Scott Reid

[Supply, February 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, as you know, I am a member of Parliament from the province of Ontario. I want to address this debate and draw the attention of the House to the fact that Ontario frequently gets missed in media discussions of the situation in rural Canada and particularly the BSE crisis. This is not simply a western Canadian problem. This is in fact a problem that is nationwide. We have cattle production across the country from coast to coast.

In particular, it is very much an Ontario problem. To make this point, I just want to give a few statistics. I do not know if people are aware that Ontario is the third largest beef producing province in the country. Beef is very much a large proportion of agricultural production in Ontario. Almost 40% of farms in Ontario are classified as being at least partly dairy or beef farms and sometimes both.

In eastern Ontario, the part of the province that I come from, the proportion would be closer to 50% of farms having either a beef or dairy component. In my own constituency of Lanark--Carleton, that proportion rises to over 60%. Over 60% of the farms in my constituency in Lanark county and the rural west end of the city of Ottawa have either a beef or a dairy component. That is true of the surrounding counties as well. In Frontenac county or Leeds and Grenville county, we see the same kind of pattern. And of course farmers are being affected every bit as much on those Ontario beef farms as they are on beef farms in the western part of the country.

What has happened with the BSE crisis is that it has been the capstone or, alternatively, the straw that may break the camel's back, on top of a whole series of other crises that are being imposed. They are sometimes being imposed by the government itself and sometimes by other circumstances upon our farmers and upon our rural people. As a rural member of Parliament, I am excruciatingly, painfully aware of this.

Let me give some examples of how the crisis is playing out in rural Ontario and some of the factors in it. Right now, rural eastern Ontario is being hit by the reclassification by the provincial Liberal government of maple syrup producers as being industrial as opposed to agricultural, on the theory that the processing of maple syrup on site constitutes an industrial activity. If one were to try transporting maple sap, which has such a small sugar content that it tastes like water, one would realize the enormous impracticalities of trying to ship it anywhere. Plus, it goes bad so it has to be boiled down on site. There is no alternative.

Nevertheless, the provincial government decided that this agricultural activity is in fact an industrial activity. The resultant tax load increase can be as much as 15, 16 and, in one case I have heard of, 18 times the initial tax load for maple syrup producers.

There is also the attack on small sawmill owners, who have been producing perfectly safely in our rural areas for years and years. The accusation has now been made that sawdust on their sites represents an environmental hazard and a hazard to the water supply. I was in Jonquière in Quebec, in Chicoutimi, a couple of years ago, and I went and stood on top of a heap of sawdust that is over 100 years old. This stuff is so inert that it has been sitting there for 100 years. There is actually a sign on it that says if people can figure out a way of getting rid of this stuff for them, let them know. Now the Ontario government has decided that this represents an environmental hazard and a hazard to the water supply.

We have in Ontario the unreasonable requirements for nutrient management that are being imposed upon livestock producers, livestock producers who have been no threat to anybody for years and have established practices that are completely safe. We know this because of the fact that their neighbours are not and have not been affected in any way by operations that have existed for, in some cases, over a century. Now they are being told they must change their nutrient management practices. For those who are urban people, what we are talking about here is how they deal with manure.

I have one farmer, who has a cattle operation in my constituency just outside of Pakenham. He told me that to comply with the nutrient management regulations, he would have to spend a quarter of a million dollars to install a giant concrete holding vat. That is a quarter of a million dollars which he cannot get unless he sells part of his herd, a herd which is greatly reduced in value at the sale barn, meaning that he cannot put in the holding vat for his manure unless he gets rid of the producers of manure, thereby eliminating any need for the holding vat.

The provincial government could deal with this intelligently. It could suspend these regulations, or get rid of them, until the end of the BSE crisis, but it shows no inclination to do that. As we can imagine, this alone will put some of our producers out of business.

When I was at an agricultural society dinner in Lanark highlands, someone from the provincial ministry of agriculture was explaining how the Nutrient Management Act would work for livestock producers. The first question he received from a local farmer was “What do you want us to do once we get out of farming?”

We see that with the Species at Risk Act. This is a federal law that affects rural areas. There is no compensation for the restrictions placed on the use of property, which in some cases render the property or parts of it useless. We were promised this by the government, but it has not been delivered. That again is unnecessary.

Then of course we have the costs and other impositions imposed by the firearms registry, which is now at $2 billion. Thank goodness it is not farmers who have to carry the entire cost of that. Certainly, when we see our taxes going toward that kind of boondoggle with no practical impact whatsoever, with no lives saved or ever saved and, notwithstanding the hon. member who spoke earlier, no stolen weapons returned to their owners, there is a sense in rural Canada that perhaps the government has some misplaced priorities.

What is the appropriate response to the BSE crisis? If we think about it and if we take the cattle and the prions out of it and look at it from a financial point of view, the real point of the BSE crisis is a cash flow problem. Agriculture, by its nature, is an industry in which producers are rich in assets, which potentially have a high value, and foreign cash. By freezing their ability to take their product to the market at a reasonable price, the problem of farmers being cash poor has been exacerbated and has been made far worse than it has to be.

The government's response ought to be to try to, first, ensure that we can do what we can to raise the price of cattle wherever possible. There are a variety of actions, which my hon. colleague has pointed out in the new Conservative Party plan that would deal with this. Second, we have to provide some form of compensation in the short run to ensure that the cash flow crisis does not force many of our producers out of business. That is significant.

Canadian cattle producers are not subsidized. They are independent producers. They do not receive the kinds of subsidies we see being applied to many agricultural sectors in the European Union and in the United States. They function on their own and they stand on their own two feet. However, for goodness sake, if we do not get them through this crisis, many of them will be out of business and it will not matter that they were able to make it on their own under normal circumstances. This is not the thin edge of the wedge toward some sort of widespread and ongoing subsidy program. This is simply helping them get through the current crisis. The government seems to have no interest in doing anything about it.

For almost a year we have seen endless and meaningless hand-wringing from the other side of the House, with no attempt to do anything, and there are so many things that could be done.

Local farmers in my constituency, in particular Pat O'Rourke who came up the idea, and I helped them with this, started producing bumper stickers and lawn signs to remind people to buy Canadian beef. This was back at the beginning of the crisis when there were many imports of beef from the United States. People did not know to look to see if the product they were buying was Canadian. People just assume that everything they buy in Canada must be Canadian since we produce so much beef here at home. We have put up thousands of these signs at this point and distributed thousands of bumper stickers. That has had some impact on raising the awareness of Canadians.

We now find Canadians are aware that they have to think about looking for Canadian product. We now need to increase the production and processing capacity. The Conservative Party plan calls for this. We need to provide compensation.

I hope the members on the government side of the House are listening and that they will take some of the actions that we have proposed today.

[Petitions, February 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my second petition calls upon Parliament to express its disapproval of Bill C-250. Obviously that is not of complete relevance to us today as that bill has gone through the Chamber. However on the assumption that our hon. colleagues in the other place pay attention to petitions that are presented here, perhaps they will take note of this petition.

[Petitions, February 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today.

The first petition draws the attention of Parliament to the fact that personnel strength in the armed forces has dropped by 30% over the past decade; that much of our military equipment, particularly our Leopard tanks and the CF-18 Hornet aircraft and, most notably of all, the Sea King helicopter, are badly in need of replacement or of upgrading; and finally, that we lack the airlift and sealift capability overseas.

Therefore the petitioners request that the Government of Canada accelerate increases to the defence budget and ensure that an additional $1.2 billion per year go toward defence in the future.

[Petitions, February 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the third petition, which is also signed by close to 1,000 people, in addition to many others who have signed earlier petitions on this subject, calls upon the government to take prompt action with regard to the BSE crisis in Canada. The petitioners point out that Canadian beef is unrivalled in quality in the world and is completely safe and ask the government to provide adequate funding for public education on this subject to ensure that consumer demand for Canadian beef is maintained.

They also call upon the Minister of International Trade to renegotiate our international trade treaties to ensure that the shutting down of the border and the maintaining of shut borders for safe product cannot happen again in the future. Finally, they also call upon the federal government to ensure that relief funding is provided for agricultural producers affected by the crisis.

[Petitions, February 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is on the subject of natural health products. The petitioners call upon the government to allow for greater access to natural health products and to restore freedom of choice in personal health care.

[Petitions, February 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by 600 members of my constituency and several adjoining constituencies, calling upon the government to repeal the long gun firearms registry. This brings to over 12,000 the number of signatures on petitions that I have given on this subject, making it the largest subject that I have ever given petitions on.

[Parliamentary Reform, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, several years ago Fair Vote Canada coined the phrase “democratic deficit” to describe the sad state of Canada's parliamentary and electoral systems.

During his year in exile, the Prime Minister took over this phrase, without attribution, and declared that he was the man to set things right.

So what is his record so far? What about an elected Senate, for example? Well, in December the Prime Minister announced that he will never appoint Alberta's two elected senators and will not permit elections in any province.

What about fixed election dates to the Commons? Not under this Prime Minister. He is planning to advance the date of electoral boundaries changes in order to call an election long before his government has served a four year term.

If there were time, we could dwell upon the Liberal Party's internal democratic deficit in the nomination races in some of those redistributed ridings, but that would keep us from the final topic.

The crowning achievement of the Prime Minister's democratic agenda; that is the three line whip. Under this daring new proposal, MPs will now be allowed to vote freely on anything the Prime Minister decides to designate as a free vote, but not on anything else.

How this differs from how Jean Chrétien did things beats me.

[Petitions, November 7th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, petitioners in my constituency have submitted a petition drawing the attention of Parliament to the continued problems of Canadian farmers due to the BSE import restrictions by the United States and other countries.

In addition to pointing out the hardships that Canadian farmers face, the petitioners draw the attention of Parliament to three proposed suggestions for rectifying the problem. The first is that Parliament ought to instruct the Minister for International Trade to renegotiate Canada's international trade treaties in order to ensure that restrictions placed for health care reasons cannot be maintained when in fact health care reasons have been dealt with. Therefore, these restrictions take the form of trade barriers.

Second, that Parliament provide for a public education program to alert Canadians to the safety of Canadian beef.

Third, that Parliament look at creating a new BSE compensation recovery program that will be more thorough than the previous one.

[Rail Crossings, November 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in nearly every small town in Canada many streets are intersected by level rail crossings. Most such lines are used for freight transportation, and from the viewpoint of town residents, they represent a danger and inconvenience with no offsetting benefits.

One particular danger is the inconsistent markings of these crossings. In my hometown of Carleton Place, there are 10 crossings which are marked in three different ways. A motorist entering and leaving the town by different routes will encounter different rail warning markers. This goes a long way toward explaining why small town Canada continues to experience car-train collisions.

However, federal regulators have offloaded much of the cost of changing such markings to the cash-strapped towns and away from the railroads which are the sole beneficiaries of these lines. This amounts to accepting a high level of risk to motorists as an integral component of federal rail policy.

The Minister of Transport has announced a large financial package in aid of Canadian rail. Why not divert some of that money toward consistent marking of rail crossings in order to protect the safety of Canadians?

[Encroachment upon Quebec Jurisdictions, October 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to read the wording of the motion twice, once at the beginning of my presentation and once toward the end. Let me start by reading it in French.

Que la Chambre reconnaisse que le Québec forme une nation, et qu'en conséquence, n'étant pas signataire de l'entente cadre sur l'union sociale de 1999, ladite nation québécoise dispose d'un droit de retrait avec pleine compensation financière pour toute initiative fédérale faisant intrusion dans les juridictions québécoises.

That wording, it seems to me, mixes two concepts that are, in my opinion, completely unrelated. The first one is the idea that Quebec constitutes a nation. The second one is the idea that Quebec or any province should be able to opt out of federal programs with full compensation.

The question it raises in my mind is why the first section of the motion could not have been left out so that it would read something like the following but in substantive terms be the same thing.

It is being asked that the Quebec nation be given:

—the right to opt out of any federal initiative encroaching upon Quebec jurisdictions, with full financial compensation.

I will read this one in English:

--that Quebec and every other province has the right to opt out of any federal initiative encroaching upon provincial jurisdictions, with full compensation.

If that had been written in the motion, I and I think all the members of my party would support it because there is plenty of room in Canada's Constitution and in our tradition to accommodate this sort of thing.

We see a growing tide of support across the country, in all provinces, for a respectful reading of the 1867 Constitution and its clear division of powers and for the interpretation which was given to the Constitution in the 1930s by what was then our Supreme Court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which said that the Canadian Constitution, unlike that of Australia or the United States, had clear watertight compartments between the jurisdictions of different levels of government. This means that within their own level, their own areas of sovereignty, or support or jurisdiction, each province should be treated and regarded as a completely sovereign entity, a completely sovereign country or nation, if we choose to use that term, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of that term, that could be done.

A tradition exists, going back to 1867 through these cases, which was at least partly incorporated in the 1982 Constitution in its amending formula. I would like to read from that to make my point. Subsections 38(2) and 38(3) read as follows:

An amendment...that derogates from the legislative powers, the proprietary rights or any other rights or privileges of the legislature or government of a province shall require a resolution supported by the majority of members of each of the Senate, the House of Commons and legislative assemblies, required under subsection (1)--

This means of seven provinces representing 50% of the population. It goes on:

An amendment [of this nature] shall not have effect in a province the legislative assembly of which has expressed its dissent thereto by resolution supported by a majority of its members prior to the issue of the proclamation to which the amendment relates unless the legislative assembly, subsequently, by resolution supported by a majority of its members, revokes its dissent and authorizes the amendment.

Therefore, the taking away of powers from provinces by amendment is clearly prohibited and a kind of formula, non-financial formula, allowing for that protection is built into the Constitution of the country since 1982. That is a very positive thing.

There is room for further movement in this direction. Let me cite from the policy of my own party, the Canadian Alliance, in this regard. It is the policy that I had a hand in writing. It states:

We believe that the Government of Canada must respect the vision and intent of the original Confederation agreements regarding the division of power and responsibility inherent in Canadian federalism as enshrined in our Constitution. We are committed to ending any misuse of the federal spending power that undermines that intent. We will seek provincial consent for financing any new program in a field of provincial jurisdiction, and provide full compensation for provinces choosing not to participate.

In other words, with the substance of the Bloc Quebecois motion, my party is already in full 100% agreement.

Finally, I turn to a set of proposals that the predecessor to my party, the Reform Party, put out in the period just following the referendum in Quebec in 1995. This was a document proposing a series of changes to the Confederation agreement that would deal with some of the legitimate aspirations that had been expressed by Quebeckers, both those who voted yes and those who voted no, but who fully participated in the process of expressing their discontent with the status quo. This document, which I helped to research, was a document the current Leader of the Opposition actually wrote and was signed off on by Preston Manning, then the Leader of the Reform Party of Canada.

Under the heading “Spending Power”, we made the following statement:

Legislation under Parliament's power to unilaterally amend the Constitution should be introduced, to forbid any new federal encroachments on provincial jurisdiction by means of the federal government's so-called “spending power” (under which the federal government simply establishes a new federal spending program in an area of provincial jurisdiction).

As members of the House can see, there is room to go a fair bit down the path proposed by the Bloc Quebecois and perhaps even to go further than it has proposed. However, very significantly, these are areas that we are saying should be available to all provinces of Canada. It should be part of our Confederation arrangement. It should be part of a concept of equality of the provinces

This allows me to address something which I have never understood about the position taken by the Bloc Quebecois and the Parti Quebecois. For some reason they are very focused on protecting Quebec's sovereignty, jurisdiction and powers, whether within the Confederate arrangement that exists currently or whether seeking to have independence, without any regard for the other provinces and the fact that they also have sovereign powers dictated under our Constitution.

I am unable to understand why they would think, as a matter of principle, that it is necessary to have this kind of disrespect for the other partners to Confederation, all which have the same aspirations as Quebec. Some of them, including my own province of Ontario, were the original supporters of the idea of provincial rights and respect for provincial sovereignty, when frankly the government of Quebec, in the early decades of Confederation, seemed much less interested in this.

I also cannot see why anyone would think, from the point of view of strategy, that it would be helpful to promote one province, to establish some kind of special status for that province, and thereby guarantee that we would see increasing centralization in the rest of the country. I think we would find that the centralizing impulse, which exists in all federations, would be greatly strengthened if the arrangement that the Bloc Quebecois is always hinting at and which it proposes effectively in this proposal were actually adopted.

Finally, I also must talk a little about the idea that Quebec constitutes a nation, as is worded here. Here I will read again the motion that was proposed by my Bloc Quebecois friend, but now I will read it in English as opposed to French to make the point about the distinctions between the French and English texts. The motion is:

That the House acknowledge that Quebec constitutes a nation, and accordingly, as it is not a signatory to the social union framework agreement of 1999, the said nation of Quebec has the right to opt out of any federal initiative encroaching upon Quebec jurisdictions, with full financial compensation.

The thing to observe here is “a nation”. If they were to say “que les Quebecois forment une nation”, or “les Quebecois forme un peuple”, if they were to say something that refers to people somehow being linked together by a mystical bond, to be connected by something that is deep within their nature, their psyche, the way that their synapses fire in their brains that makes them have something in common that the rest of world does not have in common, I could see some validity to that. However they are not talking that. It is very distinct. They are saying that Quebec forms a nation. That is, there is a conflation between whatever nation might exist, whatever people might exist and a state. The attempt here is to create a nation state.

First, that is exclusionary of the francophones who live outside of Quebec; in New Brunswick, Ontario and elsewhere. It is also exclusionary of the anglophones who live within Quebec who do not regard themselves as being part a Quebec nation, but who do regard themselves as being good Quebeckers, as being people who are good citizens of that society and who seek to act that way. That includes my own ancestors. Quebec was my first home too, and I always find it very difficult to accept that we should be excluded in this kind of way by this kind of wording.