Scott Reid

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, my response to the question about the uncertainty of when an election would occur is to go through the various scenarios. Let me start with the one that the Prime Minister has said will take place.

The Prime Minister said that 30 days after the final report of the Gomery commission he would call an election. That would take about a month. Therefore, sixty days after the final Gomery report we would have an election. That means an election would be held some time around May of next year, just when this bill will expire.

If an election were to occur then, one of two things would happen. First, we would either have dealt with the review of Bill C-3, a review which I do not think would be that difficult or complicated, and we would have passed whatever changes or amendments needed to be made. It could go through the House very easily and be in place before that election. That is one alternative.

Alternatively, the hearings would have taken place and the evidence would have been collected. If we go into an election after May 16 but before the bill has been passed, Bill C-3 would remain in place because of the provision within its sunset clause stating that it is possible for the bill to be extended a further 90 days in the event the House is not sitting. The dangers of an election occurring without a new bill having been passed or with no legislation in place at the time of the next election are very slight if we follow the Prime Minister's guidelines.

If the election happens anytime earlier than that, then presumably it is very straightforward. Bill C-3 would remain in place. There is no danger if an election is called as a result of a non-confidence vote prior to the date proposed to us by the Prime Minister.

The only other possibility would be if the Prime Minister were to break his promise to call an election 30 days after the final Gomery report, which is likely to happen if the polls are not in favour of his winning an election. That is a real danger. Surely we can have the replacement for Bill C-3 put forward before he invents his excuse for delaying the election yet further.

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, the bill before the House today, Bill C-63, would make permanent an earlier law, Bill C-3, which came into force in May 2004 on the understanding that it would be a temporary law. Because it was meant only to be temporary, Bill C-3 contained a sunset provision that would cause it to lapse on May 16, 2006, two years after the day on which it had received royal assent. Bill C-63, which is the bill we are debating today, would remove that sunset clause.

The earlier law, Bill C-3, was enacted in response to the 2003 Supreme Court decision in the Figueroa case, which struck down certain provisions of the Canada Elections Act as being in contravention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, the provisions were seen by the Supreme Court, quite correctly, as an unconstitutional attempt to limit free speech by placing unreasonable restrictions on the ability of new political parties to compete on an equal footing with the existing major parties.

The Supreme Court stated in its ruling that the offending provisions of the Elections Act would be allowed to remain in place for six months, until June 2004, in order to allow Parliament the necessary time to design amendments that would ensure the smooth functioning of a new charter compliant election law.

Bill C-3 was hurriedly drafted in the spring of 2004 when it became clear that the Prime Minister's rush to call an early election would not leave the House with sufficient time to hold the hearings necessary to meet the looming June deadline set by the Supreme Court and still, within that deadline, properly design a new law.

Thus, when he introduced the bill to the House of Commons, the then minister for democratic renewal, the predecessor of the current minister, made it clear that Bill C-3 was an imperfect stopgap intended solely for the purpose of getting us through the impending election. After the election, a more considered and thoughtful law would be enacted.

I would like to read what the minister, the predecessor of the current minister, said in the House in 2004:

Bill C-3 represents the government's proposed response to the immediate consequences of the Figueroa ruling. This bill does not, however, necessarily constitute a permanent solution. The Figueroa ruling is highly complex, and a more thorough study of its impact is required.

This is why I have written to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to encourage a broader examination of the Canada Elections Act. I have asked the committee, moreover, to present all of its recommendations in the form of a draft bill, within a year's time

Then he added as an editorial:

This is a concrete example of application of our democratic reform.

In order to buy itself a year's grace in which to design a proper law, the government added a sunset clause to Bill C-3, which causes the law to lapse after two years from the date at which it was enacted, which will be May 16, 2006, eight months minus one day from today.

After the election a new minister for democratic reform was appointed. Then he was supplemented by a second minister for democratic renewal, whatever that might be, and they in turn were supplemented by not one, not two, but three parliamentary secretaries for democratic reform and democratic renewal, the hon. members for Beauséjour, Peterborough and Bramalea—Gore—Malton.

I am not sure what the Prime Minister's point was in inventing so many new posts for so many new ministers and secretaries. A surplus of ministers will not solve the democratic deficit. It will create organizational chaos, the same chaos that has caused the government to so completely lose its grip over the electoral reform file, arguably the most important aspect of democratic renewal or democratic reform to face the House of Commons in the 38th Parliament, and that both ministers claim that it is me, not the other minister, who is responsible for this key aspect of the democracy agenda.

In fact, when it comes to electoral reform, the two ministers are so confused as to who is in charge that they have proved incapable of acting on the recommendations of the procedure and House affairs committee, which last June unanimously recommended that the minister, or one of them anyway, set up a consultation process by October 1. That was 17 days ago. Then, having missed the deadlines, the ministers told us they would be ready to have a response for the House by October 20, according to the minister for democratic reform, or else by October 14, according to the minister for democratic renewal.

In the end they wound up proposing a response and bringing it to the House on the Friday before the break. I think they were so embarrassed by it that they did not bring it to the Table. I was in the House that day. I only learned that they had submitted a response when I got a call from a reporter about it. They had submitted the response through what is called the back door. They had taken it directly to the Clerk's office. This is a highly irregular process and one which I think was designed to ensure that there would be no attention to their report, or their non-report, in which they made a serious of outrageous claims about being unable to meet the deadlines set by the committee. This is a committee that negotiated its terms with the full cooperation of the Liberal members of the committee, including one of the three parliamentary secretaries responsible for this.

The confusion was so bad that in late September I had to propose a motion at the procedure and House affairs committee to require the two ministers to appear side by side before the committee to explain who was actually in charge. As to the three parliamentary secretaries, let us look at the grandiose mandate that they were given according to the Prime Minister's action plan for democratic reform in February 2004. It stated:

Parliamentary Secretaries will now play a more active role in ensuring meaningful relations between Ministers and Parliamentarians. In Committees, they will support productive dialogue by sharing departmental information and acting as the Minister's representative to address political issues--

The procedure and House affairs committee held its first meeting of the 38th Parliament over a year ago. One might think that with three parliamentary secretaries charged with responsibility for ensuring meaningful relations and sharing departmental information, the government would have been able to find the time to initiate permanent legislation and make its proposal to the committee, as the former minister for democratic reform had promised before the election. He was, after all, the minister for the same Prime Minister who is in office today.

But as the months that had been purchased with the passage of Bill C-3 last May dribbled away, not a word was breathed on the issue, at least not until early October, when Bill C-63 was introduced by the minister for democratic reform in the House of Commons.

This bill does not propose the necessary improvements or changes anticipated by Bill C-3. Instead, it eliminates the sunset clause, thereby making this inadequate and temporary stopgap law permanent. It proposes and I quote from the text of the projected law:

Within two years after the coming into force of this section, the committee of the House of Commons that normally considers electoral matters--

In other words, the procedure and House affairs committee:

--shall undertake a comprehensive review of the amendments made by this Act and submit a report to Parliament containing its recommendations concerning those amendments.

This means that the six month grace period granted by the Supreme Court in 2003, which had already been extended by two years in 2004 because the Liberal government had frittered away the allocated time, preparing for an early election, when it thought it could capture the polls, without launching a review process to produce adequate legislation, will now be extended for a further two years to provide room for further dithering. This time there is no sunset clause.

If the government does not initiate the review within the next two years, that it has failed to initiate in the past two years, no consequences will ensue. Bill C-3, which was enacted as a legislative band-aid, will become the permanent law of the land.

The small army of ministers and parliamentary secretaries responsible for this portfolio will no doubt protest that this law contains a legal binding requirement for committee review of the provisions contained in the old law. I would have to take off my shoes and socks to count on my fingers and toes all the legally mandated legislative reviews that this government has failed to meet.

On some occasions, mandatory legislative reviews have been dealt with by means of pro forma discussions that are so brief as to be an insult to the legislative process. I will take one example, the Referendum Act contained a provision requiring a mandatory review by the procedure and House affairs committee to take place within three years. The review that took place took less than one minute.

Even if the Liberals permit a review to take place, what guarantee do we have that these two ministers and three parliamentary secretaries or their successors will not treat the recommendation of the procedure and House affairs committee with the same disregard they have just treated the most recent recommendations of this very same committee regarding electoral reform?

Today the government is caught in a bind of its own making. It really will have to conduct the legislative review made necessary two years ago by the Supreme Court's Figueroa decision or else the provisions of Bill C-3 will expire next May, not replaced by any new statute.

This means that if parliamentarians defeat Bill C-63, the government will have no choice but to allow the committee on procedure and House affairs to proceed with the review that the government promised in early 2004, but was too disorganized in 2005 to initiate. If we parliamentarians let the government off the hook by enacting Bill C-63, unless we put a sunset review clause into that bill, this much needed review will never take place.

There are still eight months left prior to the expiry of Bill C-3. That is two months more than the original six month grace period granted in 2003 by the Supreme Court for remedial legislation to be debated. That is plenty of time to bring witnesses, to suggest amendments to the Canada Elections Act and to complete the job that the government with its surfeit of quarrelling ministers seems incapable of initiating on its own. It should be possible for the procedure and House affairs committee to produce a bill and for both Houses of Parliament to pass a new and better act prior to that date. Even if an election intervenes and the House does not resume sitting until after May 16, the sunset provision of Bill C-3 allows an additional 90 days prior to the expiry of that law. If the 38th Parliament cannot complete all stages of the new law, there would still be time to reintroduce what is likely to be a non-confrontational bill.

Nobody disagrees with the basic premise of the bill which is to ensure that a party cannot masquerade as a political party, collect donations, get tax receipts for it and proceed to use them for other purposes. A non-confrontational bill could be dealt with quickly and move through all readings in the 39th Parliament and become the law of the land, assuming of course that we engage in that review process in this Parliament.

With these considerations in mind, I ask that all members of Parliament oppose this bill.

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member's comments were not mostly about the bill at hand. They were mostly about electoral reform.

He is quite right to be frustrated and a good deal more over the way the government is not dealing with electoral reform. He is quite right in his assessment that we can kiss any prospect of electoral reform or any serious discussion of it in this Parliament goodbye as a result of the way the government has gone about frittering away the available time.

He is right also about the general lack of interest. I do not know whether it is insincerity or just a lack of interest in democracy on the part of the Liberals. Whatever it is, we can certainly see nothing happening.

Given these facts, I have to admit that I am a bit surprised that the member indicated that his party will be supporting the bill. I ask why it would be doing this for this reason.

There is a required legislative review of Bill C-3 that is currently in place. There is enough time over the next eight months to engage in this review and to hear the witnesses necessary to learn how other jurisdictions have dealt with this problem. We could have the chief electoral officers of other jurisdictions come before us. This is actually longer than the six month grace period that the Supreme Court originally gave for legislation to be drafted when it passed its Figueroa decision in November 2003. There is plenty of time to deal with this.

Moreover, if an election occurs, the sunset clause says that a further 90 days will be added. There is no prospect of an election occurring during which there would be an absence of law. We would either have Bill C-3 in place, the current provisions, or the new improved provisions that could be put forward if the proper review and sunset clause and therefore new legislation were to come forward as opposed to merely saying, as the Liberals are saying in Bill C-63, “Let us just not have the sunset clause and leave the review in place. We will get around to having a review whenever. Trust us, we will take care of this. Just remove anything that would make us comply with our word”.

Given the Liberals' history with that committee, the member and myself, why on earth would we trust them again? I am wondering if I misunderstood the hon. member when he indicated that his party would be supporting this bill, given the abominable record of the government in so many parallel cases.

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, the minister earlier was constructing a narrative about why he had to put forward legislation that would remove the sunset clause in Bill C-3 rather than engaging in a review of Bill C-3, the legislation that deals with smaller parties and the potential for money to be given to organizations that masquerade as parties. That is the purpose of the bill.

Now his narrative goes like this. I use the word “narrative” because it has only a marginal connection to the truth. It is not a lie; it only has a marginal connection to the truth.

First, he said that the bill was passed days prior to the election of 2004 so there was no time for any review at that time.

Second, he said that the bill must be reviewed in connection with Bill C-24, the electoral finance law, which deals with among other things restriction of individual donations. He asked the committee in a letter he sent out in November 2004 for this to take place, and nobody objected. He got no response to the letter.

I have my researcher trying to find the letter, the existence of which I have to admit was a mystery to me. Perhaps I did not see that correspondence. The parliamentary secretary sits on the committee. One might have thought that at some point he would have said a response was needed to the letter. The minister could have done it. The minister crosses the floor to chat with me all the time. This was almost a year ago and I do not recall this. Anyway, nobody objected and therefore it must be done in conjunction with Bill C-24.

Finally, he said that the Chief Electoral Officer's report on Bill C-24 was delayed and it would not happen until later. Therefore, we could not review Bill C-24 so we could not review Bill C-3 either. This meant we would miss the legislative deadline, which meant it would be irresponsible to go ahead and not pass a law getting rid of the sunset clause, ensuring we could deal with Bill C-3 and its subject matter off at some distant time. I want to emphasize that this is nonsense, and I will ask my hon. colleague a question that relates to this.

However, first, with respect to the logical link to Bill C-24, one would expect to see this in the original letter that was sent to the procedure and House affairs committee. A letter was sent by the prior minister for the portfolio dated February 10, 2004. Members will note that this was not right before the election. It was long before an election. In it, he asks the committee to take a look at this. He makes no reference to any connection with Bill C-24. In the letter to the committee he says:

Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that the Bill is necessarily a permanent solution. The Supreme Court's ruling in Figueroa is complex and may well have broader implications, which the Committee should have a full opportunity to assess.

For this reason, I would invite the Committee, following its consideration and reporting of the Bill, [Bill C-3], to begin a more extensive study of the wider implications of the Figueroa ruling on the Canada Elections Act. I also welcome the Committee's views on other aspects of the electoral process that it believes warrant attention.

There is no necessary connection to Bill C-24.

The review could not begin until right before an election. However, the letter was sent out. That minister then became minister in June and proceeded never to bother following up. Where does the fault lie? Is it with all those incompetent members of the committee who just could not get around to it or is it with one minister who just could not remember to take care of his own portfolio until a year had gone by?

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, people watching in TV-land may be misled by what the minister has just said. He made a factually incorrect statement. He said that we could be in a situation next May where we would go into an election and there would be no rules governing the conduct of smaller parties because this legislation would have run out. That is actually not so.

There is a well constructed sunset clause and what it says is that the legislation will run out on May 16 of next year. As I have mentioned, May 16 is seven months from now, which gives us plenty of time to deal with the matter at hand, with passing new legislation and having witnesses and so on. But in the event that Parliament is not sitting when the expiration occurs, the legislation is automatically extended for a further 90 days, meaning that in fact there would be legislation in place at that time. The danger the minister is describing is a non-existent danger. The fact is that this legislation will not put us in any danger.

The real point here is that going into the next election we should have a proper replacement for Bill C-3, something that takes care of the underlying problem of moneys potentially being collected and used for groups that are not really parties. This could be done by the next election if we pass the legislation that I am proposing we pass instead of simply having the sunset clause eliminated.

[Canada Elections Act, October 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the minister said he wanted to engage in a review of Bill C-3 and Bill C-24 together. That is peachy. However, the fact is that there is no legislative requirement. Bill C-24 is not about to expire. Bill C-3 will expire May 16, 2006.

There was over a year during which, with this minister as the minister for this portfolio, a review could have taken place. In fact, virtually that entire time, with the exception of the first month of that two year period, he was the minister. During all this time, this review could have taken place. There is almost exactly an additional seven months before May 16, 2006 when this bill will expire.

The question I am working up to is twofold. First, why did he wait an entire year, as minister, indeed why did he wait an entire 16 months now before bringing this matter before the committee or before the House, when he had this large amount of time set aside to deal with the bill?

Second, we still have seven months before the expiration of Bill C-3 and the provisions it contains. That is plenty of time to bring witnesses before the committee and to hear from witnesses who could be chief electoral officers, for example, of other jurisdictions or other provinces to take a look at what they do.

Why the rush to simply replace the sunset clause, which forces his government to deal with this, with something that means that a review is not necessary when his record clearly indicates that the government is not going to respect the kinds of reviews that are put into legislation, that it is not going to follow through? Why would we want to replace a mandatory review which now forces the government to take action with a non-mandatory review which means it can dither around for another year or never get around to dealing with the bill?

[Parliament of Canada Act, October 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to speak to Bill C-251.

Let me start by indicating that from the point of view of my party's caucus, we feel this ought to be a free vote for members of Parliament. Hopefully, other parties will adopt a similar attitude.

On the one hand, I want to congratulate my hon. colleague for trying to infuse some ethics into what he feels is a House where ethics are not as strong as they should be. However, I believe this is a misguided attempt. I am afraid I will be encouraging members to vote against this legislation.

I will lay out my arguments to explain a little about what I think is problematic with the bill, but let me start by giving an outline of the general problem that exists with the bill.

I think it is misguided in this case to try to regulate by law that which is governed largely by convention and largely by rules of the House within this chamber. The definition of parties within this House, as opposed to under the Canada Elections Act, is very much a matter that is governed not by legislation, not law but by the rules of this House which may be changed by this House. Therefore, it seems to me that trying to establish laws that govern the behaviour of members of Parliament within the House and starting to try to use legislation to determine how parties are defined within the House and what members may do within it is taking away the independence that the House, as a collegial body, needs in order to function properly is a step in the wrong direction.

I find the road it takes us down, as a practical matter, is one about which we ought to worry. In general, I oppose anything that increases party discipline or the control of the party leadership over individual members of Parliament. The bill, although it is not as severe in restriction as it could be, seems to have that general effect.

We are elected partly as representatives of our parties, but also partly as individuals. Were this not the case, I suspect there would be a great deal less constituency work done by members of Parliament. Members understand the importance of doing good constituency work in order to get themselves re-elected. That is part of the political goodwill or in the case of non-performing MPs part of the political baggage they take with them personally. We ought to be doing everything we can to strengthen that part of the political equation as a way of building up the independence of a member of Parliament.

As someone who has voted against my party on a number of occasions, for example on the Species at Risk Act and on the anti-terrorism law a few years ago, what I did was consult with my constituents. I asked them how I should vote. When they advised me to vote for or against a bill, regardless what my party did, that put me in opposition to my party. However, I was able to do so and do so freely, partly because that is the attitude my party takes toward allowing a great deal of freedom for individual members of Parliament. However, in doing that, I was establishing myself as a constituent's representative. That is a very valuable thing, something that is lost when one is simply a representative of one's party.

We elect individual MPs in individual districts in our country. There is discussion of changing this system. For example, there is discussion of introducing a list system in parallel to the system of individual MPs being elected in individual ridings, in which case the assumption is people are voting for the party exclusively. Many New Democrats support this. This is done in a number of countries, including New Zealand and Germany. It has some good aspects and some bad aspects. One of the bad aspects is that members of Parliament elected under this kind of system tend to simply be voting machines.

In New Zealand, in particular, a law called the anti-party jumping law, and that was not its formal name, its was popular name, was introduced and passed a few years ago for members elected on the party list system. The effect has been to introduce an ironclad discipline where the member of Parliament stands for nothing whatsoever. Each party gets a certain number of MPs, which are a certain number of points or automatic votes in the House. If the member tries at any point to leave the party, the member is removed from the House of Commons and the next person on the list is taken.

MPs from New Zealand understand very clearly that if they become a list member of Parliament, if they are subject to the anti-party jumping law as opposed to being constituency MPs, their freedom of action is greatly reduced. I know this from having met and chatted with a number of New Zealand members of Parliament about this when I was down there a few months ago.

However New Zealand has taken an additional step, which I pray will never occur here. The House of Representatives is allowing members to cast their vote even when they are absent. Those are all things we would not want to see in this House of Commons.

I want to add that there have been distinguished individuals who have crossed the floor on various occasions and have been re-elected, so there are cases where it is legitimate. Winston Churchill, who was first elected as a Conservative, crossed to the Liberals and served for over a decade as a Liberal member of Parliament. Indeed, he served as the first Sea Lord of the Admiralty during the first world war and then he re-crossed to the Conservative Party.

As members can see, there have occasions on which this has occurred and the individual member of Parliament was not punished by his or her constituents for doing so because they judged that it was the right thing to do.

These are very frequent occasions, more frequent than not, where someone crosses the floor and is punished by his or her constituents and loses his or her seat. Probably the most famous example of this is the example of Jack Horner who in 1977, as the member for Crowfoot in Alberta, crossed to the Liberal Party and joined the cabinet of Pierre Trudeau as a minister without portfolio and then became a minister of industry, trade and commerce. He went on in the 1979 election, despite having been prior to this an extraordinarily popular member of Parliament, to be defeated by more than 20,000 votes in his constituency. He attempted to come back in 1980 as a Liberal candidate but actually went down from his 1979 total. Punishment came for his action.

The option exists for the voters to deal with things in this way. It is possible one could design a system whereby there would be sort of a half-way house in between waiting for an election and the immediate byelection that would be proposed by my hon. colleague in this bill. One could, for example, say that we would allow, if there was genuine support for a byelection in the relevant riding, a byelection to occur and we could measure this by saying that if more than x % of the voters of that constituency sign a petition calling for a byelection to occur, that byelection will occur.

This idea was actually proposed about 10 years ago for Jag Bhaduria who had left the Liberal Party and was sitting as an independent. A petition was circulated in his riding and produced probably enough votes under any reasonable system to justify the byelection. However there was no system for allowing this and he wound up being defeated in the next election, which suggests that although justice was not as swiftly served in that case as it could have been, it was not unreasonable action.

The second concern I have is that I do not think this law would actually achieve its intended goal. I say this because parties are reasonably informal mechanisms. It is possible for an individual to sit as an independent but always vote with another party in the House of Commons providing all the de facto support necessary to ensure, for example, the survival of that government.

The hon. member for Newmarket—Aurora, for example, could have crossed, sat as an independent and voted nonetheless with the government on that critical vote a few months ago. As we all recall, there was an independent MP in the House, the late Chuck Cadman, who did not cross to the Liberals, but nonetheless had a vote that was just as effective in sustaining them in power, as was the vote of the member for Newmarket—Aurora. Therefore, the problem that is attempting to be addressed is not actually effectively addressed in the legislation.

I want to conclude by pointing out that I disagree with one characterization that the hon. member used in proposing his bill. He said that this House was not the no tell motel. Surely, when one crosses the floor this is not something done surreptitiously like checking into a motel room for a romantic liaison. It is something that happens very publicly. When someone makes the decision to cross the floor everyone knows about it. They will either reward the MP or punish the MP, as the case may be. As I have indicated, punishment occurs more frequently than reward, but it is certainly not something that happens in secret.

I believe the informal safeguards we have in place are the best ones and therefore I encourage members to vote against the bill when it comes up for a vote shortly.

[Parliament of Canada Act, October 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my question is very brief. It refers to a technical aspect of the hon. member's bill. In clause 1 of the bill he amends section 30.1 of the Parliament of Canada Act. In particular, he would add a new section, proposed subsection 30.1(3), which would read as follows:

If a member of the House of Commons crosses the floor of that House, the leader of that party that receives the member shall, without delay and in writing, notify the Speaker that the member has crossed the floor of the House

Is there any anticipated notification from the leader of the party that the member leaves? If the leader of the party that receives the member fails to provide notification, nothing else, including the byelection, could actually occur under the terms of this bill. I am wondering how the member would respond to that concern.

[Property Rights, October 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear every speaker getting my riding name right since we returned. They must have spent the summer practising.

I suspect that in her remarks earlier the parliamentary secretary was making a speech that must have been written with the intention of being used on my private member's Bill C-279 rather than on this motion because she made references to the Canadian Bill of Rights. I proposed a lot of that effect and unfortunately she only seemed to have a passing familiarity with the motion before the House today.

I want to talk a little about the overarching theme of property rights that is contained in both the motion before the House today and in the bill that I proposed.

Let me start by going back in history to December 7, 1941, which is the day on which the imperial Japanese navy launched a simultaneous attack on British and American forces in the Pacific. As a result of this, both Canadians and Americans found themselves at war with Japan and both countries at that time contained large populations of naturalized and second generation citizens of Japanese origin, most living on the Pacific coast and working largely as fishermen.

Given the fear of coastal attacks, the white majority in both countries responded with what one author has described as “near-identical racism to the perceived security threat posed by the Japanese minorities”.

As a result of this, in February 1942 these mostly patriotic Canadian and American citizens were rounded up and shipped to internment camps in the interior. In their absence, their properties, including their fishing vessels, were in many cases seized without their consent. Naturally, some of the internees sought legal remedies to the outrageous manner in which their rights had been violated. In Canada, which had no bill of rights at that time, their appeals were rejected by the courts and the policy banning these citizens from returning to the west coast remained in effect until 1949.

In the United States, the cases eventually made their way to the supreme court which ruled in 1944 that the wartime internment of American citizens without proof of anti-government activity or treasonable sentiment was a justifiable use of the state power. This ruling has made some people comment that in times of crisis the bill of rights cannot be relied upon to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

However what is forgotten and what is relevant to today's debate is that this same court also ruled, at a time when war was still raging with the Japanese empire and when that empire seemed years from defeat, that it was not permissible for the American government to take away their property and sell it compulsorily. In Canada, by contrast, seized property was sold for a fraction of its value without regard to the protests of former owners. To add insult to injury, deductions were made for sales costs and taxes.

In a comparison of the treatment of the Japanese on the other side of the border, historian Roger Daniels concluded that it was “the American constitution, with its tradition of judicial review, which was largely responsible” for the less uncivilized behaviour of the American authorities.

I have related this story because I believe there are a number of vital services that can be provided by a well written, well interpreted bill of rights or charter of rights and, in particular of course, in protecting people and their property rights. Here is a clear demonstration of how this works and how it could have worked in Canada. This is the kind of benefit we could see if property rights were protected in a bill of rights.

Of course there are other ways of going about dealing with protecting property rights. We could do it through the Charter of Rights and other levels of government could pass ordinary legislation.

This has been a critical part of my own political career. I wrote the property rights policy that was adopted by the old Reform Party in the 1990s. I was active in causing the new Conservative Party to adopt a version of this policy at its most recent policy convention in March. I was happy to assist the hon. member for Yorkton—Melville when he was drafting his motion several months ago. Actually, I withdrew an item of my own from the Order Paper back in April so that he could start the process of bringing this very important issue before the House, and thank goodness he has done so.

Finally, of course, I introduced a private member's bill of my own, Bill C-279, which seeks to entrench property rights in a meaningful form in Canadian law. I will just talk for a minute about Bill C-279 before returning to the motion at hand.

Bill C-279 seeks to add teeth to the property protection provisions of John Diefenbaker's legislated Canadian Bill of Rights which was enacted in 1960. The Canadian Bill of Rights is not a constitutional document, unlike the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it only affects federal legislation, which means that it would not affect a number of the areas that were dealt with by my hon. colleague from Durham moments ago. However it does set up a pattern for the kind of behaviour we would like to see and it also deals with federal regulations that intrude on the lives of ordinary Canadians.

The Bill of Rights contains a property provision right now, but it does not prohibit any limitations on how governments may abridge property rights. Bill C-279 seeks to correct this by altering the word of the relevant section of the Bill of Rights to read as follows:

(a) the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment and use of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law, and, in the case of property, without full, just and timely compensation;

This is the whole point of the exercise. Neither I, nor the member for Yorkton—Melville, nor anybody else in the House who is speaking in favour of property rights, is trying to take away any power from the government. We are not attempting to say that governments cannot pass laws in favour of public safety, protection of the environment, zoning or taking over pieces of property for military use. We are not trying to invade on the government's right to create new bankruptcy laws which was the particularly unusual example cited by the parliamentary secretary.

We are trying to ensure that when these actions occur, for example, when the use of land is restricted because of the need to protect an endangered species because of unusual environmental situations, that the cost to the landowner of the change in use of that land is compensated in some way. There is no reason why the government cannot do this, except of course that there might be an additional cause.

This is the usual argument that tends to come up and the parliamentary secretary raised this objection earlier. Essentially, if we stop downloading the costs of new laws, and I will take environmental laws as an example, onto a specific group such as farmers, it will raise the cost of these worthwhile regulations and laws, and therefore we will have fewer of these laws and fewer of the benefits that go along with them.

There is a technical way in which perhaps that is partly correct, but the obvious thing that I want to point out is that the marginal cost in lost environmental protection would be very slight. This is true for the following three reasons. First, many environmental regulations passed right now are of limited benefit in protecting the environment. These would be the ones most readily set aside if the government could not afford the cost.

For example, there is a regulation in Ontario forbidding the production of sawdust and wood chips at sawmills, even though these chips are used to spread as ground cover by the National Capital Commission and elsewhere. Bureaucrat A who wants the regulation, if there were property rights protections and compensation for the taking of property, would have to justify the cost of that compensation to the Environment Department to bureaucrat B, who would then try to focus perhaps on using the available funds more wisely and not on measures that have no discernible benefit to the environment. This of course applies to every other area.

Second, the government would start to focus on lower cost solutions to the environmental problems that it is called upon to regulate. For example, if the government had to cover the cost of complying with its own regulations, I do not think it would approach the problem of keeping drinking water safe by creating the requirement for concrete retaining tanks for liquid manure which has been done here in Ontario under the nutrient management act. This is perhaps the highest cost possible way of dealing with the legitimate concern about keeping the water table clean and municipal water safe in the wake of the Walkerton tragedy. Because of the cost to download it, there is no need for the bureaucrats to worry about this sort of thing.

Finally, taking actions that impose costs without compensation is actually bad policy in achieving its goal. To take the example of environmental policy, there is what is known as the shoot, shovel and shut up phenomenon where someone recognizes that he or she has an endangered species on his or her property and seeks to shoot it, then shovel and hide the evidence in order to protect the property from having its usage restricted by laws.

This is what we see going on in Goulbourn where right now people are clearing their land in order to ensure they do not get wetland designation. Several years ago I saw my father's next door neighbour out in the country in rural Osgoode, south of Ottawa, do the very same thing to avoid having a wetland designation that might prevent him from severing his property.

There is in fact very little real cost to ensuring compensation. There is a great deal of additional benefit and justice, and as in the example I gave earlier of the Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, it is frequently those who are most disenfranchised and least able to speak for themselves who are the victims of a lack of property rights in the country. Therefore, I urge everybody to vote in favour of the motion before the House today.

[Queensway Carleton Hospital, September 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have the rules of the House in front of me, but I believe that in order for an amendment to be out of order, it would have to change the intention of the motion. The intention, as was made very clear in the lengthy speech of my hon. colleague, was to ensure that the Queensway Carleton Hospital is able to continue functioning.

I am aware that the hon. member disagrees with me on this point. However, I think the key point here is not the sale or lease, but it is in fact the—