700 million. Would they rather see a twinning of highways or irrigation projects or would they rather see that money put toward the confiscation of firearms?

I was also going to touch on section 745 and the million dollar appeals it cost for Clifford Olson to appeal under a sure bet clause with regard to the criminal code and court challenges programs that allow prisoners to contest how many choices of toothpaste they have. However I will leave my question with the member.

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

That is another good example. My colleague beside me said that the government does not go after some of the creeps who are pedophiles and create a registry of them. Why does it not do tangible things? Why does it not do the stuff that would produce real results so that people walking the streets would feel safe? Instead, it would blow $1 billion on a registry that does not have any tangible proof of a benefit, but it would not put money into the RCMP or the coast guard or any of those types of things that would result in real effects on the bottom line of crime. I would like my colleague to comment on that.

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague talked about some of the firearms aspects in the bill. I would like him to give us his words of wisdom and thoughts on this.

The Liberal government across the way wants to restrict firearms, encourages the grabbing of guns, wastes nearly $1 billion, lusts over the concentration of power, brings forward an unjustified act and burdens us with complicated regulations. With all those nasty things that the government has done I want the folks at home who may be watching to think about this as well.

Why has the government not done some really concrete things that would reduce crime and go after criminals and the criminal misuse of firearms? Why has the government not increased the budget for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Why has the government not increased the budget for the armed forces or for the coast guard to ensure that no terrorists enter this country? Why has the government not looked at those who have a history of violence and focus on them? Why is the government not focusing on keeping prisoners off our streets and keeping our streets safe? Why is the government continuing to encourage early parole so that some serious repeat offenders get turned back out on the street? Why is it that the government treats people who are charged under the Young Offenders Act with kid gloves thus allowing them to go out and re-offend until they finally commit a heinous crime as an adult and get stuck in the prison system? Why is it that the government has sex offenders in our jails who do not have mandatory rehabilitation and counselling?

These are all tangible things. The government operates under the perverse logic that it would register all firearms belonging to law-abiding people and spend $1 billion doing it, but by golly it would not spend money to make sure that persons who are a good risk of re-offending stay behind bars longer or serve their full term in a jail cell or that the resources are put out on the street to try to find some of these creeps.

It boggles my mind how the government would fritter away and waste our taxpayers' dollars on something that would aggravate a lot of law-abiding people across the country and make criminals out of honest folk, when there are such obvious things it could have done such as going after people who misuse firearms who are the real problem.

I know where the problems are. The Kingston jail about one hour south of here is full of problems. There are a whole bunch of rapists, murderers and the whole nine yards in that jail. However the government sees fit to spend money going after law-abiding gun owners rather than going after criminals and ensuring that they serve their full sentence or are unable to make million dollar appeals with regard to conditional release. That ought to send a shiver down the spine of every single taxpayer in this country. The government has misplaced priorities and does not go after the real problems, but it would frustrate innocent civilians.

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my question follows up almost precisely on the comment my hon. colleague just completed with.

When I was at the University of Calgary taking my degree in political science, there were people from all the different political parties in our clubs office. They shoved Liberals, New Democrats, Tories, and Reformers at that time, all in the same office. It was a hairy situation but at least we had some good arguments and got to know each other's points of view.

I remember one young Liberal, whom I will not name, who had gone through a metamorphosis, I guess we could call it. She had subscribed to the theory of anthropomorphism.

She started off as a meat eater. She ate meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, grain products and all sorts of things that one would normally consider part of a healthy balanced diet. Then she went to university and started hanging out with a lot of Liberals, ivory tower thinkers and elitists. She eventually started to feel guilty about eating meat. She did not think it was healthy for her. It was not even a question of health. She felt that eating meat was morally wrong. It was a very bizarre scenario. She gave up meat. However, once one starts down the slippery slope, one can go pretty far, and she did.

She started off for the first few months thinking that she would not eat meat because somehow it was wrong to take an animal's life, despite the fact that is what they were raised for. In any event, she thought “I am not going to take an animal's life”.

There are lacto-ovo vegetarians who consume dairy products, milk, cheese and other things derived from those sources. She eventually got to the point where her Liberal friends had convinced her that if it was not good for her to eat meat because it took an animal's life, then how could she in good conscience drink milk or eat cheese because in a sense the animal was being kept for the purposes of extracting the milk. It was an animal captivity issue then. She eventually quit drinking milk and eating cheese.

One would think that is where the absurdity would end but it did not. The slippery slope keeps on going. It gets slicker as one goes further down and the tangent goes further.

Based on talking with her Liberal elitist friends again, she decided she would not eat something that was a grain because the cutting machine had chopped the plant while it was still vibrant and living and able to stand on its own. I am trying to remember the argument but basically if the thing was still supporting itself, she determined that if one hacked it down and took the grain from the top of its stalk that was also harming a form of life. With anthropomorphism, why not have the strand of grain be just as valuable?

She eventually came down to the idea that the only thing she could eat was fruit that had freshly fallen from the tree because it was actually in the process of dying or decaying.

The question for my colleague is, has not anthropomorphism gone too far?

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick question for my hon. colleague on the gopher derby. I happen to be in favour of the gopher derby in Saskatchewan. Those little varmint gophers are causing us lots of problems. Using a .22 on them is as good as using strychnine.

What does my hon. colleague think about some of those bleeding heart brigade Liberals who want to save the gopher, even though they would not want the gopher crawling around on the Prime Minister's golf course? They are perfectly happy to have them scrambling around the Saskatchewan prairie, helping to mess up the fields of farmers or break the legs of cattle. What does he think about the gopher derby?

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I fondly appreciate my colleague's reference to property rights and personal freedoms and liberties. I prize those things.

Just recently there was a show on PBS called The Commanding Heights . It was one of the best examples I have ever seen. It was a thumbnail sketch of economics and the theories involved since the 1920s until today. It talked about Austria, the rise of its school of economics and Ludwig von Mises. There were interviews with people like Milton Friedman. It also had some wonderful anecdotes of Margaret Thatcher as well as some of the speeches taken from Ronald Regan. The show addressed the transformation.

The Liberal government has missed some of the lessons that were learned in this video. One lesson that strikes me the most is that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, when he was prime minister, used the very language in The Commanding Heights when he nationalized Petrofina and turned it into Petro-Canada. He tried to meddle with the markets as much as he possibly could. He thought the government deserved a position of commanding heights within given industries. Liberals and Tories over the years have recognized that just does not work. However it came out of a sense of failure. They were led to understand it because of the mounting budget deficits and the fact that the programs they were instituting to meddle with industry were not working. The Commanding Heights show laid out beautifully that evolution had been happening. The Liberals across the way only caught up to it after the rest of the world had pretty much passed them by. We had a growth of government coming out of the second world war because people turned to the war for its solutions and to its surmise. Afterward government continued to grow because of the Keynes model of economics stemming from its problem with the great depression. People thought that was a way of solving it.

However, the Austrian school of economics always knew. People like the Friedrich Hayek, who wrote the book the Road to Serfdom , knew that the strategy would not work. They knew that governments always would produce failures when they intervened and intruded too deeply because they did not know its place. They had no business trying to govern industries they knew nothing or little about.

With property rights, liberty and personal freedoms, the government across the way still continues to want to meddle in private property rights and personal freedoms and liberties when it really does not have a place in it or understand a lot of it. It tries to implement solutions from 3,000 kilometres away and this does not solve the problems. In many circumstances it actually makes the problems worse.

An illustration of this point is when Margaret Thatcher was facing Scargill and his labour unions with regard to the coal strike in the U.K. which came out of the winter of discontent in 1979. There were massive strikes and garbage piled up on the streets.

She had the fortitude to build up the coal supplies in England. She had been asked if she would rather have 180,000 people in the coal industry on strike and out of work or would she capitulate and let the largest public sector union in the country rule the land. When the whole thing was said and done, she faced down Scargill and some of the union goon tactics.

This might sound shocking, but by the time it was all settled, out of 180,000 coal workers, in a poorly run industry that used massive government subsidies to keep itself alive, only 3,000 people still work in that industry, which is pretty profitable. It is incredible to consider that that industry was over employed to the tune of 177,000 workers. Over 90% of the people were employed in an industry maintained by governments subsidies which was not viable.

What does my hon. colleague think of the government trying to assume the commanding heights, whether it be morally, financially or industrially, in areas where it has little or no business, intruding on private property rights, liberties and personal freedoms?

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, when my colleague from North Vancouver talked about Francis Fox banning satellite dishes a chill ran down my spine because I spent time talking with Francis Fox in Montreal. I believe he is now a vice-president with Cantel. It is shocking to think that he works for a telecommunications company. I hope his view on satellite dishes has changed. However, it sends a deep chill down my spine to think that he stood in this place years ago to ask for a ban on satellite dishes and now he is the vice-president of a telecommunications company. It is scary how this place works.

The question I have for my colleague pertains to his province of Saskatchewan. I recently read about an event known as the gopher derby. This is an event where people try to liquidate as many gophers as they possibly can and collect the tails as proof of their deed. I think the person who gets the most wins some sort of prize. The event is put on by the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.

I live in a place where gophers are prevalent. Admittedly, I live in the city but when one drives past Nose Hill one will see little gophers eating their little buddies because they are cannibalistic. If a gopher dies or is run over, some of its little buddies will run out onto the road and eat it. We see that all the time when we travel along 14th Street in Nose Hill.

We have some bleeding heart Liberal do-gooders in the cities, like my hon. colleague says, who usually do not have gophers, I will call them the bleeding hearts brigade, who are opposed to people taking out their .22s or their small rifles to hunt gophers and instead prefer the use of strychnine. I do not know why it is but they somehow think using strychnine is a morally superior solution to people hunting gophers with .22s.

In our neck of the woods we think of these things as little varmints. They cause injury to livestock. My colleague mentioned how when animals step into gopher holes they sometimes fracture or break their legs. I have seen that type of thing before and have heard many a tale about it.

What does my hon. colleague think the Prime Minister would do if those prized golf courses of his, which he likes to spend so much time on, were infested with gophers? Let us use the example of the one in Shawinigan which I think he had part ownership in but which he kind of sold, as the story goes on in terms of what his involvement was with that whole Shawinigan affair. Anyway, I wonder how the Prime Minister would react if some of those golf courses he loves so much were infested with gophers.

What does my hon. colleague think about us bringing some gophers from his neck of the woods in Saskatchewan and transplanting them on the Prime Minister's golf course and letting them run wild in a breeding program to aerate the soil? What would the Prime Minister do? Does he think the Prime Minister would then be in favour of a gopher derby?

I will make a comparison. When I was a small child growing up in Winnipeg we had so many mosquitos we could literally wipe down the side of our arms and off would come mosquito debris and our own blood because there were so many of those things. In Newfoundland there is a situation where there are five million, six million, seven million seals off its coast, and the number keeps growing. They are working their way up the rivers to try to find more food. In British Columbia, where I also lived growing up, we had spiders everywhere. Why is it we do not hear about people trying to ban a hunt on spiders? Certainly they did try to do that with the seals but of course it was Europeans who did not have millions of seals on their coasts. We would not have heard Lloyd Axworthy stand up in this place and talk about how we must preserve the mosquito.

What does my colleague think the Prime Minister would do if he had gophers on his golf course?

[Species at Risk Act, March 21st, 2002]

That is right. They are opposed to the private ownership of land.

Another question is, does the bill attack a straw man? Yes it does. It is building up this straw man of being able to defend the interests, if you will, of these endangered species.

Actually it falls so short of doing that. In a sense it is flailing at straw because there is nothing there. It tries to make farmers, fishermen, loggers and ranchers into evil beings when indeed they are the stewards of the land.

I have three final questions. How much will it cost? The minister does not know. Who will pay for it? Not the government. Would it pass in a referendum? When we leave it to the people to whom it would directly affect, it would not. It fails by all counts. Shame on the government.

[Species at Risk Act, March 21st, 2002]

I thank the member for Elk Island for informing me that it is three-tenths of 1%.

In other words, in the United States when the legislation was introduced for species that were deemed endangered, three-tenths of 1% were actually positively affected with regard to the legislation. In other words, it has a 99.7% failure rate.

Let me repeat that one more time. I want it to sink in. Maybe it will sink in for the government members across the way. I notice there are a lot less of them now since the quorum call. It is amazing how that works around here. They have disappeared. They are really not that concerned.

There is a 99.7% failure for the American bill on which the one we are debating is based. Let us get this straight. The government is expecting us to toss in millions, possibly hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars for a 99.7% failure rate.

I want that to sink in because I will ask a list of questions. I think these questions should be asked with regard to any piece of legislation that comes into this place.

Is it within the jurisdiction of that legislature to deal with it? I would argue in this case that with regard to property rights, mineral rights and all those sorts of things, I really wonder whether or not the federal government should be marching ahead with this given the fact it is not doing the proper consultation with the provinces. There are provinces that have issues with this.

Aside from jurisdictional issues, what sword upholds the covenant? All laws that are made in this place must be enforced if they are to be law or to be effective at all. Otherwise they are nonsense upon stilts, as Jeremy Bentham would have said. What sword upholds the covenant and is the sword just?

When that sword comes down on the necks of farmers, fishermen, loggers and ranchers and takes from them their livelihoods or their prosperity and violates their right to personal and private property, that is an unjust sword wielded by an autocratic and top down demagogic government. It does not help those people who are on the front line for the preservation of those lands because they are theirs, or for the species, the plants and animals that live on those lands. It is an entirely unjust sword the government wields today.

Will what the government is proposing with this third group of amendments solve the problem? My demonstration with my able colleague from Elk Island and his calculator proves that there is a 99.7% failure for the legislation that this bill is based upon. It does not solve the problem.

The question which therefore arises is why the expense to the taxpayers? Why the waste of their time? Why the lack of priority on the part of the government to list a problem, but then when it tries to come up with a solution it chooses one that fails 99.7% of the time. It does not solve the problem. As a matter of fact the American experience with this very law proves that it makes the problem worse.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to put yourself in the position of a farmer, a fisherman, a logger or a rancher. It is very tough for some of the members in this place as they stare at me with their patronizing, I think is the word I would use, looks. What they have over there is ego over common sense. What they have over there is elitism over the interests of the average people who will be dealing with this legislation.

For the people, the farmers, the fishermen, the loggers and the ranchers on the front lines of this legislation, it will mean that if they happen to think they have a potentially endangered species on their land, it will either make the land useless to them so that they cannot do anything with it, cannot have it for resale and therefore it will drive the value of the land down. Human interest, the normal affairs of things would say that a lot of people would not respect the government, and I am trying to find the word here, the law being a bit of an arse, they would not respect it. What they would do is they would go ahead and try and liquidate that problem. That is exactly what has happened in the United States.

What has wound up happening is that a lot of endangered species in this case have actually been dealt with harshly because there was not fair compensation.

This does not solve the problem. Actually it is not even neutral to the problem. It actually makes the problem worse.

What fruit will the legislation bear? If the fruit that it bears is that it makes the problem worse, it is 99.7% inefficient or failing and it costs a lot of money and it negatively impacts the people whom it is supposed to directly impact, the farmers, fishermen, loggers and ranchers, who is the government serving? What fruit is this bearing?

The question that flows naturally from it is who wants it? Certainly farmers, fishermen, loggers and ranchers do not want the legislation. By the way, my constituency is largely an urban one. However, on the edge of my constituency there are ranches with cattle roaming about them because it is Alberta. There are people who have their farms at the very edge of my riding, on the outskirts of the city. They do not want the legislation. I have talked with them. I have met them when I travelled around, even in the surrounding constituencies. These people do not want this legislation. Who does it serve?

It probably serves some self-serving Liberals across the way who have it hard written into them with a hard heart toward these taxpayers who pay their salaries that they are going to impose this law on them despite the fact that it does not actually solve the problem. Who wants it? A few Liberals do and frankly, that is not good enough as a test.

[Species at Risk Act, March 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am so glad to have an audience today. The last member did not have one so I am glad to see all the bright, smiling government faces across the way with even a few ministers in the mix. It warms the cockles of my heart. Many times have I walked down the aisle with them, but this one gives me joy.

For the folks at home who may be watching today and wondering what the shenanigans are all about, it is about legislation the Minister of the Environment is putting forward. It amounts to taking money out of the hands of farmers, fishermen, loggers and ranchers without fair compensation. That is what it boils down to. Let us get to the heart of it.

The bill is based on American legislation that has been in place for 25 years and has wasted millions of dollars. As best as the Americans can figure out, after 25 years and millions of dollars of taxpayer hard-earned sweat-soaked funds, it has saved four species, despite the fact that over 1,154 animals and plants were listed.

I do not have a calculator with me. The member right next to me is rather fond of calculators and mathematics though and I am sure he could figure out for me what percentage four out of 1,154 would be. I know it is less than 1%.