1987-06-26

PRIVILEGE


[Stage Direction]
Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine
East): Mr. Speaker, I rise on a Question of Privilege of which 1 gave you notice earlier this morning.
Yesterday the chairman of the Standing Committee on Labour, Employment and Immigration called a meeting of the committee to plan the future business of the committee and to deal with recommendations of the steering committee, that is, the subcommittee on agenda and procedure, that the committee meet on Monday, June 29, to examine the policy of the Unemployment Insurance Commission to force unemployment insurance beneficiaries to take work as strike breakers, and also to deal with the John Quigley affair.
Rather than deal with the proposals of the steering committee, the majority on the committee forced the committee, first, to meet in camera, and then passed a resolution that the committee would not meet until September 14.
As a result of that action taken by the Government majority, myself and three other members on the committee made a demand under Standing Order 92(2) that the committee meet to deal with the Unemployment Insurance Commission policy with respect to strike breakers. This demand was made by myself, the Hon. Member for Nickel Belt (Mr. Rodriguez), the Hon. Member for Spadina (Mr. Heap) and the Hon. Member for York West (Mr. Marchi).
As of this morning we have not yet had a reply from the chairman of the standing committee with respect to our demand and we need 48 hours notice in order for such a meeting to take place. We maintain that the chairman of the standing committee has no discretion in this matter to delay or refuse our request, nor can the majority on the committee do so.
The purpose of Standing Order 92(2) was to ensure the calling of a meeting by a minority on standing committees of this House. We strongly believe that this action taken by the Conservative majority on the committee, and the chairman, to
refuse a meeting under Standing Order 92(2), is a violation of our privileges and, in particular, a violation of the privileges of all Members in opposition Parties in this Parliament. This is particularly so in a Parliament such as this where the Government has an overwhelming majority.
If Standing Order 92(2) is to have any meaning whatsoever, it is that four Members of a committee can force that committee to meet when there is an important issue on which it must meet. I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that our privileges, the minority Members of this Parliament, the Opposition, are being violated by the action of the majority on the committee by the refusal to act on our demand under Standing Order 92(2) to have a meeting to deal with this important matter.
If you find, Mr. Speaker, that we have a prima facie case of privilege, 1 will make the appropriate motion to refer this matter to the Standing Committee on Elections, Privileges and Procedure.
Mr. Doug Lewis (Parliamentary Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister and President of the Privy Council):: Mr. Speaker, 1 wish to refer you directly to Citation 76 of Beauchesne's, Fifth Edition:
Breaches of privilege in committee may be dealt with only by the House itself on report from the committee.
Second, I would submit that the committee majority has decided not to sit during the summer as has, I believe, almost every other committee of this House, so that puts them in the majority rather than in the minority.
Third, the four Members of the Opposition who wish to meet Monday, only for their own purposes, have given notice under Standing Order 92(2), which they are entitled to do. But my friend presupposes that the chairman will not call that meeting. This is only the first day of the 10 day period. My goodness, if we are going to have a Question of Privilege, surely it must come at the end of the 10 day period, not on the very first day.
There is no one in breach of Standing Order 92(2) until the expiration of the 10 days. I do not think I need to say anymore than that.


Mr. Allmand:: Mr. Speaker-


Mr. Speaker:: Perhaps the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East (Mr. Allmand) could wait and I will hear the Hon. Member for Kamloops Shuswap (Mr. Riis) and then I will hear the Hon. Member again.

June 26, 1987
Privilege-Mr. Allmand


Mr. Nelson A. Riis (Kamloops-Shuswap):: Mr. Speaker, I find it unfortunate that I feel an obligation to rise on this Question of Privilege this morning. This is a time of year when we are trying to facilitate the business of the House. All Parties are trying to co-operate. We also recognize that the committees are an extension of this House, that the work done in the committees is a reflection of what happens in this House and vice versa.
I believe it is important to recognize this as a unique situation for two reasons; first, the committee was intending to deal with the Unemployment Insurance Commission's approval of the hiring of strike breakers in the Post Office.


Philip Derek Lewis: Not true.


Nelson Andrew Riis: This makes it unique. This is not a typical piece of committee business. I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary not to interrupt. We all listened to him carefully.


Philip Derek Lewis: Tell the truth. This is hearsay, and you know it.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, that deserves a comment.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East has raised an alleged question of privilege. I have listened to the Parliamentary Secretary who has made his points effectively and succinctly. The Hon. Member for Kamloops-Shuswap has the floor. 1 would ask all Hon. Members to extend the courtesies to that Hon. Member that were extended to both the other Hon. Members in this intervention.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I simply want to make the point that we are dealing with a very special situation here today at a time when the co-operation of all sides of the House is required. We are dealing with a situation in committee regarding a matter that concerns us all, that is, the impasse between Canada Post and the letter carriers and the hiring of strike-breakers. This is an issue that deserves attention by the appropriate committee, the Standing Committee on Labour, Employment and Immigration. That is what is behind a great many of the concerns that we have had in the last 24 hours.
Granted, Standing Order 92(2) indicates that within 10 days of receipt by the Clerk of the Standing Committee of a request signed by any four members of the said committee the chairman of the said committee shall convene such a meeting. Let us also recognize that by its Standing Orders the House will recess on Tuesday. In other words, if the committee chairman were to fulfil the intention of Standing Order 92(2) he could, by following that rule, call for a meeting in September. Obviously, the issue facing us today regarding the hiring of strike-breakers by Canada Post will be an academic issue come September, at least we all hope so. The issue is now; it is before us now. That is why the Hon. Member has indicated that the privileges of the minority members on the committee have been obviously violated.
Considering that we are about to enter into the summer recess and the fact that the hiring of strike-breakers is a matter of urgent and pressing necessity for the committee to deal with now, it is not unrealistic for Hon. members on this day to be concerned that, in spite of the request, the chairman of the committee has not given any indication whether or not there will be a meeting. I simply want to speak in support of my hon. colleague's concern that the privileges of Members of this House have in fact been breached.


Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, I want to make some very brief comments about the question of privilege raised by my colleague, the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East (Mr. Allmand). First, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Government House Leader (Mr. Lewis) argued against the validity of the question of privilege on the basis of Citation 76 of Beauchesne. I point out that Citation 76 is in the Fifth Edition of Beauchesne which appeared years before the provision of our Standing Orders which the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East relies on in support of his question of privilege. In fact, that section of our Standing Orders was made permanent only a few weeks ago. Thus, I would respectfully submit that the citation is of questionable relevance and validity with respect to the section of our Standing Orders upon which the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East relies, especially since as far as I am aware that section did not exist at the time that Beauchesne's Fifth Edition was published.
Second, if Your Honour looks at the citation itself, the context of the language seems to be with respect to the conduct of witnesses and their failure to attend or to refuse to give evidence rather than the type of situation which the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East is talking about today. If the point made by the Parliamentary Secretary is correct, then members of a committee could decide for themselves whether any of the Standing Orders referring to committees apply to them. I respectfully submit that such a conclusion urged upon Your Honour by the Parliamentary Secretary is patently ridiculous.
The committees of the House are subsidiary bodies of the House and subject to the Standing Orders of the House the same way as the Chamber itself is subject to those orders. Surely, if a committee or the majority of members of a committee are unwilling to follow the Standing Orders, and they are not in a position to decide whether or not the Standing Orders apply to them, then surely this is a matter for Your honour to decide upon as Speaker of the House responsible for applying the Standing Orders to the House and any and all of its subsidiary bodies.
I submit that it is clearly a matter touching upon the privileges of all Members of the House whether or not a committee or a majority of members of a committee follow the Standing Orders.
The Parliamentary Secretary attempts to play down the significance of four members of the committee having made a
June 26, 1987

request for a meeting of the committee pursuant to Standing Order 92(2) because they are members of the Opposition. I point out to you, Mr. Speaker, that the Standing Orders of the Elouse adopted unanimously by the Elouse-in fact on the proposal of the Government-make no distinction whatsoever between members of the Opposition and members of the Government majority when it comes to determining the validity of the request provided for and permitted under Standing Order 92(2). The request for a meeting provided for under Standing order 92(2) is just as valid if it is made by four opposition Members as if it were made by government Members, or by a mixture of government Members and opposition Members.
Therefore, the question for Your Elonour to decide is whether the unwillingness of the majority members of the committee to act pursuant to the clear wording of the Standing Orders of the Elouse involves a question of privilege, not only of the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East but of all Members of the House. I submit that it does.
If it were possible for the majority members of the committee to follow the rules of the House on committee meetings as they see fit, it would make a mockery of what this House has decided on with respect to the application of the Standing Orders to committees and the way that the committees should act. It would make a mockery of all the pretensions of the Government with respect to parliamentary reform which was supposed to make committees more important and more useful for all Members of the House, including members of the Opposition.
Finally, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Government House Leader argues that the question of privilege raised by the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East is premature because there are still 10 sitting days within which the chairman of the committee should convene a meeting. But the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East, 1 think, will be pointing out-but 1 want to put this on the record now-that the majority of members of the committee, supporters of the Government, passed a resolution stating that they would not meet until September. In effect, they have given their answer. Unfortunately, that answer is that they do not care about the rules of the House.
I respectfully submit that you, Sir, acting on behalf of us all have to say very clearly that the members of a committee, even though they are a majority supporting the Government, have to obey the rules to the same extent as the rest of us.


William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, I will be very brief in reply to two of the arguments of the Parliamentary Secretary. First, he said that questions of privilege arising in committee could only be dealt with on a report from that committee. In this case the committee refuses to meet even to consider the question of privilege.
Second, he says under Standing Order 92(2) that the chairman has 10 days from the receipt of a notice by four
Privilege-Mr. Allmand
members to call the meeting. The rule also says that 48 hours' notice must be given of such a meeting. We all know that Parliament has only two more days of sitting after today, next Monday and Tuesday, before it must adjourn for the summer. If we are to have this meeting before we adjourn for the summer, then the 48 hours' notice would have to be given today.
The steering committee of that committee resolved and made a report to the full committee that the committee should take up the issue of whether or not the Unemployment Insurance Commission was forcing unemployed workers to take jobs as strike-breakers or else they would lose their unemployment insurance benefits, and were saying, "here are these jobs at the Post Office, take them", and if they refused to take them, it said, "you lose your benefits".
Members of Parliament on that committee have received calls indicating that that is what is being done. We do not know whether or not it is being done. That is why we wanted to call the committee to examine this very important issue which affects the ongoing postal strike.
If we cannot meet on Monday or Tuesday to have the Unemployment Insurance Commission deal with the issue and answer whether or not it is being done, then we will not have an opportunity to do so.
If Standing Order 92(2) means anything at all, it means that four members of a committee can oblige the sitting of a committee to deal with issues such as this, even when the majority may not want to do so. Why did we decide to include that rule in the previous round of reforms? It was just for that reason, so that a committee would have to meet on the request of four members to deal with certain specified issues.
By the committee refusing to respond and grant us our request today, we will not be able to do it before the House adjourns. I submit that our privileges in the Opposition, and the privileges of all Members are being harmed by this lack of decision and/or the decision of the committee not to meet at all during the summer months.
By the way, we are not asking in this case to meet during the summer; we are asking to meet next week, next Monday or Tuesday, while the House is still sitting.


Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, I see no reason to reply to my colleague's recent comments.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East (Mr. Allmand) has raised a specific complaint that he and other members of the Standing Committee of Labour, Employment and Immigration have heard allegations that unemployment insurance officials are telling people who are receiving UIC benefits that they can no longer receive those benefits unless they take jobs at the Post Office which, as all Hon. Members know, is in a strike position.

June 26, 1987
Privilege-Mr. Allmand
The Hon. Member's complaint-and presumably it is the complaint of other members on the committee who join with him-is that if the Post Office is doing this, it ought not to be doing so because it is forcing unemployed workers to act as strike-breakers.
The Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East has clearly stated to the Chair and to the House, as I am sure he would, quite frankly, that he does not know whether this allegation is in fact true. However, he says that what he wishes and what other members of the committee wish to do is have a meeting of the committee so that the matter can be pursued.
The Standing Order under which the Hon. Member seeks recourse within the committee-and Hon. Members will note that 1 said "within the committee"-is Standing Order 92(2), which reads as follows:
Within ten sitting days of the receipt, by the clerk of a standing committee, of a request signed by any four members of the said committee, the Chairman of the said committee shall convene such a meeting provided that forty-eight-hours' notice is given of the meeting. For the purposes of this Standing Order, the reasons for convening such a meeting shall be stated in the request.
As has been pointed out by the Hon. Member for Windsor West (Mr. Gray), it is a Standing Order which has just been confirmed by the House. The Hon. Member for Windsor West argued that because it is a new order, Citation 76 from Beauchesne's Fifth Edition, which was given to the Chair by the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary, is not relevant. That citation is to the effect that it is not for the Chair to interfere with the internal workings of a committee.
It is the Chair's view that the citation in Beauchesne's to which the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary referred is not made irrelevant at all just because there are some new rules and, as a consequence, the Chair must pay a lot of attention to that.
The general rule is that a complaint about the workings of a committee is not something with which the Chair in normal circumstances is entitled to interfere or to try to set right, unless of course it is in fact a question of privilege that is carefully defined-and it has been so for decades-as something that is being done which makes it impossible for or diminishes the capacity of Hon. Members to do their duty as Members of Parliament.
The complaint the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East brought to the Chair is one which is, certainly in the minds of some Hon. Members, a serious one, and it may well be in the minds of most Hon. Members of this place. However, I cannot make this decision on the basis of the complaint itself.
What the Unemployment Insurance Commission is or is not doing is, as the Hon. Member said, not clear yet. Even if it were clear, that cannot in itself be the basis for a ruling of privilege by the Chair. As legitimate as the point may be, the Chair must remind Hon. Members that it is the responsibility of the Chair to rule on procedural matters, not on matters
extraneous to the procedure, no matter how important they may be in fact.
The Hon. Member has asked the Chair to intervene by saying that the privilege of Hon. Members has been breached as a consequence of one of two things, or perhaps both; first, the majority of the committee having decided, apparently, that they do not want to meet until after the summer is over, and second, the refusal, at least so far this morning, of the Chairman to convene a meeting as a consequence of a notice given to the Chairman on behalf of four members pursuant to the rule.
Whatever the rule might have been intended to mean, other than how it appears on its face, the Chair is in a difficult position in this case because the Chair must read the rule as it is actually stated. What the rule says is, "Within ten sitting days of the receipt". I quote these words, but the effect is that within ten sitting days of the receipt of a notice-and I am assuming for the purposes of this ruling that the notice was properly given-the Chairman shall convene a meeting and forty-eight hours' notice must be given of that meeting.
The Chair reads that to mean that under this rule the Chairman must convene that meeting or must give notice of that meeting within ten sitting days of the receipt, which means that the meeting could take place some days, certainly, after receipt of the notice.
The difficulty of the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East and of the other members who want this meeting is that unless something should change-and of course the Chair assumes nothing at this point, except that there is some expectation that the House will adjourn this coming Tuesday-the chairperson of the committee may not decide to set a date or give notice to have a meeting during the next three sitting days, that is, today, Monday, and Tuesday. If that should happen, the next sitting day the rule would apply to would be sometime after the House reconvenes in September.
It is not for the Chair to comment on whether the chairman or other members of the committee ought or ought not to make some special effort to comply with the request that has come in. It might very well be that Members would prefer that the Chair did not comment at all on what they want to do. It is certainly not the place of the Chair to do so.
It is because, at least as of this morning, the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East and the other Members who have asked for a meeting have had no response one way or the other, except a clear indication from the committee that they do not want to sit until September under after the House reconvenes, that this complaint is brought to the Chair.
As I have said, the matter is not one that is frivolous. It is certainly one that this particular committee, if it were disposed
June 26, 1987

Copyright Act COPYRIGHT ACT
to hear it, would have every right to hear and perhaps ought to hear. Unfortunately, and I say this with some regret to the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East, the Chair cannot find under these circumstances a prima facie case of privilege.
Again, the Chair is in a position where it is not appropriate for the Chair to try to intervene in the workings of the committee. The effect is, of course, that if members of the committee are not able to have some further discussion today or Monday, it may well be that, because of the wording of the rule, the committee will not have before it this matter which, as 1 have said, at least on the basis of the allegations is certainly of interest and seriousness.
However, that is a situation in which we all find ourselves as a consequence of the two things; the wording of the rule and the fact that an adjournment is scheduled for sometime this coming Tuesday. I would point out to the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East and to other Members that there are some opportunities available today, Monday and Tuesday when this matter can be raised. It may be possible for the Hon. Members to find some clarification through Question Period or by some other means, and possibly a resolution of the problem about which they are concerned may be there. I regret to have to advise the Hon. Member and his colleagues that under the circumstances it is not appropriate for the Chair to try to intervene.
I want to thank all Hon. Members, the Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East for raising this matter, the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Privy Council (Mr. Lewis) for his succinct remarks and the Hon. Member for Windsor West and the Hon. Member for Kamloops-Shuswap (Mr. Riis). I would hope that perhaps some Hon. Members could gather together in the next little while and perhaps a discussion would help resolve the difficulty-



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


Hon. Tom Hockin (Minister of State for Finance) moved: that a Ways and Means motion with respect to the Imposition of Taxes in the Nova Scotia Offshore area and to amend the Income Tax Act, laid upon the Table Thursday, June 25, 1987, be concurred in.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Monday, June 15, consideration of the motion of Miss MacDonald that Bill C-60, an Act to amend the Copyright Act and to amend other Acts in consequence thereof, be read the second time and referred to a legislative committee.
Hon. Flora MacDonald (Minister of Communications):: Mr. Speaker, when I opened debate on Bill C-60 on June 15, I mentioned that we were introducing long overdue amendments to the Copyright Act and that this was the first package of amendments that would come before the House. The House will realize, of course, that there has been no major revision of the Copyright Act since it was introduced in 1924. Therefore, we are very pleased to be able to bring these amendments forward.
I had begun to list the various measures that are included in this first package of amendments to the Copyright Act. The first measure dealt with collectives.
The collective approach has many advantages. For users, lengthy searches for copyright owners and protracted negotiations on royalty payments for each individual use are eliminated by the extension of collectives. The result is quick, easy access to protected works for users. On the other hand, for copyright owners, there is remuneration that might otherwise never have been received. There is also greater protection. Collectives have the resources to monitor the use made of works in their repertoires, insist on royalties and even sue for infringement if necessary. I know that in addition to the existing performing rights societies, namely, CAPAC and PROCAN, some similar groups are already forming and are eager to receive the go ahead that this legislation would provide.
Visual artists, for example, have banded together in Vis-Art Copyright Inc. which licences the right to reproduce its works in books, calendars, greeting cards, films and so forth. This provides a new source of income for artists. The new provisions on collectives will give Vis-Art and other newly formed groups the legal recognition needed to operate collectively. Because of the obvious benefits for both users and owners, the Government feels that the collective exercise of copyright should be explicitly encouraged in our Copyright Act.
The second measure deals with the copyright board. The collective exercise of rights does entail, as we know, possible abuses. Whenever a combination of individuals together controls access to, and use of, a particular goods or service, there is the potential for anti-competitive behaviour. In other words, if the only practical access to a particular right is through one collective, this collective can achieve such a dominant bargaining position that the interests of potential customers are not sufficiently safeguarded.

June 26, 1987
Copyright Act
Our existing copyright law provides for a regulatory body, the Copyright Appeal Board, vested with the authority to separate after hearing from interested parties. But under the present Act, only musical performing rights associations are under the jurisdiction of the Copyright Appeal Board. The revised Act would extend the jurisdiction of a new board to be known simply as the Copyright Board to include all collectives of copyright owners. This board will continue to set and regulate royalty rates. It will also be able to make binding decisions whenever collectives and those who wish to use their members' works are unable to reach an agreement. In response to a request for arbitration from either party, the board may set what it feels to be a fair royalty rate.
We believe that users will prefer the simplicity of the collective administration of one particular right to the more difficult approach of dealing with greater numbers of individuals and groups. They will rely on the Copyright Board to ensure reasonable rates and copyright owners will also welcome the board's regulation because it will preserve their right to band together for their own protection. That is to say, to the extent that specific activities are regulated by the Copyright Board, they will be shielded from the competition act under an exemption encompassing activities subject to federal or provincial regulation.
The introduction of a system of collectives regulated by a copyright board will benefit both users and owners of copyright. This will encourage creative activity in Canada and will ensure freer access to copyright materials by all users.
The third measure has to do with the abolition of compulsory sound recording licences, a very welcome measure indeed. The Bill responds to the changing circumstances in the music industry. The present Copyright Act provides for a compulsory licence for sound recording. It has been there for 60 years. Under this provision, a company or an individual has the right to make a second recording of any musical work once a first recording has been made by paying the copyright owner a statutory royalty of two cents. This royalty has been in effect for some 60 years and is one of the lowest in the world.

Originally, compulsory licenses were brought in to promote the development of new businesses in the Canadian sound recording industry. Sixty years ago, there was a fear that the industry would be dominated by a small number of large companies if music editors could use their exclusive rights to set high rates for the recording of musical works.
However, the legislation on competition has already eliminated the threat of such monopolies. Moreover, it seemed inappropriate to continue to deny copyright holders the right to determine who can record their works and in what circumstances.

Rather than being forced to sell to anyone at an arbitrarily established price, owners should be given the right to negotiate the most favourable terms possible with potential copyright owners and that is what this Bill will ensure.
The fourth measure deals with moral rights. As Hon. Members know, there is more at stake in the exploitation of a work than economic reward. Creative works are very much the expression of the personality of their authors. Creators cannot be fully protected unless their moral rights are recognized. Such moral rights include the protection of the integrity of the finished work, guarding it from any distortion, alteration or other modification.
Thus, if red ribbons are tied around the necks of sculpted figures as happened to a work by Michael Snow not long ago, the artist would no longer have to seek special legal redress since the new law would guarantee the artist's right to protect the integrity of his or her work.
Moral rights also include preventing a work from being used against its creator's wishes, in association with a product, service, cause or institution as if to imply endorsement. The present Bill specifies that moral rights are to be protected as carefully as economic rights. In fact, all the legal remedies that are now available for copyright infringement will be available for moral rights violations. This will be just as important an encouragement to creative activities as the measures I have already described. It has been welcomed by Canada's artists.
Fifth, is the measure that deals with the rights of exhibition. It is another important new right being provided in the Bill before the House. Creators of visual arts, for the sake of their reputations and integrity, will be entitled to control in what context and under what circumstances their works are to be displayed and to be compensated for this exhibition. Considering that the right of public performance of musical and dramatic works is already protected, it is only fitting to offer similar protection to visual art works.
The sixth measure deals with the protection of choreographic works. The social and cultural transformations that have overtaken the Copyright Act leaving some types of creative endeavour without sufficient protection include a very important development in the field of dance. Sixty years ago when the Act was drafted, choreographic works were characterized by a plot or a sequence of action and were therefore protected under the category of dramatic works. Now, of course, many choreographic works are visually pleasing, aesthetic compositions without any particular story line. In order to protect works in a field in which so many Canadians continue to distinguish themselves, Bill C-60 makes protection explicit for all choreography, whether or not it has a story line.
Three of the measures included in the Bill are being introduced in conjunction with my colleague, the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs (Mr. Andre), who has worked with me in the preparation of the present legislation
June 26, 1987

before the House. The first of those measures that fall within his jurisdiction has to do with the protection of computer software. In addition to transformations within categories of creative endeavour, entirely new categories have developed since the original Copyright Act was passed. Think, for example, of the knowledge, the originality and the imagination required to develop computer software.
Software development is rapidly becoming a major industry in Canada. Computer programs are clearly intellectual property entitled to copyright protection. However, since computers were unheard of back in 1924 when the Act was drafted, special court judgments have been required until now to safeguard the rights of software creators. The Bill before the House today will protect these software creators by including computer programs under the definition of literary works in the Copyright Act.
According to some estimates about some popular computer programs, one illegal copy exists for every one purchased from the legitimate owners. This measure will help ensure that creators in this dynamic field receive the rewards due to them and this will encourage further progress in a field that is vital to our economic development and international competitiveness.
The second measure that falls within the jurisdiction of the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs has to do with increased penalties for the sale of unauthorized copies. We realize that artists and creators will not be properly protected if the penalties for infringement of copyright are an insufficient deterrent. The maximum penalty for breaking the existing copyright law is only $200. This is clearly inadequate, given the enormous profits presently being made through the illegal copying and sale of books, records, video-tapes and computer programs. Therefore, the new Bill provides for fines of up to $1 million and penalties of up to five years in jail for conviction on indictment of copyright infringement.
The final measure in this grouping has to do with copyright and industrial design. While certain types of creative endeavour have been left without protection under the Copyright Act, other types protected elsewhere seemed to have been granted redundant protection. Specifically, designers of utilitarian objects which ought to be covered by the Industrial Design Act have been found potentially eligible for full copyright protection by recent judicial decisions. The uncertainty caused by these decisions has created a pressing need to clarify the present wording of the law.
The Copyright Act should not be transformed into a kind of a catch-all legislation protecting works for which copyright is not appropriate. Bill C-60 will therefore provide an objective means of determining whether or not an article can be protected by copyright, industrial design, both, or neither.
As I said, this Bill deals only with a certain number of issues under the Copyright Act. Because of the obvious urgency of
Copyright Act
copyright reform, the Government decided to proceed with revision in two stages rather than waiting to submit an omnibus Bill at a later date. The matters to be addressed in the second phase have just as high a priority as those presently before the House. However, because of the complexity of these issues, the drafting of legislation to address them has not yet been completed. Nevertheless, it is my firm intention to introduce this second phase of amendments just as quickly as possible.
In conclusion, a recognition of creators' rights stimulates creative activity and the flow of intellectual products to our cultural industries. It secures returns to creators and entrepreneurs and encourages capital investment in high cost technology. Copyright provides a legal basis for the publishing, film and recording industries and will now ensure the same for the computer industry. It is a fundamental element of cultural policy which can help ensure Canadian cultural development, Canadian sovereignty, and a national identity.
In the final analysis, copyright stimulates the economy by creating jobs and encouraging investment. It is estimated that $10 billion or 3.2 per cent of our Gross National Product is generated by industries dependent upon copyright. The legislation now before us will reinforce the Canadian cultural sector, contribute to the development of a copyright industry, and stimulate the creation of high-technology jobs. For all of those reasons, I urge that Bill C-60 be referred to a legislative committee for deliberation and study just as quickly as possible.


Mrs. Sheila Finestone (Mount Royal):: Mr. Speaker, at the outset I would like to assure the Minister that I agree with her and look forward to swift passage of Bill C-60. While I think we need to look at and clarify a few issues, I assure her that she has my support.
Canada's present copyright laws are a marvel of antiquity. They were written in 1924 when piano rolls and silent films were king. It was a time when a composer was satisfied to receive two cents each time a recording of his song was sold, and when a computer was a person equipped with an adding machine. Times have changed and it is time that this law reflects those changes.
Copyright law allows for the exercise of economic as well as moral rights. For most Canadians copyright will never be a household word, yet these laws vitally affect many activities which are of immense importance and interest in a developed society. The conduct and ethic of the businesses touched include the press, radio, television, computer software, cable television, satellites, the recording, film and theatre industries, home entertainment, books, magazines, architecture and music. In fact, almost anything that makes life worth living. Therefore, copyright legislation must reflect the legal recognition of the exclusive right of creators to determine the use of their work and to enable them to share in the benefits.

June 26, 1987
The goal in this Act is to protect intellectual property and strike a healthy balance between copyright owners and users. In 1984 the Liberal Government issued a White Paper on copyright entitled From Gutenberg to Telidon. In 1985 a Commons subcommittee held hearings across the country on revisions to the Copyright Act and its report became known as a charter of rights for creators. Both documents provided greater protection to those who rely on copyright for their living, the creators of books, songs and other intellectual property.
While we recognize the urgency and priority of new copyright legislation, we must also recognize it is not a solution in and of itself. As stated by the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, commonly known as the Applebaum/Heb-ert report, in 1982, no one should be under the delusion that copyright legislation by itself will solve either the economic or social problems of all authors.
Copyright legislation serves best those authors whose works appeal to large segments of the public wherever in the world they be. It cannot solve the social and economic problems of those authors whose works, although they may have great aesthetic and academic value, will earn very little because they appeal to relatively small numbers of users.
Therefore, I underscore my ongoing concern, and I believe that of the Minister, that passage of this legislation will not suffice for the creators of much of Canada's artistic community. The cultural support programs already in place must continue. I refer to the book publishing policy, postal subsidies, museum assistance, Indian cultural development and art programs, film development programs, funding for sound recording programs, payments to Canadian authors for use of their works in public libraries, cultural initiative programs, assistance to the performing arts, Bill C-58, the advertising regulations for magazines and television, and the simultaneous advertising substitution for cable distributors.
In the report From Gutenberg to Telidon we note that the value of the work of Canadian industries concerned with copyright law is now $10 billion. This is equivalent to 2.2 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product. Actual copyright payments totalled more than $1 billion. Perhaps a lot of people will find that they knew very little about these facts and figures and will now start to recognize the worth of these industries. If so, they might pay a little more attention. Of that $1 billion, 67 per cent is paid to Canadian sources and 33 per cent to non-Canadian sources.
It should be noted, however, that the radio and television industries accounted for 75 per cent of the total, with 82 per cent of those payments going to Canadian sources. With respect to the publishing, recording and film industries, just 22 per cent of those payments go to Canadian sources while the remaining 78 per cent was paid to foreign rights owners.
Last month the Government introduced the first of two stages of the copyright revisions. Bill C-60 has received favourable acclaim from Canadian artists. It addresses
computer programs, anti-piracy remedies, the relationship of copyright and industrial design legislation, the Copyright Board, collective management of copyright, moral rights, protection of choreography works, the abolition of compulsory licences for the making of sound recordings, and the right to exhibit artistic works in public.
I would like to give a small amount of background information on the part dealing with computer programs, offences and penalties, which is often referred to as the piracy section. The revenues from systems and application of software and custom software development as forecast for the Canadian software industry was to be in the range of $1.5 billion in 1986. We are told this Bill will give the software industry the same protection against illegal copying as has already been accorded to books. The software industry estimates that illegal copying has cost it close to $400 million a year. The legislation will now give software copyright the protection it now gives to books; that is, protection to authors for lifetime plus 50 years. It increases as well the current $200 maximum penalty to $1 million or a five-year prison term. Thus, the Bill recommends penalties which will be efficient and effective deterrents.
Casey August, Director of Intellectual Property at IBM Canada Limited, a major software developer as well as the country's largest computer company, says:
It is important that the legislation very clearly states that it is the message that is protected without reference to the media on which it is recorded.
Casey wants legal protection, not only for diskettes but for microchips, compact disks, and other media containing proprietary information.


Mr. Speaker:: I very much regret to interrupt the Hon. Member. I hope 1 have interrupted at a point at which her very interesting speech can be continued very easily when she resumes debate. However, it is now time for Statements by Members.



STATEMENTS PURSUANT TO S. O. 21


Mr. Keith Penner (Cochrane-Superior):: Mr. Speaker, the Oxford Dictionary defines a treaty as a formally concluded and ratified agreement between nations, one that a country is bound by. Canada has a number of treaties with Indian nations within Canada. These treaties are recognized and affirmed in our Constitution.
Treaty No. 9 in northern Ontario was signed in 1905, and ten years ago Treaties Nos. 6 and 7 in western Canada observed the centennial commemoration of their treaties and focused attention on the meaning of these documents. The
June 26, 1987

chiefs of treaty Indian nations repeatedly express dismay that the treaty promises have not been kept by Canada and many of their people continue to live in poverty.
In 1977 Prince Charles, while visiting western Canada and speaking on behalf of the Government, acknowledged these hardships and stressed that the Government wished to work out solutions jointly with the Indian people. In fact the Government and Indian leaders have different perceptions regarding Indian treaties and this leads to violations of the treaties by Canada.
I say to the Right Hon. Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) and the Minister of Justice (Mr. Hnatyshyn) that it is time for a national conference on Indian treaties in order to determine clearly and precisely the obligations by which Canada is bound.



CHILD CARE


Mr. Gordon Taylor (Bow River):: Mr. Speaker, I and many of my constituents do not believe in universal child care. Why should the taxpayers provide child care for the wealthy who are quite able financially to look after their own children, either in privately operated centres or by hiring a nanny? Under universality, in some cases children of the wealthy fill the centres leaving no room for children of single parents.
I am all in favour of helping those who need it, but we should not be taxing everybody, including the low and middle-income families, to pay for day care centres for the children of the rich. Furthermore, the parents in the low and middle-income groups, and even many in the wealthy classes where one parent stays at home to look after the children, object strenuously to paying taxes to take care of the children of the wealthy.
Let us provide excellent care for the children of parents who need it. Universality sounds nice but is absolutely unfair to those who look after their own children and to a majority of the people who pay the taxes.



IMMIGRATION


Mr. Dan Heap (Spadina):: Mr. Speaker, in two Globe and Mail articles today Judy Steed outlines the plight of "May"- not her real name-a domestic worker who, after spending five years in Canada, did not qualify under the Foreign Domestic Workers Program even though she had met all the normal
requirements. May's unfortunate problem was having responsibilities in Jamaica for four school age children.
The Foreign Domestic Workers Program allows women from developing countries to work in Canada as badly needed nannies mainly because of insufficient day care spaces. However, these women are not acceptable to Canada as landed immigrants unless they leave domestic work and have no responsibilities outside Canada.
The Government is telling the thousands of domestic workers in this country, as well as parents, that the care and nurturing of future generations of Canadians is worthless. The Government is telling domestic workers that house work and child care are not a career.
I call on the Government to reform the Foreign Domestic Workers Program and allow these women landed status on the basis of what they are doing now.



NAVIGATIONAL SAFETY


Mr. Clement M. Cote (Lac-Saint-Jean):: Mr. Speaker, immediately after my election in September 1984, I received an important request from residents of my constituency.
Everyone is familiar with the size of the interior sea we call the Lac Saint-Jean. It gives great pleasure to those who live along its shores, to the many tourists who come to swim in it, as well as to the great number of boaters who sail its waters.
It is mostly on behalf of these boaters that I am rising today. Even before I was elected, the Lac Saint-Jean boaters had requested new hydrographic surveys. As the lake is difficult to navigate, these maps are essential for the safety of boaters.
The Canadian Hydrographic Service told us that these maps would be published first in the spring of 1985, then of 1986, and then of 1987. Now, we are told that they will be published on July 13th.
On behalf of my constituents, I would like to thank the Canadian Hydrographic Service for having acted quickly in this matter to make navigation on Lac Saint-Jean safer.



THE CONSTITUTION

[Stage Direction]
1987 CONSTITUTIONAL ACCORD
Sheila Finestone: Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding my support in principle for the Meech Lake

June 26, 1987
Constitutional Accord; notwithstanding my fervent hope that appropriate amendments will be made to ensure that Governments will preserve and promote the fundamental characteristics of Canada, which include the rights of English-speaking Canadians in Quebec and the rights of French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec; notwithstanding my desire to see that the Accord recognizes that the unique character of Canada is its bilingual, multicultural and native aspects; and notwithstanding my concerns about the restrictive way in which Clause 16 of the Accord has been drafted and can give rise to serious Charter constraints, my most serious concern about the Accord is that it makes no attempt to revoke the "notwithstanding" clause in the Charter of Rights, the clause which provides that the rights and freedoms of Canadians can be taken away at the whim of any Government.
It is totally unacceptable that the rights and freedoms guaranteed to Canadians should be taken away for five minutes, let alone five years, as permitted by the "notwithstanding" clause. Adequate protection is to be found in Clause 1 defining "reasonable justification".
The November, 1986, resolution of my Party advocates the repeal of this clause. It is unfortunate for Canada that the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) missed the opportunity to press his provincial counterparts for the repeal of this most invidious and offensive clause. I sincerely hope that it will be addressed in the near future.

[ Translation]



EMPLOYMENT-WORK ACCOMPLISHED BY ACTION TRAVAIL DES FEMMES

Mr. Guy St. Julien (Abitibi):: Mr. Speaker, in a unanimous ruling which will probably have a major impact on the labour market, the Supreme Court of Canada maintained yesterday an order issued in 1984 by a tribunal of the Human Rights Commission forcing the Canadian National Company to implement a special hiring program for women.
This ruling represents a hard-earned victory for the organization which launched this fight against discrimination, Action Travail des Femmes, a Montreal group devoted to the promotion of women in occupational sectors traditionally dominated by men.
The CN is one of the largest employers in Canada and a very small group has succeeded in getting a very significant ruling against this corporation.
In its 1984 ruling following 150 individual complaints; the tribunal of the Commission supported the claim of Action Travail des Femmes that the CN was using discriminatory hiring and recruiting practices by refusing women the possibility of holding certain unskilled manual jobs allotted to men.
Late in 1981, only 57 women had manual jobs in the St. Lawrence region of the CN, or just 0.7 per cent of all workers in the region.
Mr. Speaker, this is one more step towards equality for women. The results of this ruling will be felt not only in businesses under federal jurisdiction, but also in all equal opportunity programs in other provinces.



EMPLOYMENT EQUITY


Ms. Lynn McDonald (Broadview-Greenwood):: Mr. Speaker, this week we celebrate the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that Human Rights Tribunals can set hiring quotas for companies that discriminate against women and other disadvantaged groups.
In 1984 the Human Rights Tribunal discovered that the recruitment, hiring and promotion policies at CN Railway prevented and discouraged women from moving into blue collar jobs and ordered CN to meet a hiring quota. CN appealed to the Federal Court of Canada and had the ruling overturned. However, the women of Quebec, led by Action Travail des Femmes, refused to remain silent when their rights were in jeopardy and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In a landmark decision, Chief Justice Brian Dickson overruled the Federal Court, ordered the restoration of the Tribunal's 1984 order, and dismissed a cross-appeal by the railway company.
This ruling in the Supreme Court will have a lasting impact on women and minority groups far into Canada's future. Due to the perseverance of Action Travail des Femmes we have taken a positive step toward eliminating systemic discrimination in employment for women and minorities.



THE ECONOMY


Mr. Gabriel Fontaine (Levis):: Mr. Speaker, the outcome of the election in Great Britain eloquently attests to renewed confidence in private enterprise, in individual initiative, in productive efforts, and in fair competition. The socialists across the floor entertain doubts about this message from London. Consider Moscow. What do they make of Mr. Gorbachev's draconian approach to the spirit of enterprise, the notion of profit, decentralization and responsibility?
June 26, 1987

The agenda of the Soviet plenum which opened yesterday is clear, and I quote: "It is devoted to Party work concerning the radical economic management restructuration".
Mr. Speaker, in the context of Great Britain and the USSR, the socialists on the other side are totally refuted and abandoned. Before nationalizing, regulating and distributing unearned wealth, their leader ought to phone Michael Gorbachev, a gesture which would modernize these dissidents!



LABOUR RELATIONS


Mr. Russell MacLellan (Cape Breton-The Sydneys):: Mr. Speaker, it seems that the Government is not only riding roughshod over the rights of the letter carriers in the present postal strike, it is out to break unions wherever it possibly can.
A great example of this is taking place at the Cape Breton Development Corporation in Cape Breton, where until recently there were 12 bargaining units representing 7 different unions. The corporation wanted to eliminate some of these bargaining units. While that may be admirable as far as it goes, it does not require a corporation to tell people to give up their bargaining unit.
Three of the unions, the International Association of Machinists, the nurses' union, and the United Transportation Union, want to maintain their own identity.
The Cape Breton Development Corporation is saying that there are too many illegal stoppages. The International Association of Machinists have only lost 12 days through illegal strikes and have only had one legal strike in 47 years. In 10 years the nurses' union has only had one grievance, which it won.
The workers of this country should be able to maintain their bargaining units. It is a right that the Government should respect.



NATIONAL DEFENCE


Mr. Dave Nickerson (Western Arctic):: Mr. Speaker, the White Paper on National Defence, with its re-emphasis on
Canadian territorial, particularly northern, defence, has been extremely well received in the North, the defence needs of which had been neglected for so long by previous Governments.
The establishment of a northern training centre is an excellent idea which ought to be put into effect as soon as possible.
A location will be needed with an existing infrastructure, variety of terrain, and one which is suitable for land, sea and air operations. Might I invite the Minister of National Defence (Mr. Beatty) to consider Inuvik which combines all these attributes together with a long and friendly association with the military, as probably being the best site in the Arctic for the new training facility.



CANADIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE-END OF MONTREAL ALOUETTES' FRANCHISE

Mr. Iain Angus (Thunder Bay-Atikokan):: Mr. Speaker, 1 want to join with sports fans across Canada in expressing my concern about the future of the Canadian Football League.
I want to say at the outset that I believe strongly that Canadian football can survive and prosper. However, in order to do that it will take a concerted effort from all those involved, the owners and management of all teams, the players, the fans and the communities involved, and all levels of government.
The collapse of the Montreal Alouettes a couple of days ago, while coming as a shock to all of us, was really not a complete surprise. Dark clouds had been building over the CFL and this franchise for a number of years.
Nevertheless, it was still a tragic day for professional sport in Canada. The CFL, and the Alouettes in particular, are a Canadian institution which has brought a great deal of pleasure and no small sense of pride to Canadians for many years.
As our cultural and sport industries come under increasing domination from south of the border, the CFL, and Canada's unique brand of football, become increasingly important as a source of national unity, and national and regional pride.
The CFL can survive but it will take all of us to make it do so. Let us pull together and ensure a healthy future for Canadian football.

June 26, 1987
Oral Questions FISHERIES



DRIFT NET EXPERIMENTS-CALL FOR CANCELLATION

Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg-Birds Hill):: Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Canada-U.S. interparliamentary group meetings in Vancouver. I was part of Committee 3 which was discussing areas of mutual environmental concern.
Something which we all agreed upon as Canadians and Americans was the horrible practice of the Japanese and others in the Pacific Ocean with respect to the use of drift nets. Imagine my embarrassment when I found out subsequent to that meeting that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (Mr. Siddon) not only allowed a drift net experiment last year but, after making several lofty speeches about how horrible this practice was, allowed another experiment to continue in drift netting. Drift netting is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting. It is totally abominable and unacceptable.
I call on the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to cancel this experiment, to give some credibility to Canada's international voice on this issue, and to work actively to have all other nations stop this horrible practice of using drift nets.

[ Translation]



TAX REFORM


Mr. Jean-Claude Malepart (Montreal-Sainte-Marie):: Mr. Speaker, having slapped taxes on prescription drugs, soft drinks and long distance phone calls, the Government- contrary to the answers given in the House by the Minister of Finance (Mr. Wilson)-clearly and definitely intends to tax food. Just look at pages 10 and 11 of the brochure Tax Reform 1987-Sales Tax where the Government clearly indicates the process leading to a tax on food.
Mr. Speaker, I serve notice on the Prime Minister and the Conservative Government that a country-wide action plan will be launched as early as this summer. Petitions will be forwarded to 3,000 organizations to make sure that this Government never gets around to taxing food, bread and butter.



EMPLOYMENT EQUITY


Mrs. Lucie Pepin (Outremont):: Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Supreme Court of Canada released its judgment on the equal opportunity program.
Pursuant to this Supreme Court decision, henceforth CN Railway will have to offer 25 per cent of its blue collar jobs to women until such time as they make up 13 per cent of all CN staff. By ruling in favour of Action Travail des Femmes, the Supreme Court has paved the way for women to gain access to jobs which, by tradition, are open to men only. We can only rejoice at this decision.
Yesterday, however, Mr. Gordon Fairweather made a statement to the daily newspaper La Presse asking the Government to enforce its employment equity legislation much more rigourously. On a number of occasions this year, the head of the Human Rights Commission told the Government that its employment equity legislation for women was not producing concrete results. He publicly urged the Conservative Government to act more firmly and make its employment equity program compulsory. Perhaps the Conservative Government will draw inspiration from the Supreme Court ruling to show leadership by enforcing Bill C-62 so that Crown corporations will give women equal opportunities under their employment programs.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD

[Stage Direction]
[ Translation]

Right Hon. John N. Turner (Leader of the Opposition):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Prime Minister. Could he confirm a report in today's La Presse that the Prime Minister received a letter from President Reagan, stating that the U.S. would go along with a trade dispute mechanism that would be applied only at the discretion of the United States, especially in the case of free trade talks?
Did the President really say that in his letter to the Prime Minister? And what was the response of the Prime Minister of Canada?


Right Hon. Brian Mulroney (Prime Minister):: Mr. Speaker, 1 can confirm that I received, as I do from time to time, a query from the President of the United States, following comments I made to him in Venice, and which constitutes a major step towards a final settlement, I hope, of this aspect of the problem.
I will not comment on the contents of the letter or my answer, except to say that we are making the kind of progress that is normal in this kind of situation.
June 26, 1987

[English\


REQUEST THAT NEGOTIATIONS BE TERMINATED
John Napier Turner: Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister knows that it has been our position ever since the imposition of the U.S. countervail on the export of Canadian lumber to the United States and, indeed, I understand it to be the position of his Government as well, that a binding trade dispute mechanism must be an essential part of any trade agreement with the United States. It appears that the United States is not willing to contemplate that mechanism. It also appears that the United States is not willing to exempt Canada in any meaningful way from its unilateral remedy position even after a free trade agreement is signed.
Will the Prime Minister not admit, therefore, that if there is not to be a binding trade dispute mechanism, if there is not to be some meaningful restriction on the unilateral imposition of countervail, he might well order his negotiator to break off negotiations because there is no further point to those negotiations?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend says he received advice that the Americans are not willing to contemplate such a proposal and are not willing to exempt Canada. We have received no such advice at all. We have received indications of positions, bargaining positions, I presume, of the American administration, and we have received no such indications, definitive indications, of positions whatsoever.
I have indicated many times that I believe an important part of the rationale for the building of a free trade arrangement is the promotion of our mutual trading interests. It would be self-defeating if, within the parameters of such an agreement, there was an instrument that vitiated the notion of this free access, in other words, if a free trade arrangement contained the capacity for one party unilaterally to trigger retaliatory measures against the other. The object of the exercise is to find a mechanism that will resolve those matters without that unilateral capacity to trigger reprisals of that kind.
That is the philosophy that motivates our negotiators. That is the mandate we have given our negotiators, and we have received no position, definitive position, from the other side, declaring this to be unacceptable from their point of view.


APPLICATION OF UNITED STATES LAW-REQUEST THAT PRESIDENT'S LETTER BE TABLED
John Napier Turner: Mr. Speaker, we have had it confirmed that the letter does exist, as the Prime Minister has also admitted in the House, and that in that letter the President of the United States expresses the unwillingness of the American administration to exempt Canada from those unilateral remedies, particularly by way of a compulsory submission to a binding dispute mechanism.
Oral Questions
The Minister for International Trade has already said today: "I have been monitoring the politics of this and I would say that the free trade talks could be the victim of a U.S. Trade Bill". Both the United States Trade Act of 1974 and the current Bill before Congress apply increasingly strict unilateral remedies directed by the Congress against trading partners of the United States. The truth is that this country has already been a victim in these trade talks in terms of lumber, fish and other items, and we have received nothing in return.
Will the Prime Minister table the letter from the President of the United States? And if it be true that the Americans are not willing to contemplate a compulsory binding trade mechanism, will he advise his chief negotiator, Mr. Reisman, to walk away from the table while he still has the shirt on his back?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my right hon. friend had, of course, a more charitable view of Mr. Reisman's competence when he was serving as his Deputy Minister of Finance. I would just say that the interests of Canada are being extremely well served by Ambassador Reisman and his colleagues, who are doing a tremendous job in putting forward the national interest in a very important and sensitive series of negotiations.
The Leader of the Opposition does know, of course, it would be a breach of every convention for me to table correspondence I receive from the President of the United States, or from any other Head of Government, on a given item in the House of Commons. My hon. friend knows that. The President of the United States expresses a point of view in his letter and he does not go beyond that. On the basis of that, the negotiations will continue.
But my right hon. friend raises an important matter when he refers to the Trade Bill which is presently before the United States Congress. The ramifications of that Trade Bill could be extremely serious for America's trading partners and, in particular, have serious consequences for Canada, for employment in Canada. That Bill could cost jobs in Canada. It is precisely because of the implication, the enormous implications, of that trade legislation, and what it could trigger in consequence, that Canada is seeking a comprehensive free trade arrangement with the United States to make sure that does not apply to Canada so we continue to have the investment and jobs, the hundreds of thousands of jobs this country needs to grow and to prosper. That is why the negotiations are so important.


CONTENT OF PRESIDENT'S LETTER
Mr. Brian Tobin (Humber-Port au Port-St. Barbe):: Mr. Speaker, despite the Prime Minister's best efforts to suggest otherwise, let it be made clear that it is not the competence of the negotiator, Simon Reisman, that is in question today. It is the competence of the man who has given Mr. Reisman his mandate, the Prime Minister, that is in question today.

June 26, 1987
Oral Questions
Mr. Reisman said this week: "If we leave each side free to interpret the trade agreement, then you do not really have what I would call a reliable commitment". Today it seems clear to everyone but the Prime Minister that a reliable American commitment will never happen.
Hasn't the President of the United States in his letter to the Prime Minister, in reality, politely suggested to the Prime Minister that he should take a walk?


Mr. John McDermid (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister for International Trade):: Mr. Speaker, the short answer to the question is no.


REQUEST NEGOTIATIONS BE DISCONTINUED
Brian Vincent Tobin: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Prime Minister, the author of the mandate. I want to say to him that it is clear to everyone in Canada, and to everyone in this House, that these talks are coming apart at the seams. The Government is setting up the U.S. Congress as the villain in the talks.
The Prime Minister has said many times that it took courage to enter these talks. I want to tell him that the last fellow who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel also had courage. The question Canadians are asking today is does the Prime Minister have the common sense and intelligence to walk away from these talks when the interest of Canada is obviously not being well served?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, the only people who want the talks to come apart are the Liberals and the New Democratic Party. They would love to see them fall apart-


Mr. Blackburn (Brant):: Come on.


John Horton McDermid: -for crass political reasons, no other reason. I can tell the Hon. Member, number one, the talks are not coming apart as he would like to say.


Derek Nigel Ernest Blackburn: Even your own Party doesn't believe you.


John Horton McDermid: And number two, our Government has said right from the start that if it is not a good deal for Canada and for Canadians we will not sign it. We still stick by that.


CANADA POST CORPORATION
Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister responsible for the Post Office who said yesterday in this House: "The process which has been unfolding over the last 10 days in these labour negotiations is perfectly normal". The Minister will be aware
that two days ago in Prince George, British Columbia, a large postal truck, crashing through the picket line, broke both arms, both legs and caused internal injuries to a female employee on the picket line. He will know that yesterday there were two people in Ottawa injured on the picket line.
Is this the process the Minister considers to be normal in terms of labour negotiations?
Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of Consumer and Corporate
Affairs): Mr. Speaker, I think the Hon. Member would have been more forthcoming if he had read the rest of my comments into the record as well, but they are there in Hansard. However, I would like to read from the Gazette of June 18:
"It's a very tough issue because you have two conflicting realities. The postal workers must be treated fairly and justly, but other Canadians must continue to receive their mail", Saskatchewan MP Lome Nystrom said yesterday.
That is what the Post Office is trying to do, deliver the mail.


CORPORATION'S HIRING OF STRIKE-BREAKERS
Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is directed to the Right Hon. Prime Minister. On April 19, 1984, the Right Hon. Prime Minister made the following statement. He said: "My father was not only a union member, he was a union officer, and I do not cross picket lines". In light of this very clear and precise statement made by the Prime Minister does he think that it is correct, that it is appropriate, that it is acceptable for the Post Office of Canada to be hiring strike-breakers whose intention it is to cross picket lines?


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, the Hon. Member is quite right. I do not cross picket lines. I never have and I never will.
The answer to the second part of the question was provided by the Hon. Member's seat-mate who indicated, in a response which was just cited in the House, that the Post Office has an obligation to the Canadian people, to the taxpayers and to ordinary citizens to try to deliver the mail. That is what it is trying to do.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


REQUEST MEDIATOR BE APPOINTED
Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, my question for the Right Hon. Prime Minister is this. Does he support Canada Post's hiring of strike-breakers to cross picket lines?
I also want to ask him this question. He knows that this morning both sides have indicated that they have reached an impasse, that the negotiations have in fact broken down. On many occasions both sides have made the request for a mediator. The right hon. gentleman's reputation is as a labour
June 26, 1987

mediator. When both sides are requesting the appointment of a mediator, when the people of Canada want the mails to continue, when the talks have broken down and an impasse has been reached as of this morning, why on earth will the Prime Minister and his Government not ask that a mediator be brought in now to begin resolving this very critical issue?


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs):: Mr. Speaker, the article I just cited had another interesting quote from a member of the New Democratic Party. It states:
Although condemning the use of strike-breakers, Keeper-
-the Hon. Member for Winnipeg North Centre.
-hesitated when asked if an NDP Government would move to ban the use of
non-union labour during a legal strike . . .
"Frankly, I really don't know. It's difficult for me to know what we would do if we were in office-''


Mr. de Jong:: Appoint a mediator and quit playing stupid politics. People are getting hurt.


Harvie Andre: The fact is you cannot have it both ways, on the one hand-


Nelson Andrew Riis: What about answering the question?


Harvie Andre: -standing up here being condemnatory, and on the other hand talking like this.


Mr. Cassidy:: Are you going to put a mediator in or not?


Harvie Andre: I remind the Hon. Member to read-


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Saint-Jacques.


GOVERNMENT POLICY
Mr. Jacques Guilbault (Saint-Jacques):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. Everyone wants the mail delivered, but I am not sure every Canadian admires the way the Government has been handling the mail strike, to put it mildly, in a strange way. It has not intervened. It has not appointed a mediator. It has not put an end to the use of these scabs, these strike-breakers, despite the violence. The questions which beg to be asked are these.
What is the Government's hidden agenda with regard to the Post Office? Is the Government out on a mission to try to bust the unions? Is this step number one to privatize the Post Office? Why is the Government not coming out clearly now and telling Canadians what it is trying to achieve by its hands-off approach, what it is trying to achieve through the back door?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, in an article reported in Le Droit on June 18 the Hon. Member for Papineau had some advice. He said:
Oral Questions

The Government should "cut the umbilical cord. The baby doesn't belong to the Government any more, and the Conservatives should let the baby grow up."

When the Crown corporation was created by the House, with its unanimous consent, the objective was to remove the political interference which had caused the problems in the past. Canada Post is endeavouring to fulfil its social responsibility of delivering the mail. There is a dispute going on and the parties are in discussion now at the Chateau Laurier. I think we ought to give that process a chance to work and, in the meantime, ask all parties to behave responsibly and to avoid violence.


GOVERNMENT POSITION
Jacques Guilbault: Mr. Speaker, I think we can safely say a Government has never behaved as mysteriously as this in a postal strike-watching events unfold without doing anything. One wonders what the Government is trying to accomplish. Is it trying to break the unions? Is that it? Is it trying gradually to privatize the Post Office? For heaven's sake, stop this hypocrisy! Tell us and tell all Canadians what you're really trying to do through the back door!


Hon. Pierre H. Cadieux (Minister of Labour):: Mr. Speaker, the impresssion I get this morning from the questions asked by the parties opposite is that they don't want the negotiations to continue. The parties are sitting around the table, and they are now negotiating. The Government has already intervened by appointing a conciliator and a commissioner. The parties have gone back to the negotiating table. Why not encourage them to negotiate? We should not get involved in the negotiations when the parties are at the table. Let them negotiate!


CANADA-UNITED STATES NEGOTIATIONS-FILM LEGISLATION PROPOSALS
Mr. Steven W. Langdon (Essex-Windsor):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. I would like to quote to the Prime Minister from the publication which his own Government put out at the start of the free trade thrust with the U.S. in which it said that its primary goal was "new rules . .. limiting U.S. trade remedy laws, i.e., exemptions from measures aimed at others-". Will the Prime Minister confirm that in the same week that his Government has postponed its film legislation proposals it has received from President Reagan a clear rejection of that exemption which has been the primary goal of the Government, according to its own publications?

June 26, 1987
Oral Questions


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I cannot confirm that because that would be false.


REQUEST PRIME MINISTER TABLE PRESIDENT'S LETTER
Steven W. Langdon: Mr. Speaker, it is a question which I think the Canadian people can only resolve if the Prime Minister is willing to table the letter which was sent to him by President Reagan. I ask the Prime Minister why he will not do that. Is this country condemned to keep on surrendering while the United States keeps on hammering us?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I know that as a matter of policy the NDP is a protectionist group. I know that the NDP favours this kind of economic isolation. I know that the NDP is opposed to foreign investment unless it happens to be in the riding of the Leader of the NDP.


Mr. Althouse:: Do you know what your Government's policy is?


Martin Brian Mulroney: We know that NDP policies would take us back to the 1930s. We know, and I can assure the House, that at an appropriate time the anti-trade, anti-American-


William Alexander (Bill) Blaikie: You are starting to sound like Trudeau now.


Martin Brian Mulroney: -anti-NATO, anti-business policies of the NDP will be examined by the Canadian people.


Nelson Andrew Riis: You sound defensive.


Martin Brian Mulroney: May I ask the Hon. Member this. While an international negotiation is going on-


William Alexander (Bill) Blaikie: Stop reading your own fund-raising letters.


Martin Brian Mulroney: -designed to create the hope to create jobs for Canada, stop taking the American side-


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Ottawa-Carleton.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


PUBLIC SERVICE
Mr. Barry Turner (Ottawa-Carleton):: Mr. Speaker, my question is addressed to the Right Hon. Prime Minister.


Mr. Young:: Good luck!


Some Hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


John Barry Turner: Mr. Speaker, serious allegations, including the accusation of perjury, have been made against the Deputy Minister of Employment and
Immigration. What does the Prime Minister intend to do about these very serious allegations?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, the charge of perjury that was made is entirely without foundation. The Deputy Minister, Mr. Gaetan Lussier, neither appeared as a witness in the case in question nor did he sign any affidavit on the matter. He could not even legally, by extension, have been involved in any act that would give rise to that accusation.

May I say on another level that I have had the personal privilege of working with Mr. Lussier, as have other people. I had the opportunity the other day to reach him in Whitehorse to convey to him what he already knew about my view, that he has been, as have his colleagues, a truly outstanding public servant.
The Public Service has served the country honourably and well. This kind of attack is unacceptable. I have dealt with it in my caucus. 1 shall deal with it every time and in every circumstance.
The accusation against Mr. Lussier is false and unacceptable, and such accusations against public servants shall not be tolerated by the Government.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


CANADA POST CORPORATION
Mr. Alfonso Gagliano (Saint-Leonard-Anjou):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister responsible for the Canada Post Corporation. Canadians have voiced their indignation, and even the Conservative Member for Richelieu, echoing the feelings of many of his colleagues, has stated that the Conservative Government is being immoral and antidemocratic when it allows Canada Post to hire strike-breakers and encourages violence on the picket lines. Can the Minister tell us today how much Canada Post is paying to hire strikebreakers? What is the cost of the newspaper ads which Canada Post is running every day? Is there any truth to the rumours that the strike is costing Canada Post up to $1 million a day?

Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of Consumer and Corporate
Affairs): Mr. Speaker, we know that the lack of postal service in a complete shut-down of the system costs the Canadian economy enormous sums of money. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business said that the last strike in 1981 cost $3 billion to that business sector alone.
June 26, 1987

We know that postal service is vitally important in many sectors of the economy, and that is why the conciliation commissioner recommended and observed in his report that the Post Office has no other alternative but to continue to try to deliver the mail.
Officials are trying to do that. I have asked them and they have indicated that they will try to avoid violence in all circumstances. I would ask other parties to do that.
In the meantime let us encourage the negotiators at the table to reach a solution, because I think it is in everybody's interest that we have an efficient, productive postal service to serve the needs of Canadians.


CORPORATION'S HIRING POLICY
Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, the daughter of the Liberal candidate in the byelection in St. John's was refused a job in Canada Post because she refused to sign a form that she would cross picket lines.
Does the Minister agree with the policy of Canada Post that in order to be hired a person must sign a form agreeing to cross picket lines? Is that fair? Is that justice?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the Hon. Member might spend some time profitably with his colleague, the Hon. Member for Papineau, in terms of what is the proper position vis-a-vis the Government and this Crown corporation.
The Crown corporation is endeavouring to fulfil its social responsibility. It is endeavouring to do that in a way which avoids violence but gets the mail out.
In the meantime they are at the table now, as I have indicated, trying to find a resolution to this dispute. I would hope that all Members of the House would try to be encouraging to that process rather than try to make mischief.


THE CONSTITUTION
Ms. Pauline Jewett (New Westminster-Coquitlam):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. As the Prime Minister knows, Canada leads the world in the constitutional protection of the equality rights of women.
Recently women lawyers in Canada, while welcoming the Meech Lake Accord, have raised serious concerns that the guarantees of equality rights for women and minorities have been overlooked in the Langevin amendments.
If this is the case, will the First Ministers be open to improvements which will ensure that the equality of rights of women and minorities provided for in Sections 15 and 28 of the Charter will not be put at risk?
Oral Questions


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, there is absolutely nothing in the Meech Lake Accord that would diminish or in any way affect equality rights for women and minorities.
On the contrary, the object of the exercise was to strengthen the country and, in the process of so doing, strengthen the rights of minorities and women across the nation.


REQUEST THAT FIRST MINISTERS CONSIDER EQUALITY RIGHTS
Pauline Jewett: Mr. Speaker, the First Ministers will know that the Langevin amendments overlooked the guarantees of equality rights for women and minorities in the Charter. Surely this will be raised in the public hearings this summer.
May I at least ask the Prime Minister, and indeed all First Ministers, if they will now give very serious consideration to this concern, so that the rights of women and minorities will not be undermined and that indeed they will be enhanced?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I am not in any way quarrelling with the right of my hon. friend to raise the question about equality rights for women and minorities. If someone wishes to raise this at the parliamentary committee, of course that is the place where I suppose concerns can be mentioned.
Surely my hon. friend will acknowledge with regard to the Meech Lake Accord that there is nothing which does anything other than strengthen the unity of the country. Specifically, I think that the action of the Government with regard to the promotion of the interests of women toward equality-plus, for example, the most recent action yesterday of the Government in the House with regard to the promotion of the rights of minorities under the Official Languages Act-indicates a commitment which is profound, durable, and I think beneficial to Canada.


WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Lucie Pépin: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Prime Minister. In fact, the Prime Minister promised Canadian women he would fight to give them equality, but the kind of Bill that was tabled yesterday is certainly not going to help minorities or women and it certainly does not hold very well for having the equal status of women included in the new Meech Lake Accord. I wish the Prime Minister would give the House the assurance that in the next round of discussions, women's rights which were laid down in the Charter and the Constitution will not be threatened anymore than the rights of Indians and minorities. Could

June 26, 1987
Oral Questions
the Prime Minister give the House the assurance that when he has a meeting with the Premiers, the agenda will include reinforcing Clause 2 and providing additional assurances with respect to Clauses 15 and 28, in order to promote entrenchment of the rights of Canadian women?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I am sorry but I am not sure I understood the Hon. Member's comments. Is she trying to say, on behalf of her political group, that the Meech Lake Accord is flawed and that some radical surgery is necessary or a radical amendment in connection with the question she brought up, or is she talking about tabling some new proposals at a second round of discussions, because I get the impression that her party was basically in favour of the Meech Lake Accord and, in fact, I said yesterday that we were prepared to consider the other issues at a second round?


NECESSITY TO ENSURE WOMEN'S RIGHTS WON'T BE JEOPARDIZED
Lucie Pépin: Mr. Speaker, the purpose of my question is to ensure that proposals will be made at the second meeting with the Premiers, to show Canadian women that their rights are not being threatened. This is not a protest against the Meech Lake proposals. I simply want to ensure that at a second meeting with the Premiers, you will confirm those rights in the Constitution.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, if there is the slightest doubt about this, I will do so with the requisite speed, and, I am sure, with the co-operation of Members on all sides of this House.


AGRICULTURE
Gordon Edward Taylor: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Hon. Minister of Agriculture. Whereas the Hon. Minister, in answering my question last Thursday on the eligibility of hay farmers to share in the Special Canadian Grains Program, said in part "market prices must have been directly and detrimentally affected by the U.S. Farm Bill"; and whereas the market price for exported hay to Japan from Alberta and indeed from Canada is adversely affected because the U.S. has been and is subsidizing American compressed hay exported to Japan, will the Hon. Minister review the negative decision made, I believe without this information, by the farm leaders?


Hon. John Wise (Minister of Agriculture):: Mr. Speaker, I am sure we must respect and admire the Hon. Member's
continuing interest in this problem. I must inform the Hon. Member that I have in front of me a briefing note from Mr. Pender, the administrator of the program, and also from Mr. Frank Clayton, the assistant deputy minister of policy, which confirms my answer to my hon. friend of last Thursday that, indeed, hay is not supported under the U.S. Farm Bill and that lower prices received from last year's hay crop really resulted from an overabundance of supply. Consequently, it cannot be regarded as eligible under the Bill.
The Hon. Member will know, Mr. Speaker, that our Government already provides assistance for alfalfa pellets and alfalfa cubes as eligible commodities under the Western Grain Transportation Act.


EMPLOYMENT EQUITY
Ms. Margaret Mitchell (Vancouver East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. What is his view on equal pay for work of equal value? The Prime Minister will recall that in the 1984 Leaders' debate the Prime Minister said
[ Translation]
"I find it an aberration and an injustice that the Government would accept a principle and later smother it in practice."

Yesterday the head of the Human Rights Commission announced that fundamental reform of existing equal pay for work of equal value legislation is essential if women are to achieve pay equality. Will the Government introduce pay equity legislation just as soon as possible as recommended by Mr. Fairweather?


Hon. Robert de Cotret (President of the Treasury Board):: Mr. Speaker, in answer to the Hon. Member's question, I would like to say that it is always good to put some order in your own house before doing it elsewhere.
We have moved, and moved quickly, to implement equal pay for work of equal value in the federal Public Service in conjunction with the unions. All 13 of them are working closely with the Government to implement as quickly as possible pay equity that should influence positively roughly
81,000	female employees of the federal Public Service.


REQUEST THAT PRIORITY BE GIVEN TO DRAFTING LEGISLATION
Margaret Anne Mitchell: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Minister of Justice. He will know the Human Rights Commission concerns a much broader sector than that to which the President of the Treasury Board has referred. It is not good enough to limit this to employees of the federal Government. We need fair pay now.
June 26, 1987

Will the Minister of Justice give priority this summer to drafting equal pay legislation? Will he introduce it in the House in the fall so that employers will be required, and there will be enforcement, to raise the wages of underpaid female employees?


Hon. Ray Hnatyshyn (Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada):: Mr. Speaker, as the Hon. Member points out, the recommendations of the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission have only recently been received. I can assure the Hon. Member that these recommendations will be carefully considered by myself and by my cabinet colleagues.
Building on the record that we have developed in our Government, as indicated by the President of the Treasury Board, we want to make sure that where possible we will continue this exemplary record, and we will give this matter the most serious consideration.


WAGE GAP AFFECTING WOMEN IN FEDERALLY REGULATED COMPANIES
[Stage Direction]
Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine
East): Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice. Earlier this spring Statistics Canada came out with a report indicating that for the first time in 18 years the wage gap between men and women in Canada had widened rather than narrowed.
At that time I asked questions of the Government as to whether it would do something about it. Now we have the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission pointing out that
300,000	women work for federally regulated companies and that the wage gap is 35 per cent. Is it not time for the Government to give urgent action to the suggestion of the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission and bring in amendments as soon as possible?
Ramon John Hnatyshyn: Mr. Speaker, I do not think there has been any Government that has been quite as sensitive on the whole question of equality for the women of Canada than this Government. It has been manifested in areas within our own direct jurisdiction. I would remind the Hon. Member that this Government has been responsible for the creation of 850,000 new jobs since we came into office. A very large number of these have been devoted toward the women of Canada.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine East. A short supplementary, please.


HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S RECOMMENDATIONS
[Stage Direction]
Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine
East): Mr. Speaker, we also know that 71 per cent of part-time jobs are held by women and that is one reason that the wage gap is widening.
The Chairman of the Canadian Human Rights Commission points out that under the present system for lodging complaints on pay equity, federally regulated companies are
Oral Questions
depriving women of $1.2 billion and this amount is growing all the time. This is an urgent matter. Won't the Minister take action soon as a result of the request by the chairman?
Ramon John Hnatyshyn: Mr. Speaker, I reiterate the fact that we have worked and demonstrated our commitment with respect to equality. I have given the undertaking in this House to look very carefully at the recommendations and suggestions of the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission. I have been known as "Fast Ray", but to ask me to bring in legislation the day after the chairman brings in his report is asking a bit much.


PURCHASE OF DOME PETROLEUM-SENATE COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATION
Mr. Ian Waddell (Vancouver-Kingsway):: Mr. Speaker, this has been a fairly quiet Question Period. I hesitate to bring up the matter of public opinion polls, but I would like to put a question to the Prime Minister. He is probably aware that a huge majority of people, according to the public opinion polls, favour a Canadian solution to the problem of the take-over of Dome Petroleum.
Given that yesterday or the other day the Senate Committee on Energy recommended that the federal Government take steps to re-open the bidding for Dome so there can be a Canadian solution, what is the Government of Canada waiting for? Why does it not do just that?


Hon. Marcel Masse (Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources):: Mr. Speaker, I am somewhat surprised at the question of the Hon. Member, and especially at his comments about the Senate. I find such a show of interest surprising coming from him. I had always thought that the New Democratic Party was convinced that the Senate held no views whatsoever and that the Senate was not a valid place to produce such opinions.
Second, the Canadian solution which this Government would prefer, and I wish to emphasize this, Mr. Speaker, would be to ensure that the assets and shares of Dome remain in Canada. In this context, the best solution would be one which would ensure a future for Dome in Canada.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Vancouver-Kingsway. A short supplementary, please.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, perhaps the Minister would like a Senate appointment.


Some Hon. Members:: Oh, oh!

June 26, 1987
Oral Questions GOVERNMENT POLICY


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the Minister. Yesterday, given that Bill Hopper, president of Petro-Canada, told the House of Commons energy committee that he was interested, to use his words, in some of the assets of Dome, what is the Government's policy? The June 30 deadline is coming up. Is the Government prepared to let Dome go bankrupt, lose all those jobs in western Canada and cause all those problems, or will the Government act and get a Canadian solution now for Dome?


Marcel Masse: Mr. Speaker, I repeat that it was the action taken by the previous Government under the National Energy Policy which created the problems we are now facing, especially as far as Dome is concerned.
What this Government is now doing is to ensure that Dome will have an economically realistic future in the energy sector.


TAX REFORM
Jean-Claude Malépart: Mr. Speaker, I want to direct a question to the Prime Minister in connection with statements made by the Minister of Finance concerning the tax reform. People in Canada, especially senior citizens and families, have been wondering ever since the tax reform was announced, the new tax, whether-if only the Prime Minister would stop talking and laughing, and listen to the questions we are asking-
I should like to ask the Prime Minister, and Canadians would like to know: Will the Prime Minister speak out against any sales tax on food, a sales tax on bread and butter? Will the Prime Minister reject such a measure?


Robert René de Cotret: Mr. Speaker, will the Hon. Member for Montreal-Sainte-Marie stop scaring people with this kind of question!
Nowhere in the White Paper is there any reference to a tax on food. The Minister of Finance has been quite clear. There is no question of taxing food in the White Paper. We will be consulting the provinces concerning three possible sales tax formulas.


TAX ON FOOD-GOVERNMENT POSITION
Jean-Claude Malépart: Mr. Speaker, either the President of the Treasury Board cannot read or he did not read the document. The document entitled Sales Tax, pages 10 and 11, shows what the consequences would be and who are the biggest food consumers. Since it is
printed in this document-and my question is directed to the Right Hon. the Prime Minister, the public at large would like to know-will the Prime Minister prevent his Government from taxing food, bread and butter, or does the Prime Minister intend to allow this tax to be levied? Yes or no?


Robert René de Cotret: In the White Paper there is no proposition about a tax on food. The decision has not been made-


Jean-Claude Malépart: The decision has not been made!


Robert René de Cotret: The reference is to the base. No decision has been made. The discussion has to do with the tax base and the tax rate. There is no mention of a tax-


Jean-Claude Malépart: Like in the case of the elderly. Pensions will not be de-indexed!


An Hon. Member:: Small dictator!


Robert René de Cotret: Again I will repeat what the Minister of Finance said: There is no tax on food in the white Paper, nor will there be a tax increase for small wage earners.


PORNOGRAPHY
Mr. Geoff Scott (Hamilton-Wentworth):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice. The Minister of Justice will know that the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision yesterday in the case of Video World Ltd. This case involved the obscenity section of the Criminal Code. The Minister will also know the country's concern over the spread of pornography and the degradation of women. Can the Minister advise the House of the effect of the Supreme Court case on Bill C-54, the pornography amendments?


Ramon John Hnatyshyn: Mr. Speaker, the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada has affirmed the decision of the Manitoba Court of Appeal which determined that explicit depictions of vaginal, oral or anal intercourse are contrary to the current obscenity laws. The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada was unanimous, as was the decision of the Manitoba Court of Appeal, and I think it establishes that the Government's Bill is in tune with the current law of the country with respect to the explicit depiction of these activities.


Mr. Speaker:: The next will be the last question. The Hon. Member for Cowichan-Malahat-The Islands.
June 26, 1987


INDIAN AFFAIRS
Mr. Jim Manly (Cowichan-Malahat-The Islands):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Indian Affairs. The Government has made a complete shambles of the implementation process of Bill C-31 providing for the reinstatement of Indian people who had lost status through unfair and discriminatory laws. Instead of the Government honouring its commitment that no band would be made worse off because of Bill C-31, almost the entire burden has been put on the individuals themselves, mostly women, and on the bands, their councils and chiefs.
Why has the Government not followed through with its commitment to provide adequate funding so that no Indian band would be made worse off after Bill C-31 than before? Why is the Government making an already difficult situation between reinstated people and their bands more difficult by not making the resources available?


Hon. Bill McKnight (Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development):: Mr. Speaker, the Hon. Member's premise is completely false. Under the provisions of Bill C-31, dollars are made available for implementation. Once membership and status are established, the programs that are available to other status Indians in Canada are automatically made available to the returnees under Bill C-31 as of the date of application, not as of the date membership has been recognized by the Department through the review process.
The Government has identified dollars. Housing dollars are made available for those people who indicate that they would return to their bands and to reserves. The Government is honouring and will continue to honour the commitments made.
One thing the Hon. Member should be aware of is that the committee assumed that the maximum number of people asking to be reinstated would be in the neighbourhood of
68.000	to 75,000. We now anticipate that there will be some
90.000	individual applications made for reinstatement under Bill C-31.


LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT FUNDING
James Douglas Manly: Mr. Speaker, the system is completely backed up. Less than one-third of the 90,000 applications have been processed. Only 12 bands have had membership codes approved and that provision expires at the end of this year.
Will the Minister guarantee to the House that he will seek more funding for the reinstatement process when the present funds run out because they are completely inadequate to do the job?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Mr. Speaker, the dollars provided by
Committee Reports
the legislation are still there. The dollars that were recommended by Government and approved are still there to be used by those bands with returnees.
The Hon. Member says that only 12 codes have been recognized. The legislation, in a compromise situation to try to accommodate different points of view, established a two-year time period in which bands could put forward membership codes and have them accepted if they wished to take charge of the membership of their people rather than have the Department do so, and I hope they all take advantage of that opportunity. The point is that over the two-year period we have assisted Indian bands in establishing membership codes so they could provide for their own people and have control of those membership codes as the legislation allows.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Mr. Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 101, I have the honour to present to the House in both official languages-

-the report on the official visit to China by a delegation of the Parliament of Canada-

-April 19 to May 2, 1987.


TABLING OF ANNUAL REPORT
Mrs. Claudy Mailly (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Communications):: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 67(2), I have the honour of tabling the annual report of the CRTC.
Pursuant to Standing Order 67(4), the report is deemed to have been referred to the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture.


TELEFILM CANADA
Claudy Mailly: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing

June 26, 1987
Introduction of Government Bills
Order 67(2), I have the honour of tabling the annual report for 1986-87 of Telefilm Canada.
Pursuant to Standing Order 67(4), the report is deemed to have been referred to the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture.


TABLING OF REPORT ON ACCESS TO INFORMATION AND PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
Claudy Mailly: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 72(2), I have the honour of tabling the CRTC report on Access to Information and Protection of Privacy.
Pursuant to Standing Order 67(4), the report is to be referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Solicitor General.


PETITIONS
Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 106(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the Government's response to 34 petitions numbered as follows: 332-2427, 332-2498, 332-2572, 332-2582, 332-2595, 332-2602 to 332-2629 inclusive and 3322636.



COMMITTEES OF THE HOUSE


Mr. Scott Fennell (Ontario):: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour of tabling, in both official languages, the Twenty-Fourth Report of the Striking Committee.
[Editor's Note: For above report see today's Votes and Proceedings.]

Mr. Speaker, I have had discussions with the opposition Parties regarding unanimous consent to defer the tabling of the 25th Report of the Striking Committee until shortly after one o'clock. I would ask that you secure that agreement.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is that agreed?


Mr. Gauthier:: I agree, Mr. Speaker, but I think that by our rules the names must be tabled today. I take it that the Conservative Party Whip is going to do that shortly after one o'clock.


Thomas Scott Fennell: Yes.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is that agreed?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.



CONSUMER AND CORPORATE AFFAIRS-SECOND REPORT OF STANDING COMMITTEE

Mr. Bob Horner (Mississauga North):: Mr. Speaker, as a representative of the chairperson of the Standing Committee on Consumer and Corporate Affairs and a member of that committee, I have the honour to present the second report of the Committee on Bill C-70, an Act to amend the Hazardous Products Act and the Canada Labour Code, to enact the Hazardous Materials Information Review Act, and to amend other Acts in relation thereto, with amendments.
I want to commend the people who made the work of the committee so easy. It is a tripartite committee consisting of the federal and provincial Governments and management and labour, who worked long and hard on this. I encourage early enactment of this legislation with a view to the safety of people in the workplace.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]



CANADIAN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT


Hon. Tom McMillan (Minister of the Environment) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-74, an Act respecting the protection of the environment and of human life and health.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Shall the Hon. Minister have leave to introduce the Bill?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, Bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.

Hon. Don Mazankowski (for the Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-75, an Act
June 26, 1987

to implement an agreement between the Government of Canada and the Government of Nova Scotia on offshore petroleum resource management and revenue sharing, and to make related and consequential amendments.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Shall the Eton. Minister have leave to introduce the Bill?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, Bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.


Hon. Perrin Beatty (Minister of National Defence) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-76, an Act to provide for emergency preparedness and to make a related amendment to the National Defence Act.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Shall the Hon. Minister have leave to introduce the Bill?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, Bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.


Henry Perrin Beatty: for leave to introduce Bill C-77, an Act to authorize the taking of special temporary measures to ensure safety and security during national emergencies and to amend other Acts in consequence thereof.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Shall the Hon. Minister have leave to introduce the Bill?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, Bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Introduction of Private Members' Bills.


B. Keith Penner: Mr. Speaker, on a very brief point of order, Members today received a communique from the Hon. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (Mr. McKnight) which indicated that today in the House he would be tabling a report in conjunction with the requirements of Section 22 of an Act to amend the Indian Act, 1985. The
Petitions
Minister was in his place during Question Period and at the appropriate point in the proceedings he did not rise to present his report. Can the Parliamentary Secretary or the Government House Leader explain what went amiss?


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: It is not a point of order but if the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr. Mazankowski)-


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I am not aware of the communique but I will undertake to the Hon. Member and the House to look into it and perhaps come back a little bit later.


B. Keith Penner: Yes.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: Here he is.


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Mr. Speaker, my office provided to the opposition Party critics notice that later this day a report would be tabled on the implementation of changes to the Indian Act as prescribed under Bill C-31. As I understand it, that will take place later this day.


PETITIONS
Mr. John Reimer (Kitchener):: Mr. Speaker, on behalf of 279 Canadians living in my riding in the Cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, I am pleased to present a petition calling upon the Government to pass the motion favouring the return of capital punishment for certain acts of planned and deliberate murder.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to table eight petitions signed by people from my riding. The petitions meet the requirements of Standing Order 106.
These petitions are signed by residents from several areas in my riding, who now avail themselves of their ancient and undoubted right thus to present a grievance common to your petitioners in the certain assurance that your Honourable House will therefor provide a remedy.
They say that according to a report published by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, one woman out of eight is subjected to psychological, economic, sexual or verbal violence by her spouse; that at a time when the Government should act instead of cracking down, the National Capital Commission intends to raise the rent for La Maison d'Amitie, the only francophone non-profit organization in the area for women and children in distress, by more than $3,000 a month; that the Prime Minister stated recently in the House that the problem of battered women is one of the most seriouus social and legal challenges facing us today; therefore your

June 26, 1987
Petitions
petitioners humbly pray and call upon Parliament to urge the National Capital Commission to reverse its decision to raise the rent and to continue, as in the past, charging the symbolic sum of one dollar.


Clément M. Côté: If I may, Mr. Speaker, a brief comment before presenting my petition. This is the first Friday I am in the House since the Standing Orders have been changed, and on Fridays we rise at 3 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. I am proud that this new Standing Order has been adopted because it was a project I launched nearly a year ago.
I am proud because not only Members but also the Clerks, the stenographers and all the staff of the House can finish earlier.


Clément M. Côté: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present to the House a petition in the name of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean AQDR and its 1,530 members, the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean FADOC and its 13,500 members, and the Lac-Saint-Jean information and redevelopment service which request the continuation of the part-time service centres of the Department of National Health and Welfare of Canada at the temporary offices of Alma, Rober-val, Saint-Felicien, Dolbeau, Jonquiere, and Ville de la Baie.


Steven W. Langdon: Mr. Speaker, I have a petition against Bill C-55 which attempts to change the entry system for refugees in this country. The people who have signed this petition come from many different parts of Canada. They are deeply concerned about the limitations to the right of appeal in this Bill. They are deeply concerned about the notion of a safe third country. They suggest that Parliament should look instead to the Standing Committee which has made many recommendations for a better and more humane direction for the future.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Mr. Speaker, it is my honour and duty to present a petition signed by about 200 Canadians, most of whom are from the City of Toronto. They point out that since many people are driven by the troubles in the world to seek safety from persecution in Canada and since the existing system of refugee status determination has been overloaded, a new system is needed. They advocate the one which was developed a year and a half ago by the Standing Committee of Parliament on Labour, Employment and Immigration which has widespread public support.
Therefore, they humbly pray and call upon Parliament to ensure that the Government enacts legislation which will embody the principles of fair and quick oral hearings for
refugee claimants before a refugee board independent of the Immigration Commission, universal access to such hearings for every claimant in Canada, and adequate opportunity to arrive in Canada to make this claim.
Mr. Speaker, I have another petition which relates to the same matter but has a different prayer. It points out that Bill C-55 threatens to undermine Canada's commitment to assisting refugees, in particular by screening out many who might have a genuine claim. The petitioners recommend that the new procedure for refugee claimants should be that recommended by the Standing Committee of Parliament.
Therefore, they recommend that Parliament withdraw Bill C-55 and substitute therefor legislation embodying the principles of fair and quick oral hearings of claims of refugee claimants before a refugee board independent of the Immigration Commission, universal access to such hearings for every applicant in Canada, and the right to appeal on the basis of fact.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Mr. Speaker, I also have a petition from a number of residents in many parts of Canada who are concerned that the low-level flight training of pilots of NATO countries at the Canadian Forces Base in Goose Bay, Labrador, is disrupting the way of life of many of the native people there and is also a provocative and aggressive warfighting action which tends to endanger world peace.
They therefore request Parliament to ensure that the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) end all low-level flight training at the Goose Bay Canadian Forces Base and cease negotiations with NATO for the establishment of a larger base there.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to present a petition pursuant to Standing Order 106 signed by petitioners in Ontario and a variety of places in British Columbia who are increasingly concerned that the number of chemicals used as herbicides and insecticides are being proven to have harmful effects on human health.
They believe that these chemicals produce short and longterm harmful effects on non-target organisms such as soil and water. They say that the same chemicals have, in past years, been registered and approved as safe for various uses. They believe that the new chemicals are consistently approved under the same guidelines as the now-proven-harmful ones were and that the non-active inert components contained in the distributed product have been neither adequately tested nor named.
Therefore, they are calling upon the House of Commons to initiate a full public inquiry into the safety, testing, registration and regulation of the use of pesticides. They ask the House of Commons to consider the examination of alternative
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ways of controlling pests such as biologic control and plant-derived pesticides.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
Copyright Act
Total (services, goods and equipment, and Industrial Co-operation)
Signed contracts Ontario	(#i	780	1,285	1,391	1,559British Columbia	108	161	149	190Value of contracts Ontario	$'000	97.249	285,296	270,896	360,501British Columbia	21,642	28,198	40,622	41,730
Notes:
-Statistics exclude procurement by Crown Marketing Boards for foodstuffs; -In FY '83-84, food aid contracts were not recorded in the main computer; -In FY '84-85, only bilateral food aid contracts were recorded.
Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 104 and 140.


Mr. Riis: In (a) 1983 (b) 1984 (c) 1985 (d) 1986, how many proposals and for what total sum of money have (i) British Columbia (ii) Ontario businesses been successful with the Canadian International Development Agency?


Hon. Monique Landry (Minister for External Relations):: 1.
Statistical information of the Canadian International Development Agency are recorded on a fiscal year basis, April 1 to March 31.
2. The following table presents the number and total value of contracts awarded by CIDA from fiscal year 1983-84 to fiscal year 1986-87. (The information may differ from statistics on disbursements within a particular fiscal year.)
Service Contracts	1983-84	1984-85	1985-86	1986-87Registered consultants Ontario	(#>	not available	1,295	1,655	2,014British Columbia	not available	338	412	517Signed contracts Ontario	(#>	409	436	474	696British Columbia	53	51	52	85Value of contracts Ontario	$'000	50,206	124,121	115,913	206,460British Columbia	12,745	10,597	32,136	21,298Goods & Equipment Contracts Signed contracts (#) Ontario	* 84	677	815	718British Columbia	8	62	74	72Value of contracts Ontario	$'000	28,443	142,078	145,768	138,654British Columbia	5,394	9,911	5,105	15,832Industrial Co-operation Signed contracts (#) Ontario	287	172	102	145British Columbia	47	48	23	33Value of contracts Ontario	$'000	18,600	19,097	9,215	15,387British Columbia	3,503	7,690	3,381	4,600


Mr. Riis: For the fiscal year 1986-87, did the government retain the services of private law firms in the City of Kamloops, British Columbia and, if so, what was the total cost and, in each case, what was the name of the firm and the amount received?


Ramon John Hnatyshyn: For the fiscal year 1986-87 the total cost for legal agents in Kamloops, B.C. is $186,319.31, as follows:
Berna, Andrew	115.86
Mair, Janowsky, Blair	147,271.52
Webber and Company	26,657.90
Horne, James	2,272.08
Schaefer & McMillan	10,001.95


Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, I ask that the remaining questions stand.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The questions enumerated by the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary have been answered. Shall the remaining questions stand?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Miss MacDonald that Bill C-60, an Act to amend the Copyright Act and to amend other Acts in consequence thereof, be read the second time and referred to a legislative committee.
Sheila Finestone: Mr. Speaker, I note that Bill C-54 does not purport to extend copyright protection to actual semiconductor chips. This is surprising since the Bill does deal with other aspects of computer programs and software. The Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs advises me that such changes will be forthcoming in part two of the copyright legislation yet to be tabled.

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Copyright Act
The United States has a semiconductor chip protection act which extends protection to chips created by Canadian nationals only if Canada enacts comparable legislation protecting American chip originators. Since we do not have comparable legislation on chips, our local originators could be at a disadvantage in the U.S. market.
I am advised, however, by officials of the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs that Canada has been granted an interim protection order under the U.S. legislation. Since this order is due to expire in the fall of 1987, and notwithstanding assurances that there will be an extension, I believe the Government would be best advised to give immediate and serious consideration to this chip issue. Postponing the addressing of this issue to some unknown and fleeting phase two is really not satisfactory.
With regard to the anti-piracy remedies, the major objective of a copyright enforcement policy is to secure compliance with the law and to provide for restitution if the copyright owners' interests have been damaged. As with all aspects of the legislation, the remedy provisions must be seen to be fair to both users, that is the defendants, and owners, the plaintiffs, both in the letter of the law and in its application.
According to the feedback 1 have been receiving, at the present time there seems to be satisfaction for the new measures being proposed to increase the criminal penalties, including fines. For example, revenues from the sale of sound recordings in Canada amounted to over $600 million in 1985. It is estimated that a further $40 million worth of pirated records and tapes were bought in that year. Pirated video cassettes account for as much as 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the legitimate market, whose retail value was some $530 million in 1984 and has been growing considerably.
Estimates of pirated software vary widely. For some popular application packages, there may be at least one pirated copy in use for every package authorized by the publisher. That can be very serious.
The new Section 25 proposed by the Bill imposes severe penalties on a person who knowingly infringes the copyright of a work. While I appreciate that the word "knowingly" has been in use in the penalty section of the old Copyright Act for decades, I want to be assured that these new stronger deterrent criminal sanctions are not imposed against persons who unwittingly violate copyright laws. Do such people commit the offence knowingly? Just as the innocent infringer is treated less severely under Section 22, the civil remedies section of the existing Copyright Act, I will be asking in committee whether the new Bill could treat innocent infringers less severely than deliberate infringers, as I have no sympathy for the latter.
Let us turn to educational exemptions. Leading up to the introduction of this legislation, I received representations from
educators who were concerned that they might not be exempted from penalties for not obeying copyright. It is my understanding that there is not a general exemption for the reproduction of copyright material for educational purposes mainly because such an exemption could seriously jeopardize the function of the copyright system in stimulating the production and dissemination of copyright material.
Clearly, educators face problems in attempting to ensure access to a lot of copyright material. In many cases, it is difficult and time consuming to locate copyright owners of particular works in order to secure permission to reproduce such materials.
In Quebec, teachers can legally photocopy substantial extracts from a repertoire of 17,000 titles under a blanket agreement between the Quebec Ministry of Education and the Quebec Writers' Union, /'Union des ecrivains du Quebec. The Ministry of Education is paying $1 million a year to cover photocopying of printed works by educational institutions in the province. The union distributes royalty payments to its members according to the use made of their works. Perhaps educators in other provinces could use the Quebec experience and therefore allay their fears.
The new Copyright Board and the introduction of an incentive to set up a system of collectives to ensure reasonable rates for artists is a new and welcome addition.
Let me turn to the mechanical royalty rate for composers. There exists in the present Copyright Act a provision for compulsory licensing of mechanical reproductions which is a two-cent rate for composers and music publishers of recorded music. It was intended for piano rolls and shellacked 78 rpm breakable recordings. The law was passed in the heyday of silent pictures and three years before the first national radio broadcast. Last March, I called for the abolition of this section and, therefore, am most pleased to see the repeal of Section 19, for it has been two cents for too long.
Song writers will now be able to freely negotiate royalty rates with publishers. I am pleased that we are finally allowing individual creators who work with their minds and imagination a fair return for producing exciting Canadian cultural products.
Creative works are very much the expression of the personality of their authors. The authors of the Charter of Rights for Creators believed that moral rights should be accorded as much importance as economic rights. I am pleased, as are many Canadian artists, that this definition has been expanded. We will certainly all remember artist Michael Snow who, in 1982, was forced to go to the courts to have the Toronto Eaton Centre remove the red ribbons from the necks of the 60 geese forming his sculpture. Flight Stop.
I find it interesting that the Government, in one piece of legislation, gives the creators rights over their work, preventing it from being altered in any way, while another piece of legislation, Bill C-54, commonly known as the pornography
June 26, 1987

Bill, gives authority to alter displays of erotica. Clause 159.7 of the Bill states:
Every person who displays any erotica in a way that is visible to a member of the public in a public place, unless the public must, in order to see the erotica, pass a prominent warning notice advising of the nature of the display therein or unless the erotica is hidden by a barrier or is covered by an opaque wrapper, is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
Is this not a conflict? Which legislation will take precedent?
I will not address the matter of whether we should cover erotica material with a fig leaf, a maple leaf, or gift wrap.
What about the right to exhibit works of art in public? Presently the 1924 Copyright Act does not entrench in law the right of artists to obtain royalty fees for exhibiting their art works in public.
According to the new legislation, exhibition rights will become an integral part of copyright that can be exercised like other economic rights. Fifty years ago, the enactment of a performance right was considered a maverick development. Now performance rights are commonplace and have undeniably enriched composers and lyricists.
While Canadian visual artists are compensated through proceeds of sales and reproduction fees, these sources do not cover the full use of these art works. Today, the businesses of art rentals and exhibitions in public and private galleries significantly exceed the income from original works. Furthermore, in 1981, a Canadian Council study found that less than one-tenth of one per cent of art gallery expenditures went to artists' fees. Clearly there has been an insufficient onus on gallery proprietors to remunerate the visual artist in amounts commensurate with the number of exhibitions being held.
I am pleased that through this statutory exhibition right, artists will now be in receipt of royalties rightly earned.
I will now deal with choreography. Under the current 1924 Copyright Act, choreographic works come within the category of dramatic works. As a result, works of choreography must develop a plot or a sequence of action.
Glass Houses, a work by Toronto choreographer Christopher House, or Marcel Marceau's work in mime are examples of work not constructed around a dramatic plot.
Groups appearing before the subcommittee in 1985 asked that there be an entirely separate category of protected subject matter labelled "choreographic works" incorporated in the new legislation. "Choreographic works" is defined in Bill C-60 as: "Any work of choreography, whether or not it has any story line". While I accept this definition, 1 would have preferred that suggested by Elise Orenstein of the Canadian Association of Professional Dance Organizations, which is "an arrangement or an organized thought in time and space which uses human bodies as design units".
Perhaps the most contentious part of the Bill could be the clauses which relate to the Industrial Design Act of Canada. The field of industrial design is closely related to copyright. In fact, a number of court cases have occurred in Canada because
Copyright Act
the parties were unable to ascertain whether their rights were protected by the Copyright Act, or by the Industrial Design Act.
For example, consider the June, 1986 decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in Bayliner Marine versus Doral Boats. The court held in that case that a company which produced engineering drawings to manufacture a special type of hull for a boat, and then manufactured the boat from those drawings, could not assert any copyright against a party which bought one of the boats, took it apart, and manufactured its own boat after copying the actual hull. The court held that if the company which originated the design had wanted to protect its rights, it should have sought registration of the design for the boat hull under the Industrial Design Act. The originator was out of time to make such a registration since the Industrial Design Act only permits such registrations to be made within one year from the date the design was "published", that is, shown publicly. According to the Government, Bill C-60 proposes to "resolve the ambiguities resulting from recent court decisions" and "to provide an objective means of determining whether an article can be protected by copyright, industrial design, both or neither".
However, the Bill may fail to accomplish its objective in the area of industrial design. The amendment to Clause 46 of the Bill returns the law to the unsatisfactory state which existed in Canada following the Bayliner marine decision, to which I just referred. The new Clause 46 provides that the copyright in certain designs will become unenforceable once an article is manufactured from that design in quantities of more than 50. So we are left with the unusual situation that if 35 articles are produced from the design, the designer will have copyright protection which will then disappear once the 50th article has been produced.
The effect of the Bill is that those relatively few designs which are created purely for artistic purposes, and not for manufacturing, will be afforded copyright protection, while the vast majority of designs which are created for industrial purpose, that is, products to be manufactured in quantities of more than 50, will have none. The latter will be protected, if at all, under the little-known Industrial Design Act, which is only about two pages long, but only if registered within the specific time limit of one year allowed under that Act. Therefore, the ultimate effect of the Bill will be to take most designs outside of copyright and place them under the Industrial Design Act.
In other words, most of our designers will no longer be able to simply fill in a pre-printed form and send in a cheque for $35 in order to register their copyright in a new design. Nor will they be able to claim copyright protection even if they forget to register at all, which is normally the case. Rather, our designers will be obliged to register promptly under the more complicated scheme set forth in the Industrial Design Act, which could cost hundreds of dollars in legal or agent's fees.

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Copyright Act
The lawyers will be happy. The designers, the persons the Bill is supposed to protect, will not.
If our designers are astute enough to know about the obligation to register under the Industrial Design Act, will they receive as much legal protection for their design as they would have obtained under copyright? I am advised that the answer is no. First, the length of protection for industrial design is a maximum of 10 years. It is considerably longer for copyright, as we well know. Second, the remedies for infringement provided for in Section 15 of the Industrial Design Act, that is, the injunction, are not as extensive as will now be available under the new Copyright Bill.
One would have thought that since Bill C-60 chose to shift registrations to the Industrial Design Act, for designs which are manufactured in quantity, rather than the Copyright Act, the least the Government could have done would be to amend substantially the Industrial Design Act which is itself decades old and inadequate. But, no, while the Government has sought to bring non-controversial parts of the Copyright Act up to date with Bill C-60, the same Bill proposes only one amendment to Section 2, that is, the definition section of the Industrial Design Act, an Act which in itself is over 100 years old.
I recognize the difficulties and the differences in opinion, but once having decided to amend this Act, I think we should do it right, do it thoroughly and do it now.
How are the two Acts to work in a complementary fashion when one of them is being brought into the 1980s and the other is left to languish in the past? In my books, I give the Government only half marks. Having identified the problem that exists on the inter-relationship between these two statutes, the Government's Bill fails to deal adequately with the problem.
It is suggested that necessary amendments to the Industrial Design Act could be brought in under phase two of the copyright legislation which has yet to be tabled in the House. But who knows if we will ever see phase two of the legislation during this Parliament? Phase two may prove to be as illusive a subject as the introduction of phase two of the sales tax reform proposed by the Minister of Finance (Mr. Wilson).
I have some additional concerns with respect to the new Clause 46(3) of the Bill. That clause sets out certain kinds of products which will be afforded copyright protection, notwithstanding the Industrial Design Act. For example, is it fair that the creator of cartoon characters which are covered by copyright, will lose copyright protection, and that is the Mickey Mouse characters and so on from Walt Disney? They will lose copyright protection and only be covered by industrial design protection for a maximum of 10 years once the design is imprinted on a T-shirt? I would suspect that during legislative committee hearings into this Bill, some groups will wish to come before us to suggest that their particular type of manufactured product should be added to Clause 46(3) so as to receive copyright protection.
With respect to the retroactivity portions of Clause 24 of the Bill, I am always wary of such clauses and will invite the closest scrutiny in legislative committee. I am indebted, however to officials of the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs who have explained the mischief with which the section is designed to deal. I hope they will not catch more fish in this retroactive net than is absolutely necessary.
Copyright is an essential freedom. It has an important role to play in the culture and economy of our country. It is not a restrictive concept. It is, rather, one which promotes the free flow of knowledge. Without copyright, any book, painting, or musical composition, for example, could freely be copied and its creators would not be entitled to any benefit such as royalties from the creation of their work. Obviously, an author would have little incentive to produce any original works if others could, without authorization, copy those works and benefit from so doing.
Thus protecting works by copyright enables creators to profit from their creations. Copyright encourages and provides incentive for artists to continue to create works to be part of the growth of Canadian culture, the development of which we all encourage.
I would like to say in conclusion that copyright is an essential right which must follow the trends and technology of a society like any other basic right. I hope that will be the outcome of this amendment.


Lynn McDonald: Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity today to speak on Bill C-60, the very long-awaited amendments on copyright legislation. We are dealing with a Bill which dates back to 1924, the last Act, which has been scarcely modified since then and, of course, there have been enormous changes in the intervening years which have necessitated a new Bill.
I had the pleasure of working on the Subcommittee on Copyright, and of hearing submissions from experts, from artists and from cultural workers across the country. I very much enjoyed the learning experience in finding out the very particular problems that changed technologies have made for our artists and which have necessitated this new legislation. I regret that not more of the recommendations of the subcommittee have been included in this Bill. This is rather a timid Bill. It includes the most non-contentious of the items on which we worked and a lot more remains to be done.
Nonetheless, I compliment the Government for finally bringing in the Bill. I am certainly going to co-operate in seeing that it gets passed today on second reading and gets to committee for some further study, not that we would anticipate a lengthy period in committee for a subject which has been so very much studied by committee, by departmental task forces and by experts over the years.
The Subcommittee on Copyright entitled its report: "A Charter of Rights for Creators". Certainly our approach was to give creators full credit to ensure that their economic rights,
June 26, 1987

their moral rights and the integrity of their work, are far better protected. We enunciated some principles which guided our approach throughout the treatment of copyright. Our idea was that a creator should be protected and abuses eliminated, whatever the medium. We ought to have some common standards to ensure that the creator has the full economic rights and the opportunity to control and prevent copying and distortion of his or her works. We set out the general principle, whatever the medium they should apply.
We, of course, sought to incorporate the new forms of creative activity that were not anticipated at that time in 1924 when the Act was first passed. Computers, software, hardware and television itself were not invented at that time. Of course, there have also been enormous changes in other techniques for printing, changes in all forms of creative activity since then that we felt needed to be updated in the new legislation.
In the case of computer software we thought that there ought to be protection by way of copyright. An amendment to Bill C-60 will ensure that the writers of software will receive full protection, that criminal and civil liabilities will apply, and there will be the provision of the full period of 50 years plus the life of the creator, as is the case for other literary works.
I especially welcome the measure in the Bill to end the right for mechanical reproduction for sound recordings. For a long time there has been agitation on this issue. At the time this provision was made, the sum of money agreed upon was two cents per side as the fee to the composer. There was then the possibility of compulsory licensing. No one had to negotiate a contract with composers. They were automatically given the right of payment of this very minimal sum of money. Of course, over the years inflation has made two cents per side a ridiculously small sum of money. It has meant that there is no incentive, for one thing, for composers to see their works produced in Canada when they can be making more money having them produced elsewhere. Who else is working at the same wages as they were in 1924? It is hard to imagine that type of situation continuing. So this is one of the provisions that was very long overdue. I am pleased to see it as one of the provisions that we have in Bill C-60 which is before us.
The question of moral rights was one that the Subcommittee on Copyright spent a lot of time dealing with. We were concerned not only that artists receive their economic rights, and many artists are poor, but that all artists are at the risk of having their work misrepresented, distorted, used in some fashion or other. We have had scandalous cases of writers and visual artists having to sue to protect their rights. In some cases they have been successful. But why should they have to prove damage to reputation? Why should they have to go to this excessive amount of trouble to prove their case, to guarantee the integrity of their work?
So what we recommended and what the Bill will do is to make it easier to protect the moral integrity of an artist's work.
Copyright Act
There cannot be modification without the creator's consent, except for legitimate restoration and conservation. The artist will no longer have to prove that the change was prejudicial to his or her reputation. For the purpose of penalties, moral rights will be treated as being just as important as economic rights. So an artist could sue for damages and not just for an injunction to stop the distortion to the work as is the case at present.
I think that is an advance that our artists will very much appreciate. Certainly, the people who came to see us talked very vigorously about the need to protect their moral rights as creators and the need to end the indignity of having to prove that somehow their rights had been damaged, the presumption being that they did not have the right to control the use of their work.
The provisions in Bill C-60 state that moral rights cannot be assigned to anyone else, although the creator can agree not to exercise them, in effect, to waive them. I hope that artists will not be pressured into these types of agreements, as I think that would be unfortunate. Certainly, our intention is to increase the rights of artists. One has to worry about what kinds of contracts they may be forced to sign that would limit their ability to exercise those rights.
Another area in which we see an important advance for artists is in exhibition rights, rights for visual artists to receive fees for the exhibition of their works in museums, public art galleries and so forth. At present there is no such provision. Visual artists have made various arrangements. They have some type of a fee schedule and they request payment. But they do not have a right in terms of payment; it is only a voluntary provision right now. The sums of money earned are not very high. We are very pleased to see this advance that gives a visual artist exhibition rights.
I am not sure how far these rights go. I will be looking into the fine print to examine this matter a little more closely. It was brought to the attention of the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture at hearings recently in Moncton by a very well known artist, Claude Gauvin, that when she had a CBC show done on her and her work the CBC would not pay her artist rights for showing her paintings. The CBC argued that she was getting free publicity by having this show and she ought to be grateful for having free publicity and ought not to be getting royalties. I think that is unfortunate. I think it is wrong. If she had been a musical artist having a show done on her compositions the CBC would have had to pay her royalties for her copyright on her musical works. But because she is a visual artist there was no similar obligation. I hope that that loophole will be closed. If it is not, we will have to look at some amendment in committee.
Another area in which there has been improvement is with respect to choreography. There will now be protection for the first time in a choreographer's own name. There will be a separate category for choreography. It will not be considered just a type of dramatic work. The limitation of treating choreography simply as one other type of literary work is that, of course, for some modern dance there is no story line. They

June 26, 1987
Copyright Act
are not literary works. The expression is that dance is an arrangement in time and space using human bodies as design units. This is a technical expression for what we are trying to get at. Perhaps it is the right expression. It does not quite convey what we see. Nevertheless, the idea is that there ought to be protection for these more abstract forms of choreography as well as for the more traditional type which tells a story. This is an interesting advance to see. We have excellent dancers in Canada and excellent choreographers. This is an art form that has really thrived in recent decades. So it is quite proper that we see improved recognition of this art in our new copyright legislation.
The area of industrial design and its overlap or separation from copyright is a very complex one. At present there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to whether industrial design or copyright is the appropriate framework for some particular blueprints, designs and so forth. Our recommendation at committee, something which the Bill respects, was simply to clarify this point of division. There have been lawsuits and there is a certain amount of murkiness as to what the situation is. We have to clarify what comes under copyright, which has very much more extensive protection, and what should come under industrial design legislation.
We should extend the full rights of copyright to what should come only under industrial design. Full copyright protection is, of course, the life of the creator, plus 50 years. That is a very strong form of protection. It would be quite inappropriate and certainly not good for the economy to extend this type of protection for examples of work that should only receive the lesser protection of industrial design.
We are expecting a revision of industrial design legislation. That is another question and not one I will deal with here. We are content to see that there ought to be a careful delineation of roles and to confine copyright to what copyright was really intended to be for, that is, to protect the original work of creators.

Creators have been waiting for this Bill a long time. It is a disgrace that we still depend on legislation passed sixty years ago, when we consider the major technological changes that have taken place since then. At the time there were no computers, no software, no television or video-cassettes.
There have also been major changes in the field of artistic expression, in dance and choreography. Choreography used to mean the explanation of a theme or a story. Today, we have form choreography, without a story. The legislation mush be amended to include this type of expression.
There has been a substantial change in the value of the dollar, if we look at inflation over a period of sixty years. For composers, two cents per record side may have been reasonable in 1924 but it certainly isn't now and has not been for some time. We should abolish the right to music reproduction so that composers can get contracts that are fair.
This Bill is going to do just that, since the moral rights provisions under the present legislation are not adequate. Artists and especially painters have told us that an amendment is needed to better protect the integrity of their work. Today, an artist has to produce evidence of prejudice to his name or reputation.
The proposed legislation will extend moral protection and prevent any changes in the original work.
Another part of Bill C-60 would facilitate the establishment of copyright societies. Certainly this development is very much welcomed and very much promoted by the copyright committee.
Individual creators may authorize collectives to manage access to their rights to collect and to distribute royalties collected on their behalf. We already have two very large collective copyright societies in operation for music-CAPAC and PRO Canada. There is also the Union des ecrivains du Quebec for the administration of photocopying rights. However, the development of similar kinds of copyright societies has been impeded in Canada by competition legislation. There would be the possibility of prosecution under those laws, which has prohibited the formation of other copyright societies.
Under the new law, if a new society formed and filed its rates with the copyright board, it would be exempt from prosecution by the director of investigation for the Competition Act. Instead it could go to the copyright board for an examination of the tariffs set, if the society thought that the tariffs were not in the public interest. However, the society would have to make a case that the tariffs set were not reasonable and were contrary to the public interest. That gives considerable scope to artists to form collectives and ensure that their rights are better protected.
The user and owner of copyright would decide on the rates. There would be an appeal to the copyright board, only if there were an objection by one or the other side, or if there were an objection by the director of investigation for the Competition Act.
Our idea was that we should encourage creative people to get together to protect their rights, to advance their rights, to administer their rights collectively in a way which they certainly cannot realistically do individually, to assume that bargaining will take place in a fair way, and to use appeal to the copyright board only if the parties are unable to resolve their difficulties, or only if it is clear that the public interest has been harmed. We would expect that normally this would not be necessary and that owners and users of copyright would regulate tariffs themselves.
The Copyright Appeal Board is to be given a new name. Its old name was somewhat a misnomer because it was not an
June 26, 1987

appeal board. With its new, more descriptive name, it will have certain new powers. It will have the power to set rates or to alter rates by copyright societies on musical performance rights. It will have the power to fix royalty rates for new societies when negotiations between the user and the owner of copyright fails, or when there is an appeal to it in effect.
The copyright board will have the right to license the use of copyright works when the owner of the copyrighted work cannot be located. There would be an appeal to the Federal Court on points of law from decisions made by the copyright board.
The chairperson of the board would be a judge. There would be two full-time appointees and up to three others, full or part time. They would not be public servants. I would hope they would be knowledgeable experts in the field of copyright.
Altogether the provisions for the board are very much those anticipated by the committee. They are certainly in the spirit of the recommendations of the Copyright Subcommittee as to its powers and composition. I very much look forward to seeing this copyright board established in the fashion proposed here.
Finally there is the question of piracy, the violation of copyright. Right now the provisions are far too inadequate. We know that there is an enormous amount of violation of copyright and that the technology available now for home copying and piracy in video and audio cassettes is extensive.
Right now the fines do not deter. Pirated video cassettes may be 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the legitimate market, which of course means an enormous loss in revenues to artists. Fines on summary conviction could go up to $25,000 or six months. The penalties on indictable offence, or the really serious offences, could go up to $1 million or five years in prison.
I remember the Copyright Subcommittee discussing what the penalties should be. I certainly remember arguing very strenuously for hefty financial penalties. We must have realistic deterrents if creators are to have full protection of their economic rights. We must have serious penalties, which will mean that it is not good business to violate copyright, that one is better off to pay the royalties than to pay the stiff fines which we would anticipate being meted out.
I want to raise a few objections about how the Minister has dealt with the issue. I am very concerned, as a member of the committee and as someone who has worked extremely hard on the issue, that I have been somewhat maligned. The Minister actually had the colossal gall to say in the House the other day that I have been holding up copyright. I even received a telephone call to the effect that the NDP was not being sufficiently vigilant and indeed was working against the interests of artists.
I sat on the committee and was there when it reported. On October 18, 1985, just shortly after the committee reported, I directed a question in the House to the Minister asking when the Government would bring in a Bill and received an answer
Copyright Act
indicating that at the earliest possible moment the Government would give these 132 recommendations its consideration and would introduce legislation, subject to negotiations with the other House Leaders. We had been somewhat led to believe that there might be legislation within six months.
I raised the issue again on October 24, 1985, and referred to the subcommittee's report and urged that we have speedy action to implement it.
On January 28, 1987-and in the meantime I had raised it in committee with the Minister, indeed with more than one Minister, on a number of occasions-I indicated that artists had been waiting since the fall of 1985 for action on a new Copyright Act. 1 said:
They are beginning to be very disturbed by rumours that the Government is backtracking on the excellent proposals for reform unanimously made by the copyright committee.
We had even heard rumours that the legislation would not be complete, and of course it has not been complete.
I continued:
The only way for the Government to put to rest these most unfortunate rumours is to bring in a Bill soon with the important and comprehensive recommendations of the copyright committee in it.
Then on March 11, again in a question to the Minister of Communications (Miss MacDonald) referring to the longstanding injustice to composers, I asked when she was going to bring in legislation to remedy this injustice and to do so very quickly. Then, however, on June 15, 1987, we have the Minister stating:
Last week the Member was protesting when I brought in copyright legislation. That was long overdue as well... I hope the Hon. Member will not have the same negative reaction when I bring in the film legislation.
I have been urging film and copyright legislation. In the case of copyright legislation, I have been urging it for years now. This is a complete misstatement of my position. What the Minister was referring to was a letter that I had sent her on May 25 wherein 1 protested her plans to bring the Bill in on a particular day when the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture would be holding hearings in Saskatoon. This would have meant that the Liberal critic and I could not have been present.
Here we had a Bill that had been waiting for months and months and months. The Copyright Subcommittee's report was presented in October, 1985 and the Minister was planning to bring in the Bill on a day on which the two people most vitally concerned from the opposition Parties had to be at her own Department's committee hearings on another task force. What I did was not done to hold up the legislation. I have been urging that the legislation be brought in for years and I simply want to correct that situation for the record. I think it is quite reprehensible that that sort of misrepresentation should have been committed.

June 26, 1987
Committee Reports
I want to refer to my regret that certain other matters have not been included in this legislation and very much hope they will be included soon in the Government's next legislation. Performers' performances is one aspect of copyright that was not included in Bill C-60.
We did not see any easy remedy for the question of home copying. The committee recommended that there be some kind of royalty payment attached on cassettes, blank tapes and machines for copying that would go to collective societies. My recommendation was slightly different from the majority report. It should be in the form of a tax to ensure that the money does not go out of the country but gets plowed back to our own creative people. Nonetheless, the principle is that creators ought to be paid. Home copying is a way of escaping paying royalties. If a person purchased that same object, he or she would be paying royalties, but if a person copies it from the air, the individual avoids paying royalties to creators. I am sorry we have not seen action on this very important question.
We recommended changes about how photographs get treated for copyright. That is not in the Bill. Some of the contentious issues were excluded. I can understand the Government is still divided on that issue, particularly with regard to broadcasting and retransmission rights.
I call on the Government to move quickly on these very important matters that have not yet been included. Artists are concerned with the possibility of new taxes. They are concerned with cut-backs in the arts, and so it is important they get adequate protection in copyright.
I welcome this legislation. I am keen to see it get to committee. I do not think it will take long in committee. Our artists deserve this piece of legislation. I will certainly co-operate and my Party will co-operate in seeing that the Bill gets swift passage at this stage and gets back to the House for third reading as soon as we can possibly manage it.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is the House ready for the question?


Some Hon. Members:: Question.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, Bill read the second time and referred to a legislative committee.


Thomas Scott Fennell: Mr. Speaker, following my request earlier this day, I have the honour to present the twenty-fifth report of the Striking Committee.
If the House gives it consent, I intend to move concurrence in this report later this day.
[Editor's Note: See today's Vote and Proceedings.]


CONCURRENCE IN TWENTY-FIFTH REPORT OF STANDING COMMITTEE
Thomas Scott Fennell: Mr. Speaker, I should like at this time to move concurrence in the twenty-fifth report of the Striking Committee presented earlier this day.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.


Hon. George Hees (for Minister of Transport) moved: by unanimous consent, that Bill C-21, an Act to exempt certain shipping conference practices from the provisions of the Competition Act, to repeal the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act, 1979 and to amend other Acts in consequence thereof, as reported (with amendments) from a legislative committee, be concurred in.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
George Harris Hees: that the Bill be read the third time and passed.


Mr. Blaine A. Thacker (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Transport):: Mr. Speaker, it is an honour and a privilege to rise to speak on third reading of Bill C-21, an Act to exempt certain shipping conference practices from the provisions of the Competition Act. I can assure Members of the House that this Bill has had a thorough going over by the legislative committee.
Bill C-21 was referred to the legislative committee and we started hearings in April. We heard some 16 witnesses, we had 36 submissions and there were 16 motions for amendment
June 26, 1987

which were accepted. I am totally convinced that this Bill sets out a sensible and reasonable balance between the needs of Canadian shippers and the international carriers.
I want to commend the Members of Parliament who sat on this committee. We have all spent many years in opposition and some years in Government. We were led by the distinguished Chairman, the Hon. Member for Quebec East (Mr. Tremblay). The Hon. Member for St. Catharines (Mr. Reid), the Hon. Member for Fraser Valley East (Mr. Belsher), the Hon. Member for Dartmouth-Halifax East (Mr. Forrestall) and the Hon. Member for York East (Mr. Redway), all members of the committee, served the committee very well indeed. The Official Opposition was represented by the Hon. Member for Papineau (Mr. Ouellet), who has had many years' experience in this House and in Cabinet. He brought a lot of wisdom and advice to the committee. The Hon. Member for Thunder Bay-Nipigon (Mr. Epp), representing the New Democratic Party, presented his case well.
I believe that the committee served the new rules of Parliament very well. We had recommendations that were aggressive and had to go back to Cabinet. The Cabinet accepted the wisdom of the three Parties as represented on this legislative committee, and I think the Cabinet should be commended for accepting the committee's wisdom. Not all wisdom lies entirely in the bureaucracy and the narrow interest groups that bring some of these issues to the fore. When Members of Parliament direct themselves to a problem, it can genuinely lead to improvements in Bills. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to participate on third reading.


Hon. Andre Ouellet (Papineau):: Mr. Speaker, 1 welcome this opportunity to speak on behalf of my party at the last stage before Bill C-21 is adopted by this House.
We are all aware that the international shipping conferences play a major role in the transportation of goods between Canada and other countries. The conference system was created over a century ago as part of the trade relations between Great Britain and India. At the time, fierce competition between big ocean carriers caused a great deal of instability and uncertainty in the important export trade between these two countries.
Finally, shippers, carriers and consigness decided that all parties stood to gain from increased safety and stability in the transportation of both goods and passangers.
The resulting agreement finally formed the basis for the shipping conferences that have now spread throughout the world.
The conferences are organizations whose members, the various ocean carriers, all subscribe tot he same code of conduct covering, among other things, rates and levels of service, doing so in exchange for agreements on the provision of regular services.
Shipping Conferences Exemption
A typical activity of shipping conferences is monitoring price competition, since member shipping lines are obliged to charge the same rates.
In order to restrict internal competition, shipping conferences usually set limits on the number of trips that may be made by each member, as well as on the quantity of merchandise that may be carried and the number of ports members may call.
The present legislation does not require a shipper enter into a patronage contract exclusively with a carrier who is a member of a conference. In practice, however, the conferences generally insist on signing such a contract, in return for certain considerations, including discounts on the quantity of merchandise shipped.
On the other hand, a shipper may drop a patronage contract to take advantage of cheaper rates with another carrier, whether or not the latter is a member of a shipping conference.
The present legislation also protects the conferences from any legal proceedings under the Competition Act, it provides Canada with a measure of control over conference activities and gives the Canadian council of shippers the right to restrict the powers of the conferences.
Mr. Speaker, this legislation, referred to as the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act, 1979, has served our country and our trade interests very well.
However, in 1984, the United States, our neighbour to the south, passed a new Act, the U.S. Shipping Act of 1984, which not only ratifies the principle of the conference system but also includes provisions to further protect conferences in certain areas against American antitrust laws.
Canada's proximity to the United States and the fact that this country is served by a number of joint U.S.-Canada shipping conferences requires that the laws of our countries be fairly compatible on this question. That was one of the arguments put forward by the Government when it tabled this Bill.
At the outset, we in the Opposition agreed. Nevertheless, we had some serious reservations about some aspects of this legislation. The Government was trying to reconfirm the shipping conference situation, but the legislation had some clauses built in that in fact threatened the very existence of the shipping conference. We in the Opposition argued that some of these features had to be removed from the legislation. To that end, we moved a number of amendments in the legislative committee.

Mr. Speaker, in our view, the amendments improved the Bill and provided legislation that recognized the existence of the conference system without thereby jeopardizing their existence

June 26, 1987
Shipping Conferences Exemption
or viability. I must say that the work done in committee was exemplary and that all parliamentarians and the Government in particular should take note.
In fact, this time the Government decided to listen to the claims and suggestions of the various intervenors who testified before the parliamentary committee. I must say that had the Government been as receptive to the representations which were made with respect to Bills C-19 and C-18-both pieces of legislation concerning the Department of Transport-but to which the Government would not listen, we in the Opposition would probably have supported C-19 and C-18. But we could not do so because we felt that the Government was simply not prepared to move forward without bringing in amendments in the field of transport deregulation, particularly concerning Canada's trucking industry as well as air transportation in Bill C-18.
But this time, in the case of Bill C-21, consultation has not been a sham, it has been real. Not only did the Government listened to the suggestions of the witnesses who appeared before the parliamentary committee, but it also listened to those of the Official Opposition.
It has acted responsibly by amending the Bill to take these suggestions and criticisms into account.

Finally, we will have seen an exercise in which good faith, good judgment and a sense of responsibility won over simple partisanship. This is thanks to the contribution of all members of the committee and in particular the excellent work of the Parliamentary Secretary. I would like to pay tribute to him on this occasion because he has been very active in the committee. He has been a force that has conveyed to his Minister and his Government the views expressed by all members of the committee, not only by opposition Members. Some government Members also had views and feelings with regard to this legislation.
In conclusion, we have before the House a better Bill, a good Bill.

Therefore, Mr. speaker, I have no hesitation in saying that we in the Official Opposition will support this legislative measure.


Mr. Ernie Epp (Thunder Bay-Nipigon):: Mr. Speaker, as the New Democratic Party's representative on the legislative committee which dealt with Bill C-21, I appreciate having this opportunity to say something about the Bill before us and about the work carried out by the committee. I would recognize comments made by others about working together on the committee and about the role of the Parliamentary Secretary in carrying changes to the Bill to the Cabinet for consideration.
I must say that I remain very concerned about what the consequences of Bill C-21 may be in practice over the next several years. In order to spell out some of those concerns, I would like to take a little more time than my colleagues on the committee have taken to consider the matter.
This particular version of the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act is of course a part of a series of Bills designed to exempt the operation of conferences, agreements among ocean carriers, selling services to those who wanted to export or import products. These conferences have allowed carriers to agree together on the terms and the rates of service and have exempted them stage by stage through each reformulation from the operations of the Canadian competition law.
The need to re-enact the 1979 Shipping Conferences Exemption Act created the opportunity to which the Government responded with Bill C-21. In 1982 there was a review of this matter by the Water Transport Committee of the CTC and the report to the Minister was generally favourable to the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act, 1979.
It is realistic to recognize that the U.S. legislation in 1984 changed the situation somewhat. Of course, various other factors are at work on the oceans these days, primarily less traffic and an over-supply of vessels. This has created a situation where it has been very difficult to operate at a profit. Whether one blames the U.S. legislation for the bankruptcies in the American lines or ascribes them to the same circumstances affecting others is an open question. It is worth recognizing, however, that the Canadian Bill arose not just in the circumstances of a change in the U.S. law but in the context of an oversupply or, one could easily say, excessive competition among lines. A good deal of service was being offered by carriers who were not in the conferences and rates were falling. It is that economic context which we need to keep in mind in considering the Bill before us today.
The U.S. legislation had several key points, and I want to single out just a few of those. First was the provision for independent action by shippers within the conferences, that is mandatory independent action on rates on 10 days' notice. That meant that if a shipper wished to come to an agreement with a carrier who was in a conference and negotiate lower rates than the conference had established, there was a provision in the law for the shipper to do so. That mandatory independent action was the first of the disruptive elements which the U.S. law threw into the operation of the shipping conferences.
The provision for service contracts which would enable an individual shipper, usually a larger shipper with a lot of business to do, to arrive at special terms with a carrier within a conference was another of the provisions which the U.S. law threw into the ocean shipping scene. The law required that not the contracts themselves but their essential terms be published and available to others who were interested in trying to match
June 26, 1987

these favourable arrangements. A third provision was a denial of intermodal rates, that is to say, not just the carriage across the ocean but also the movement on land by rail or truck. The carriers were denied the opportunity to do that.
The question for us, of course, is how to relate to the changes the U.S. has made. Elow should we position ourselves given the diversity of conferences, and some very large ones have come into existence recently, which organize the vessels carrying goods to and from North America? What we were given in Bill C-21 so far as some of these provisions I have been exploring are concerned was a provision on loyalty contracts. That is to say, a basic feature of the conference system by which shippers commit themselves to a particular carrier. They say, in return for giving you all of our trade, what are the rates? The loyalty contract reflects the arrangements they have arrived at. This gives the carrier some assurance of cargo to be carried. That is for the carrier a very important feature.
What Bill C-21 has done is to open up the possibility that a shipper might be able to divert some of the cargo from this loyalty contractor to others. Of course, that opens up the possibility of playing off members of the conference against independents who may want to enter the trade for their own advantage, even if what they are doing in the short run is going to be ruinous to them and to others in the long run.
The Bill also includes provisions for independent action and it is of course reflecting the American law, where mandatory independent action is provided for on very short notice, that another of the contentious features of Bill C-21 is to be found. The length of notice a shipper has to give before this action comes into effect is one of the points in which the Bill was amended in committee thanks to the hearings and the careful investigations we carried out.
A third feature of Bill C-21, the service contract arrangement, is given novel treatment. Where the U.S. law provides that these particular special arrangements between shippers and carriers will be filed confidentially but their essential terms released so that others know what they are doing, what the best arrangements are that a big shipper can arrive at, in Bill C-21 we have a provision for confidentiality of service contracts. It will not be known to others what exactly a big shipper has been able to arrive at in negotiating one of these service contracts.
As I have already suggested and others have noted the Bill received some amendment in committee. One of the most important changes, and this was a recognition by the Government of concern in the industry about the consequences of the legislation, was the deletion of a clause which would have allowed independent action on service contracts. Those contracts now negotiated will not be open to that additional violation of the conference principle but the service contracts themselves will continue to operate and the confidentiality of them continued as well, as I want to note in a moment.
Shipping Conferences Exemption
The increase to 30 days' notice on independent action was an improvement over the 10 days originally in the Bill. A couple of other more or less significant changes which the Bill proposed were a fine of $5,000 per day for violations, which is an enormous increase from what was in the old Act. The committee agreed to reduce that to $1,000 a day.
The proposal that the Act, once passed, should terminate at a certain time was also dropped from this Bill. That strikes me as very sensible. Once the law is established it should continue in force unless and until it proves to be unwise or in need of reconsideration. That can obviously be done. However, it should not contain a sunset clause which will cause it to lapse in five years, which will only impose work on the next Parliament. Therefore, that was a useful amendment.
Among the amendments which I put forward in committee which were not accepted was one to Clause 12 to have service contracts, in their essential terms, open to the public, as American law now specifies that they shall be. I regret intensely that that particular amendment was not accepted. Various interests called for it in appearances before the committee. The decision to keep them confidential in Canada becomes the basis for my objection and my advice to my colleagues to vote against the Bill in the form in which it has come back from committee.
Clause 21 is another on which I proposed an amendment. That amendment grew directly out of the work of the Water Transport Committee in 1982 but which reflected a philosophy different from that of the Government on transport legislation in general which is to let the market-place operate with very little concern on the part of the Government. It seemed to me that we wanted instead sound regulation and, since the negotiations between shippers and the conferences do not always go as well as they might, an obligation placed upon the carriers to negotiate with these shipping associations in good faith which would reflect the American law. That was one of the obligations which I sought to include in the Bill. The government majority of members of the committee refused to accept that.
The issue of considering Bill C-21 was illuminated by a couple of professional witnesses who appeared before the committee at the very beginning of its deliberations. The first was a Canadian, Professor Gunnar Sletmo of Montreal of 1'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. As Professor Sletmo himself reminded us, he chaired the task force considering deep sea shipping a few years ago. He knows intimately the people involved in large-scale shipping in Canada. He knows very well what their concerns are about carriers. He took quite a different position on the Bill from that of the shippers' council. In a paper which he presented to the committee he discussed the background to the operation of conferences and his concerns about what Bill C-21 might do. He said:
As shipping space, usually in the form of containers, is largely a standard "commodity", there has to be some mechanism for reaching agreement on rates

June 26, 1987
Shipping Conferences Exemption
among major shipping lines. If not, the result is a free-for-all which while it may benefit the large corporation in the short run, will squeeze out the small shipper who does not have hundreds of containers to offer for shipment. To insist on free competition in a market with the above characteristics is to promote instability, inefficiency, and bankruptcies. A completely free market will result in rates that are non-compensatory in periods of slow trade and surplus capacity, but which will skyrocket during tight supply conditions with growing trade.
Under such circumstances, the price shocks in the general cargo sector would be akin to those experienced in the oil sector in years past where tanker rates changed by a factor of ten or more over a short period of time.
In this paper Professor Sletmo points out a variety of forces that work on the conferences as constraints on the possibility of monopoly pricing. I will not take the time now to note those, but to the six cited in a classic study from the early fifties he added a couple of additional factors which are operating now, those being air cargo and the neobulk shipment developments of the last years.
He is arguing, of course, that the constraints are such that there really is no need to try to destroy the basic conference system. It was his conviction, as well as that of many other people, that the shipping conference system basically, which Canadian law recognized more fully than U.S. law had before, though perhaps not quite up to the sophistication of European and Japanese law, was in fact designed to destroy the conference system.
In addition, Professor Sletmo pointed out what the consequences would be for small shippers. In a certain classic sense there was a confrontation between the shipping federation, which speaks for those who represent the ocean carriers, and the shippers' council which is, I think, first of all, the organization of the large exporters and importers who provide so much of the container trade to the carriers. The shippers' council wanted Bill C-21, and the shipping federation was convinced that some of the provisions, particularly the secrecy on the service contract, was detrimental to the future of the conferences and, therefore, a danger to Canadian ports and Canadian shipping. Professor Sletmo adds:
The Bill in its present form may harm the small shipper who lacks the resources-human and economic-to keep fully informed about different transport arrangements. He usually lacks the volume to obtain interesting special rates or service contracts. The small shipper is highly dependent upon regular liner services at stable and predictable rates. For that to be available, an efficient and reliable liner industry is needed. In all trades, that has till now meant the presence of conferences. This does not preclude the presence of independents, however. On the contrary, non-conference services represent a valuable complement to conference lines and obliterate claims that conferences "monopolize" trades.
If the hand of the largest shippers is further strengthened by legislation, it means still lower rates for those shippers. However, this does not mean reduced costs to conference lines. Hence, the general rate structure will come under upward pressure to recover the reduced liner income. An analogy is a hotel raising its individual rates because it was forced to accept even lower corporate rates.
I could read from the submission of Dr. Leslie Kanuk, an American authority who appeared before the committee the same afternoon, i will only cite her American observation that if it ain't broke, why fix it? She stated that the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act of 1979, the system which we will continue to have until this Bill comes into effect, worked pretty
well. I suggest that we face a period of very serious risk as this Bill goes into effect. It is more severe than the American law. Rather than following American law, as the Government has often done, particularly in the secrecy involving service contracts, we do not know how ocean carriers and the conferences will respond to it. There is a possibility that they might give up serving Canadian ports. That, of course, would have immediate impact on our ocean ports.
There are some particular possibilities along that line that I want to point out. Given the developments in carriage these days, particularly the U.S. railways going to the stacked container system of movement across the continent, there is a possibility that American ports and railways will be able to grab trades, even from inland Canadian shippers. Some Canadian centres, in particular Toronto and Montreal, are not all that far removed from American ports. There is a real possibility of displacement of Canadian ports by American ports. For example, Vancouver on the West which could be displaced by Seattle. In the East, Elizabeth, New Jersey, would displace Saint John, which could conceivably take port business from Montreal.
In 1985 almost a quarter of the containers moving through Canadian ports were American. In addition, approximately one-fifth of Canadian cargo moved through American ports. In fact, on the West Coast, almost one-half of the containers were moving through Seattle and other centres.
The Shipping Conferences Exemption Act could easily result in the various ports, such as Montreal, Vancouver and Saint John suffering very severely. This could involve some thousands of jobs at the ports, with the additional economic ramifications. Only time will tell, but the uncertainties that the Government has created with this Bill are such that I have advised my colleagues that we should join in opposing this Bill.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is the House ready for the question?


Some Hon. Members:: Question.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those in favour of the motion please say yea.


Some Hon. Members:: Yea.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those opposed please say nay.


Some Hon. Members:: Nay.
June 26, 1987


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: In my opinion the yeas have it.
And more than five Members having risen:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Pursuant to Standing Order 13(5), a recorded division on the proposed motion stands deferred.


FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND DEPOSIT INSURANCE SYSTEM AMENDMENT ACT
[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Tuesday, June 23, consideration of the motion of Mr. Hockin that Bill C-42, an Act respecting financial institutions and the deposit insurance system, be read the third time and passed.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Resuming debate with the Hon. Member for Kenora-Rainy River.


Michael Morris Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. My colleague, the Member for Kenora-Rainy River (Mr. Parry), may have concluded his remarks.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I will recognize the Hon. Member for Ottawa Centre.


Michael Morris Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, Bill C-42 has been before the Finance Committee for some time. It is the first of three portions of the financial deregulation and reregulation which the Government has been putting forward.
While this Bill is important, it is unfortunate that it has not been accompanied by the third portion of the Government's legislation which would have informed us of its policies about such crucial issues as self-dealing, conflict of interest, and the size of financial institutions.
This is the least contentious of the three Bills because in the wake of the collapse of the western banks and the new ownership under which were placed all of the minor banks that were set up in the last 10 or 12 years, it became evident that there needed to be a new formula for the supervision of financial institutions. That is what is being done in this particular area.
I regret that the portions of the Bill dealing with deposit insurance still have not resolved some of the existing questions. The committee spent considerable time looking at this question in some detail.
I might say that there was some contention in the committee over the question of whether or not and under what circumstances the Deposit Insurance Corporation would be able to levy a penalty of an excess premium on institutions that were not maintaining the standards prescribed by the CDIC for the operation of its affairs. A good deal of confusions remains
Financial Institutions
between the Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Superintendent of Financial Institutions as to who does what to whom.
I think it is wrong that the Bill has not been changed in order to prescribe more specifically some of the duties of auditors. I hoped that change would be implemented because one of the tragedies and scandals of the collapse of the western banks is that there still has been no effective action taken to discipline the professional auditors who allowed that to take place without reporting on the prevailing situation in the western banks. We now know that there was a great deal of effort to essentially mislead investors and depositors about the true nature of what was happening.
There was some interesting discussion in the committee on the question of whether the creation of a separate office of the Superintendent of Insurance was adequate protection in ensuring that financial institutions in Canada will continue to be safely, effectively, and prudently operated.
The basic question in this area was whether we should essentially insure deposits, almost without limit, or whether there should possibly be a form of co-insurance for deposits over a certain level. No specific measures were ultimately implemented in this area, but the point is well taken that the Government has put too much reliance on the effectiveness of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions to oversee these financial institutions. This has essentially left little or no role to the private investors, municipalities, and depositors to ensure that they are not making unnecessarily unwise investments in order to obtain an extra one-quarter per cent or one-half per cent interest.
I expressed concern that it looks as though the Office of the Superintendent of Insurance would not get adequate new resources in order to ensure that what happened in 1985 might not happen again. The Superintendent said that he would decide what resources he needed and had been assured that he would get those resources when he went before Treasury Board and Minister of Finance (Mr. Wilson). I appreciate the confidence that he expressed.
The new Superintendent is obviously a man of great capacity and we welcome his appointment. However, I am not sure whether Mr. Mackenzie might not face similar problems that his predecessor faced as Inspector General of the banks. He may be unable to get adequate resources or effectively fulfil the greater responsibility he has been given. Unfortunately, that is a problem that has not been resolved.
One could raise many other questions about this legislation. The Superintendent of Financial Institutions is being given very substantial powers to effectively move in on institutions, seize assets and, according to the other Bill, determine the value of real estate assets. This was not possible at the time of the collapse of the western banks and, had some of these powers existed at that time, it might have saved the taxpayers, bank customers, or perhaps both, hundreds of millions of dollars. Canadian taxpayers would not have had to bail out the banks to the degree that was required.

June 26, 1987
Point of Order-Mr. Penner
It is regrettable that we are essentially locking the stable door after the horses have fled. I think one has to conclude that while this legislation is a welcome improvement on what existed before, we are looking at a situation where well over $1 billion has been effectively advanced from the Treasury of the Government of Canada to rescue institutions which went deeper and deeper into trouble before they were caught. It was the officials who were responsible to the Government who gave assurances that these institutions were in good financial order. It was those assurances which then led the Government to decide that it had no choice but to honour the commitment and bail-out not just those depositors who were insured but those uninsured depositors, which meant that tens upon hundreds of millions of dollars went to foreign depositors who simply invested in the western banks in order to get a slightly better term on their money.
It was this Government which was responsible for that and for the expenditure. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to recall this very carefully when at future times we find the Government saying: "We cannot go ahead on such issues as child care. We cannot have a universal child care program because the money is not there".
It reminds me of what the Government said before the Second World War when Members of my Party, the CCF at the time, said: "We should be spending money to help get the economy moving. We should be prepared, if need be, to even have deficits in order to ensure Canadians get back to work". The Prime Minister of the day, be it a Conservative Prime Minister, Mr. Bennett, or a Liberal Minister, Mr. King, said: "We cannot do it. The money is not there". But then the war came along and suddenly the money was there, not to invest in peace but to invest in armaments to fight against the Germans. Of course, we should have done that in the circumstances of the time, but it is ironic that when it was a matter of having Canadians working, the money was not there, and when it was a matter of Canada fighting in a war in Europe, the money suddenly came to be there.
Our Party's suggestion was that there should be a program which would initially cost, 1 believe, some $300 million, and we are told the money is not there. When we press our case, the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) stands up and goes through those lines he was rehearsing with Decima Research before he came to the House of Commons today, to try to paint the New Democrats as a bunch of crazy socialists who somehow do not know which end is up.
I have to ask which is more important, to bail out foreign depositors who happen to put money into Canadian banks in order to get an extra one-quarter per cent of interest, or to ensure the beginning of a child care program which will serve families across Canada? It says something about the Government's priorities that it puts foreign bankers ahead of Canada's children. With those remarks, I conclude my comments on Bill C-42.
We are in fact opposing the Bill as we did on second reading, not so much because of the technicalities of what is in here but because of our basic disagreement and concern with the Government's failure to come to grips with the problems of over concentration of ownership in the financial sector, its weak procedures, the weak policies it put in place, and its failure to even come up with policies which would match the recommendations made by the committee on finance in which my friend, the Hon. Member for Kamloops Shuswap (Mr. Riis) participated and which unanimously recommended that no commercial concern should be able to own more than 30 per cent of a financial institution in Canada. The Government has said it is very worried about commercial financial links but then it tells a company such as Imasco, for example, that it only has to disburse 35 per cent of Canada Trust and it can keep the remaining 65 per cent.
We are disagreeing with all three of these Bills for these basic reasons of principle, although when we get down to the specifics, my comments would be a bit more moderate and would reflect the comments I just made.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is the House ready for the question?


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, it is very important, I think, that a variety of points of view be put on the record-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Order, please. The Speaker will now hear a point of order.


POINT OF ORDER
Mr. Speaker:: I should advise the House that I had arranged to hear a point of order from the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior (Mr. Penner) at this time, at the conclusion of the last Member's speech.


B. Keith Penner: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order regarding the tabling today of a report by the Hon. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (Mr. McKnight) as required by Section 22 of an Act to amend the Indian Act, 1985, a statute which is generally referred to as Bill C-31. I gave you notice earlier today, Mr. Speaker, that I intended to raise this point of order and I thank you for hearing me now.


Philip Derek Lewis: Order or privilege?


B. Keith Penner: A point of order. I would have made my point of order earlier today under Routine Proceedings. I had expected the Minister to table the report. I realize now he was not required to do that, that since it is a statutory obligation, it
June 26, 1987

could be filed with the Table and that has been done in correct order.
I regret, however, that the Minister did not make a brief statement in conjunction with his tabling because the Standing Orders permit no oral questions when a report is tabled only. However, that is beside the point. My point of order will be brief and succinct. It has two parts to it. Both are related to the statutory obligations of the 1985 Act to which I referred earlier, commonly known as Bill C-31. The statutory requirements of what the report must contain is the first point I want to make. My second point is what further action is required now that the report has been tabled, that is the adequate and appropriate Parliamentary response to the report.
First, the statute in Section 22.1(c) states the report shall include detailed information on "the impact of the amendments on the lands and resources of Indian bands". There are two other requirements just ahead of that, (a) and (b), and they require certain statistical information. So far as I know, those two sections are complete and in accord with statutory requirements. It is Section 22.1(c) which gives me concern, the impact of these amendments on the land and resources of Indian bands. I say to you, Mr. Speaker, there is a deficiency here and this deficiency represents a statutory avoidance. The obligations of the statute have not been fulfilled.
To support my allegation, I turn to the report itself which confesses this inadequacy. It says it is still too early for the full impact of the 1985 amendments on reserve lands and band resources to be felt. In view of the changes that may take place over the next few years, Indian Affairs will undertake an evaluation of the impact of the 1985 amendments and present a report in June 1990. I argue that that simply will not do. The statute never said at any time that the report must indicate the full impact. It said it must report the impact after two years. Those, Sir, are already significant because 25,000 native people have now been registered as Indians and 9,000 had their band status restored immediately. The impact, therefore, exists and this report does not adequately report on that impact.
The Minister and his department have made no real effort to provide this information to the House. So the first part of my point of order is what recourse does the House then have if a statutory requirement imposed on the Minister is incompletely or inadequately fulfilled? I allege this report is deficient and incomplete. Second, Standing Order 67(4), states:
Reports, returns or other papers laid before the House in accordance with an Act of Parliament shall thereupon be deemed to have been permanently referred to the appropriate standing committee.
However, the statute differs from that standing order and when there is a dispute between a statute and a Standing Order, you will know, Sir, that the statute must take precedent. I quote from Erskine May, 19th Edition, page 212:
A statute overrides, and cannot be superseded by, an order or regulation of one House or of both jointly.
Point of Order-Mr. Penner
There is a difference, Sir, in simply referring the report pursuant to Standing Order 67(4) or doing what the statute requires. Section 22(2) of the statute states that such committee of Parliament as may be designated or established for the purposes of this subsection shall forthwith, after the report of the Minister is tabled under Subsection (1), review that report and may in the course of that review undertake a review of any provisions of the Indian Act enacted by this Act.
That refers to a committee of Parliament. It does not state a standing committee of the House of Commons. Someone advised me earlier that that may be no more than sloppy drafting. Be that as it may, it states a committee of Parliament-and the definition of Parliament is the House of Commons, the Senate and the Governor General. Of course the Governor General does not participate in committees.
So it would seem to me that a case can be made that what is called for by the statute is a special joint committee. This special joint committee shall be given more than the usual powers of a standing committee. It should be able to travel from place to place, and it should have the assistance of experts. It is vital that such a committee assess fully the impact of this law, Bill C-31, upon Indian people, Indian bands and Indian nations.
The simple fact is that the opposition Members, that is, myself and the Hon. Member for Kenora-Rainy River (Mr. Parry), have lost confidence and faith in the work of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. It rarely meets. When it is convened it barely functions. This law, Bill C-31, is too important to be treated in such a cursory fashion.
Therefore, Sir, the second part of my point of order is that the statute calls for the designation or establishment of a parliamentary committee to deal particularly and exclusively with the report. A perfunctory reference to the standing committee will just not do. I ask Your Honour to rule that such a reference to the standing committee ought to be set aside. There is a statutory obligation on the House to strike a special committee, most likely a special joint committee, to undertake fully and completely the assessment of Bill C-31 upon the Indian people of Canada.
Thank you, Sir, for listening to my point of order.


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Mr. Speaker, first, I want to thank the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior (Mr. Penner) for giving me notice that he would be presenting this point of order. I would like to address the point the Hon. Member made with respect to the adequacy of the response in the report under the statute that we are discussing, which is ordinarily known as Bill C-31. I suggest that there is a response. The response as to the impact was that the impact could not be measured, enunciated or substantiated with

June 26, 1987
Point of Order-Mr. Penner
knowledge because of the information that the Department had at the time of the legislative requirement for responding.
One of the most dramatic and far-reaching aspects of the changes to the Indian Act under Section 22 will be with respect to Indian bands having control of their membership. As the statute was passed, two years were allowed for bands to take control, if they wished, of their membership by establishing a membership code in accordance with the statute.
Up until the last two weeks or three weeks as this report was being prepared, bands had not provided membership codes to the Department. Therefore it was very difficult for the Department to assess how people who were reinstated under Indian heritage return and membership return would be treated by individual bands. Therefore, with respect to the impact on lands and resources, as well as in terms of actual increases in program and service expenditures, only a small number of people have returned to reserves to date. As a result, the full impact of the amendments are yet to be felt. The Department is therefore committed to continuing to monitor the impact of implementing Bill C-31.
I do not want to take any more time on that point. I think the Hon. Member opposite understands the rationale for the report being statistical in nature and the inability of the Department to enunciate the full impact.
I want to address briefly the tabling of the document, as the Hon. Member has suggested, pursuant to Standing Order 67(1). That Standing Order states:
67. (1) Any return, report or other paper required to be laid before the House in accordance with any Act of Parliament or in pursuance of any resolution or Standing Order of this House may be deposited with the Clerk of the House on any sitting day, and such return, report or other paper shall be deemed for all purposes to have been presented to or laid before the House.
My colleague opposite referred to this. I would also point out that Standing Order 67(4) states:
67. (4) Reports, returns or other papers laid before the House in accordance with an Act of Parliament shall thereupon be deemed to have been permanently referred to the appropriate standing committee.
In this report, as it was tabled, we felt that it was deemed to be referred to the appropriate standing committee, that is, the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.


James Douglas Manly: Mr. Speaker, I would like to say just a few words in support of my colleague, the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior (Mr. Penner).
I agree with him when he says that the report that is being tabled today by the Minister is incomplete in that it does not deal with the very important fact of the impact of Bill C-31 upon Indian bands and Indian organizations. That was not dealt with. In his response the Minister said that the impact could not be measured because the information that the Department had at that time was incomplete.
I wish to submit that the Minister and the Department did not undertake the necessary process to obtain that type of information. Although the full impact is not yet known as to what Bill C-31 will do to Indian bands across Canada, Indian bands are already experiencing considerable difficulty in the implementation process. The Assembly of First Nations, meeting now in Toronto as we speak, would not agree with the Minister that no determination about the impact can be determined. There is an impact. Although the full impact cannot yet be established, we should be able to see what some of the preliminary impact is. We should be able to understand in what direction the impact is moving Indian peoples.
I wish to stress that when the committee was dealing with this Bill, we were very concerned about the widespread changes that this would introduce to Indian communities. As a result of that we built in the procedure that there would be a full reporting to Parliament by the Ministry on the impact that this would have. We realize that we were not completely sure of what was going to happen. By the Minister and the Department not filing a full and complete report, they are not meeting their obligation to Parliament. In turn, as Members of Parliament, we are not meeting the obligation that we undertook at that time to the Indian people to ensure that we would monitor the impact of Bill C-31 upon their communities. The Department has failed. The Minister has failed. Unless we as the House of Commons insist that the Department and the Minister table a full report, then we are failing.
I would like to second the other point made by the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior, that is, that a special joint committee be appointed to look at all aspects of the implementation of Bill C-31 to see how it is actually affecting Indian communities and the people who are being reinstated.


Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, I have just a few brief remarks to make since I believe the Minister has replied fully. First, with respect to the question as to whether or not this matter should go to a standing committee or a joint committee, I make two points. First, I wish to reiterate a point made by the Minister. He said that Standing Order 67(4) states:
67. (4) Reports, returns or other papers laid before the House in accordance with an Act of Parliament shall thereupon be deemed to have been permanently referred to the appropriate standing committee.
I submit that the Minister is in compliance with the rules of the House. Had the Government been aware of any request or consideration that the matter go to a joint standing committee, then that is something we could have taken into consideration. In the meantime I submit that to suggest to the House that one has a point of order because one has lost confidence in a standing committee, which is not fully made up of people of one's own Party, is more a matter of debate than a point of order.
June 26, 1987

I submit that the point of order fails and that the Government has in fact complied with the rules of the House, which I submit is in Your Honour's jurisdiction. Whether or not the report is broad and does all things which every Member of the House of Commons wants it to do is a matter for debate and maybe even a matter of judicial interpretation. However, as far as whether or not it complies with the rules of the House and stands as a valid point of order, I submit that we are in compliance with the rules of the House.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, 1 want to add two or three points to this very critical point of order. I am pleased the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior (Mr. Penner) raised it.
I suspect that every Member of Parliament has received volumes of mail in terms of the problems and concerns of native people in respect of Bill C-31. I know that in my own constituency, with a number of reserves and the problems associated with them, it has been a matter of delegations, telegrams, and letters for months and months. Obviously we are all interested in the issue.
Setting aside the point made by the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior and the Hon. Member for Cowichan- Malahat-The Islands (Mr. Manly), that members of the standing committee have little faith in the committee in terms of its past performance, to say nothing of the views held by Indian people through various Indian bands and native nations, the critical part of Your Honour's decision is where the statute calls for a parliamentary committee.
I do not think you would find anything but an enthusiastic response from native people and native bands across Canada if the House saw fit to send the matter, not to the standing committee which I submit has lost the confidence of the House and of native people, but to a special parliamentary committee made up of Members of the Parliament of Canada, including the Senate and the House of Commons, to assess the impact of Bill C-31.
It is not only important for what it has or has not done over the last two years, but in a sense it sets the tone for decades and generations of people to come. We would only be fulfilling our parliamentary responsibilities and duty in the most honourable way possible if we participated in a parliamentary committee as opposed to simply seeing the matter referred to the standing committee.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior (Mr. Penner) has brought a matter of some complexity to the Chair, and others have commented on it. It is somewhat similar to an application brought to the Chair some days ago by the Hon. Member for Nickel Belt (Mr. Rodriguez). Since I will be ruling on the matter shortly, it is probably advisable to reserve at this time.
Financial Institutions
I assure the Hon. Member for Cochrane-Superior, the Hon. Member for Cowichan-Malahat-The Islands (Mr. Manly), and the Hon. Member for Kamloops-Shuswap (Mr. Riis) that I will look very carefully at the point raised. There is, as I say, a similarity which creates certain problems for the Chair.
I have listened carefully to the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary who, as always, made remarks which will be of assistance to me. However, I think I would ask the indulgence of the House to reserve on the matter because the two cases are very similar and will probably have to be decided on somewhat similar grounds.




[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Hockin that Bill C-42, an Act respecting financial institutions and the deposit insurance system, be read the third time and passed.
Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, Bill C-42 comes at an interesting time, at a time when for obvious ideological purposes the Government has launched into a mad plunge into deregulation. We have seen the deregulation of the transportation industry-shipping by sea, by rail, by land, and by air. In other words, we have seen an ideological approach to the whole matter of deregulation when the facts and witnesses indicate that there is no sense to it at all. I suspect we would see exactly the same applied to the financial industry. However, we have seen an interesting mix of deregulation and reregulation. If the Government had decided to deregulate financial industries as it has deregulated other industries, it would have been inappropriate. Of course what brought it on was the total collapse of a number of financial institutions in the last few years.
This is a new phenomenon in Canada. Previously the last bank failure in Canada was in 1923 with the failure of the Home Bank. There had not been a bank failure in Canada until 1985 when of course, 62 years later, the Canadian Commercial Bank and Northland Bank collapsed. I will have more to say about that in a moment.
Along with those two banks other financial institutions collapsed: Astra Trust Company, the Fidelity Trust Company, AM1C Mortgage Investment Corporation, Greymac Mortgage Corporation, Seaway Mortgage Corporation, Northguard Mortgage Corporation, Pioneer Trust Company, Western Capital Trust Company, Continental Trust Company, North American General Insurance Company, Underwriters National Assurance Company, American Reserve Insurance

June 26, 1987
Financial Institutions
Company, and Pitts Insurance Company. I will not take up the time of the House to continue reading the list. However, basically since the Conservatives formed the Government of Canada, we have seen the collapse of a whole series of financial institutions. I do not want to suggest for a moment that it was only because of the election of the Conservative Party to form the Government of Canada, but I will say that it was a factor.
The need to move with some haste or some expedition in terms of reregulating or updating the regulations attached to Canadian financial institutions was focused on the SI billion bank bail-out bungle perpetuated by various government Members. It was a financial mess.
Those who must bear some of the responsibility include the management of the banks in the whole matter of the bank-gate affair, when they tried to cover up the errors they had made as senior financial managers in both the Canadian Commercial Bank and the Northland Bank. Then of course outside auditors were involved-the Clarkson Gordon team, the Peat Marwick team, and the Thorne Riddell team-for not ringing the alarm bells when they should have. If they were living up to their professional responsibility, they should have said to the shareholders and the depositors that those two banks were in serious trouble. However, they too were part of a giant cover-up.
Then the Governor of the Bank of Canada told people not to worry, that the Canadian Commercial Bank was a secure bank. He told depositors to have no fear, and of course he should have known better. The Inspector General of Banks also misled, I suspect inadvertently, the people of Canada by saying that his team had been in there looking at the banks, and of course he had not. He had overlooked that and in a sense misled the shareholders, the depositors, and those doing business with those two banks, to say nothing of the then Minister of State for Finance and the Minister of Finance (Mr. Wilson) who repeatedly stood in the House of Commons as senior representatives of the Government, sending out a false message to the people of Canada, particularly the shareholders, the depositors, and those doing business with the two banks. They said: "Everything is fine, don't worry, have confidence in us". Big deal, we know what happened when the whole thing collapsed.
Of course with them went thousands of small businesses in western Canada and a concern for the shareholders, to say nothing of those people who were wondering what would happen to their deposits.
Even the six chief executive officers of the six major Canadian banks were caught up in this misrepresentation of the facts. They were brought in at the eleventh hour. They did not realize that the two banks, for all intents and purposes, were brain dead and could no longer survive. They did not know that the two banks required artificial intensive care just to keep them going in a very artificial way for some time. They should have known, but they listened to the Minister of
Finance, the Minister of State for Finance, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and the Inspector General of Banks. They had faith in these people, but of course we know now that that faith was misplaced.
Then along came the Estey Commission which proved conclusively that the failure of the two banks had nothing to do with economic conditions in western Canada. It was a popular myth at the time to say that there were difficult economic times and therefore the two banks collapsed. We were reminded of many other financial institutions which did not collapse in western Canada; they in fact remained strong and viable. It is true that they had difficult times, but they did not collapse.
Judge Estey of that inquiry pointed out clearly that it was the management or, more appropriately, the mismanagement of those financial institutions that made the whole set of errors, errors upon errors upon errors, made by people who had failed to do their jobs adequately. While no one person or one group of people can be targeted as being the cause of the problem, it was indeed the system. Today we are trying to improve the system.
We have made some progress in improving the system. As my colleague, the Hon. Member for Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy), indicated, we are supporting parts of this legislation, but other parts we have difficulty with. The critical part of Bill C-42 responds to Estey in the creation of the office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. This mega-office will provide an overview of financial institutions in the country. This office will consolidate the function of the present Inspector General of Banks and the Superintendent of Insurance. The superintendent of this new office will be responsible for the administration of statutes, the execution of supervisory actions in the assessment of solvency and will be answerable, of course, to the Minister of Finance.
I will not take up any more time of the House in an effort to facilitate the passage of this Bill, but we oppose this Bill primarily for the reason that it fails, in our estimation, to deal adequately with deposit insurance. While we hold to the policy of ensuring deposits over S60,000, as long as this Government is in power the depositors know that regardless of what happens, it will move in with whatever amount of taxpayers' money is necessary, whether it is half a billion dollars, a billion or a couple of billion dollars. But there is no money for decent day care facilities, no money to provide venture capital for small business and no money to support fishermen and farmers. When it came to bailing out the uninsured depositors, made up almost exclusively of foreign banks, the Bank of Japan, Wells Fargo, the Bank of Kuwait, the Dubai National Bank-and we can go on, along came the Government of Canada, using taxpayers' money, and bailed them out.
We do not have confidence in the present Government to have faith in the present deposit insurance changes. More
June 26, 1987

appropriately, Mr. Speaker, is the ownership provision. We felt strongly about this when we looked into this whole matter in the Finance committee. As a matter of fact, I remember sitting late into the night time and time again looking into concentration in the financial community. As New Democrats, we felt ownership should be limited to 10 per cent, that 10 per cent ownership in a financial institution, like we have at the banks, is a safeguard to keep away from one individual or one group of companies having exclusive domain or having monopoly control over a particular institution.
The Finance committee thought that might be a little bit heavy, although it was okay for the banks of Canada, so they raised it to 30 per cent. They felt that any more than 30 per cent ownership would cause problems in terms of financial corporate concentration in the power exercised therein. This Bill fails totally to come to grips with that. As my colleague from Ottawa Centre indicated, even with the huge Imasco conglomerate it will only be allowed to divest down to 60 per cent ownership in its financial institution which gives Imasco total effective control, to say nothing of many, many others where the control is 100 per cent in the hands of one individual. With all due respect to Arab sheiks, they can come into Canada and pick up a financial institution and own one. That is not what we feel is in the best interests of the Canadian depositors or people doing business with the Canadian financial institutions.
We oppose this legislation. We feel reluctant that we did not have a better Bill than Bill C-42. It is a small step in the right direction. The Bill really fails to deliver the kind of protection that the Canadian public deserves, in terms of shareholders, depositors and those doing business with the Canadian financial institutions.


MESSAGE FROM THE SENATE
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Before I recognize the Hon. Member for Gander-Twillingate (Mr. Baker), I have the honour to inform the House that a message has been received from the Senate informing this House that the Senate has passed Bill S-ll, an Act respecting the acquisition, operation and disposal of the Windsor-Detroit tunnel by the City of Windsor, to which the concurrence of this House is desired.
Financial Institutions




[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Hockin that Bill C-42, an Act respecting financial institutions and the deposit insurance system, be read the third time and passed.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Resuming debate. The Hon. Member for Gander-Twillingate (Mr. Baker).


Mr. George Baker (Gander-Twillingate):: Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Privy Council (Mr. Lewis) apparently does not believe that I can deliver a very short address. All I need is one minute-I could take 20 minutes if I wished, but I won't because I understand we are going on to another Bill in a couple of moments-just to put on the record what the previous speaker was talking about. It is interesting to note that none of these people from the Governor of the Bank down to the top management of all of our major financial institutions, to all of the highly paid experts in the financial community during those meetings which took place, knew exactly what they were recommending or what they were about.
It is interesting to put on the record as well that politicians and Cabinet Ministers had meetings prior to the decision being made, and really on their shoulders lies the responsibility of the billion dollars which had to be spent.
There appears in this Bill a section under which fines can be levied for "not sound business and financial practices". It leads certain financial institutions to think twice about taking a chance. In other words, at the end of this month, on Tuesday, the Fisheries Improvement Loans program comes to an end, the Farm Improvement Loans program comes to an end, all of the guaranteed loans to primary producers come to an end unless Bills are passed in this Chamber by Tuesday afternoon, which obviously they will not be.
The Government of Canada, getting out of the practice of guaranteeing loans to small business people, changed the law under the Small Businesses Loans Act. Now, if you are a businessman and you walk into a bank, wanting to start up a business, you have to put 1 per cent up front first. You have to say to the bank manager "Look, I want a loan and I will pay you 1 per cent cash today in order to get that loan because that is what the Government of Canada says in its new Small Businesses Loans Act". The other primary producers cannot even get a guarantee anymore. By putting in this Bill, "not sound business and financial practices", banks will hesitate, they will think twice or three times because if it ever gets in the newspaper that they have been fined for carrying out unsound business practices, as our critic has pointed out, that

June 26, 1987
Business of the House
would certainly be a serious affront to that particular financial institution.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is the House ready for the question?


Some Hon. Members:: Question.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those in favour please say yea.


Some Hon. Members:: Yea.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those opposed please say nay.


Some Hon. Members:: Nay.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: In my opinion the nays have it.
And more than five Members having risen:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Pursuant to Standing Order 13(5) the recorded division stands deferred until 6 o'clock p.m., Monday, June 29, 1987.


BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to indicate House business further to the exchange which took place here in the House a week ago arising out of the question of privilege raised by the Hon. Member for York Centre (Mr. Kaplan) and as well the point of order raised by the Hon. Member for Burnaby (Mr. Robinson). I would like to indicate at this time that House business as it relates to the proceedings next week and perhaps address the concerns that have been expressed by both Hon. Members.
You will recall, Mr. Speaker, as will Hon. Members, that both the question of privilege and the point of order respecting the notice and timing of the proceedings on Motion No. 5 respecting capital punishment standing in my name were left in abeyance to allow Members to have private discussions to determine if acceptable arrangements could be arrived at. For my part, I have been unable to have spokesmen for the Parties reach such agreement and arrangements. Earlier today I received rejections from my counterparts to a proposal which would have added time on Monday next to allow participation in the debate and to conclude it that day.
In the circumstances, therefore, I feel it is appropriate as a way of giving the fair notice of a vote which was sought by the Hon. Member for Burnaby and to follow up on the concerns expressed by the Hon. Member for York Centre a week ago to give adequate notice prior to the vote being taken. I would like to take this opportunity to give notice that at the next sitting of the House, immediately before the Order of the Day is called for resuming debate on government Motion No. 5 respecting capital punishment and on any amendments proposed thereto, I will move that the debate be not further adjourned.
As the Standing Orders work, the notice, when moved on Monday, will require a final vote on the question by 1 a.m. that sitting day without a provision for deferment. I regret that I cannot help the Hon. Member for Burnaby meet his request but at least-


Michael Morris Cassidy: So much for a free vote in the House of Commons.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: At least, I do want to use this opportunity to give ample and timely-


Michael Morris Cassidy: So much for free debate in the House of Commons.


Mr. Speaker:: Order. The Hon. Deputy Prime Minister (Mr. Mazankowski) is addressing the House on a matter which is very important to this Chamber as all Hon. Members know. Members of course will have different views as to how this debate might proceed. However, the Hon. Deputy Prime Minister has come to the House to take into account at least to some degree the matters raised by the Hon. Member for York Centre (Mr. Kaplan) and the Hon. Member for Burnaby (Mr. Robinson) several days ago.
At that time, I adjourned the matter in the hope that Hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber could sort out their difficulties and arrive at some more unanimous agreement as to how the debate should proceed. The Hon. Deputy Prime Minister has said that at least in his view, that was not possible and has now come to the Chamber to, as I take it, try to meet at least some degree of the concerns that were raised the other day and to give more notice than perhaps was seen to be given before of the steps the Hon. Deputy Prime Minister is intending to take on Monday which will of course lead to a limitation of the debate, assuming that all of that does take place. However, I would ask Hon. Members to extend to the Deputy Prime Minister the same courtesy that we would extend to all others and that is to hear the Hon. Deputy Prime Minister throughout his entire remarks. Other Hon. Members may want to rise briefly and the Chair will consider that if it is appropriate.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I have almost concluded my remarks. I would simply repeat that the purpose of my coming to the House this afternoon is to try to comply with the requests made by Hon. Members opposite to provide ample and timely notice to Members who have expressed concern and
June 26, 1987

to all other Elon. Members. I appreciate being allowed to take the time of the Elouse to do just that.
Mir. Gray (Windsor West): Mr. Speaker, we are profoundly disappointed that the Government has chosen to choke off debate on a matter as important as the reinstatement of the death penalty. This is not consistent with what happened when this matter was before the House in the past and it is certainly not consistent with the words of the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) in his eloquent speech opposing the death penalty.
I do want to make an inquiry and I hope I am doing it in a proper manner. In light of the remarks of the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr. Mazankowski), I wonder when there might be rulings on the question of privilege and point of order raised in this connection Friday last. I hope my inquiry will not be taken in any way as attempting to expedite your consideration of the matter, but I feel that I must ask the question in view of what the Deputy Prime Minister has just said.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I am very, very disappointed that we have to do this. First, I want to say to the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr. Mazankowski) that at least we appreciate the notice so that on such a critical vote, Members of Parliament from all sides will be adequately notified that the vote will take place at one o'clock early Tuesday morning. However, I want to say how profoundly sad we are that this has taken place.
So far during the debate on capital punishment, 82 per cent of the Members of the House of Commons have as yet been unable to make a speech.


Thomas Scott Fennell: That's not true.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Eighty-two per cent have been unable to make a speech in the House of Commons. We believed the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) when he said that the people of Canada would see a full and free debate and a vote in the House of Commons. We took that to mean that those Members of Parliament who wished to make a speech on capital punishment would have the opportunity to do so. Now, when 82 per cent of the Members have yet to make a speech on capital punishment, the Government is introducing a motion that will force a vote after just a few more hours of debate. That is something that we find unacceptable. Once again, we find that the Prime Minister's word is not to be taken as offered. The Prime Minister has said one thing and now the Government is doing another. That seems to be a trend that we find very, very disappointing.
I think the people of Canada will also think that they have been shortchanged. They have a right to know why their Members of Parliament are voting as they will vote at one o'clock on Tuesday morning. It is not unrealistic to expect an opportunity to be at least provided to those Hon. Members who wish to make a speech to explain to their constituents and the people of Canada why they will vote as they will.
On behalf of the New Democrats, I want to register our profound disappointment. We feel that this is an inappropriate
Business of the House
use of parliamentary procedure. Never was the heavy hand of closure meant to limit a debate on what is literally a life-and-death issue.
On behalf of the New Democrats, I say that this action is inappropriate. This is not what the Prime Minister promised the people of Canada. It is something that we feel will detract from the esteem the public now holds for the House of Commons and the Parliament of Canada. If Hon. Members who wish to speak on an issue as crucial as this cannot, with 82 per cent of the Members of the House of Commons not yet having had the opportunity to make a speech on this critical issue, the people of Canada will feel that they too have been betrayed.


Jacques Guilbault: Mr. Speaker, I too want to say how deeply disappointed I am that the Government should have decided to impose closure on the capital punishment debate.
The decision has a special impact because this is supposed to be a free vote, yet it belittles the authority of the whips, and each Member expected, or perhaps the majority of Members were expecting to have an opportunity to air their views and explain their vote.
I also think that the majority of Canadians really thought that their Members of Parliament or most of them would speak to this issue.
Speaking for myself, I may be among those who will not be able to take part in the debate and who would have liked to explain why they will be voting against the resolution to restore capital punishment.
I want to be brief, and in conclusion I would say that it is rather strange that the Government chose to impose closure on this kind of vote. Ironically, closure, which is also called the guillotine, will now apply to a bill aimed at reinstating capital punishment.


Mr. Nowlan:: Mr. Speaker, I have been sitting here listening to the House Leader on this very sensitive and serious issue. Having been involved in three other debates on capital punishment in my term as a Member, knowing full well the emotion and division this debate creates because it deals with individual conscience, I am frankly rather disappointed at the reaction from those on the opposition side, and I have sat there myself. I was hoping the House Leaders would have been able to reach an agreement to shorten the time for the debate and extend the hours. If Members opposite really wanted to give every Member an opportunity to participate in the debate, surely that would have been the simple thing to do. House Leaders could have come together for that purpose, not for partisan political reasons in order to try and castigate the

June 26, 1987
Business of the House
Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney). They can face up to the issue without making cheap political points.
I am not going to have a chance to speak in this debate, but I am not that worried. There is not a Member of this Elouse who cannot communicate with the media as to why he or she votes the way they vote. To lay the blame on the Prime Minister is to give it to him both ways. I have had some problems with the Prime Minister on other issues, but I am not prepared to sit here and listen to the hypocrisy involved in lambasting the Prime Minister for not fulfilling his promises and then doing the same thing when he tries to fulfil a promise on something as sensitive as capital punishment. The Opposition in their hypocrisy tried to condemn him there, too.
I think the House Leader has been most reasonable in trying to come up with a deal which nobody here has talked about. We could have sat here all weekend, any weekend and had this thing-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please.


John Patrick (Pat) Nowlan: This leaves me absolutely cold.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Speaker:: I indicated that to the degree it was appropriate I would recognize Members, and I may well recognize a few more. However, I want to warn that in the mind of the Speaker this exchange could very rapidly become a debate on something else entirely. I do not think that would be appropriate.
[ Translation]


Jean-Robert Gauthier: In my
opinion, Mr. Speaker, every Member enjoys the privilege and the right to speak in the House. Sixteen Members of the Official Opposition have expressed their desire to take part in this debate. If anything is important at all in this House, it has to be that Members may express themselves, speak, and present their points of view. What this Government has done by imposing closure is that it turns this into a partisan issue, it adopts with respect to this question a new policy which restricts the right to speak of the Members of the Official Opposition, and I strongly object to that policy. I think it is irregular and unacceptable, Mr. Speaker. Again I repeat that 16 Members on this side are anxious to take the floor, and we will do everything we can to make sure they get it.


Michael Morris Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, I deplore the Government's decision, and especially, and that is the point of order, the fact that the Government interfered in a debate that had been initiated as part of Private Members' Business. Furthermore, according to the Government spokesman, it was initially supposed to be a free debate and a free vote without any inteference on the part of the Government.
I also deplore the statement by the Government House Leader, who said that, after seeking a consensus with the opposition parties, he had been obliged to announce closure.
Mr. Speaker, the Government House Leader wanted the Opposition parties to accept his proposal to finish the debate next Monday or else he would impose closure. Mr. Speaker, it was no choice at all.
Quite frankly, I think it is hypocritical of the Prime Minister and his Government, the Minister of Justice and the rest who have clearly stated they are against capital punishment, to let the debate go on and then all of a sudden insist on a vote.
1 would say to my colleagues opposite, Mr. Speaker, that all Members should have a chance to participate. It was this Government's decision to have the issue debated in the House. We felt there were many other questions that were far more important to Canadians than spending days and weeks and months on the debate on capital punishment. Everybody knows now it is hardly likely this process will lead to a Bill and, subsequently, to the application of the death penalty.
Mr. Speaker, we may well ask why the House has spent so much time and effort on this issue. Didn't the Government know enough not to initiate this process or have it initiated? And why is the Government now interfering with this question instead of leaving it as Private Members' Business?


Mr. Belsher:: Mr. Speaker, I am not sure that opposition Members would agree to any time being convenient to bring in closure. The suggestion that it will happen on Monday certainly will not be agreeable. However, if the people opposite are sincere in wanting to make sure Members have an opportunity to speak they could, through the House Leaders, talk about a limited time of five minutes or 10 minutes for each person to speak in the debate on Monday. Thus all Members could be accommodated.


Brian Vincent Tobin: Mr. Speaker, I am one of those who is probably going to find himself in much the same position as other Members who want to speak on this Bill. Let us be clear what we are doing. The House is being asked to endorse or reject a motion which in principle affirms capital punishment as a suitable vehicle for the state to carry out the law of the land. We are talking about the House of Commons saying yes or no to capital punishment. For Members to stand up and suggest that five minutes or four minutes or three minutes is an appropriate amount of time for a small number of Members to be heard on such a fundamental question is simply unacceptable, as well intentioned as those comments may have been. I include the Hon. Member for Annapolis Valley-Hants (Mr. Nowlan) in that comment.
If there is to be something said for House Leaders going back to the negotiating table and discussing this further, then I would suggest, if there is any hope of a reasonable or rational solution being arrived at, the three gentlemen involved should go and do it. I for one cannot agree in any way, shape or form to do anything but to refuse to allow the business of this House to proceed if the Government is going to invoke closure on a fundamental question like capital punishment.
June 26, 1987

I cannot accept on the one hand the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) standing in this House making the speech he made just a few short days ago and today the man who sits at his right hand, the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr. Mazankowski), walks into the House and moves closure. The Prime Minister said he would do all within his power to oppose capital punishment and two days later in walks the Deputy Prime Minister and moves closure.


Mr. Speaker:: The Hon. Member for Humber-Port au Port-St. Barbe (Mr. Tobin) is raising a point which was raised a few days ago. I suggest to the Hon. Member for Windsor West (Mr. Gray) that the Chair would find it appropriate to make a ruling and I will do so at eleven o'clock Monday morning. I do not see anything to be gained by rearguing what I heard a few days ago. I assure all Hon. Members that I have the point and that having been through this same debate twice in my time in this Chamber, along with many of those who are here today, I understand completely the feelings, sentiment, emotion, and some of the other things that go with it. With that we can close off the argument and I will come back to the Chamber at eleven o'clock Monday morning.


Philip Derek Lewis: Mr. Speaker, there have been discussions among the Parties and I think you might find there is a disposition to not see the clock in order that the House may deal with report stage of Bill C-56 and third reading on consent, which deals with certain Acts relating to financial institutions. In addition, we would deal with second and third reading of Bill C-66, an Act to establish the Veterans Appeal Board. Having dealt with those two items, we would adjourn for the weekend.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I want to confirm that there have been discussions. There was an undertaking by the House Leaders to assist the Government in passing certain Bills, particularly that of concern to veterans and the tandem legislation to the Bill with which we have just dealt.
On behalf of the New Democratic Party, it is our intention not to see the clock for a few minutes in order to allow the completion of this legislation today.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, after the conduct of the Government in moving closure, it does not deserve any consideration with respect to its legislative package.


Dave Nickerson: Don't take it personally.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: If that is the way it is, good-bye.


Mr. Speaker:: It may be that the Chair could ignore the clock for a couple of seconds in case anyone wants to change their mind. I am, of course, prepared to co-operate. Are there any Members rising?


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I want to echo the sentiments of my hon. friend, the Member for Windsor West (Mr. Gray), the House Leader for the Liberal Party, that it is very frustrating,
Veterans Appeal Board
when you are trying to accommodate business of the House, to have members of the Government yelling across the floor at you. That is very difficult.
However, I would like to propose that we take five minutes to deal with the Bill of interest to veterans. The Minister of Veterans Affairs (Mr. Hees) is here. He has been waiting patiently all day. We had an understanding that this Bill would be dealt with earlier. I think the Parliamentary Secretary to the Government House Leader (Mr. Lewis) made an error in the order of the business for today. In order to facilitate the Minister of Veterans Affairs, I suggest that we take two or three minutes to deal with this Bill.


Mr. Speaker:: Is there consent?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.