1991-11-21

ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Hon. Alan Redway (Don Valley East):: Madam Speaker, I have the great honour to present a petition from dozens and dozens of people in my constituency. They are calling upon Parliament to do whatever is necessary to resolve the plight of refugees currently in Canada and make decisions humanely and promptly to allow these individuals to plan their lives.
The petitioners' particular concern is for those people who have been separated from their families for many, many years. They want the situation to be redressed as quickly as possible.
I have a further petition from residents of Toronto, East York, Don Mills, Victoria Village, all raising the concern related to the separation of spouses as a result of the refugee and immigration processes.
The petitioners are calling upon Parliament to do whatever is necessary to allow families to be reunited within a reasonable amount of time, i.e. no longer than one year.
We all know the plight of families of immigrants and refugees who are separated from one another. Obviously this is a situation that has to be redressed quickly.


Mr. Maurice Foster (Algoma):: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition from several dozen
farmers from southwestern Ontario deploring the lack of government support.
Last year government support programs were cut by 40 per cent at a time when the world price for grain was dropping by almost a similar amount.
The petitioners are calling on government to provide the same assistance that would have been provided had the new safety net system been in effect during the 1990-91 crop year.
In fact, when the government finally made an announcement, it was only for about half the amount that was needed. The minister is supposed to be making an announcement at eleven o'clock this morning spelling out the exact details of that arrangement.
In any event it is clear to these producers that in fact the government has short-changed them by almost 50 per cent, and the payment is over a year late.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
Mr. Albert Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Madam Speaker, I ask that all questions be allowed to stand.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Shall all questions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



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[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Friday, November 8, consideration of the motion of Ms. Campbell (Vancouver Centre) that Bill C-12, an act to amend the Young Offenders Act and the Criminal Code, be read the third time and passed.
[Stage Direction]
November 21, 1991
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Mrs. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West):: Madam Speaker, the goal of a safe, law abiding society is one we all pursue and we in this Chamber feel a particular responsibility to work toward.
We have all been shocked by the information on the escalation of youth crime. All Canadians want to get the problem under control. We in the Liberal Party believe this legislation is taking the wrong direction to ensure a society that is safer both in the short term and in the long term.
The goal of the Young Offenders Act when it was passed nearly a decade ago was to protect society in two ways. In the short term the purpose was to ensure that youth convicted of crimes dangerous to society were in secure detention when that was necessary. But the second goal was to ensure that every possible step was taken to protect society from a life-long criminal, in other words to ensure that the young offender did not become a life-long threat to public safety and security.
The belief was that youth detention centres should provide not only incarceration for the immediate protection of society, but rehabilitation, counselling and training that would allow a young offender at a crossroad in life to change from a damaged young person into a contributing, fulfilled member of society.
The purpose was also to separate the young offenders from hardened criminals so that they would not be detained in a place where they would veiy quickly and effectively learn the patterns of crime for a lifetime and all the skills of crime.
For over 16 months this bill has been before committee. There have been numerous witnesses from all parts of the justice system and the system dealing with youth. The bill has been universally criticized for the direction it takes. It has been called regressive and mired in outdated premises and concepts.
The bill is not based on the notion that society has failed if a child ends up in prison. Rather than deal with the reality of the causes of youth crime and how best to rehabilitate young offenders and avoid a life-long problem for society, the bill in fact makes it easier to penalize children in the adult criminal system and to abandon them forever to a life of hardened crime.
After nine years we know there are problems with the legislation and with the system that implements the
legislation and that changes are needed. A big failing is that the needed facilities for the detention and treatment of young offenders have not materialized. The courts, knowing this, are not necessarily mandating detention when they should. The necessary support services have not been provided in communities for young offenders so that the appropriate level of supervision can be provided while a young offender is reintegrated into society at a pace that maximizes at least the potential that the young offender will return to the community as a healthy, adjusted, productive citizen.
Because the resources have not been provided, one thing that is happening is the privatization of detention and treatment services. It is one thing to privatize a baseball stadium, but it is quite another thing to leave to the private sector the treatment of damaged and vulnerable young people.
One benefit of privatizing the system is deemed to be cheaper provision of services. The reason it may be cheaper is that outside the public system it is easier to pay low salaries. The result of that is a rapid turnover of personnel in detention facilities so that those who are dealing with young people are constantly new on the job and inexperienced.
In the privatized facilities there is inadequate control of the delivery of programs, particularly of the rehabilitation programs that the centres are intended to provide. There is inadequate provision for the reintegration of the released young offender into society. There is little control over the fact that there may be very vulnerable 12-year-olds in with reasonably hardened 18-year old young offenders.
This bill does not deal with these issues. It fails to deal totally with the need for a comprehensive rehabilitative program which we and most witnesses heard on this bill have recommended. Instead the solution the government proposes is to transfer the young offender to the adult justice system, to the adult court, and eventually to the adult prison where the school for crime in the life of this young person can come fully into operation.
This bill is giving up on these young people and on the whole intention of the Young Offenders Act. We are trying to avoid for the young offender and for society someone who is constantly in society as a cost and as a risk.
November 21, 1991

Another compelling reason why this is the wrong answer is the unequal treatment that young offenders receive across Canada. In one province, for instance, the chance of the young offender being transferred to criminal court is as little as 15 per cent, whereas it is as great as 87 per cent in another province. The federal government has to take responsibility for the fact that there is no consistency in treatment of young offenders across Canada. Surely, if we have a nation, it is because we believe there are certain national standards for national programs and national rights that exist within Canada, wherever one happens to live.
A second reason for condemning this approach is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It requires that young offenders be incarcerated separately from adult offenders. It is not good enough to have a lot of press conferences around an international conference on the child and then ignore the international obligations to our children.
Just two weeks ago in Canada we had a national symposium on children and youth; 400 people from across Canada were here when that symposium ended to meet with parliamentarians and make us aware of the crisis facing our young people. They described some situations to us and asked for our urgent action. They are directly relevant to the bill before us today and to the fact that we do have a high rate of young offenders and we are not dealing with them adequately.
Poverty is one of the underlying reasons for the escalation in youth crime. We may all know the figures but I think they need to be repeated again and again and again, until we understand that they are a tragedy in one of the wealthiest countries of the world and they need to be dealt with. One million children live in poverty in Canada. The largest single group of poor in Canadian society is our children. One out of every six children we meet on the street is poor. In 1989 there were 62,000 more poor children in Canada. The problem is getting worse and not better. At many food banks 40 per cent of those being helped are children.
Right here in Ottawa, within the shadow of this building, one child in four lives in a family whose income is insufficient for basic necessities. Some neighbourhoods close to Parliament Hill have a child poverty rate in excess of 35 per cent. Thirty-nine per cent of all the poor children in this region are under the age of six.
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We know that poverty leads to higher death rates among children, more accidents, higher hospitalization rates, higher suicide rates, higher rates for dropping out of school, higher rates for never having a decent chance or a fair chance in life.
Child welfare graduates are over-represented among street youth; those on social assistance; the unemployed; the underemployed; those in juvenile prostitution, in youth courts and in penal institutions; and the learning disabled. There are thousands of kids as young as 13 who make their home on Canadian streets. They lead lives marked by poverty, disease, violence and crime.
When I was dealing with youth employment and training programs a few years ago, we were finding shocking statistics among young people who qualified for government training assistance, i.e. people who had been unemployed at least six months and with grade 10 or less education. They had no real employment history and therefore were eligible to come into training.
What we were finding consistently in these training programs was that 80 per cent or more of the young people who met those criteria had been victims of abuse. We can start to see the tremendous cost not only to the child but in actual dollars to society.
Among the prison population that is equally true. There is a very high rate of children who come from families marked by abuse such as substance abuse and direct sexual or physical abuse of the children.
The Liberal Party does not believe in going soft on young offenders. We do believe in trying to deal with the problem that put the young offender in the system in the first place and in not putting that young offender back into society as a danger to society and himself or herself. We have proposed lengthening the maximum sentence from three years to seven years to respond to evidence that the rehabilitative process can often take much longer than three years.
We believe that appropriate sentencing is necessary to maximize the chances of recovering a young life rather than dooming the young person and society to one more criminal on the streets. We have urged the government to establish a totally separate youth justice system in which sentencing and rehabilitation are all part of the package and to put in place the rehabilitative programs that are essential to achieving the objectives of both protecting society and giving the young offender a second chance.

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Crime among youth is escalating. Society is paying a high cost for neglecting its most vulnerable and damaged young. These are the ones who end up as our young offenders. The young people who come into the justice system as criminals, and often as very violent criminals, have been failed throughout their youth and childhood by our society. If we fail at the point when they come into the system to deal with a problem that we have been neglecting then we lose the last chance society has to help young offenders become productive citizens.
Let us not miss the last chance we have when they are in trouble with the law, when we have the ability to put them in a controlled environment for their own good and for the protection of society.
The goal of the safe law abiding society rests not in abandoning the goal of recovering young lives but in working harder to achieve it.


Mr. David Barrett (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take my place in this particular debate. I would like to start by complimenting the previous speaker who was in my opinion focused frankly on specific areas that need to be mentioned. I heartily endorse her comments about rehabilitation.
Thirty years ago I came into public life after having been dismissed from my job as a senior personnel officer in the corrections branch in the province of British Columbia for making public speeches on this very subject. I was told that I was outside government policy. From the experience of being dismissed from my job and with my professional background in this particular field I went on to become a politician, only to discover that like everybody else my priority in terms of dealing with children in trouble was not a high priority.
Little did I think that 30 years later the same arguments which were presented would still be necessary in other jurisdictions in this country. This bill is a knee-jerk reaction to what the government thinks is the need to get tough with law and orderissues.
Let me say at the outset that I do not believe there is any ill will in the government's attempt at this bill, but
frankly it is simply playing politics with the community and pandering to the lowest common denominator about what this issue is in depth. While my colleague talked about rehabilitation, I only have a few brief moments to concentrate on prevention.
We can predict at this point that regardless of this bill, in spite of this bill and some may partially argue because of this bill, there will be an increase in repeat crimes by young offenders. This is despite any work at all being done to prevent what we know are the seedlings and the fertile ground for future offenders in this country.
This bill does not address what my colleague touched on as a major part of the problem, that is poverty and neglect among children in this country. Frankly, and I say this from a moral perspective, it is immoral if not amoral that this government and previous governments of different political stripes have never set about establishing a child's charter in this nation to ensure that every young child, boy or girl, is defended in the face of every legal protection so that we can assure that each succeeding generation has done its best to prevent the kind of problems that we exacerbate by the nature of the society we have.
Is it justified that children go to school hungry? It is not just a trite statement to be made and abandoned because we are talking about this bill. The reality is that because of government policies, both provincially and federally, every single day children in this country go to school hungry. Every single day children go to school without adequate parental guidance or adult love. Children go to school in this country neglected and battered every single day.
What are the preventative programs to deal with these issues? They are not spoken by the government. They are not detailed out of committee, but instead we have another foolish bill that suggests that we can solve these problems by punishing children. It is very easy to punish children. There is a hypocrisy in our society. Children get punished far more readily by our court system than adults do. The cynicism around the treatment of adults in our criminal justice system, particularly if you are rich, does not even translate down to children.
November 21, 1991

The quality of the lawyer and the kind of money you have to back you up in the criminal justice system have a major impact on whether you are going to be convicted or found innocent.
Even that range is diminished because for the most part wealthy children do not show up in incarceration. It is the children of poverty and the children of neglect whom we focus on through this kind of legislation with some kind of campaign suggesting law and order and that we are going to show the community we are protecting it.
Every single child who is in need of preventative care and does not get it because of the absence of decent food, decent clothing and decent housing is a ticking time bomb and will come back to haunt the community as adult offenders.
I want to point out that it is not as if we do not know who these children are. Let us examine the first line of defence if we want to talk about protecting the community from violent offenders. From early childhood years we can demonstrate right at the kindergarten or school level the need for preventative services for children who are already giving us signals about severe problems and disturbance.
Tell me where across this country there is a concentrated, detailed preventative program available in the public school system that ensures that a child who shows up in that system, immediately spotted, has access to the kind of care, focus and attention that he or she needs. It cannot be done. That is not our concentration. We will spend money on incarcerating people. We will spend money on punishing people, but any sensible dollar to be spent on prevention is purely accidental rather than by national or provincial planning.
There is lip service being paid to this problem through the private agencies. Lord knows there are many United Way agencies that do attempt to provide preventative child care services, but we have always left that to the private sector. We have always assumed that charity would take care of "charity needs". We have never understood as a nation that our basic moral responsibility is to the child. That is a community responsibility not to be fobbed off in the hope of some charity dollar.
To suggest that this bill by punishing young offenders is going to solve the problem somehow is an outright lie. I am not naming anybody as a liar but the bill is a lie. The bill will leave the impression earnestly with some politi-
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cians that once it is passed this problem is dealt with. That is a lie. The bill will leave the impression with the public that somehow we are making new moves to deal with juvenile crime. That is a lie. The bill will leave the impression with some journalists and some earnest editorial writers that this somehow is a step forward in dealing with a very serious problem. I say that is a lie.
As long as there are children hungry in this country, as long as there are children neglected in this country, sexually abused, physically abused and without one adult figure who is able to give love to that child, these problems will continue to grow and expand exponentially in our greatly growing anonymity in our society.
In the old days there was a role for the religious communities in dealing with these kinds of problems. This too has broken down. We are talking about the anonymity of a neglected child in a community that frankly does not give a damn. To suggest that somehow we are going to protect that child from becoming a violent offender by these meagre moves in this bill is absolutely stupid.
What can be done? Let us quickly and in a forthright manner examine a serious problem about poverty. Let us commit ourselves as a nation to say that no child shall ever go to school hungry again. Let us commit ourselves to say that no child, regardless of where he or she lives in this nation, should ever be forced to live in hovels or abandoned to the kind of housing that is a national disgrace, let alone an international disgrace. Let us commit ourselves to a preventative social and health care program that ensures that every aspect of society's services can be mobilized for those children in need.
I am not talking about the 98 per cent or 99 per cent of children who have the good fortune, regardless of all the other inhibitions, to have some loving relationship in their life that can sustain them even through poverty and bad housing.
I am talking about that 1 per cent or even 2 per cent of the children who have never had a chance from the moment they have been bom. For those groups-and I throw this in with a note of sincerity-that claim to be the great advocates as anti-abortionists and the pro-lifers, I admire them for their principles but I disagree with their position.

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I challenge those groups. If they are so concerned about the lives of the unborn, let them be just as concerned about the ones who are bom and put the same amount of energy into defending those children, the kinds of rights they have and the kinds of services they have.
Thirty years have gone by and I still have to make this kind of speech. This indicates to me that either I am a failure or nobody has been listening. But I am not alone; I am not alone. Just recently in this community of Ottawa there were over 400 men and women from all types of organizations demanding of us parliamentarians a new and broad understanding of children's needs in this country.
All of our caucuses met with those people and we were all pious with our platitudes with those people. The summation after their arriving in Ottawa is that we are all good men and women regardless of party, dedicated to the needs of children. It is not true.
It is not because this Parliament is indifferent. It is not because the politicians are indifferent. Frankly we have never taken the time to understand what the heck these problems are in the first place. It is not because they are Tories, Liberals or New Democrats. It simply is that we have not begun to understand that a dollar of prevention is worth $100 of rehabilitation. A dollar prevention is worth a lifetime of a secure life, chance or opportunity for every child in this country.
The only way we can do that in law is to pass a law guaranteeing a charter of rights for children in this country so that any time a child is hungry, without adequate housing or without necessary services in terms of prevention, then by law they are entitled to receive those by order of a court. Anything less will not work.
The goodness, the good will, the decency of all of us collectively simply will not work because priorities around budgets at the municipal level, the provincial level and the federal level are always squeezed for other needs.
Children come first. We can all mouth that, but we have to go beyond it and enshrine it in law to ensure that we are beginning to deal with these problems.
I know I have conveyed with some modest passion some opinions to my colleagues here today and that the
government will withdraw the bill and say: "We are going to redirect our energies to ensure that children are protected". Would that happen, I would be a very happy person.
But I would walk out of here. I have said my peace and this day will go. The same system that creates child criminal offenders will go on and on and on with somehow believing that we have done something today to stop it. It is simply not true.
There are my comments. If we really love children, if we really care for children, then let us do it by backing it up with law, not with claptrap.


Mr. Howard Crosby (Halifax West):: Madam Speaker, the Young Offenders Act and its amendments raise a subject dear to a number of members of Parliament, I include the one who just spoke as well as myself and I am sure there are many others.
The real point is: What do we do to resolve the problem in Canada of abused and neglected children? How do we martial the legislative and governmental forces to resolve that problem? I think that parliamentary histrionics will not in any way contribute to the resolution of the problem.
I am sure, my hon. friend agrees that we have to be workmanlike about the business of constructing a model legislatively and through governmental resources to respond to the problem.
I hope the member realizes that the Young Offenders Act and its implementation across Canada deal with one aspect of the child abuse and neglect problem and that is the child who runs afoul of the criminal laws. The laws that are there are designed to protect all other citizens. We have to deal with that problem in a real world and in a real way.
I want to ask the member about his interest in the Canadian charter of rights for children. For many years in this House of Commons and other places I have advocated the cause of missing children and sought legislation to deal with that problem. I have been told by officials in the Department of Justice that we cannot deal with the problem federally. We cannot include it in our criminal law because that power was left to the provinces under the civil law power to enact laws to protect neglected and abused children.
November 21, 1991

The member advocates this Canadian charter of rights for children. I would like to ask him how he proposes to implement that. How does he propose to get the provinces and the federal government onside? Does he recognize that we need a constitutional base for doing this? How are we going to do this unless we succeed in the constitutional initiatives of providing a proper and expedient method for amending the Constitution so that we can overcome these problems?
I say to the member as well: Will he ask his friend, the new premier of British Columbia, to take up this cause and to seek a charter of rights for children and initiate legislation in his own legislature that will lead to a constitutional amendment?


David Barrett: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for raising these questions.
The obstacles are not as insurmountable as one would think, as they appear on the surface. For example, let me give a parallel program. One single province initiated socialized medicine in this country and then it ultimately became federally mandated with federal conditions on it. As a matter of fact it was Madam Begin's own legislation that even told the provinces what they could not do about socialized medicine. What is there is the power of the province and then the federal government to order things to be done.
Second, it is already a fact that every province constitutionally has the power to apprehend a child. Every province in this country is mandated by law to apprehend a neglected child, if the complaint is verified, and to protect that child, even removing the child from its parents and putting the child in a foster home. We have mandated the provinces to make those decisions in intervention.
I say that the power is already there. There is not one province that would go back on a foster care program. There is not one province that would go back on the authority to apprehend a child. There is not one province that would deny its responsibility in ensuring, once the case is made in front of a juvenile court, that the child receive the care.
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What I am saying is that we should go the next step as we tried to do in British Columbia by closing both Brannen Lake and Willingdon School for girls. We closed them. We ordered them closed, never to return again in the same form, those two training schools. All it takes is leadership and courage.
I am suggesting the legislative pattern that exists in this country would provide it. I say to the member: "Don't walk out, but come back and name a province that does not have this authority already". The authority and the leadership the member asked for exist today in every single province. What is lacking is the will or the commitment to add the auxiliary services.
It is true that the authority to seize a child by the state is already there, but once the child is seized by the state what is the moral and social obligation of the state to provide the services that are necessary? An adult cannot be seized in the same way. The state cannot seize an adult in the same way as it seizes a child. This is a serious responsibility. If the member is serious, he would make sure that the fiscal policies and the budgetary means are there to ensure that child receives the nourishment both emotional and physical which he or she needs. To fob it off by saying that some premier should do something is at best a misguided notion of what already exists. We have the authority. We just do not have the will to commit the budgets.


Mr. Ron Fisher (Saskatoon-Dundurn):: Madam Speaker, I would like to compliment my fellow colleague on his tremendous speech. If there is a time for outrage then I suggest this is a prime time for it.
I would like to ask the member a question on the basis of his tremendous experience in this field and leading out of a comment I heard Jesse Jackson make actually a year or so ago. He said: "You have two choices:"-maybe four but in groups of two-"you can have child care now or you can have jail care and welfare later". Although it may not be exactly within the context of the bill, I wonder if the member could make a bit of a connection between the neglect of our children and the ultimate problems we have in later years with criminality.

November 21, 1991
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David Barrett: I want to thank the member for his comment. It is like that popular commercial: "You can pay me now or pay me later".
If we want to look at it purely as taxpayers' dollars, every shred of evidence shows that prevention saves money. But to go a bit further, where there have been studies, where every effort has been made at preventative care at an early age, the preventative intervention has shown that violence will diminish, that person to person attacks will diminish, and that a productive, mature adult is produced in society.
How does it make sense? The member wants an analogy. I will finish by giving an analogy. If a well is poisoned it is obvious that the water has to be cleaned up, so we move immediately under public health and clean up the water. If an illness is diagnosed early and we get preventative treatment then we save a life. There are poisoned wells out there that we know exist, and they are poverty, bad housing, and neglect of children by not having proper day care. Those are the poisoned wells.
There are problems of infection with the same medical analogy. We can spot a virus very early in a youngster. It may be sociological, not physical, but it is real just the same. When we prevent that, just as we do with inoculation or preventative care, we also give preventative medicine. The analogies are there.


Mr. Tom Wappel (Scarborough West):: Madam Speaker, I am very delighted to have the opportunity today to address the House of Commons with the concerns that my constituents have brought to me about the Young Offenders Act and about the society that produces offences by young people.
I want to begin my remarks by just saying that the riding I represent, Scarborough West, is one of five federal ridings in the city of Scarborough, which has a population of 550,000. That is a sizeable population. Within my riding I have a sizeable population both of youth and of senior citizens. In the city of Scarborough, and particularly in the riding of Scarborough West, we have conflict and we have difficulty. Some of the conflict and difficulty involves young people who may or may not be dealt with by the legislation we are talking about today.
Very recently in my riding, or just north of my riding actually, literally across the street, there was an incident
on a Sunday at a flea market which was packed with people. A group of approximately 50 youths in an obviously well organized, well planned raid, stormed into the flea market, destroyed the glass panels of a jewellery vendor and stole over $100,000 worth of jewellery, almost like a military operation, and they were gone before anyone could even react.
A street in my riding is called Leyton Avenue. People literally are living in fear. In fear of what? In fear of drugs. There are crack houses on that street. It is a known hang-out for some elements of youth. People are afraid to walk on that street. People are literally afraid to walk by certain of the houses on that street. The efforts of the police, while laudable, have not been able to stem the problem. Safety in the streets has been affected.
I am not overdramatizing when I say that the sister of one of my constituency assistants literally had to dive for cover and cover her child with her own body on Leyton Avenue because of gun play. This is in the riding of Scarborough West in the city of Scarborough, in the province of Ontario, in the country of Canada.
If you wear shoes called Doc Martins, or if you have a leather jacket, or indeed any kind of expensive apparel and you are a young person or you are elderly, you literally have to think not twice but three or four times before you go to a local shopping mall. Before you leave that local shopping mall, you may have been swarmed and you may have no jacket and you may have no shoes. The majority of those offences are being committed by young people.
That is a tragedy. People do not seem to know what to do about it. People seem unable to grasp what has happened. They have come to me and said: "What can you as the federal member do? What can Parliament do? What will Parliament do? Is anybody listening? Does anybody know that this is happening in our country?"
I have held public forums in my riding on the topic of safety in the streets and on the Young Offenders Act. I have requested that people write to me about their concerns. I want to tell you, Madam Speaker, that they have attended these forums and they have written to me. I now have the opportunity as their representative to state to this House what their concerns are and what they want me to tell the House of Commons.
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There are a number of concerns but the first one is protection for themselves. They feelthat they are no longer able to walk from the senior citizens' home to the local Becker's store and back home. They are confined to their apartments because they fear for their own lives. This is in a major metropolitan area of our country. It is hard to believe but it is the fear.
Virtually everyone I am afraid as a result of this fear feels that the present Young Offenders Act, and I use their words, is "too lenient". We talk about that. We tiy to understand what too lenient means. Of course, we are talking here not about adults but about children. We are talking about young people who in many cases come from broken families with terrible stories of abuse and difficulty. What do we do? I have heard that in cases of serious offences people want transfer to adult court to be made easier. Why? For the protection of society. These cases are not frequent but when they happen, they shock the sensibilities.
In Scarborough there was a youth who killed three people. He received three years. He is now out on the street. Three years for three lives. That is unacceptable to the people of Scarborough West.
What about the jurisdiction of the Young Offenders Act? People in my riding have pointed out, and I should point it out as well, that the Young Offenders Act of course replaces the Juvenile Delinquents Act. The Juvenile Delinquents Act was drafted in another time, when we did not have the knowledge that we have now about human psychology and about the growth of human beings throughout their lifetimes. However, the age at which a person was responsible was seven years of age. It has now been raised to twelve. That is a concern, as I will illustrate later.
The final concern that was brought out unanimously,was the inability to publish the names of people charged with serious offences. This is not just pointed out by residents and the constituents of Scarborough West; this is pointed out by the metropolitan Toronto police force. How difficult it is for them to apprehend alleged offenders if it cannot identify those alleged offenders to the public. If someone is alleged to have committed a sexual assault on a 10-year old girl, and the police know who they are looking for, they cannot identify that young person. It is against the law. That hampers the ability of the police to apprehend that
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young person and bring him in to the system which we all hope is going to be able to help to bring him back into society as a productive member. So they are concerned about the ability to publish these names, and this affects their safety.
What is the approach of the Young Offenders Act to young persons? I think it is worth while to quote directly from section 3 of the act, and I quote;
It is hereby recognized and declared that (a) while young persons should not in all instances be held accountable in the same manner or suffer the same consequences for their behaviour as adults, young persons who commit offences should nonetheless bear responsibility for their contraventions.
That is in the act.
(b)	Society must, although it has the responsibility to take reasonable measures to prevent criminal conduct by young persons, be afforded the necessary protection from illegal behaviour.
(c)	Young persons who commit offences require supervision, discipline and control but, because of their state of dependency and level of development and maturity, they also have special needs and require guidance and assistance.
There are a number of other sections, but I am only going to go as far as subsection 3(d).
(d)	Where it is not inconsistent with the protection of society, taking no measures or taking measures other than judicial proceedings under this act should be considered for dealing with young persons who have committed offences.
I do not quarrel with those general statements. The constituents of Scarborough West, I believe, do not quarrel with those general statements. It is the application of those general statements that has brought some problems, and I would like to talk specifically about three of them.
What about transfer to adult court for serious offences? That is one of the things that this bill, the amendment to the Young Offenders Act, is talking about. What is the purpose? Is the purpose to force the young person who is alleged to have committed the serious act-let us say it is murder-into the adult system? Is it the purpose that upon conviction they should go into an adult penal institution? No, I do not believe so. I believe the purpose is to ensure that on a finding of guilt, for the protection of society and for the betterment of the young person who can then take advantage of counselling and all of the other programs that hopefully would be provided by society, society would be protected and we would be prevented from having a sentence of only three years for the crime of murder.

November 21, 1991
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Does this bill do that? The government would have us believe it is are responding to this concern of society, but I say no, this bill does not do that. What it does, sadly, is pretend to do that. If a young person is found guilty of first degree murder or second degree murder in youth court, the bill provides for a maximum sentence of five years, as opposed to the present three years. Or does it? If you look at the bill, you will see that the clause amends the present provision to provide that the person will be ordered "to serve a disposition not to exceed five years less a day". If we left it at that, that would seem fairly obvious on its face. However, it goes on:
-comprised of
(i)	a committal to custody, to be served continuously, for a period that shall not, subject to subsection 26.1.(1), exceed three years from the date of committal, and
(ii)	a placement under conditional supervision to be served in the community in accordance with section 26.2.
What does that mean? That means that if we pass this act, a young person who commits the offence of murder will still go to jail for a maximum of three years, no more, if they are found guilty in youth court. Then they will be placed under "conditional supervision" for a period of a further two years.
Really, there is no increase for the protection of society to five years. There is no ability of society to be able to exercise the degree of control necessary for someone who has taken a human life to be able to rehabilitate that person beyond three years, and yet the government pretends that it is responding to the concerns of Canadians for further protection.
What happens if a young person is convicted in adult court? First of all, I am sure that most right thinking people would agree that no young person should be thrown into jail with hardened criminals who are adults. This is not logical. This will not benefit either the young person or, in the long term, society at large.
But what happens? If a person is found guilty, and this could be just as easily a person who is one day short of 18 as a person who is one day past the age of 14, the bill provides that the sentence is life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for between 5 and 10 years, as specified by the judge. If an adult is found guilty, he must serve between 10 and 25 years.
What does that mean? It means that in the particular case that we are talking about, where the young person killed three people-that person was 17 and a half when those murders were committed-the maximum penalty, if that person had been taken to adult court, which that person was not, would have been under this bill a maximum of 10 years, if so specified by the judge.
That is not acceptable to the people of Scarborough West.
What about the jurisdiction of this bill? Many people might not realize that young person is defined as "anyone who is 12 years of age up to 18". What does that mean? That means that if you are under the age of 12, this act does not apply to you. It absolutely does not apply if you are under the age of 12.
In today's paper, there was an incident in Toronto where an 11-year old child had a metal replica of a gun, and that young person, who is not a young person for the purposes of the Young Offenders Act, pistol-whipped an elderly citizen. The police apprehended that 11-year-old and they are powerless to do anything except return that young person back into the hands of the Children's Aid Society. This act does absolutely nothing to help those young people who are under the age of 12 and who get involved in breaches of the law.
If this is known by me, if this is known by my constituents, it is positively known by drug dealers. It is positively known by adults why prey on children and who will use them and have already used them in the United States and in parts of Canada to be couriers for drugs, to be their mules, knowing that because they are under the age of 12 absolutely nothing can be done. This bill does nothing to deal with that problem, and that is a concern that society has. We passed a bill on gun control but if an 11-year old child is seen walking down the street with a handgun obtained from his parents' cupboard, or wherever, nothing can be done. Yes, the gun can be confiscated and given back to the parent but nothing can be done to that 11-year old child. Is that logical? The people of Scarborough West do not believe so. That is the tragedy as well because those young people cannot be helped.
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As the section says, those young people require supervision, discipline and control, but they cannot get it because they are not dealt with by the Young Offenders Act.
There is absolutely no change brought about by these amendments with respect to the publication of the names of people who are alleged to have committed serious criminal offences. That is a major flaw. The people of Canada want to know that they are protected, want to know that when their children go to school there is no one among them who has been charged or convicted of a serious criminal offence. We can argue about a definition of serious. I am talking about first or second degree murder.
These are some of the problems that have been identified by my constituents. By no means is it of all of them. What irritates me as their representative, and them is the attempt by this government to pretend that it is dealing with their concerns, when all it is doing is putting out a little bit of window dressing around Christmastime to try and convince Canadians that something is being done.
Young people are not being helped and the concerns of society are not being listened to. I say it is time to listen, not only to the bureaucrats, not only to the so-called experts, but also to Canadians who are afraid to walk the streets, Canadians who feel frustrated that no one is listening, to young people who cry out for authority and guidance in an age when the watchwords are: "Do your own thing "and" if it feels good, do it". We cannot continue with that.
We must come to grips with the fundamental problems that are besetting us, attacks on the family and attacks on authority. It is time to identify these concerns. This bill or the act is a tool which can be used to protect our society and help our wayward children. Let us treat the wound instead of debating the size and colour of the bandage. This bill does not treat the wound and I will be voting against it.


Mr. Len Taylor (The Battlefords-Meadow Lake):: Madam Speaker, I had the opportunity to be sitting here just a few moments ago before this hon. member spoke to listen to the speech of the hon. member for Esquimau-Juan de Fuca who spoke so eloquently about
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prevention and the need for young people to be spared poverty and deprivation in our society.
I listened to the hon. member who just spoke and I wonder if he understood the words of the member for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca on preventive matters. When the member speaks about an 11-year old child engaged in a violent activity or an 11-year old child walking down the street waving a handgun, I wonder if the member is suggesting that something has to be done to punish that 11-year, old child who may have engaged in violent activity, or does he recognize that 11-year old child requires help. That 11-year old child may have been living in overcrowded housing conditions and may have been denied food and sustenance, may have been denied attention, love and care at home. Must that 11-year old child be punished for the way in which society has dealt with him, or does that 11-year old child need care and attention? Should he or she be brought into our society and assured that the child fits into our society?
Is prevention important to the hon. member who just spoke? Or do we have to deal with law and order, throw them in jail, throw away the key, and they have to pay the price for their sins?


Thomas (Tom) William Wappel: Madam Speaker, I really do wonder if the member was listening when I spoke.
I indicated my full support for section 3(c) of the Young Offenders Act which quite plainly says that young people are not adults and require special guidance and assistance which adults do not get.
The point however is that 11-year old child will not get the special guidance and help that society can give because that 11-year old child is not covered by the Young Offenders Act. That is the point.
We are not talking about punishing an 11-year old child. We are talking about helping an 11-year old child, and, yes, I did listen very carefully to the hon. member from Juan de Fuca.
I agree that we have to look at the problems of society and we have to deal with this problem in an over-all sense. I ask hon. members to consider, at a time when the family is under attack, when people are ridiculed for promoting the concept of two-parent families with both parents providing love, care and guidance, when people are ridiculed for advocating monogamous heterosexual relationships, when pornography is proliferating under the guise of freedom of expression, when we are killing

November 21, 1991
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over 100,000 unborn children, female and male, each year at taxpayer expense, at a time when segments of western society are talking about the active killing of the weak and infirm, when males assault females in ever growing numbers and when women and children are abused for sexual gratification, is it any wonder that Canadians feel that our society is falling apart?
Yes, we have to deal with all these matters. We cannot deal with something in isolation and we certainly cannot deal with a bill that pretends to be something it is not.


Mr. George S. Rideout (Moncton):: Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to have an opportunity to speak again on this particular piece of legislation, to discuss in general the wrong aim of the government's bill, to address some of the concerns that I think all members of society have as they relate to young offenders and also to discuss some of the issues that have already been discussed here this morning.
The Liberal Party will not be supporting this legislation because we do not think it works. We recognize there are problems. I had an experience just last evening.
It is hard to believe but I was babysitting for my brother. One of my nephews was asking me about my son, what he does in school and things like that. Patrick also asked me whether he had any Doc Martins, which are the shoes that kids wear these days. I said that yes, he did have a pair. I thought they were the worst looking pair of shoes I had ever seen but he thinks they are kind of neat.
Patrick told me that if he could get those shoes, he could not wear them to school because someone would take them from him. I listened to that and really had trouble believing that was the shape of things until you hear some of the stories about violence in our schools and violence among our youth.
I know my own son, Stephen, talks about attacks among his friends and unprovoked attacks against some of his friends. There is violence and police involvement and all of those things. As we have grown up, I think we have all faced some difficult situations but most of the time, it seems to me-maybe I was sneaky enough or cowardly enough that I always managed to avoid those confrontations-today these confrontations occur more often.
We do have problems with youth and you hear stories of the real crime elements, of drug lords utilizing youth as part of that trade. You hear of youths being involved
in swarmings and all of those types of things. We recognize that there are problems.
I guess my concern is that I am not sure that locking up children is the way to solve that particular problem. I agree with some of the comments just made, that we have to take a look at this on an holistic basis. There are housing problems. There is poverty. There is child abuse that leads to these types of circumstances. Are we really treating the symptoms rather than treating the actual cause?
This legislation and the changes that are proposed by the government are still just treating symptoms and not moving to the real root cause of the problem. How do we eradicate poverty and youth poverty? How do we eradicate the problems of housing and situations like that? How do we eradicate child abuse? Those are things that have to be addressed as well.
I believe that this legislation will do nothing really to solve that problem. What it is responding to in large measure is the issue of law and order, keeping these kids off our streets and locked up and out of the way. I think that in some sense we can understand that because we do not like to see that type of violence occurring in our communities and we particularly do not like to see it where it involves young people.
At the same time, locking up a child for 10, 15 or 20 years like an adult is going to create, in my view, a monster in the end. If we take the classic case of a youth who was involved in murder, transfer that youth to adult court and put that youth in an adult prison for 20 years, what are we going to have? The thing to remember is that child is probably 15, 16 or maybe 17. Tack that 20 years on and we are looking at someone who is going to be back in society at age 35, 36 or 37 and what have we created with that youth?
In my opinion, Madam Speaker, and I am sure that you would agree, we have created a monster. We will create a number of monsters because our prison system is such that if those children were abused before they went to prison, for sure they will be abused while they are there. We will then be condoning that abuse of our youth.
I think the intent of the young offenders legislation is proper. We should say that youth are different and we should look at how we treat youth and how we make them pay for the mistakes that they make. We have to look at a whole host of things.
November 21, 1991

However, making it too easy to transfer young offenders into the adult system is not in my way of thinking rightly aimed. The obvious situation is that if you are unfortunate enough to be a youth in some provinces you are more likely to be transferred to the adult system than if you are in another province. I cannot remember the statistics exactly but I know that you are less likely to be sent to an adult court in Prince Edward Island than you are in Manitoba.
A youth or a child is going to have his life dictated somewhat by where he or she lives. That is not fair and equal treatment under the law. We must have as much even treatment as possible in our system so that all youths are treated fairly and equally.
The other complaint that I see in the legislation and the concern that I have is in the area of rehabilitation, training and education. For a child of 14 to 15 to turn to crime means that something very seriously wrong has occurred prior to attaining that age. What are we doing to rehabilitate, train and educate these children?
I guess our answer is: Let us send them to the adult prison and there they can get their education and they can learn how to make licence plates. The legislation does not seem to be rightly aimed in my view. They can learn how to perform crime better in this adult institution. They can learn how to avoid being caught the next time they get out rather than sending them to institutions and places where we can try to convince them that life or that lifestyle is one that is unacceptable and not to be accepted by society and at the same time point them in a direction that they do not see the benefits of crime and in fact they see nothing but the disadvantages of crime. The opportunities that our society presents to them are such that they can be participants in society.
Instead the government is of the view that we should make it easier for these children to be sent off to the adult institutions. We have all heard the gruesome stories and we might as well say them out loud. Some of the older prisoners look with glee when young boys arrive at that institution. They are even carving up the spoils, so to speak. What this government wants to do is send those children to that life, to that lifestyle.
We on this side of the House feel that is wrong. We feel it contradicts the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and while the government has tried to fix it up
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it has failed. That contradiction of the UN charter of Rights still exists and has not been dealt with.
We believe that the solution to achieving the intent of the legislation-and the intent is good-is a thorough overhaul of the whole system to create a youth system of justice. Let us keep youth in that system.
There is no question that some youths are abusing the system as it presently exists. I do get upset when people talk about the child who committed three murders and only got three years. That was not the fault of the legislation. It was the fault of the court, and the people who administered it. We cannot strike down the intent and direction of that legislation just because it has not been properly handled.
We think that two things have to be done. There has to be a youth or juvenile system with all of the rehabilitation, training and education facilities that are necessary so that we can salvage these youths. At the same time there have to be some deterrents. Those presently in the legislation do not seem to be working. In my other life as mayor of a community I would listen to the police talk of the problems of juvenile crime and try to solve those problems. I am aware of the problems that the police forces face.
But the solution that the police want is a longer sentence. I think in some sense that is not bad, depending on what we are going to do with that child or that youth. Maybe we should look at it as an opportunity to try to salvage that youth and not put him out of the way in an institution so we do not have to worry about him for a period of time. If we do that we are going to have to worry about him when that period of time is over. We will face far more serious problems each time we do that.
Maybe we should get our house in order as far as youth are concerned. We must deal with a proper housing policy. We must deal with poverty in our inner cities and poverty among youth and elderly people, all of those things. We have to look at all of these issues on an holistic basis.
We on this side think that the present legislation is wrong. We proposed a number of amendments that would have put some heart into the legislation and corrected many of the deficiencies that are there so that it would comply with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. But the government did not see that as a good idea. It decided to move on the side of punishment

November 21, 1991
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rather than on the side of salvaging youth. For us on this side of the House that is unacceptable.


Mr. Gilbert Parent (Welland -St. Catharines-Tho-rold):: Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague has indeed touched on many of the pertinent points with regard to this legislation. The whole theme of what he was saying this morning was that we should look at ways to salvage youth rather than simply punish them.
I share with him and many parents across Canada the grave malaise we have in this country. Young offenders seem to snub their noses at the system. As recently as a week ago I had a call from a mother who was saying that because of the way the law is interfering with her life she has less and less control over her children. She was asking me how she was going to raise her children. I bring this point up only to show that she wants to salvage them, but at this point it seems that the law puts her children beyond her.
My colleague has mentioned that we should have the proper facilities and training. I very strongly believe that we should have mandatory counselling whenever a young offender is charged and convicted and before he is released. I do not believe that they should have the option of whether they take this counselling or not. This opens the door once again to the young offender saying: "Look, I do not want to be helped". In many cases I do not know if they are equipped to make that decision.
I put it squarely to my colleague. I would very much like him to make not only a personal comment but one on behalf of the Liberal Party as he is our direct spokesperson in this debate. I would like his views on what I think is a necessity at this point, that is the obligatory counselling of young offenders after they have been accused, after they have been tried and after they have been sentenced for crimes which they have committed.


George Saunders Rideout: Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. It was one of the difficult issues that our committee faced when we looked at this particular legislation. What is suggested by compulsory training and rehabilitation is overshadowed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and whether those rights exist and how we could accomplish that.
Our view on the committee was that we probably could not make it compulsory, even though some of us thought that it was a good idea and would like to do it. The advice that we received was that it would be struck down as unconstitutional. We thought that if we put enough flexibility into the system we could probably achieve the goal by using the carrot and stick method. Youth who took the training, rehabilitation, counselling and all of those types of things would be eligible for consideration for being out sooner. More benefits would flow to that young person by embarking on a rehabilitation-type process through consultation and those types of measures.
The other answer that I would like to give to my colleague is that the problem we face in Canada is that we are told we do not have enough resources. That is the scary part of this legislation and the way the government is aiming it. Its solution is to bump them up into adult court, just get rid of them, and then we will not have to face that problem.
What we are saying on this side of the House is: put the money to the test and make a system that works. Let us have a youth system with all of the benefits that could flow from that. Let us keep our youth out of the adult system. Make all of the consultations, rehabilitation, education and training facilities available so we can salvage our youth.
In short, my answer is that I personally thought that compulsory treatment and counselling was a good idea, but I faced the legal argument of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I had to agree that probably would intrude on the situation and therefore we could not achieve what might be a good idea.


Mr. Russell MacLellan (Cape Breton-The Sydneys):: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his excellent speech.
I think it gave us a lot of information and certainly put in perspective, first of all, the problems that this bill creates and, second, the problems that are already there that it does not help.
The member has alluded to the fact that we will send these young people to incarceration and they will come out after having had a crash course in how to commit crime. They will also be sexually and physically abused so there will be a greater than average chance that they will
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have a terrible grudge against society. They will feel that now they have made this start in life they cannot possibly recoup, and they will just continue what they are doing and become more desperate and proficient at doing it.
I think we are not solving anything here with respect to rehabilitation and treatment of the young offender. I do not think we are doing anything to curb the increasing crime rate in this country that has alarmed a great many of our citizens.
I would just like to ask the hon. member who represents a community in Atlantic Canada and has been involved in municipal government about his concerns and the concerns of his citizens with respect to the rising crime rate. We have heard about the concern of citizens in large cities and I just want to ask him if that concern also applies to average or medium sized cities.


George Saunders Rideout: Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I do not think there is any question that all communities throughout Canada are concerned about the rising crime rate. That is what we have to be on our guard against, and because it is occurring we have a knee-jerk reaction.
I think we have to put in place a system that will work. I was just reading a comment in one of the recent media reports that violence by youth rose by 34 per cent over a four-year period and that violent crime was up dramatically in the year 1990-91.
There is no question that there is a problem and it is not only in the big cities. In my own community we have seen a number of violent crimes and an increase in the number of murders. That even excludes the high profile ones like Allen Legere and others that everybody has heard about.
In the youth area, as we talk to school teachers and parents, we recognize that there is an upswing in violence among youths. The children in our schools are living to a degree in fear and have now learned how to deal with the rules of the jungle.
My nephew Patrick told me last night that he would never wear any clothes that were in style because somebody would try to take them. This is a kid who is 11 or 12 years old. That is the reality that a kid here in
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Ottawa is dealing with, and my son tells me the same thing in Moncton, New Brunswick. It is a problem. There is violence and the children have learned how to deal with it. Patrick told me that he just wears regular stuff. He does not wear any of the popular things because that would be a problem.
There is violence. There are serious things happening. They are not just happening in the big cities; they are happening in the small cities too.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.


Some hon. members:: Yea.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: All those opposed will please say nay.


Some hon. members:: Nay.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: In my opinion the yeas have it.
And more than five members having risen:


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Call in the members.
And the division bells having rung:


Mr. Vien:: I rise on a point of order, Madam Speaker. Could we have unanimous consent of the House to defer the vote until Monday?


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member for Lau-rentides is the acting Whip for the government. I had been advised before that the government Whip would be asking for the vote to be deferred. This is totally according to our rules so the vote is being deferred until tomorrow and, Friday being a day on which we do not vote, the vote is automatically deferred until Monday.

November 21, 1991
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MEASURE TO AMEND
[Stage Direction]
The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-30, an act to amend the Criminal Code (mental disorder) and to amend the National Defence Act and the Young Offenders Act in consequence thereof, as reported (with amendments) from the Standing Committee on Justice and Solicitor General.
Hon. Shirley Martin (for the Minister of Justice) moved: that the bill, as amended, be concurred in.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
Madam Deputy Speaker:: When shall the bill be read the third time? By leave, now?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Shirley Martin: that the bill be read the third time and passed.


Mr. Rob Nicholson (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to rise and speak in favour of this bill at third reading stage. I believe this bill represents a major improvement in the law respecting the mentally disordered who have come into conflict with the criminal law.
In introducing this bill the Minister of Justice said it proposes "wide-ranging changes to modernize, streamline and clarify the provisions of the Criminal Code dealing with mentally disordered accused".
Today I would like to deal with the role of the review boards in assuring that mentally disordered persons who have been found to be either unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible are dealt with fairly and in a manner that takes into account public safety.
Under the provisions of the Criminal Code as they stand today, the lieutenant-governor of the province is the person responsible for making all decisions regarding the detention, care and conditions of release of those under the authority of a lieutenant-governor's warrant. While the code does provide for the establishment of boards to review the cases of persons held in custody under a lieutenant-governor's warrant, this provision is not mandatory. British Columbia and the two territories have yet to establish review boards under the authority of the code. The role of the board is merely advisory. Nor
does the code give much guidance as to how boards should conduct themselves.
It is therefore not surprising that the Law Reform Commission of Canada in its report entitled Mental Disorder in the Criminal Process, published in 1976, found that the make-up of the boards differ, the resources available to the boards differ, the criteria they apply, the procedures they use, the material they examine and the rights they accord the prisoner patients all differ from province to province. In some the differences far exceed the similarities.
While in recent years the review boards have taken pains to find out what their counterparts in other provinces are doing, the first annual report, Canadian Data Base: Patients Held On Lieutenant-Governors' Warrants, prepared by Doctors Hodgins and Webster for the federal Department of Justice in October 1989, continued to show very considerable discrepancies in procedures.
I do not by this intend any criticism of the review boards or their members who are performing a difficult task with great dedication. Nor am I suggesting that we should insist upon absolute uniformity of procedure as between the various review boards. However it behoves us to assure that there is equality of justice in the way in which we treat mentally disordered persons who come into conflict with the criminal law. This is particularly so in light of the comments made by the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Swain v. The Queen, which talks about the way in which mentally disordered individuals are dealt with presently under the Criminal Code.
In order to foster equality of treatment the bill requires that a review board be set up in each province and territory. This provision guarantees that no matter where one is in Canada cases of this type will be dealt with by a body that has the same structure, powers and obligations as elsewhere in the country. Moreover, henceforth the review board will be the decision-making body rather than merely an adviser to the lieutenant-governor as is the case today.
From both a legal and practical point of view this change makes sense. There is a principle of law that the person who decides the case must hear the evidence, but the lieutenant-governor presently hears neither the witnesses nor the arguments of counsel. It is the review board that sees the mentally disordered person, hears
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the evidence, examines the files and has the expertise to make a proper assessment of what needs to be done.
From a practical point of view in the larger provinces if the lieutenant-governor were to consider each individual's case with the same care that the review boards do, he or she would have to spend almost full time examining and deciding these cases. Of necessity therefore the lieutenant-governor must rely on the recommendations of the review board. The proposed modification puts the decision-making powers where they belong.
This bill also proposes changes in the structure of the review boards. Under the existing provisions of the Criminal Code, a review board shall consist of a minimum three and a maximum of five members, at least two of whom shall be duly qualified psychiatrists entitled to engage in the practice of medicine under the laws of the province for which the board is appointed, and one member shall be a member of the bar of that province.
The new provisions would set the size of the review board at a minimum of five but with no maximum. The larger minimum is to bring a greater range of expertise to the board, while the elimination of the maximum is to allow for different panels of the board to be created in large provinces so that service on the board does not become too onerous for its members who have to take time off from their regular positions.
The membership of the review boards will also be changed. With the elimination of the role of the lieutenant-governor from the process, it was thought important to have the board chaired by a federally appointed judge, a retired judge or a person eligible to be appointed as a judge. This would help to ensure that the public would have confidence in the board. Provision is made however to permit the incumbent chairperson to complete his or her term of office so as not to interfere with the operations of an existing board.
This bill also reduces the minimum number of psychiatrists on the review board from two to one. However, where only one psychiatrist is named at least one other person must have training and experience in relation to mental health and be qualified by the laws of a province to practise medicine or psychology.
The reason for this reduction in the required number of psychiatrists is that in the territories and in some of
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the smaller provinces it is often difficult to find two psychiatrists that have not been involved in the treatment of a mentally disordered person before the board.
For this same reason the bill only requires that the designated professional members of the review boards be qualified somewhere in Canada and not necessarily in the jurisdiction where the board is located.
Both the Law Reform Commission of Canada report which I have referred to earlier and the study done by Doctors Webster and Hodgins reveal that the review boards conduct their hearings in a fairly idiosyncratic manner. It is not essential that the procedure followed exactly the same procedure in every board. However there are some basic rules which must be adhered to if the procedure is to be "in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice", to use the words of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The following are some of the rights that should be respected in all cases: the right to receive a notice of hearing, the right to be represented by council, the right to be present during the whole hearing unless there is a good reason for being excluded, the right to give evidence, and the right to examine or cross-examine witnesses.
These are among the primary procedural rules set out in the bill. Other rules protect the privacy of the mentally disordered. They require the board to keep records of the proceedings and to give reasons for its decisions. There are miscellaneous rules dealing with specific problems that may arise. It should be made clear, however, that it is not intended by these amendments to convert the review boards into courts. The first in the list of procedural rules set out in the bill is that subject to those rules hearings may be conducted in as informal a manner as is appropriate under the circumstances.
The bill also provided that any procedural irregularity in relation to a hearing does not affect the validity of the proceedings unless the accused suffers substantive prejudice. While some boards may fear that the procedure spelled out in the bill will cause the proceedings for them to become longer and more complex, it is reassuring to learn from the Hon. Mr. Justice Thomas Callon, chairman of the Lieutenant-Governor's Board of Review,

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that his board has been following these rules without any difficulty for the last three years.
In addition to setting out a core of provisions relating to procedure before the review boards, the bill sets out the dispositions the boards may make and the powers they may exercise in carrying out their functions. These provisions are necessary because the boards will have in the future the decision-making power which to date has been exercised by the lieutenant-governor.
Among the remaining provisions regarding the review boards, there are two I would like to mention particularly, for each of them deals with a problem that exists in the present legislation. The first provision grants a right of appeal from a board's decision to the court of appeal of the province or territory in question. At present there is no right of appeal either from the recommendations of the review board or from the decision of the lieutenant-governor, although some relief may be obtained from a decision of the latter in certain cases by means of a prerogative writ. It is universally agreed that a right of appeal ought to exist in such cases and this bill therefore addressed a long-standing deficiency in the law.
The other provision addresses the issue of which review board will have jurisdiction to review the case of a person who has been transferred from one province to another. At present there does not appear to be agreement on the subject. The bill resolves the question by stating that the board of the receiving province will have jurisdiction over the person subject to any special agreements that may have been entered into by the attorneys-general of the respecting provinces.
In summary, the bill modernizes the present law and resolves a number of problems in relation to the care and administration of those who are either unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder. It does so in a manner that respects the rights of the mentally disordered while protecting the security interests of the public.
Finally, it appears to satisfy the concerns expressed by the Supreme Court in the case of Swain v. The Queen. There is an additional provision that was suggested by the hon. member for Moncton and agreed to during the
legislative committee process that the provisions of this bill should be reviewed within five years.
That is something I think all hon. members should welcome. This is a complicated provision we are dealing with and I think it is appropriate that Parliament should revisit the subject after five years.
I believe five years would be a long enough period to give reasonable time for this bill to be implemented and reasonable time for us to be able to assess either its positive aspects or its weaknesses, if any.
I am pleased that too is a part of the bill. As I say, I am pleased that this bill has received the co-operation of the House as a whole and that it received the co-operation of hon. members when it was referred to a legislative committee.
As a result of those deliberations and all the work that has gone into preparing this, I encourage every member of the House to support this legislation which I think is both progressive and humanitarian.


George Saunders Rideout: Madam Speaker, I want to give my colleague opposite our assurance that we will be supporting this legislation on this side.
While there are some hesitations and concerns which were brought forward during the committee study, we feel that given the present circumstances we will support the bill. I am sure some people are a little confused with the Swain decision and what it means. In effect, the Supreme Court of Canada did put us to a very strict timeframe and we have had to deal with that.
In fact, the government was forced to ask for an extension of time because our time ran out on November
2,1	believe the date was. It has now been extended into February. The legislation itself is probably okay. That is the best way to put it at this particular stage because nobody is really sure.
As we listened to the testimony, it became more and more confusing. What was interesting, I suppose, was tiying to balance the legal arguments over what constitutes mental disorder or insanity as we have always heard it talked about before and what were the medical definitions and trying to see whether we could deal with those two different issues.

Suffice it to say, sometimes during the committee hearings everyone was totally confused as to what it meant and how it would be administered.
I think in actuality the legislation is not bad. It does deal with the problems that were talked about in the Swain decision and deals with lieutenant-governor warrants and their unconstitutionality.
I was pleased to put forward the amendment that would see us come back and take another look precisely for what I have just said, the problems that the committee faced, trying to grapple with the different issues. This will at least allow us to go back and correct the deficiencies once they become apparent.
I am sure there will be some, but over all the bill seems to do what it is intended to do and that is a proper thing. Much of the bill, as well, is going to be implemented relatively slowly and the parliamentary secretary has referred to all the difficulties and all the things that the bill is going to do.
We are going to see what will happen over a period of time. Hospitals are going to start with pilot projects and some aspects of the legislation will not be in effect for two to three years. That was why the amendment was crafted, so that a five-year period would see the bill come up for review.
There is one problem. I consulted with most of the ministers of justice and ministers of health of the provinces to see what was going on from their vantage point. There are some concerns that the effect of this legislation will cause problems for the provinces. We should be mindful of that.
In essence what is being said-and that is the way our Constitution works-is that dealing with the criminal law we turn to the federal jurisdictions but when we are dealing with health and care of people through the health care system they become the responsibility of the provinces. We are going to see a burden placed on provinces. We were concerned that there might be some unevenness in the delivery of that health care. Those issues were also of concern to us.
I just want to quote from a couple of letters that I received because they contain this common theme of uncertainty as far as the provinces are concerned. From my own home province of New Brunswick, the minister
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of health, the hon. Russell King, wrote back to me and said: "With regard to the department of health and community services concerns, the service delivery system required to ensure the Supreme Court decision is upheld will need to be flexible in terms of providing services in both the community and in a hospital setting. The additional need for the province of New Brunswick to prove dangerousness will require mental health specialists familiar with the mental health and criminal justice system, a specialty not previously required in this province. The community component of this service will involve screening, assessment and treatment. Further, the hospital component of this service will need to be upgraded".
That gives a clear indication of some of the concerns that the minister of health for the province of New Brunswick has observed in reviewing the legislation. He does not say: do not do it. He just says recognize that this is going to create some problems for New Brunswick.
The same theme occurred in a letter that I received from the minister of justice and premier of the province of Prince Edward Island, Joseph Ghiz. He indicated to me that his province supports the changes but recognizes the shift to the provinces particularly in the area of treatment. He is concerned and says: "The amendments make no attempt to build in treatment as part of Parliament's response to the mentally disordered offender but leaves that issue entirely in provincial hands at a time when there is a great deal of controversy across Canada on the civil rights aspect of involuntary treatment. We would rather have seen specific treatment provisions in these amendments as they represent a very narrow and justifiable public safety infringement on civil rights in a manner ancillary to and flowing from the public interest in safety and prevention of crime".
From these quotes and from other letters which I have received from across the country, the provinces do have a concern. They realize that it is their obligation to provide for the mentally ill, but we are dealing with the criminal justice system as well as the mentally ill. That is going to create new responsibilities and new stresses and strains on the hospital situation, on community based services and all of those types of things that have an impact on provincial budgets.
While the federal government is a beneficiary in a way because it has now dealt with this relatively easily from its vantage point, there will be an onus and a responsibil-

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ity passed on to the provinces, and the provinces are concerned.
That points to the benefit of the amendment which we proposed on this side of the House because we will be able to look back after five years and determine whether the provinces have been successful in changing and adapting to the effects of this legislation.
In a general sense we are supportive of the legislation. It was absolutely necessary because the Supreme Court said we had to do it. We had to do something and this bill seems to do what we want. In that sense we will support the legislation and look forward to the review which will occur in five years because, if we are wrong, we will at least have an opportunity to remedy it and to remedy it very quickly.


Mr. Ian Waddell (Port Moody-Coquitlam):: Madam Speaker, I rise on behalf of the New Democratic Party as justice critic to speak on this bill. I just want to add a few remarks to some of the comments that have been made by my hon. friends who have already spoken, the parliamentary secretary and the member for Moncton.
To take up one of the member's themes and to re-emphasize it a bit more, the public policy process in this bill has not exactly been a rousing success. The government left it up to the Supreme Court of Canada to force a change in the present insanity provisions of the Criminal Code. That is what we are talking about in Bill C-30, the issue of criminal insanity.
The government has had the bill since 1986. It has had a Law Reform Commission report since 1976. That means it has been sitting on its hands and was forced by the Supreme Court of Canada finally to act. That is not a very good way of doing legislation. This minister has been very slow with her legislation. It is only in the past little while after a lot of public pressure and pressure from the opposition, I might add, that some action has finally been produced. We had all talk and no action. Now we have some action and we are pleased about it.
Some of the principles that have to be emphasized I noticed the parliamentary secretary opened his speech with and I basically agree with him. We have to take into account public safety, the safety of citizens from people who are insane versus human rights. These people do have human rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, rights as Canadian citizens and as individual human beings.
Part of the reason for the Swain case-and I believe that is the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada that brought on this amended bill if I recollect it right-was that someone was given a pretty well indeterminate sentence, locked up for a long time for an assault charge. That does not ring right with people. That seems wrong. I think that is why there was some basic feeling that this system really was wrong in terms of human rights.
We have to balance human rights with the public safety. I was able to see this concretely when I met a few months ago in British Columbia with some people from the human rights committee of the B.C. Mental Health Association, led by a woman called Judy Shipper who came to Ottawa to testify before our parliamentary committee. I am very grateful for the work those people in my home province of British Columbia have put in on this bill and for their comments. I met with them, with some patients and with some people who were the main forensic unit is in my riding in British Columbia. It was very interesting. I was sitting across the table from two people who had committed murder when they were insane. They appeared to me from what I could see that they had made substantial progress on the road back to sanity.
These are very difficult cases. What do we do with these people? We have the notion of retribution from the public, we have the public interest, and on the other hand we have the human rights of these people. They should not be sitting locked up when they are basically cured. It is a very difficult issue. The bill attempts to deal with this.
Let me deal with some of the provisions of the bill. As I said, the Criminal Code provisions for the mentally disordered offender contain a lot of inconsistencies and omissions and often lack clarity. Much of the law dates back to 1892 or earlier. The law of insanity in Canada is really a 19th century law. The language used to describe mental disorder is archaic and in some cases the authority given to the courts and to the lieutenant- governor is inappropriate.
On May 2, 1991 the Supreme Court of Canada in the Swain case decided that one of the key provisions of the Criminal Code was contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and therefore invalid. The court gave Parliament six months to clean up the law. This was extended and Parliament ultimately produced Bill C-30.
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November 21, 1991

Back in 1976 the Law Reform Commission of Canada in its fifth report called Mental Disorder and the Criminal Process stated that major changes were required in the way the criminal law dealt with persons suffering from mental disorder.
The Department of Justice carried out additional studies to gather data on exactly how the existing system was operating. It also conducted extensive consultations with the federal and provincial government and produced a draft bill in 1986. We are just getting to that bill now.
This is a big bill. The thrust of these amendments is to modernize and streamline the law in response to demands for change by legal and medical practitioners and interested organizations in accordance with the government's 1990 undertaking to review federal legislation affecting the handicapped.
Amendments are based on the recognition of the complementary roles of the federal and provincial governments. We have two governments involved here. We set the law but basically the provincial governments look after health and the institutions and make a lot of the decisions: a typical Canadian way of doing things. Therefore we have to deal with the provincial governments as well.
I might add that I believe my friend, the member for Moncton, has introduced an amendment that there be a review of this bill. I think that is a good idea. We have been busy with gun law, young offenders, extradition and you name it in the justice area. I have a feeling that we should have given this bill a little bit more scrutiny. I think we have protected ourselves by this review. Where there is good will to make this work it will work. I think we are going to have to come back to the bill.
Let me go into a few more details of the bill. As I understand it, one of the first provisions is the idea of remand for assessment. I might say that I started my working career as a Crown attorney in Vancouver and was defence counsel there. I dealt on a daily basis with some of these remand cases, as crown counsels do.
A court may order that a person be sent for an assessment of his or her mental state. This is when a person is picked up for a criminal offence and is referred to as a remand. A person can also be committed under
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the provincial Mental Health Act when a person is mentally ill. We are talking now about someone who is suspected of being mentally ill but is picked up in the system through a criminal offence. That criminal offence can range from shoplifting to assault to murder.
Currently the Criminal Code permits a remand only on the basis of medical evidence and only for the purpose of examination to determine fitness to stand trial. When the person is brought into court it has to be determined if he or she is fit to stand trial. The person is remanded, the case is adjourned, and the person is in custody.
The amendments will let the court decide the kind of evidence necessary to trigger a remand. The remand is expanded to include an assessment to determine the individual's mental status at the time of the offence, as well as to assist in making appropriate disposition or even a hospital order. This is good. This gives a lot more flexibility to the judge.
The traditional remand for fitness is maintained. Where appropriate, the court may order treatment with safeguards for the sole reason of making the accused fit to stand trial. It has to be determined right away if the accused person is fit to stand trail. This is to enable the person to have a trial as quickly as possible while witnesses are still available, before memories fade. We do not just want to lock the person away and not have the trial.
It is sort of like Alice in Wonderland. The queen said to Alice: "Off with her head and then we will have the trial". This time we are going to have a little fairer procedure. We will not take the head off before we have the trial and we will have a speedier trial.
There is provision for a five-day assessment. Normally when a a person came into court and we did not know whether the person was fit to stand trial, the person was remanded for 30 days automatically. That is a big deprivation of liberty. If it is a shoplifting offence the penalty would normally be maybe a suspended sentence or probation.
Under this bill, as I understand it, in order to save time and money and minimize interference with the liberty of the person, subject to the assessment the amendments stipulate that a remand for a fitness evaluation will be no

November 21, 1991
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more than five days, excluding any travel time, unless the accused and the prosecutor agree to a longer period. That is definitely an improvement in the law.
A new area of the law deals with protected disclosures as it relates to evidence of statements made by the accused. Once we remand the accused for psychiatric assessment, the assessment is done by a psychiatrist or a psychologist. During that court remand period when the assessment is being done, there is going to be protection in the law so that what the accused says to the psychiatrist and the psychologist cannot be used as evidence in court without the consent of the accused. There are some exemptions to this rule. I will not go through the exemptions, but that is putting it simply. And that makes sense, does it not? We want the person to be able to unburden himself to the psychologist or psychiatrist to see whether that person is really fit to stand trial. That is an improvement.
The other area that the bill deals with is the verdict of insanity. Section 16 of the Criminal Code sets out the defence of insanity, and that is amended to modernize its terminology. I said that this insanity notion in our law goes back to the 19th century, to the 1892 Criminal Code, as a matter of fact. Anyway, it is amended to modernize its terminology to make it more consistent with current medical use and to remove a subsection that was found by the court to be unnecessary. The amendments do not attempt to alter the judicial interpretation of the insanity test itself.
We have sort of moved to modernize it, if I can put it that way, but not completely. As I understand it, in the legislative committee that studied this bill members heard from psychiatrists and psychologists. They asked the committee to modernize the law, whereas criminal lawyers do not quite agree on the same terms as the psychologists and psychiatrists. I point out to this House that we still have to approach this. We may still have to come back after a few years and actually deal with modernizing the modern law of insanity. But that is a big project.
Consultation press reports over the past few years show that the general public finds it difficult to understand the present verdict of not guilty on account of insanity when it is known that the accused committed the act. They say that if he committed the act, how can he
not be guilty? In addition, a number of psychiatrists suggest that the verdict of not guilty permits the accused to continue deluding himself or herself that he or she has done nothing wrong. They say this may interfere with the possibility of treatment, if the person does not think he or she has actually done anything wrong.
That is what the psychiatrists say. I received a letter from one of Canada's foremost criminal lawyers, my friend Clayton Ruby from Toronto. He wrote to me about these proposed insanity amendments, and I will just quote one of the paragraphs from his letter. He says: "I do not understand why we fled from the idea that insanity does not produce a true acquittal. I like the idea that it does. This document"-that is the bill-"abandons that idea and creates some new form of non-criminal responsibility. Indeed I do not even like abandoning the verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. I think people understand it and I think it is a true acquittal". Well spoken, like a true defence lawyer.
We see the difference between the medical group and the defence lawyers. Parliament has to struggle to find an adequate definition. I am just telling the House that I do not think we have quite found it, but we are moving that way.
Some American states have moved to the verdict of guilty but insane. This runs counter to the basic principle of Canadian criminal law that to be convicted of a crime one has to do the act, which is called the actus reus in criminal law, and you have to have the mental state, which is called the mens rea in criminal law. You not only need the wrongful act; you need the guilty mind. If you are insane, how can you have a guilty mind? Therefore you are not guilty, if I can put it very simply. That is the Canadian law in two sentences with respect to insanity.
This bill therefore proposes a verdict here which declares that the accused committed the act or omission but is not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder. To me that sounds reasonable, but I do point out that criminal lawyers that know more about the law than I do, Clayton Ruby for example, say this is too much of a hybrid. We are going to need another look at this as we go on.
November 21, 1991

With respect to the disposition, once a finding of insanity or unfitness is made, the individual must be ordered by the court into strict custody until the pleasure of the lieutenant-governor is known. What a quaint phrase. The lieutenant-governor is the cabinet basically or the lieutenant-governor of the province acting on the provincial cabinet. You can be locked up and the key can be thrown away until the cabinet, politicians, let you out.
You may get someone who has killed a couple of people in his family because he is mentally insane or even someone who has done something not so serious. The lieutenant-governor is going to hesitate to sign that order and you are going to be locked up for a long time. Of course that is the problem.
Such persons are then held, as I said, in the psychiatric facility under the jurisdiction of the provincial lieutenant-governor. About 1,100 Canadians are now being held in custody in this fashion. It is important to recognize that none of them has been convicted of a crime. Indeed many of them have not even had the benefit of a trial to determine whether in fact they committed a crime. In many respects their situation is worse than if they had been convicted of the offence charged. Indeterminate custody under a warrant of the lieutenant-governor is at the lieutenant-governor's absolute discretion.
The Criminal Code provides for the creation of a board of review in each province but, as the parliamentary secretary said, for a while in the territories and British Columbia there was not even that board of review. The lieutenant-governor is not obliged to set up a board of this kind or to follow its advice. Board procedures are not set out and neither the decisions of the board nor those of the lieutenant-governor are subject to appeal.
We can see why the Supreme Court of Canada said that there were some very questionable procedures under this law from the point of view of the charter of rights.
Under this bill review boards become mandatory and will assume the decision-making role currently filled by the provincial lieutenant-governors with regard to persons found insane or unfit to stand trial. That is the most important part of the bill and the part I think all of us in this House support.
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To assure that persons who are found unfit to stand trial and not criminally responsible because of mental disorder are dealt with expeditiously, the bill provides that the court can make a disposition if it is satisfied that it can do so readily and that a disposition should be made without delay. If the court does not make a disposition, the review board shall make one within 45 days, within a maximum of 90 days, if the court is satisfied that exceptional circumstances exist. The review board must review a disposition made by the court within 90 days of it being made.
That is what the bill sets out. It is technical but that is what the bill as I understand it sets out. We are going to see how this works. I know we have the pledge of the government that it will watch to see how this is going and review the matter if it is not working.
A guiding principle with regard to all decisions and dispositions under the proposed legislation is that the court or review board shall use the least intrusive or restrictive option consistent with the protection of society. For example, the court or review board might allow someone who committed a theft who is not dangerous and willing to submit to psychiatric treatment on a voluntary basis as an out patient to stay at home rather than occupy a costly hospital bed. Such a condition would be subject to supervision and so on.
I just want to make this point. This tendency to treat people with mental illness outside institutions is basically I think a good idea.
We have to accompany that by resources. We can enact all the laws we want here but if we do not provide resources and the provinces do not provide resources and the government does not provide resources, we cannot rely on charity. We need real resources to deal with these people. I think that is the mistake that has been and is being made.
There have to be professionals who can come to visit these people. There have to be good facilities and treatment centres and so on, and I think that is where we keep falling down. If we fall down, we are going to have a major problem in Canada like in other countries where we have a lot of people basically on the streets, homeless, with mental illness problems. We just do not want to go that route. I warn the government about that because we are on our way down that road.

November 21, 1991
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I thank the House for its permission to conclude my remarks even though my time has expired. I just wanted to add that there is a provision for capping. There would be outer limits as to how long you can hold a mentally disordered accused. I think that is good. I think it is about time we had that, and I think that was what was said in the Swain decision.
As I understand it some provinces will have to amend their mental health legislation to bring it into line with the new Criminal Code provisions. I think my friend from Moncton did a good job in writing to the provincial people to get them to respond to this and to get them to know what is going on.
That means the capping provision of this bill will be delayed for some time. I know that is going to happen and I hope that will come in sooner rather than later.
When we review this again we should have a look at the protection of society with respect to dangerous offenders, which is covered by this matter. The dangerous offender provisions will be amended here in the bill consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There will also be provisions for hospital orders, dual offender status and amendments to the Young Offenders Act.
Let me conclude by summarizing my thoughts, and I will do it simply. We passed a very big and very complicated bill. It deals with a matter that is very complicated. I tried to make it fairly simple in the sense that we have new remand provisions, new capping provisions, provisions for a new board of review, and we brought it into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so that people have their rights. I hope we have the right balance between the protection of society and the rights of the individual. That is the key to good criminal law and good procedure.
We have to work with the provinces and we need to have some resources to deal with the people. We have to continue to consult people in the field.
Having said all that, and I thank the House for giving me a little extra time, on behalf of my party we would agree to this bill going through today. I know when it passes here it will go to the Senate and I expect it will be the law of Canada very shortly.
Again I would like to express the view that we will have a review of this bill in a few years and the provinces will act quickly and efficiently in getting their boards and facilities in order.


Jacques Vien: Madam Speaker, on a point of order. I believe both sides of the House would be agreeable to calling it one o'clock.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: If the hon. member does not mind, perhaps we should first put the question, vote and then decide what time it is.

Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed.
[Translation\
Madam Deputy Speaker:: It seems there is unanimous consent for calling it one o'clock.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Madam Speaker, it is only 12.30, but if hon. members say it is one o'clock that is quite possible because this Parliament has extraordinary powers.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The Chair is the servant of the House.
It being one o'oclock, I do now leave the chair until two o'clock this afternoon.
The House took recess at 12.31 p.m.


[Stage Direction]
AFTER RECESS

The House resumed at 2 p.m.
November 21, 1991

Russell Gregoire MacLellan: Mr. Speaker, we are losing the battle to the ugly multi-million dollar pornography empires. The government must address the increasing presence of pornography in our society. It is time for legislative action.
Pornography promotes the degradation and sexual subordination of women and children. It desensitizes its users to the pain of the women and children who are used to produce the pornography or who have to deal with the men who use it.
Pornography injures women and children. It injures them by its existence, its production and its use. Canadian women will not achieve equality until violent and degrading pornography no longer exists.
Appearing before the committee last year, the Minister of Justice said she was examining the pornography issue. I urge the government, in its fight to stop the violence and inequality with which women live, to introduce tough anti-pornography legislation now.


AGRICULTURE
Mrs. Louise Feltham (Wild Rose):: Mr. Speaker, recently Preston Manning stated: "Farmers must become accustomed to living with less and farmers must reduce their dependency on government subsidies".
This irresponsible statement shows that Preston Manning evidently lacks knowledge and understanding of the farming community. Does he know how much it costs to produce a bushel of wheat and what it sells for on the world market? Does he know that 80 per cent of what we produce we must sell on the world market?
Since 1985 our government has assisted the agricultural industry by providing $12.5 billion. We have brought in the GRIP and NISA programs. We continue to strive for the clarification and strengthening of article XI of the
GATT negotiations. We have always and will always continue to support our farmers.
To reduce the national debt is a laudable goal, one to which this government is committed. But we will not do it to the detriment of Canadian farmers.


CANADA MORTGAGE AND HOUSING CORPORATION
Mr. Brian L. Gardiner (Prince George-Bulkley Valley):: Mr. Speaker, the troubled British Columbia northeast coal project is in the news again with reports that the federal government, through CMHC, has ordered mortgage companies to vote against a restructuring of Quintette Coal.
CMHC has insured over 700 Quintette houses worth about $50 million in the community of Tumbler Ridge in northeastern British Columbia.
Millions of tax dollars have been invested in this project and it is important that the federal government state clearly its purpose in ordering this vote.
I am encouraged by the government's decision to set up an interdepartmental committee to monitor events related to the project where federal departments are involved.
It is my hope that with the commitment by the Minister of Transport and the minister of energy the government is working to improve the lines of communication with the B.C. government and that this will help the new government in British Columbia to work to see that public investment is protected and that workers in Tumbler Ridge are considered in any decision about the future of the mine.


EXPORTATION OF GOODS AND SERVICES
Mr. David Berger (Saint-Henri-Westmount):: Mr. Speaker, the government keeps saying how important it is for Canadians to export our goods and services. However, it has cut funding that was supposed to help Canadian companies export their products.
Last week in Montreal I met the president of an international marketing firm. She had urged other firms to take part in a trade fair in Dubai next January. Ten companies had accepted the invitation, and the govern-

November 21, 1991
ment was to pay part of their expenses. Today there is no more funding, and the companies will probably be unable to go. She asked me to draw the attention of hon. members to this discrepancy between what the government says and what it does. The government insists we should trade internationally, but at the same it cuts export development funding. Last month Canada registered its first negative trade balance in 15 years, and the policies of this government will certainly do nothing to turn the situation around.

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SUPPLY MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS
Mr. Willie Littlechild (Wetaskiwin):: Mr. Speaker, the outcome of the current Uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations is of critical importance to Canada's egg, dairy and poultry producers.
Among agricultural producers in my riding and throughout Alberta there is widespread and strong support for the strengthening and clarification of article XI.
This section of GATT, as you know, allows for the establishment of import quotas to support supply management programs which have ensured fair prices to producers based on their cost of production. It has done so without subsidies and without dumping on international markets.
There is significant concern that despite our official commitment to article XI, Canadian negotiators will be pressured into accepting tariffication. This would result in insufficient protection.
To quote one of my constituents: "Tariffication is in direct contradiction to the use of supply management as a permanent means of ensuring that producers achieve adequate domestic prices based on their cost of production".
I ask members of the House to encourage Canadian negotiators at GATT to continue to stand firm in their commitment to article XI and to ensure my concerned constituents that they will not become sacrificial lambs in the process.


WORLD COMMUNICATION NETWORK
[Stage Direction]
Mr. David Ding^vall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):
Mr. Speaker, the case of World Communication Network is an embarrassment for Enterprise Cape Breton and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.
The federal government has invested over $4.2 million into a company with questionable business practices. The government will not recover the $342,000 it gave WCN Investments, the parent company, to do a feasibility study.
However, Canadian taxpayers are hoping that the government is doing something to get back the $4.2 million in interest-free loans it granted this company.
More than anyone else, I want to see economic development in the region of Cape Breton. However, one must question the government's intentions when it backs a speculative technologies company with shares that soared from 35 cents to $57 and then bails out of its own commitments.
Someone made a lot of money. Too bad it was not the Canadian taxpayer or the few innocent Cape Breton residents who had a short career with World Communication Network Investments in Cape Breton.

Mr. Geoff Wilson (Swift Current-Maple Creek-As-siniboia):: Mr. Speaker, this morning the Minister of Agriculture released details of the distribution of the additional $800 million in farm support and adjustment measures known as FSAM II.
Grain and oilseed producers will receive some $700 million of this in income assistance. On the prairies there will be recognition of eligible forage and summerfallow at a rate of 25 per cent of the payment on seeded acres.
I want to congratulate the minister for his understanding of the special conditions which prevail across the southern prairies, conditions which require summerfallow and which should encourage the seeding down to grass of marginal and erodible lands.
November 21, 1991

This assistance, combined with other payments and programs such as GRIP, NISA and FSAM-I, will put approximately $3.4 billion into the hands of grain and oilseed producers between now and June.
The average producer will receive total payments equivalent to about $40 per acre over and above his return from the marketplace in the next 12 months.


SIKH RELIGION
Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre):: Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of my colleagues and particularly my colleague from York West.
As you know, across the country today tens of thousands of Canadians will be celebrating the 522nd anniversary of the birth of Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh religion.
As Canadians are aware, the Sikh community within Canada has been a proud and vibrant one during the past 100 years, contributing to our nation's growth and strength.
In many temples today, Canadian Sikhs will be marking this day with special reverence. Canadians should be aware that Sikhism teaches compassion, tolerance and understanding of one another and, more important, that the human race is one as no distinction is made between colour, race, class or sex.
I am confident that all Canadians will want to join me on this day of recognition of the principle of respect for one another which was thought by Guru Nanak and which guides the lives of millions of individuals worldwide. The community's continued contribution to our nation's development is one which they may be proud of.


MINING INDUSTRY
Mr. Guy Saint-Julien (Abitibi):: Mr. Speaker, the Quebec mining industry is looking forward to the signing of a new Canada-Quebec subsidiary agreement.
A new agreement is essential to help the mining industry carry out research on ore bearing deposits, mine wastes and exploration in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue and Chapais-Chibougamau areas.


THE MEDIA
Mr. Howard McCurdy (Windsor-St. Clair):: Mr. Speaker, David Duke lost and lost badly to a discredited former governor who, except in Louisiana in 1991, would be without merit.
Edwards, the victor, sank into oblivion but David Duke is everywhere for he is now a presidential candidate. For whom? The media. Why? Precisely because David Duke, however marginal, is a racist and a Nazi and that, for the media, will sell newspapers, whatever the cost.
Enter the deputy Liberal leader. She knows the media. They will gather like flies around her if she can give them a Canadian Duke. Even if not quite, even though it may offend-


Mr. Speaker:: I know the hon. member feels very strongly about this matter, but I think that is getting very close to a personal attack. I know the hon. member would not want to do that. I would ask him to complete his statement.


Howard Douglas McCurdy: Meanwhile, except for The Montreal Gazette, racism in the Public Service, a real Canadian issue, is absolutely ignored though raised in this place.
Do you want to know what is wrong with politics? Ask the media. They can be found in a herd.


VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Mrs. Beryl Gaffney (Nepean):: Mr. Speaker, yesterday in Ottawa over 300 people gathered to remember a woman who was brutally murdered last week by a crossbow.
Patricia Allen's estranged husband has been charged with first degree murder in her death. Violence is inflicted against women most often by men they know. In 1989, 119 women were murdered by their spouses and that is 62 per cent.
As one woman commented yesterday: "We are safer on a dark street alone at night than we are in our homes".
Patricia's murder also shows us that violence against women cuts across the socio-economic spectrum. Violence touches or can touch every woman.

November 21, 1991
I am pleased to see recent initiatives by the justice minister which includes a commitment to incorporate a clear definition of consent in new sexual assault legislation, as well as her positive reaction to suggestions by my colleagues in this House that access to crossbows be restricted in law.
So far the government has taken small steps. I suggest now is the time to break into a dead run in the race to end violence against women.


CONSUMER LOANS
Mr. Garth limner (Halton-Peel):: Mr. Speaker, there is a growing personal financial emergency for many Canadian consumers.
There is now indication that many bankers are unwilling to extend credit so these consumers can consolidate their debts at lower rates. They are being forced to carry their debts on credit cards at rates of close to 20 per cent.
Others have been forced into the arms of a new breed of loan sharks, people who are demanding up-front fees for the service of making an application to a lender. Consumers are being ripped off by these sharks and there is apparently no legislation in place, federally or provincially, to stop the practice.
I am urging the government to consider forcing an end to this repugnant practice. I am equally urging that Canadian banks get off their assets and start working with consumers, providing them with the living capital they need.


AIRCRAFT INDUSTRY
Albert Glen Cooper: Mr. Speaker, punitive lawsuits in the United States against airplane manufacturers have effectively shut down small plane manufacturing in that country.
This has resulted in a tremendous shortage of small planes world-wide. Canada is uniquely positioned to become the world manufacturing centre for small aircraft.
The Eaton group's interest in bringing Piper to Canada is an indication of this.
I urge this government to seize the opportunity to create thousands of new jobs by immediately making the development of a small plane manufacturing industry in Canada a priority by eliminating regulatory and legal impediments as soon as possible.


ABORIGINAL HOUSING
Leonard William (Len) Taylor: Mr. Speaker, for years aboriginal people in Canada have expressed concern about overcrowded living conditions and inadequate housing funding. On November 19, my colleague, the member for Prince Albert-Churchill River, asked the minister of Indian affairs to alleviate this overcrowding because without correction children in Indian communities will continue to fall ill.
The minister's response that existing housing programs were adequate ignores the many examples to the contrary. In my own constituency this week, a father at Canoe Lake, Saskatchewan has pulled his children out of school to protest overcrowding in his own home where his family of eight has been trying for five years to upgrade their living conditions. The Chief of the Canoe Lake Band says they have as many as 50 people on the waiting list for new housing.
Obviously, there are inadequacies in the aboriginal housing program that must be improved. I say to the minister today: look at the realities of reserve housing and increase the funds available to the bands to ensure that they have adequate resources to meet the housing needs of their members.


YUGOSLAVIA
Mr. Bill Attewell (Markham-Whitchurch-Stouff-ville):: Mr. Speaker, the war in Croatia goes beyond the conceivable in this day and age. Croatians have been left alone to defend themselves against a Serbian dominated communist government and the fourth largest European army.
The Yugoslavian presidency has no control; the army is out of control.
In failing to recognize Croatia and Slovenia, the Canadian government is sending a clear message to Serbia and the Serb dominated Yugoslavian army that they may proceed with their slaughter without retaliation.
November 21, 1991

I call on the Secretary of State for External Affairs to recognize the legitimacy of the democratically elected countries of Croatia and Slovenia. Such a step would improve the desperate situation in these countries and help put an end to the brutal abuse of human rights.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Ms. Sheila Copps (Hamilton East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Yesterday the government claimed that the Chamber of Commerce was a supporter of its economic policies. Today that same Chamber of Commerce rejected outright the government's economic direction.
This morning the Minister of Finance said: "Everything is going along tickety-boo except for two things. First, employment is going to go higher and second, no one has any confidence in the economy".
Has it occurred to the minister that if unemployment is up and no one has confidence in the economy that his policies could be wrong? How can he justify higher unemployment when 1.5 million Canadians are already out of work?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, we are encouraged today by the September retail figures, which have risen by .8 of 1 per cent, which is a step and going in the right direction. Housing starts for the month of October were 202,000. There were 108,000 full-time jobs created in September and October. Interest rates are continuing to come down. They have come down by a further nine basis points. The bank rate today is 7.69 per cent. Those are all positive indicators.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce said today that the country is facing a national economic crisis, and it blames this government's monetary policies. Why does the
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minister refuse to change his policies, after predicting this morning, that unemployment, which already affects
1.5	million Canadians, will reach even higher levels? Why does he support a policy that maintains such high levels of unemployment and is breaking up Canadian families?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: I do not know, Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member in her busy schedule had a chance to read the letter that was sent to me by the Chamber of Commerce. As I interpret the letter, the issue that it is raising is the burden of debt both at the federal and the provincial level, the external debt level, and high interest rates. What it is really saying is that the government has to curtail spending.
I appeared before the finance committee this morning. I had recommendations from the New Democratic Party for further expenditures of $3 billion to $4 billion to kick start the economy. That would certainly run contrary to this.
As well, I think it should be pointed out that the debt to GDP ratio is going to stabilize in Canada in 1991-92 and then start coming down. The deficit to GDP ratio has come down by 50 per cent from 8.7 per cent to 4.6 per cent. That is by far a better record than that which has occurred in the United States. We are using its figures. It has reduced its deficit to GDP from 6.2 per cent to 5 per cent; we have reduced ours from 6.7 per cent to 3.7 per cent. I think that is a good record.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance himself this morning predicted an even higher unemployment rate. Has he been to the food banks? Has he listened to the unemployed who are losing hope across this country? Can he at least listen to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce which has today issued a massive condemnation of his monetary policies? Will he please permit the Canadian dollar to come down to give hope to some Canadian families?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: I would be interested in knowing the hon. member's policy on the dollar. Does she want a fixed exchange rate? If she wants a fixed exchange rate, why does she not enunciate it in clear-cut terms?

November 21, 1991
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Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, my question is also for the Minister of Finance. Earlier today the minister confessed, and I quote: "The unemployment rate in late 1991 and into 1992 will be somewhat higher than we anticipated". Somewhat higher than we anticipated? Mr. Speaker, he is talking about unemployment rates above 10 per cent. That means that tens of thousands more people will lose their jobs due to the economic nightmare created by this government's policies, that goes on and on and on. I ask the minister: Why will he not recognize that his policies are a failure and announce new programs to create more jobs right now?


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: I do not know what is bothering the hon. member. A frank exchange-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I am being criticized for a frank exchange, laying down the facts as we see them. The fact of the matter is that unemployment will be higher than we had originally expected because of a number of factors. I outlined them this morning: the overhang of consumer debt, the poor position of the corporate balance sheets. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. recovery is not as robust as was originally expected. I repeat, the Chamber of Commerce can have its assessment of the economy. The Conference Board of Canada just this week predicted growth in 1992 of 4.3 per cent. The IMF, a respected international organization, expects that Canadian growth in 1992 will be 3.8 per cent. The OECD, another respected international organization, expects that growth in Canada will be 3.5 per cent. This represents the best growth rate of any industrialized country in the world.
If that is what is going to occur, and I have every confidence it will, there will be jobs created, there will be economic recovery, and there will be price stability. That is our goal.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance says I am bothered. He should be bothered too about the tens of thousands of people in addition to the 1.5 million already out of work who are losing their jobs due to this government's policies. I am bothered and he should be bothered too about the 6,500 people in Windsor and the 250,000 people in Toronto whose unemployment insurance benefits are running out
this month and next month. They are being forced on to the welfare lines by this minister.
The minister announced today that he has found money to help our farmers, and we are glad to see this. I ask the minister: Why will he not also announce today that he has found the money for new programs to create more jobs for those people who are now out of work, rather than put more people on to the welfare lines? Why can he not do that?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, of course I am concerned and bothered by the unemployed. But I am also concerned and bothered by the massive burden of debt that we inherited from the mismanagement of his government that is putting a very severe restraint upon us.


Mr. Nault:: That spin doesn't work any more. We're not buying it.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: They say they don't buy it. I want to tell my hon. friend across the way this government has not added one red cent to the burden of Canada's national debt. Two hundred and six billion dollars was inherited, $197 billion worth of compound interest. That is what has driven up the debt. That is what is making it so difficult for us to extricate ourselves from the difficult economic situation that we face.


CORPORATE TAXATION
Hon. Audrey McLaughlin (Yukon):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance. Today the Minister of Finance told the Standing Committee on Finance that he will finally be taking some action on assistance to farmers, and we are pleased to see that.
What was quite interesting was that the minister said that some of the revenues from this would come from unpaid taxes by corporations, $2.6 billion in unpaid taxes by corporations. Week after week in this House my colleague from Nickel Belt has been pointing out to this government the number of corporations that pay no tax. Week after week I and my party have been pointing out the number of corporations that pay no tax. The response has always been from the former Minister of Finance that they have closed the loopholes; from the Minister of State for Finance that the corporate tax system is fair and simpler. But the minister today says that there is $2.6 billion in tax uncollected.
November 21, 1991

I ask the Minister of Finance: How can this system be so inefficient? How has he closed his eyes for so long to this unfair tax system and what is he going to do about it?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that the hon. Leader of the New Democratic Party approves of and concurs with what we are doing.


Audrey Marlene McLaughlin: We would like to see, Mr. Speaker, the government do much more. The Minister of Finance and his government could have done well to listen to the Auditor General in 1990 who warned this government that by reducing the ability to collect taxes and enforcement it was in fact reducing revenues, and today we see that is what has happened. This government better gets its act in order.

Medicare has been cut, health care has been cut, education has been cut, and many social programs have been cut by this government. After all these cuts and after this deplorable waste, the government has discovered that corporations are not doing their share and that there is money out there that could be recovered.
Will the minister recover all the money our corporations owe Canadians and reinstate programs for the people of Canada?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of National Revenue will be outlining in some detail the initiatives that will be taken in this regard. I am pleased that I have the support of the hon. member in stepping up the collection procedure. We hope we will continue to have her support in that regard.


Audrey Marlene McLaughlin: Mr. Speaker, I must say to the Minister of Finance that it is not a question of having our support. It is a question of this government not listening. Now it is out consulting Canadians. Canadians want a say and we say what the minister has finally admitted today, that we have not had
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a fair tax system and it is about time this government recognized that.
The minister is very good at projecting what will happen. He is the future tense minister: what will happen? He admitted today that unemployment this winter will be higher than he said it would be, that the deficit will be higher than he said it would be, and that the minister who predicted an early recovery was wrong when he said that we have declining unemployment.
I want to ask the minister how Canadians can have faith in this minister's projections about the future when he will not recognize the problems of today and when all his projections have been wrong.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member does not have to take my word for it. She can phone up the International Monetary Fund, phone up the OECD, phone up the Conference Board of Canada, phone up other organizations that do objective analyses and objective assessments of this country.
It is all well and good for the hon. member to preach gloom and doom, but some positive signals did emerge today. Retail sales are up, not down. Since September and October, 108,000 full-time jobs have been created so that is a good signal. Interest rates are continuing to decline. Housing starts are up. It is not all positive but, comparing the extrication of this particular recovery as compared to 1981-82, we are doing fine.
There was a lot of conflicting data in the 1981-82 period. As a matter of fact, within a year there were two months of negative growth. So as you come out of a recession you will get this sort of volatility, Mr. Speaker.


EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
Hon. Lloyd Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Deputy Prime Minister. Today, 19 Haitians are occupying by force part of the embassy in Port-au-Prince. Could the Deputy Prime Minister report to the House on developments in Haiti and indicate what steps have been taken to regain

November 21, 1991
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control of the situation and guarantee the safety of Canadian personnel?


Hon. Mary Collins (Associate Minister of National Defence and Minister responsible for Status of Women):: Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the Secretary of State for External Affairs, I would respond to that question.
As the hon. member is aware, the Prime Minister while in Paris recently invited President Aristide to come to Canada for further discussions on this issue. We want to ensure there is democratic government returned to Haiti.
With respect to the current situation of the 19 Haitians who are occupying the Canadian embassy, the latest information I have received is that they are in fact still there. Threats have been made to our Canadian personnel and obviously on that basis they will not be appropriate, persons to be considered for refugee status. Therefore we are encouraging them to leave the embassy. I can assure the hon. member that all our Canadian personnel are safe.


Lloyd Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for the information. I hope she will clarify what appear to be quite confusing statements.
The Prime Minister, in Paris, said that these people occupying the embassy are not asking for political asylum. On the other hand, external affairs spokesmen here in Ottawa say they are in fact asking to become political refugees.
The Canadian people would like to know exactly what is taking place, what are the demands and how are we coping with them. Can the minister indicate the Canadian government's position with respect to accepting refugee demands from Haitians, or are we rejecting them outright as the American government now appears to be doing.


Mary Collins: Mr. Speaker, I want to advise the member that in the particular situation of the 19 who are occupying the Canadian embassy, based on the information we have at this point and the behaviour, the threats that were made
at the Canadian embassy, they would not be considered for refugee status.
We of course are continuing generally in terms of accepting people who meet our criteria for refugee status, whether they are from Haiti or from other countries.


AEROSPACE INDUSTRY
Mr. Jim Peterson (Willowdale):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance. The government has known for some time about a proposed joint venture between McDonnell Douglas and the Government of Taiwan, a deal that would transfer 3,500 jobs from Canada to Taiwan.
What specific measures will the government announce today to keep these jobs in Canada?


Hon. William C. Winegard (Minister for Science):: Mr. Speaker, there is no agreement between McDonnell Douglas and the Government of Taiwan in terms of exactly what would happen if they joined forces. I think it is a bit premature to try to answer this hypothetical question.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: It is not hypothetical when 3,500 more jobs in the aerospace industry are on the line, Mr. Speaker.
Again my question is for the Minister of Finance. Governments around the world, and now Taiwan, have recognized the importance of government investment in aerospace, yet our minister for industry and our Prime Minister recently went begging to the European community to get its permission so that Canada could give away de Havilland to the French and Italian governments.
Is this piecemeal, systematic dismantling of Canada's aerospace industry just one more plank in this government's so-called prosperity agenda?


William C. Winegard: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows we have been involved in the discussions with respect to de Havilland right from the beginning. He also knows that the memorandum has just been signed between McDonnell Canada and the Government of Taiwan. He is speculating on an agreement that he knows nothing about. Neither do we.


AGRICULTURE
Mr. Vic Althouse (Mackenzie):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance who announced today that $400 million of the farm aid package will come from unspent gulf war funds, and the other $400 million will come from next year's budget by way of requiring corporations to remit half of any income taxes that were in dispute.
Why did he not require those same large corporations to remit all of the $2.6 billion of disputed funds instead? This would have raised enough funds to more than meet the required farm aid package of $1.3 billion instead of simply cutting it back to $800 million?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, very simply because some of these accounts are in dispute and it will require legislation.


Victor Fredrich (Vic) Althouse: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Agriculture. The government decided to penalize farmers who have seeded forage crops on good class 1 to 4 farmland by paying those acres one-quarter of what was paid to those same lands seeded to grains and oilseeds.
Has the government already abandoned its brief policy of diversification, sustainability and market responsiveness? What is the reason for signalling farmers to plant grains and oilseeds instead of forage crops?


Hon. Bill McKnight (Minister of Agriculture):: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member obviously did not understand what the announcement today involved. The announcement today involved the culmination of discussions with the third line of defence committee made up of industry, farmers and provincial representatives. They recommended that we pay on seeded acreage and pay 25 per cent on summerfallow and 25 per cent on forage.
The hon. member also forgets that one of the reasons I did not choose the option to just pay on seeded acres- that was another option I had from the third line of defence-was because this government in FSAM-1 put forward $50 million in the prairie region to promote forage production and $22 million in the rest of Canada to promote forage production, making a total of over $72 million in forage production.
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Is the hon. member saying that those who summerfallow and those who seed are not eligible but only those who are in a soil zone or in an area where forage production can take place should receive assistance from this government?


UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
Ms. Albina Guarnieri (Mississauga East):: Mr. Speaker, on Monday this government announced that it would raise the employment tax collected through UI premiums to 7.2 per cent, a higher rate than even the GST. This tax hike will mean fewer new jobs and smaller pay cheques for the Canadian worker.
I would ask the Minister of Finance to admit that by taxing jobs his government will put even more Canadians out of work.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, that question has been asked in the House before and it has been responded to by myself and by the Minister of Employment and Immigration.
There are three criteria that have to be followed: first, the financial integrity of the UI account; second, the impact that it will have upon the employees and the employers; and, third, the over-all impact it will have on the fiscal accounts of Canada. All of these things had to be taken into consideration.
There was a range between holding the premium at $2.80 which would have generated deficits of $4.6, $6.2 and $7.3 billion in later years or a modest increase to $3 or an increase to $3.20 which would have balanced the account much quicker.
We chose the tradeoff, recognizing that it was going to have an impact and recognizing that we needed to put the UI account on a sound financial footing.


Albina Guarnieri: Mr. Speaker, the minister is always asking where he can raise funds. Perhaps he should have charged a commission on the jobs his government shipped to the United States.

November 21, 1991
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What this government must find particularly attractive about raising its employment tax, for that is what it is, is the fact that it makes moderate wage earners pay more of the cost of the high unemployment caused by this minister and his colleagues.
I ask the minister if he finds it just to make ordinary wage earners pay so much of the social cost of the Tory economic decay.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, this is a difficult issue. I wish the hon. member would understand that it is not a matter of just simply postponing the burdens of today on to future generations.
There is a time when we have to start paying our way. We cannot postpone it. We believe it is time to bite the bullet and to make sure that we can preserve the financial integrity of this account. To fail to do that would increase the burden of servicing the UI account with a decreasing amount of benefit occurring to the unemployed. Surely the hon. member would not want that to happen.


INTEREST RATES
Mr. Ron MacDonald (Dartmouth):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
The demand for the government to take action on credit card interest rates continues to grow. Just yesterday the Consumers Association of Canada said that if credit card interest rates did not drop substantially within the next 30 days it would support a legislative cap on interest rates.
My question to the minister is this: How many days have to pass, how many calls for action will it take and how many millions of dollars in excess interest charges will be sucked from consumers' wallets before he and his government do something about this very real problem?
The better answer, as the minister has said from time to time in this House, is for individuals to endeavour to pay their credit card bills on the due date.


Ronald MacDonald: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Minister of Finance.
Last evening the Consumers Association also said that it believes that there is sufficient evidence of gouging and rate fixing on credit cards to warrant an investigation by the Competitions Bureau. This is a very, very serious allegation.
My question is this: Is the minister prepared to order a fast track investigation by the Competitions Bureau to ascertain whether or not the big banks have, indeed, been taking obscene windfall profits from the pockets of Canadian consumers? Yes or no, or are you just going to continue to allow it to go the way it has been?


Mr. Jim Edwards (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs and Minister of State (Agriculture):: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows because he is a student of these matters, the Competitions Bureau is an arm's length organization. It is an organization which I am sure he would want to operate without interference or direction from the Government of Canada. It has its duty imposed upon it by statutes. It knows its duty and I am sure it will carry out its duty.


HIBERNIA
Mr. Steve Rutland (Sault Ste. Marie):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister and it concerns the 55 per cent to 60 per cent Canadian content target for the Hibernia project.
Canadian manufacturers are concerned that no Canadian preference will be given or can be given under the Hibernia guidelines.


James (Jim) Stewart Edwards: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows, the question of putting a cap on interest rates does not really solve the problem.
The difficulty this presents is that the tendency would be then for interest rates to cluster around the cap mark.
I ask the minister if he will guarantee Canadian manufacturers that indeed the 55 per cent to 60 per cent Canadian content goal will be attained.


Mr. John A. MacDougall (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources):: Mr. Speaker, officials from both the Canada and Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board believe that these figures cer-

November 21, 1991

tainly can be met and will be doing everything possible in the future to make certain that it will be fulfilled.


Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, from all reports from Canadian manufacturers that is not true.
The Canadian steel industry, taking a specific, is in a crisis and in need of profitable domestic orders. It was anticipated that these orders would come from Hibernia. The member would know that last week Algoma lost a critical steel plate order to a Belgium supplier.
We know we can be competitive in this product. It has been suggested that Europeans are dumping plate into Canada.
Will the minister ensure that Canadian steel interests are safeguarded so that Canadian producers get their fair share of any further steel contracts for Hibernia?


John Alexander Frances MacDougall: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows, Algoma can certainly lay the dumping charge if it believes it is in place.
The information that I have been given is that we will be doing everything in our power to ensure that 55 per cent to 60 per cent Canadian content will be there.


CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
Hon. Jean Lapierre (Shefford):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs. After the Wells-Chretien show of mutual admiration in 1990, which disgusted all Quebecers, we were recently treated to a Chretien-Clark meeting of minds on the subject of the federal referendum. What excuse does the minister have for being in league with the Leader of the Opposition in another attempt to put Quebec in its place and sabotage the implementation of Bill 150?


Right Hon. Joe Clark (President of the Privy Council and Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs):: Mr. Speaker, I will not discuss with my hon. friend the
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so-called complicity of a member of this House with Mr. Chretien, in view of his own considerable experience in this area.
The proposal is one we made in the throne speech: to table in Parliament a bill that would allow the government, if necessary, to hold a national referendum. This is about our commitment to table referendum legislation.


Jean-C. Lapierre: Mr. Speaker, the Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs knows perfectly well that yesterday in the National Assembly, the Quebec minister of justice, in fact the National Assembly, was unanimous in stating that the federal government had no business trying to hold a referendum or preventing Quebecers from choosing their own destiny.
1 have this question for the Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs: How can he justify this attempt to pass legislation that would steamroll Quebec's plans, especially Bill 150?


Charles Joseph Clark: Mr. Speaker, I welcome this question, because I think it is very important for Quebecers to know all the facts so they will have a good understanding of the federal government's position. Our position is that we are going to table a bill that will allow us to hold a referendum. I have said many times that it was not our intention to table a bill or hold a referendum that would allow one part of Canada to force the other part to act in a certain way. That is quite clear.


CANADA LABOUR CODE
Guy St-Julien: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Labour. For many months large numbers of Canadian women have been waiting for the federal government's decision to include preventive withdrawal of pregnant workers in the Canada Labour Code. Could the minister report on the latest developments at the federal level regarding preventive withdrawal of pregnant women?

November 21, 1991
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Hon. Marcel Danis (Minister of Labour):: Mr. Speaker, as the member is aware, I had started consultations on enhancing the kind of protection available to nursing and pregnant women. The consultation process is now complete, and I am ready to submit a recommendation to my cabinet colleagues.


THE ENVIRONMENT
Mr. Paul Martin (LaSalle-Emard):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of the Environment.
Last night's fire at a provincial chemical storage site in Grand Coulee, Saskatchewan once again demonstrated the vulnerability of Canadian communities to the hidden threat of environmental accidents.
Under the Environmental Protection Act, the minister has the authority to establish a national code of practice that would ensure safe storage of all such facilities across the land.
Why has the minister not done so? More important, why has the government not guaranteed the public's right to know of the toxic hazard that exists within neighbourhoods?


Hon. Jean J. Charest (Minister of the Environment):: Mr. Speaker, we have been made aware of this incident in Saskatchewan, as is the case for most people.
We have offered and Environment Canada is always ready to work in co-operation with the provincial authorities when these type of incidents occur.
I think the hon. member would recognize that when these incidents do happen it is the provincial government's primary responsibility to deal with them. Storage is their primary responsibility. In fact, I understand that the new Minister of the Environment from the Government of Saskatchewan has ordered an inquiry into this fire to determine why these substances were stored where they were.


Paul Edgar Philippe Martin: Mr. Speaker, for the same minister.
There has been a number of these incidents across the country, to the point that it is now the responsibility of the federal Minister of the Environment.
Section 35 of the act, if indeed the minister has read the Environmental Protection Act, gives this minister the authority to make an interim order in respect of any toxic substance and to put in place whatever regulations are required.
Will the minister agree today to make such an order that is within his authority to ensure safe storage at all hazardous chemical sites in the country, and will he also commit to guarantee the public's right to know?
It is not fair to ask the Canadian public to live under the constant threat of a hidden toxic disaster.


Jean J. Charest: Mr. Speaker, I think I should caution the hon. member that we should resist unduly dramatizing situations that are very serious. I do not take away for a second the fact that these are very serious situations that we are dealing with.
In the area of the environment, the federal government's intention is not to be paternalistic. I know that there is some difference in the hon. member's approach to the federal government's role on the economy, for example. He seems to object strenuously to the federal government having any role that will go beyond what the constitutional framework is. In the area of the environment he seems to have a very different approach. He cannot have it both ways.
We work in co-operation with the provinces and in veiy close co-operation with the Canadian Council of Ministers. When there were problems, for example, with PCBs we worked with the provinces to identify sites. On those that came under federal responsibility, we took action. On those that came under provincial responsibility, the provinces took action.
We intend to work in the same co-operative spirit in the years to come.


PUBLIC WORKS
Mrs. Diane Marleau (Sudbury):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Public Works and con-
November 21, 1991

cems the termination of a contract for the construction of the Veterans Affairs building in Kirkland Lake.
Can the minister explain to this House why enormous moneys have been spent on one piece of property with construction well under way since the beginning of August and why now for some reason everything is being shifted to a completely new site with completely new plans all, in the same city?
What sense does this make?


Hon. John McDermid (Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows, the Minister of Public Works is away at the present time.
I would be happy to take the question as notice, look into it and get the details for her as soon as possible.


Diane Marleau: Mr. Speaker, I will also ask the minister concerned if he can estimate how much money has already been spent by his department on this project.
How many northern Ontario companies stand to lose by abandoning the original site? Is he prepared to meet with all the parties concerned to minimize the damage and continue with the work in progress as quickly as possible?


John Horton McDermid: As I said in my answer to the first question, I will take all the representations that the hon. member has made and present them to the minister and we will get an answer back to her as quickly as possible.


THE ECONOMY
Mr. Garth Turner (Halton-Peel):: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance has taken a lot bashing here this afternoon in regard to his frank testimony before the committee this morning where he refused to sugarcoat the facts.
I want to ask him a question relating to the letter from the Chamber of Commerce. That letter says it does not matter what the minister does about reducing the deficit if provinces and municipalities sharply increase their deficits or taxes.
I want to ask the Minister of Finance if he agrees with that sentiment. The Chamber states: "Can the gains the
Oral Questions
minister is making be wiped out by the provinces and municipalities through their own deficits and taxes?"


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I think the point is well taken. I think it speaks very much to the economic union proposals that we have been advancing in the constitutional debate which suggest that we must co-ordinate our fiscal policies between the two levels of government in a more effective fashion. I think that is a clear undertaking of provinces as well. I think the trick is to try to find a mechanism that will allow us to do that.
I say that because the combined expenditure of the provinces' local and hospital sector is now $1.36 for every $1 the federal government spends. In terms of taxation they tax $1.05 for every $1 worth of taxation that we extract. We all recognize that there is but one taxpayer.
The criticisms that have been levelled about the containment of the transfers has been done only on the basis to discipline the provinces and their spending habits on the same basis that we have disciplined ourselves in terms of our federal program expenditures.


CIGARETTES
Mr. Jim Karpoff (Surrey North):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Finance concerning the rapidly growing cigarette smuggling problem which is promoting organized crime, costing more than $350 million yearly in lost tax revenue and undermining a major anti-smoking health program. The minister knows that cigarette exports from Canada have doubled this year and are being smuggled back into Canada, mostly from the United States.
Will the government introduce a full domestic price export tax on Canadian cigarettes?


Hon. Doug Lewis (Solicitor General of Canada):: Mr. Speaker, the government is well aware of the cigarette smuggling problem. The Minister of National Revenue has been working with respective police authorities in an effort to develop better strategies to counter this growing problem.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, four billion cigarettes were exported from Canada in the first nine months of this year; more than double the number

November 21, 1991
Oral Questions
from last year. This represents a black market potential worth as much as $2.8 billion.
Will the minister explain why he cannot implement an export tax immediately? It has already been used for such diverse products as softwood lumber, oil and natural gas.


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I can tell the hon. member that the Minister of National Revenue is working with using other than export taxes to police this activity.
I must warn the hon. member that the increase in exports in cigarette production has not been necessarily to the United States, but our exports overseas of cigarette production in this country have grown rather dramatically. That has helped the tobacco farmers of this country that party is always talking about helping all the time.


HEALING LODGE
Mr. Larry Schneider (Regina-Wascana):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Solicitor General. I understand his department is the process of developing location criteria for the healing lodge for aboriginal women under federal sentence. Since I represent a supportive aboriginal community, I have great interest in this facility.
Therefore, I would like to ask the Solicitor General to enlighten me on the status of the location selection process.


Douglas Grinslade Lewis: Mr. Speaker, I can confirm that several communities have indicated an interest in the healing lodge, as well as communities interested in the prisons for women.
I announced last July that the healing lodge would be located in one of the prairie provinces where the majority of the federally sentenced native women come from. The criterion has been approved by the task force committee and it should be released to the interested communities in the next two weeks.


POVERTY
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (St. Boniface):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
The report by the National Council of Welfare points out that a single mother living in Manitoba who raises one child receives $9,000 below the poverty level. That same single mother raising that child often receives inadequate child care support payments from her spouse, too often paid late or not paid at all.
What is the government prepared to do to help that single mother with her child and all of the other mothers in this country receive what is justifiably theirs?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the federal government is providing some $7.5 billion toward income and employment support to families, and particularly to children.
There have been substantial increases to the child tax credits since 1985 and changes to the recent Canada Assistance Plan. The government has doubled the child care expense deduction. We have increased the child tax credit. A number of initiatives has been taken.
The hon. member is suggesting that more should be done. Obviously, if we can find the ways and means to do more, this government has always been prepared to do that. We do believe that children in our society really represent the future of this country. We are doing our darndest to relieve them of the burden of debt that was left by his party when it was in office.


HUMAN RIGHTS
Mr. John Brewin (Victoria):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Acting Prime Minister.
Yesterday the House heard that the government was still thinking about what its policy was going to be in respect of development assistance to countries that violate human rights.
Today before the subcommittee on arms trade we heard evidence from Ernie Regehr of Project Ploughshares that in the past three years 43 per cent of the Third World countries to which Canada is permitted to export military commodities are countries that violate
November 21, 1991

human rights and are on a list of human rights violators. They include Kenya, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
The government purports to have a policy prohibiting exports to human rights violators. What happened to the policy? Is it incompetence or simply negligence on the part of the government?


Mary Collins: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member is aware, External Affairs does indeed have a policy with respect to the export of military goods. It is one of the most advanced in the world.
Just a few months ago the Secretary of State for External Affairs published for the first time a booklet which outlines all our exports, as an effort at transparency. It is something we have been encouraging other countries to do as well.
With respect to the other aspect of his question, I think it is unequivocally clear that the Prime Minister just as recently as the Francophonie this week has once again reaffirmed Canada's position of linking our foreign aid to human rights issues. In fact our proposals were adopted by the Francophonie. Canada has announced a specific project to assist Francophonie countries in the development of human rights as well.


POINT OF ORDER
Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order arising out of an exchange that took place between myself and the member for LaSalle-Emard yesterday. He made an allegation which is grossly unfair and false. I hope that he will reconsider it.
He indicated in the preamble to his question:
- the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, has said clearly to the banking community that he wants them to lighten up. He is saying to them: "I do not care how interest rates drop, I do not want you to lend money to Canadian businesses to create jobs". Is that government policy?
Privilege
Mr. Mackenzie is a distinguished public servant and I have had an opportunity to check what he did say. He did indicate there was a difficult environment for financial institutions throughout the world. I think from the standpoint of fairness the hon. member would agree with me that this was a most unfortunate allegation and I would ask him to reconsider it.


Mr. Speaker:: I am not at all sure it is a point of order, but as one of our colleagues just said,^ having said it, I think the hon. member for LaSalle-Emard should be able to respond.


Paul Edgar Philippe Martin: Mr. Speaker, messages are conveyed in a number of ways. It was very clear that in the language of the banking community the interpretation of Mr. Mackenzie's speech was that he was asking the banks to tighten up. The reading is very clear. I have had the opportunity to speak to members of the banking community and that was indeed the message that was conveyed.
I would also say that there was no allegation and I was in no way impugning any ill motive to Mr. Mackenzie. What I was pointing out was the very clear difference between his message as it was interpreted by the banking community and the constant message expressed by the Minister of Finance in this House.


Mr. Speaker:: I think I should advise the House that I probably have another point of order. However I have a point of personal privilege and I now have to revert to the order in which these were received. On a question of privilege which comes first, the hon. member for Skeena.


PRIVILEGE
Mr. Jim Fulton (Skeena):: Mr. Speaker, my question of privilege arises from remarks of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary of State for External Affairs on Tbesday, November 19, 1991.
The roots of the question of privilege in fact come from a question raised here in the House on October 2, 1991 by myself of the Prime Minister as found at page 3139 of Hansard. Pursuant to Standing Order 38, as found on page 3061 of Hansard for November 19, 1991, one finds the answer to the question as given by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary of State for External Affairs.

November 21, 1991
Privilege
I believe it is a question of privilege because it is partly fact and partly of the law of contempt of Parliament. I have satisfied myself' through direct personal communication with the Secretary of State for External Affairs that the November 19, 1991 statement to this House by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary of State for External Affairs is false.
I endeavoured to obtain a satisfactory resolution to this in writing from the government and to date this has simply been without satisfactory result. I believe this to be substantially beyond a dispute as to the allegation of fact because the statement made by the parliamentary secretary is the following, and I quote:
It is not only U.S. subs that have gone through there, but other
NATO subs have been there.
This is a direct reference to Dixon Entrance. The reason that it is a more complicated matter than just a border is that if one refers to the November 1, 1991 answer of the Secretary of State for External Affairs, when I asked if there had been any U.S. submarine activity in Dixon Entrance in the previous two years, she said on November 1, 1991 in this House:
My understanding is no, but I am quite prepared to look into it
and let the member know.
Three days later I was forced to raise it again in Question Period and put it to the minister again, at which point she said, and I quote:
Indeed there were transits through the Dixon Entrance in 1989
and 1990.
I do not think it should be necessary, once a parliamentary secretary or a minister knows that a statement they have made is false, for a member to be forced to come back every time in Question Period to get it remedied.
The reason I think this constitutes a matter of privilege is that the government had denied on the floor of the House and outside this House that there had been any known submerged illegal traffic through Dixon Entrance and subsequently was forced to admit it.
We now have an allegation by the parliamentary secretary who has access to information that members do not have from External Affairs and has stated on the floor of this House that subs other than U.S. subs have been using Dixon Entrance. It is quite clear that the minister says that is not the case. I believe that constitutes privilege, since it has not been withdrawn in the House or in writing as I requested. I am prepared to move the necessary motion so this can in fact be taken up by the House itself.


Mr. Benno Friesen (Parliamentary Secretary to Secretary of State for External Affairs):: Mr. Speaker, yesterday afternoon I became aware that I had in fact misspoken myself in responding to the statement made by the member for Skeena. I was prepared today to make a correction in Hansard and had prepared a statement to that effect.


Mr. Speaker:: I would like to advise the House that the hon. member for Surrey-White Rock-South Langley gave me notice of rising on a question of privilege and I take it this is exactly the point.


Benno Friesen: Right.


Mr. Speaker:: I thank the hon. member. Please continue.


Benno Friesen: Mr. Speaker, as you said, I had given you notice that it is my intention to correct the record. I asked Hansard officials to take notice of the fact that when I spoke on November 19 I may have given the impression that submarines of NATO partners other than the United States have transited Dixon Entrance.
I was referring to the government's October 30 announcement giving consent to port visits by nuclear powered and capable vessels that include British submarines. Dixon Entrance has not been used, and I underscore that, by NATO allies other than the United States. Canada's prior consent for transit of Dixon Entrance, as announced on October 30, pertains only to American submarines visiting the underwater acoustic testing facility in Behm Canal, Alaska.
I would also emphasize to the hon. member that if there is a question of who is right, I or the minister, I will choose the minister every time.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member for Skeena has raised the point as a point of privilege and it may have appeared on the surface that there might be a point of privilege. The hon. member has given an explanation and I thank both hon. members for their courtesy in expressing their views.
November 21, 1991


PREAMBLES TO QUESTIONS
Bill Attewell: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of privilege.
Beauchesne's on page 121, section 410.(8), reads:
Preambles to questions should be brief and supplementary
questions require no preambles.
Mr. Speaker, if you read the "blues" you will discover that the Leader of the NDP today, not in her first supplementary but in her second supplementary, literally made a speech.
Today I wanted to ask a question in this House. Mr. Speaker, I think it is most unfair that you would not cut short something like that. It should not be allowed. We should get back to the basics of Beauchesne's.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member can quote Beauchesne's and so can other hon. members. When the hon. member can bring all other hon. members together and direct to the Speaker a change in practice that has been going on since long before the members who are now sitting on the right of me sat on the left then I would be only too prepared to cut down preambles.
There is no question in my mind that the overly excessive use of preambles creates problems in the Chamber. It creates problems for me because it takes too long. It creates problems for those receiving the question because they deal with the preamble before they get to the question.
The hon. member's position is not without some substance. However I say to the hon. member and to other hon. members that I need the co-operation of all members if we are going to change the preambles. I will do the very best I can. I thank him for his intervention.
Is the hon. member rising again?


Bill Attewell: Yes, Mr. Speaker. I just want to make the point that it is one thing to say that all members can make something happen, but I really think your leadership is the key to make that happen. I do not feel that it is that difficult.


Mr. Speaker:: You may find out now how difficult it is.


Mr. Nelson A. Riis (Kamloops):: Mr. Speaker, as you are well aware, and I think all members are well aware, the House leaders of the various parties have been
Business of the House
having discussions for some time to find ways and means to make Question Period more productive.
For example, we have offered to extend the hours and others have suggested a shortening of preambles. I think that those who were listening carefully to the questions raised by the Leader of the New Democratic Party during Question Period would have to agree that they were really outstanding questions considering the importance of the material.
I think the hon. member is right. We can all work to improve and make them more effective questions. That is certainly a goal that we will continue to work toward.


Mr. Speaker:: I think the hon. member for Kamloops has indicated that there is always room for improvement. Perhaps the exchange moves us in that direction. I thank both hon. members.


BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Mr. Speaker, on the weekly business question to the government House leader, he is well aware that the co-operation that has been given to him by the Official Opposition and by members of the New Democratic Party has seen the passage of Bill C-38, Bill C-12 and Bill C-30.
I wonder if he could indicate to the House, because of the co-operation which has been extended to him, what business will be remaining for the rest of today and for Friday. I believe we have an understanding for next week up until Wednesday. I wonder if he could explain that.
Second, while he is on his feet, I wonder if he could give us some clear indication as to when the enabling legislation for the purposes of a federal referendum would be coming before the House.


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, I would be willing to answer that question even if they had not been co-operative.
They have been and we have been able to make some progress. It would be my intention this afternoon to call government Motion No. 5, the motion dealing with decorum in the House. It is appropriate, given the point

November 21, 1991
Business of the House
of order we have just discussed, we have an opportunity to debate that more between ourselves.
Tomorrow, Friday, November 21, we hope to begin and complete report stage and third reading of Bill C-3, an act dealing with real property, a technical matter, and possibly complete the debate at report stage and third reading of Bill C-35 which is a miscellaneous act, just correcting a number of statutes. Again it is not too controversial.
In the early part of next week I would hope that we would be able to complete report stage and third reading of the collection of bills dealing with the financial institutions, that is Bill C-4, the Trust and Loans Act; Bill C-19, the Bank Act; Bill C-28, the Insurance Companies Act; and Bill C-34 dealing with co-ops and caisses populaires.
In terms of the rest of the week I would expect to engage in the usual discussions on how we might complete the business for the end of next week as well as the next three weeks leading up to the Christmas break.
Unfortunately I do not have the information to respond to the question of the House leader of the Liberal Party respecting referendum legislation.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my hon. friend, the government House leader, regarding an issue from I think two or three days ago during Question Period.
The Minister for Consumer and Corporate Affairs referred to and quoted from a number of letters. He enthusiastically stood and said how pleased he was to ensure that they would be tabled.
I have not checked the Table. Perhaps he could indicate if has he got around to that or if would he do that perhaps for tomorrow.


Harvie Andre: I am still enthusiastic about taking those documents up. I am sorry to hear they have not been tabled. I will endeavour to have them tabled tomorrow.


REPORT OF AUDITOR GENERAL
Mr. Speaker:: As chairman of the House of Commons Board of Internal Economy I have the pleasure today of tabling, in both official languages, a report on the
recently completed audit of the House of Commons administration carried out by the Auditor General of Canada.
On behalf of the board I would like to thank the Auditor General and his staff for a thorough and constructive review, the first comprehensive audit of the administration since 1980.
The report concludes that substantial progress has been made since 1980 and that the opportunity for further improvement is available in a number of areas.
According to the report: "Our observations do not suggest serious widespread problems".

The board was pleased to note the Auditor General's praise for dramatic improvement in the way public funds are used at the House of Commons.
At the same time, we are indebted to the Auditor General for his useful diagnosis of administrative practices needing improvement and his prescriptions for change.
To facilitate follow-up the Board of Internal Economy has created a subcommittee for audit implementation. This subcommittee will oversee the practical application of the Auditor General's advice.
All members of the House of Commons have an obligation to make the best possible use of resources provided by the Canadian public. The board will continue to help ensure that the recommendations which achieve that goal are implemented.

More specifically, acting on the Auditor General's recommendation, the board intends to strengthen the management of House-wide issues by re-examining and improving its information planning and decision-making systems. A review of the organizational and authority structure of the two management committees of the House administration and their relationship to the board has already begun. A formal program evaluation and internal audit function have also been established.
The audit report has concluded that the efficiency of administrative services varies. Measures are always under way to adopt best practices of well performing units in other areas which could benefit from them. Steps will
November 21, 1991

also be taken to improve the efficiency of operations and management practices where needed.
With regard to recommendations dealing with security, action will be taken to improve further the effectiveness of the operations of the service. As to the recommendation for a joint security force with the Senate, the board has noted that the Auditor General is currently conducting a broad review of this and other potential joint services on the Hill. The board wants to review the results of this study before reaching a decision on this matter.

On the question of making more information about House activities and members' expenditures public, the board agrees that budget documents should be made more readily available to the public.
The board will also undertake a review of the various expenditure categories which are not now part of but could qualify for inclusion in the members' operating budget.

In conclusion, the board was pleased to note that for almost all services more than 90 per cent of members who responded to an audit questionnaire said that then-needs were well or very well met. As a result the Auditor General concluded that:
Clearly managers and staff of the House have reason to be proud
of this accomplishment.
The board would like therefore to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all House employees and express to them the board's appreciation for the high standard of services they have rendered to the House and the public of Canada.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Friday, October 25, consideration of the motion of Mr. Andre (p. 4030), the
Government Orders
amendment of Mr. Dingwall (p. 3887) and the amendment to the amendment of Mr. Riis (p. 3881).
Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg Transcona):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be able to have the opportunity to enter this debate on decorum in the House of Commons, which was a motion prompted by some unfortunate events in the life of the House recently, the nature of which was not reflected in the government's motion.
What prompted this motion in the first place on the part of the government was a need to respond to the public perception that life in the House of Commons was deteriorating and what prompted that perception of deterioration was the use of racist and sexist language.
Yet the motion we have before us from the government talks about general matters of decorum and fails to make the appropriate distinction between general matters of decorum and the use of racist and sexist language. I think that is, if I understand the amendment from the Official Opposition, what the amendment seeks to do. It seeks to make it clear that it is a distinction which needs to be made by the government and by the motion so that the government is not able to buiy the embarrassment which it quite rightly should feel about the behaviour of the members who used the racist and sexist language in question in the larger issue which has existed for some time of House decorum.
Our amendment has to do with the question of political parties taking responsibility for the behaviour of their own members. Therefore it points to the need for the government to respond rather than just simply asking the House to respond to a situation in which certain behaviours or the use of certain language by members might call into question whether they should continue in their particular parliamentary duties. This is an issue the government has not been willing to face up to and which our amendment tries to address.
I might also say a curious thing happened with respect to this motion. The government House leader said there was going to be a free vote on this decorum motion. I am not sure why he felt this was important. I do not know whether he has people in his own caucus who want to vote against the decorum motion and is freeing them up to do so. What could he possibly have meant by declaring a free vote on a motion which encourages good decorum in the House of Commons? Is there dissent, debate and

November 21, 1991
Government Orders
discussion within the government caucus about whether decorum is a good thing in the House of Commons?
If it is a free vote then why is the House leader, after having introduced the motion, speaking on behalf of the government as to the acceptability of certain amendments? If it is a free vote then it seems to me that the government House leader cannot negotiate on behalf of that collectively known as the government caucus as to whether the NDP amendment or the Liberal amendment is acceptable. Therefore one can only speculate as to what goes on in the dark recesses of the government House leader's mind as to what constitutes a free vote. First, although I am certainly not against it in principle, why was this declared to be a free vote in the first place? Second, why, if it is a free vote, does the government continue to negotiate in a way that is reminiscent of non-free votes, of more traditional party votes?
What I want to suggest today in speaking about the matter of decorum is that in spite of the need to address some of the things that have happened here in the last little while, the fact of the matter is that the incidents which became notable were incidents having to do with things that members said which they did not intend to be on the record. I think it would be a mistake on our part if we became preoccupied only with those things which have been said which people had not intended to be on the record.
The fact of the matter is that this place is as much in danger of being undermined by the things that are said on the record.
In this respect I am talking about the general matter of decorum, how members conduct themselves in the House, the way in which we ask questions, the way in which they are answered and the general way in which business of the House is conducted.
Much of what is said on the record and which is within the rules has contributed in the last little while to a general deterioration in the perception by the public of the House of Commons. I enter this one caveat and that is it is not the first time the House of Commons has been held in disrepute.
I can remember when I was a kid during the Diefen-baker-Pearson era, the Munsinger crisis, the Rivard scandal and everything else, when people thought that
political life in Canada would never recover from that all-time low, that muck-raking and everything that was going on, and yet it did.
There may be a certain extent to which political life goes in cycles and is renewed from time to time. We I think rightly perceive that almost all Canadians with the exception perhaps of that very strange 16 or 17 per cent who support the Conservatives would feel that a renewal is in order. We may disagree among each other as to what shape and what context that renewal should take, but I think there is almost unanimity within the Canadian public that renewal is now in order.
I do think that we have come upon a new time in the life of Parliament and that we may actually be in something which is not just cyclical but historically new and historically problematic in a way that other times of cynicism about Parliament and politics have not been. I think that has to do with two things that are related.
It has to do with the absence of real power on the part of members of Parliament and the subsequent substitution of the rewards of power and real influence, however limited that might be, on the part of members of Parliament and the subsequent substitution of publicity as that which has taken the place of whatever power members of Parliament may have had in the past and have subsequently lost.
I am not trying to do kind of a golden age thing about a time when members of Parliament had all kinds of power. Members of Parliament have probably always had to struggle to have as much influence as they could over cabinet, over the Prime Minister and over various other forces in our political process. The fact is, and I certainly feel this is the case, that since I arrived here in 1979 the power of individual members of Parliament and of members of Parliament collectively, whether expressed in the form of opposition parties or in committees or whatever, have been reduced.
I know that goes against the conventional wisdom on the government side, that as a result of the McGrath reforms the power of the private member, the individual member, has been increased and I want to go into that. I think that at some levels, in some procedures and in some ways that is true, but when we get to the fundamentals, when we get to things that really count, the power of Parliament, as Parliament or expressed through opposition parties or expressed through the decisions of

committees, has actually been reduced since 1984 rather than increased.
For instance, committees have the power to study what they want to study now instead of waiting for a government reference, the way it was when I first arrived here. The committees do not yet have the power to have their conclusions, after they launch these independent studies, respected by the government.
We have seen a decline in the enthusiasm people had for reform of the committees. As a result of the absence of a government prepared to respect the decisions, in some cases unanimous, of committees there is a decline in the belief that committee reform is actually working because no real power has accrued to those committees as a result of reform.
That is just one example. There are others. For example, the most recent rule changes have severely curtailed the ability of the opposition to get in the way of the government and force it to come to terms with criticisms of its proposals or legislation. I know some people in the public might say: "That is precisely the problem. He is talking about getting in the way of the government".
In many ways that is what this place is for. We are here to hold the government accountable, to get in its way, to ensure that it does not always get its way. We are here to represent alternative points of view and alternative ways of solving the problems the government seeks to solve with its legislation.
Over the years the power of the opposition to make the government listen, by making life difficult for it, has been eroded. This ability to delay things ought not to be regarded in the entirely negative way that it is sometimes regarded. It seems to me that the notion of delay has been unduly discredited. What we try to do here, especially when the government is trying to do something that we think the public is dimly aware of or does not realize the full consequences of, is hold things up until public opinion can be informed or mobilized, depending on the particular view of the public.
There is always a political judgment to be made by the government and the opposition. When we hold things up we might pay a political price if we are wrong in our political judgment. We might be seen as holding something up that in the final analysis the public thinks is
Government Orders
good, or at least all right. The government has to make that same kind of judgment. However, lately the rules have become so skewed that we rarely have to make that judgment any more because we cannot hold up anything long enough to feel that we are in a position requiring us to make that judgment.
In the absence of that kind of power there is a tendency on the part of members of Parliament to want their constituents to at least know that they are here. How do you do that? You show up in the media. You have to be seen, not just on the parliamentary channel but on the news if you can manage it.
In the absence of this real power, which can be respected and used, members of Parliament are behaving irrationally for very rational reasons. In order for people to have the impression that they are doing something when the things they used to be able to do they are not as able to do as a result of changes in the rules or because changes have not been accompanied by the appropriate attitude on the part of the government to give those reforms real substance rather than just procedural reality.
The wrong kind of behaviour is rewarded in this place by attention. People wonder why. I am trying to explain why I think it is so. Members who are unwilling to play this game are condemned to a life of relative obscurity. Members who are by nature unwilling or unable to play that kind of attention seeking game are condemned to a life of obscurity. They may tiy to find other ways to combat it politically, such as being good constituency members or utilizing other strategies for surviving that kind of obscurity.
The fact is that this is one of the central problems in the House of Commons today. Unless we address it, we are not going to get to the heart of that.
There is never going to be a relationship that is completely equal. The government is always going to hold the upper hand to some degree. That is as it should be. The government is the government.
However, when there is a completely lopsided arrangement like we have now it is no longer the negotiation of peers. It is simply the semblance of civility that exists when you are in a room with a big bully known for

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his violent behaviour. You try to get along because you know what happens if you do not get along.
That is the relationship we are in now. If the power relationship was more equal or more balanced then we would be able to do things that people are sending us here to do.
I will give a couple of examples. In recent weeks we have had back-to-work legislation a couple of times. As a result of the fact that back-to-work legislation is something the government tends to need that day and because this government has not yet figured out a way to streamline the rules in its own favour, there is still the odd occasion when it actually needs our help to get something through that same day.
When the government needs us-as it should; after all we are not just furniture around here-time and time again we are able to do constructive things.
We are able to work together. We are able to say to the Minister of Labour that if you want that back-to-work legislation concerning the grain handlers at Thunder Bay by such and such a time, maybe you had better listen to the grievances the union has and ensure that pensions are on the table.
It had to put pensions on the table, and that was a good thing. We all agreed upon that. It was a constructive event because the power relationship was the way it much more often used to be when the ministers had to depend on members to get their estimates and various other kinds of things through the House, when members of Parliament had real power over the government instead of just acting as a facade for the parliamentary dictatorship that is emerging.
It was the same with the back-to-work legislation on the postal strike. That was again a situation where there was a greater equality of power between the two sides of the House. We were able to say that it would be a lot easier and a lot fairer if some commitments were made to the workers with respect to the pay package that had been negotiated up to that point and if the imposition of arbitration was not something which would bring everything, including money matters, back to square one.
We were able to do that, although Canada Post has since tried to fudge on that commitment. That is another
example of what this Parliament can be like. I sometimes feel that in those few moments when we are doing things, where we are needed by the government, that is what Parliament ought to be.
When all of us are important and all our views are taken into account what comes out of the Chamber eventually reflects, in so far as is possible, the concerns of all the people in the Chamber. That is not always going to be possible.
I am not trying to be naive about this, but I use it as an example. If we could find a way to restore and enhance meaningful power on the part of members individually and collectively, a lot of the behaviour that we do not like would disappear.


Mr. Jim Hawkes (Calgary West):: Madam Speaker, I was going to leave the Chamber when I heard the hon. member begin to speak.
I was very interested in what he had to say because he worked so hard on the McGrath commission that brought about the first big blush of parliamentary reform. I am pleased that he spoke. I heard some very useful thoughts and ideas.
I would like to respond to him. One night two weeks ago was not a very pleasant evening. He rose to try and get some information and the Speaker would not allow it to be put on the table at that point. We did have an early vote and it was really at the request of the member in private members' hour who moved the motion. The Whips were only vehicles to activate what the private member wanted, which was the subject matter to go to committee, no vote to be held, and it was blocked by a separatist in the Chamber.
So just to clear the background, I understand people did not understand that background in the heat of the moment. It really was what we had to do, if we were to respect private members' hour. We had to follow the wishes of the private members and that is how the Whips functioned on that evening.
I would also like to just say that it is a funny kind of a day. We had a few statements about decorum before we got into this and I was going to rise and decided not to and I went to the table afterward. We have a Standing Order 31 and there are rules related to that. It is the first part of the Question Period. Today we had 15 statements

made by 15 different members. Seven of them broke one rule, the length of time rule. Nobody called them to account. Will there be any punishment tomorrow because they took other members' time in the sense of them being ignored and not recognized? I personally think there must be. I think a rule without enforcement is worse than no rule at all. I think that is part of what has gone wrong.
I agree with the member totally that the wrong behaviour is rewarded in this place. If the refereeing was such that the wrong behaviour could not and did not occur then perhaps some responsible behaviour would be rewarded out of this place. When you give television a picture of somebody breaking the rules of the Chamber in terms of language or attitude versus a calm, rational statement, they will take that bad picture and put it on television 10 times out of 10. Unless this place stops it when it starts then that is the way the institution gets portrayed.
I back the member totally when he says that the wrong behaviour is rewarded and it should change. Wrong behaviour should be penalized and then ignored.
In my early days in this Chamber we were filibustering the Constitution. I raised a point of order for about an hour on what time it was and which clock was the right clock. I did not break a rule, but I did try and delay the government from doing what I thought was wrong. The Speaker was embarrassed because television used that argument of the clock with great repetition. I was not recognized for 33 consecutive Question Periods. After 31 I rose on a point of order and I was on the list, but the control is in the hands of the Chair, the referee. Nobody needs to be recognized ever in this Chamber. If we misbehave I suggest to the Chamber we should not be recognized for some suitable period of time. Then the reward, which the member is seeking, does not occur.
The use of inflammatory language, the use of personal insults, that kind of behaviour, which all of us abhor in our colleagues of all parties, will not be brought to a standstill until we cease to reward it. When you are a politician, being ignored, not being allowed to catch the camera and not being on television are the basic ways available to us to punish. But it has to emanate from the Chair. It simply has to emanate from those control
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buttons that sit on the arms, that cut members off, that switch cameras.
I do not know whether the member would agree with me, maybe not totally, but does he and his party agree that the inappropriate behaviour that brings the institution itself into disrepute has to be brought to a halt? Then not only should we have equal powers but I think equal power comes from equal respect.
In this Chamber you get your way with your colleagues of all parties because they respect you. It has more to do with that I think when it comes to legislation and amendments and so on than anything else.
There are other games we get into from time to time. Over the years I have seen members of all parties who have had enormous influence on a variety of events simply on the basis of the homework they have done and the respect they have earned from their colleagues.
Inappropriate behaviour detracts from respect. Appropriate behaviour gives us respect.


William Alexander (Bill) Blaikie: Madam Speaker, I believe the hon. government Whip was referring to the vote which took place on the private member's bill of the member for Winnipeg-St. James which prompted the anger leading to the grabbing of the mace.
My understanding of it is different from my own conversations with the member for Winnipeg-St. James. When I talked to him at that time I certainly was not under the impression that he had requested the early vote. He seemed as surprised by it as anyone else. I understand that there was a move to refer the subject matter to committee and not have a vote. All that happened with the consent of the member.
The vote had finally been caused because of the refusal of the Bloc Quebecois to give unanimous consent for it to be referred to committee. The decision to have the actual vote after a four or five minute bell was something decided by the government Whip and the opposition Whip. It certainly made a lot of members very unhappy who, myself included, were on their way to the Chamber to vote for that private member's bill.
I think it does raise a question. I am not sure what the answer is. I am not suggesting that the answer to the question of the role of government Whips in the deter-

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mination of votes for Private Members' Business is easy. There could conceivably be-, I am not saying this happened on this occasion; the government and opposition Whips may have had good reasons in their own minds-collaboration on the part of the two Whips against a member whose motion was coming up for debate and was not well liked. An early vote might work against the possibility of it passing.
I think that is a concern. Possibly we can address that in the Standing Committee on House Management in the long list of concerns we must consider.
As for the hon. member's comments about the Chair I have to say with greatest respect to the Chair that I think there is a great deal of truth in this. I have said this before. When I first arrived here in 1979, if the Speaker thought that your first question had been too long or had been answered, you simply did not get recognized for a supplementary. It happened to me.
I would stand up and be standing there and somebody else would start talking. The Speaker used that power to discipline people. If you did not do things right you soon knew about it. How did you know about it? You knew about it because you did not receive a supplementary or did not get recognized, et cetera.
I know the argument of the Chair is that now that the party lists go to the Chair, the Chair does not have any recourse. We had party lists then so I do not think that fully meets the objections. One of the objectives of the McGrath committee report suggestion to have the Speaker elected by the whole House by secret ballot was to give the Speaker a greater not a lesser mandate to deal with the House on behalf of the House.
I know what the Speaker has to say about this. However, with the greatest of respect I think the Chair already has that authority. If it was used fairly a great wave of relief would sweep over the Chamber. I only hope that will happen at some point.
Finally with regard to the point made about respect versus power, I think the hon. member is right. Respect has a lot to do with it but it is also a question of power.


Diane Marleau: Madam Speaker, I am very happy to speak today on this motion of the government. I certainly agree that it is something this House has to address. It is something that each and every one of us has to think about very seriously.
I was once a student in a private boarding school. The sisters there used to give lessons in savoir-vivre. That is how to behave, how to treat your fellow classmates, how to stand properly and how to address someone else. Many of us here could benefit from that kind of lesson and of being reminded many times that respect begins with respecting one another. It is an extremely important issue.
This is not a school. In essence this is the highest court of the land. It is the place where the laws that govern all the people of Canada are made.
Part of the reason for the lack of decorum in the House of Commons is the frustration of Canadians, which is reflected by and large in members of Parliament. There is a feeling across Canada-we are all very much aware of it-that Parliament is not listening to the ordinary Canadian. That is reflected here because often as members of Parliament we feel that we are not listened to. We feel that the government sets the agenda behind closed doors, comes out with a bill process, and often imposes that process on the rest of the members of this House, including the backbenchers on the government side. It is extremely frustrating. We have been elected to represent the people in our ridings, yet it is almost as if we are not allowed to completely do our job when this process is under way.
First and foremost we must open the process up. Perhaps we need more pre-study of bills, more open discussion, and more respect for each other's opinions. We will not always have the same opinions. We do have a parliamentary democracy. A parliamentary democracy is made up of different parties. Different parties have different philosophies, different rules, different things they care about, and different ways of looking at things. One is not any better or worse than the other, although we may sometimes believe that we have the answers. There will be some very strong disagreements on some issues.
I honestly believe that we can do this if we work together. I have seen some of these things work and work well when the government is open to bringing forward the best piece of legislation possible.
When I was on the finance committee I had the good fortune of working on a piece of legislation concerning which we were told: "We want you to come up with the best piece of legislation that you can". The government had brought forward some legislation and realized that it
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was not the best it could be. It was a very difficult issue. What we came out with was certainly not perfect. However all parties worked on it together. It felt good to think that we could work constructively. We could support the bill because we knew what had gone into the bill. We knew its weaknesses and we knew its strengths. We were happy to do it. That is not to say that there were not reservations about that particular bill.
I would like to see much more of that happening.
When we talk about decorum in the House of Commons it is often in reference to Question Period. I have been a member of this House of Commons for three years now. It is not always easy, especially as a new member, to stand in this House of Commons and ask a question during Question Period. There are many times when you stand to ask a question in Question Period and are laughed at. There are a lot of comments being made. It is not an easy thing. I understand one of the reasons the government members sometimes do this is because it is very uncomfortable to have some of these questions asked.
I respect that the questions are uncomfortable, but I believe that Question Period is the only time and the only area right now within our Parliament where the government can be taken to account and can be questioned on some of the things it has done.
The government Whip spoke a short time ago and said: "Well, you know we have to enforce times and the Speaker has to be more strict and he has to turn the button off and not recognize people". The problem with that is it puts all the burden on the shoulders of the Speaker. I would hope that the Speaker can temper some of these limits with a little bit of mercy.
There are times when you stand up in the House of Commons and you are nervous. You may stumble on your words and it may take you a little bit longer than other times. I would hope that there is some mercy in this House of Commons, instead of automatically turning the button off after 30 seconds, because somewhere, somehow in some book it is written that your speech should only be 30 seconds long. There are some questions that are impossible to ask in 30 seconds.
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I know we strive very much to have our questions within a certain limited time. I know the government also wants its ministers to answer in as succinct a pattern as possible.
Let us go back to Question Period and the fact that Canadians often only see the theatrics of Question Period, because that is the 30 or 10 second clip. That is not going to change very much. Television is here to stay. It is not going to go away. People like that. Much as we sometimes decry the theatrics, they will continue. People will continue to demand them and as long as we are providing the theatrics, television will show them.
The biggest thing we can offer is that we do not fall into the same traps. If we respond in a calm and professional manner, then perhaps there will be a balance and we will not only see the theatrics.
We live in a very fast changing world. You never know from one minute to the next what will happen and you have to be prepared for everything.
The other aspect is the televising of the debate. Did the respect of Canadians for Parliament go down after we started televising Question Period and the debates, or was it going to happen anyway? I would suggest that it would probably have happened at any rate.
If you go back over the history of Parliament, you find in many of the old debates that the same questions of respect for Parliament by the people of Canada have come up time and again. The same things are happening in countries around the world. Whether it is just television causing it or not, I would venture to say it is not. I would venture to say that it is happening around the world, not just in our country. We are not alone in having these particular problems.
I would like to remind the people of the House of Commons that I believe that television has actually brought more decorum to the House of Commons than there was before televising.
I was a student at Ottawa University 30 years ago. I thought it was great fun to come up into the gallery and watch the House of Commons. I can tell you that what I see today is far tamer than what went on in this House of Commons during debates and Question Period 30 years ago. It is a much calmer place. It is not half as noisy.

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I can tell you that there was paper throwing, there was banging on the tops of the desks, and there were all kinds of goings-on. Of course it was not televised and it was quite pleasant as a student to sit upstairs and look down in here and make fun of some of the players and admire some of the others. Because I had the opportunity to visit this Chamber that many years ago, I am quite happy to report that it is a far different place nowadays than it was then, some of it for the better.
We talk about responsibility. I think everyone has to take responsibility. Parties have to generally just speak to their members and remind them of their responsibilities as parliamentarians to the people in their ridings.
I would like to believe that we will all take responsibility and not put all of the burden on one person who happens to be sitting in your place, Mr. Speaker. I think your position is quite difficult in that you must always be the person doling out the times and then, perhaps, the punishments. I do not believe it should solely be the responsibility of the Speaker.
We talk about responsibility. You know, when others show responsibility toward you, it is a lot easier in turn to show responsibility toward them. I will give an example. Ministers of the Crown are always going to my riding of Sudbury and making announcements on all kinds of things that I am not notified of. I have no idea of what they are doing in my riding, ever. I find out afterward when I read the newspapers.
I think that as a sign of respect it might be nice if we were told in advance, although perhaps not too far in advance because they would worry that we might say something. However, if we were at least warned that they were going to be in the riding, and perhaps invited to attend occasionally, it would make us feel more a part of what is happening with this government and it would make us feel better. Perhaps we would treat the ministers better as a result of this. It is a simple courtesy, I would think. Many times we probably would not be able to be there because they would travel to the riding when we were here in Ottawa, or something of that sort. But simple courtesies make you feel better about many things that go on in this House.
I would suggest that has to start happening, along with a whole new way of coming forward with bills and budgets. The government goes behind closed doors and
consults with the private sector or whomever it consults with. It then comes up with a budget which of course we are expected to answer to on the first day.
Of course that becomes a very controversial time. I believe if we could sit down in advance and perhaps lay out what we are facing and arrive at some decisions or at least be privy to some of the decisions, all Canadians would be better served. There would be less animosity derived from hearing that the government has to cut this program and we that program.
If Canadians were aware of all of the alternatives that had been considered during the process and exactly why these things had to be done, regardless of whether you liked doing them or not, it would make this a more humane House and a more humane process.
I was once on municipal council and I know this is very different from that because this is a party based house and municipal council was not. But it was far easier to strike a budget when the people of the area had followed through all of the deliberations and all of the difficult choices that had to be made. There was more respect at that point for the members of council who had to make those hard decisions. Sometimes there was animosity toward some of them, but it was a more open process and therefore it was easier to accept some of the difficult things. I believe we can move in that way.
I believe, though, that when there are some serious breaches, such as some of these sexist remarks and racist remarks, they warrant a serious reprimand.
I was at home when a member challenged the mace, and I understood why they reprimanded this particular member of Parliament, but what I did not understand was the severity of that reprimand versus what happened following the sexist and racist remarks. We have to somehow bring back a certain amount of equilibrium between the two, and I think everyone realizes that. I am hoping that this debate will actually change it.
We then talk about freer votes. I believe in freer votes.
I have absolutely no problems with free votes. I have certain principles and I would hope that at any time when I am asked to vote on things that would compromise my principles I will continue to vote against those things. I have no problems with that. I think the mechanism for freer votes is already in place, as my
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colleague mentioned earlier, and it should be used more often. There are many, many bills that come forward in this House not based solely on ideology. There are things that we can all more or less agree on, things that some of us may disagree on but they cross all party lines. I think it is very important at that time that we be given the right to do what is right and to vote the way the people in our ridings would want us to vote.
It is not always easy to know what the majority of the people in the riding want. Often there are a number of very vocal constituents who will bend your ear, but they do not necessarily always represent the majority of the people in your riding. You have to use your own judgment many a time to find a way of determining what the rest of the people who are not speaking out really feel on an issue. That is somewhat difficult, and it has to do with each and every member of Parliament. Obviously during an election campaign people in the ridings must make sure they question the candidates to know what their feelings are and what their beliefs are, because then they can make some judgment as to whether they want to be represented by that person.
I am also very interested in the emergency debate questions. We had a debate on Croatia and Yugoslavia and the emergency there. I wonder why it took so long before we could have the debate on that question. The situation got progressively worse and worse, and I know that demands were put for an emergency debate perhaps as long as two months before the debate actually occurred. You wonder, as you sit here as a member of Parliament, why consideration was not given sooner to the debate. It is a simple question.
I am not too sure how the decisions are arrived at concerning emergency debates. I would appreciate if anyone later on can tell me how these things come about, whether there has to be a total consensus or whether something that is of vital importance to a certain large sector of your country should be considered automatically. I believe that in the past it was far easier for a member of Parliament from any side to rise and ask for leave to have an emergency debate on an issue of importance.
I thank you very much, Madam Speaker, for telling me that I am running out of time. I would just like to remind everyone that we are here to govern Canadians and we
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are here because we are Canadians, and we are here to work for Canadians and for our country.


Mr. Alex Kindy (Calgary Northeast):: Madam Speaker,
I really did appreciate the speech by the hon. member for Sudbury. I think she expresses her feelings and her observations of this House and how it works.
I would like to make a couple of comments. She talked about bills being put forward to the House and said: "How are they prepared? Where do they come from?" I had the pleasure and maybe the honour as well as the disappointment of sitting on the other side of the House with the government.
I can tell her that bills are not being discussed in the government caucus. The caucus is not consulted. The bills are being prepared by the department. The minister brings them and says: "I am going to have first reading of this bill on this date". Naturally you cannot change the principle of the bill once it has been read the first time.
There is a lot of frustration by members of Parliament on the government side because they have no input in the legislative process. The same thing happens when budgets are presented. They are being developed by the Minister of Finance, the deputy minister of finance, a couple of advisers and probably the Prime Minister who is advised what it is going to contain.
Even ministers do not know. It is budget secrecy. I will just give you an outline of what was happening when I was there. I said to the member for Etobicoke-Lake-shore who was Minister of Finance at that time: "Look, you are going to present a budget and you want us to sell that budget tomorrow. We do not know what this budget contains. We do not know whether we agree, whether the Canadian people are going to agree, but this is the way it works. Tomorrow, you get your kits. You go on the phone and you defend that budget".
One of the things that this budget contained was the reduction of old age pensions. Naturally, if they had consulted the members, the members would have told them: "Look, if you want to punish anybody, do not punish the people who have worked for this country".
This is the way things are happening and this is why there is a lot of frustration in Parliament. People are frustrated because really they do not have any input. They do not have input into legislation. They do not have

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input in the direction that the government is going to move and so on and so forth.
This is why there is a lot of theatrics in Parliament. You have to show that you are important. When you stand up in Question Period you become aggressive. You are shouting. The louder you speak, the better you are going to be. If you do not have the proper answer from the other side the government, everybody laughs and everybody is happy.
The member for Sudbury said: "In this House, when you ask a question of the government, it is not always easy to put it in 30 seconds". Then you are going to have laughs, comments and if you are a first-time member you might be a little bit rattled. You say: "What am I doing? Am I doing something wrong? Why are they laughing? Is my shirt not properly buttoned up?", and so on and so forth.
There is no understanding of what is being asked. It is a serious matter: unemployment, high inflation, suffering. Those questions are being asked by the opposition.
It was asking today about a lot of bankruptcies. It was serious. People are losing their homes and businesses. We do not want a smart answer from the other side. We want reality. Everybody wants to address this problem, whether it is the opposition or even the government members, but they have no input.
The only thing they can do is laugh and make a joke out of a serious question.
If we do not have a fundamental change in this House I think it is going to be extremely difficult to make progress.
I see that the Speaker says that I am maybe too long in my comments. I am sorry, I will conclude.
The fact is that we need to have a fundamental change in this House. There should be more free votes, more respect for each other, and we should not go back to the school teacher mentality in which the Speaker is going to be the only person who is going to correct and punish. We are the highest court in the land and so we should not deal like that.
The Whip on the government side would like that because he has the school teacher type mentality.
I am going to conclude because my time has expired. I congratulate the member from Sudbury for an excellent speech.


Diane Marleau: I thank the member very much. His comments lead me to believe that it is a question by and large of control by a handful of people perhaps on the government side and a feeling of total helplessness by a large number of members which creates some of the lack of decorum in here.
I believe that we have to move forward with the new and forget about the old ways of doing things. We have done things in this House for many years in that way. The sooner we open up the process, we change the process, we look at really responding to the people of Canada and open up the control process so that everyone has somewhat of a voice in the process, everyone will be much happier and Canadians will perhaps feel that they have been better served.


Howard Edward Crosby: I do not have a question, but I have two comments. There is somebody waiting to speak. I will not take up much time.
In commenting on the remarks made by the hon. member from Sudbury, I could not help but note that in the motion there is a statement that Canadians have expressed alarm at the excessive partisanship in the House of Commons. It talks about decorum and civility.
I think what concerns Canadians with respect to partisanship is that partisanship prevents matters from being resolved, prevents problems from being solved, prevents questions from being answered. It is that kind of partisanship that causes major difficulties. I can think of many areas in which if the members of the House could get together on an instant basis they could resolve problems.
I think of the Supreme Court of Canada decision-and I hope this is dear to the heart of the hon. member-in relation to the so-called rape shield law. The Supreme Court of Canada declared a provision of the Criminal Code providing the rape shield law invalid. I would not like to think there is one member of the House who is opposed to the rape shield law, and yet we sit here day after day powerless, apparently, to do anything about it. I am sure if we could come together we could pass a motion or a bill-I have a private member's bill before the House-under the Constitution to invoke the provi-
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sion that will allow the rape shield clause to remain in force.
It is that kind of difficulty that concerns the public. We cannot get together to resolve simple problems that in our hearts we all want to resolve.
I would like to have the member comment on that and see if she can suggest some way that we can find a vehicle, an instrument, to get together on matters in which there is no real disagreement. It is that kind of partisanship that shocks the Canadian people.


Diane Marleau: I know that there is a way of resolving this but there has to be a will on all sides to resolve it. When you say you want to get together and come to an answer and come to a conclusion, you have to listen to all sides. It cannot always be either my way or your way; it has to be a compromise on all sides. When we learn to compromise we will have moved ahead a very long way in doing and behaving the right way.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: The hon. member for Algoma-Unemployment; the hon. member for Kenora-Rainy River-Employment; the hon. member for Saint-Leonard-Paper Industry; the hon. member for Ottawa Centre-Education; the hon. member for Prince George-Bulkley Valley-Forestry.


Mr. Jean-Robert Gauthier (Ottawa-Vanier):: Madam Speaker, as you know, the hon. member for Saint-Denis, who is a member in good standing of this House, would like to take part in this debate. I intend to leave him enough time to have a chance to share with us some of his comments on Motion No. 5 before the House today, which is of considerable interest to hon. members and to our listeners.
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members, at least those I have had the pleasure to work with for a number of years, are by and large people who take their duties seriously and who are very dedicated. They enter political life with a lot of enthusiasm, although sometimes they are rather naive about what they are getting into. Many members are surprised when all of a sudden they realize it is an extremely demanding job.
That being said, I can see why the government wanted to table this kind of motion in the House. The motion is an attempt to respond to one of the public's concerns, namely how to make this forum, this House of Commons, more representative of the interests of Canadians and a better reflection of what Canadians expect of their elected representatives.
I assume hon. members will recall a comment by that great French politician, Charles De Gaulle. Someone mentioned the occasional state of disorder in the French National Assembly. This is nothing new; Canada does not have a monopoly on this kind of situation and this kind of-


Mr. Prud'homme:: Partisan situation.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: -situation where you get disputes between the various parliamentary groups. Charles De Gaulle said, and you will excuse me if I do not use his exact words, but I will try to give the gist of what he said. He said: "We are elected and our system of universal suffrage does not necessarily select the best people. It is a reflection of our population".
When you think about it, it is quite true we have the parliaments we deserve because we elected them, we 27 million Canadians. However, governments also have the parliaments they deserve, because it is often the government that sets the tone, and in fact it should set the tone, decides what the business of the House will be and tables legislation in the House. I want to quote from an article by Michel Vastel which appeared in Le Droit on May 25, 1991.
Quite frankly, being a federal or provincial member * l1630) today, in fact being in any kind of politics, is not easy.	.
When we visit our ridings we are told: "We get the Mr. Prud'homme: An excellent journalist, impression that the House of Commons, and not only
the House of Commons but the provincial legislatures as Mr. Gauthier: Michel Vastel reported the following, well, are not always very disciplined and are lacking in quoting from the Speech from the Throne: "The respect decorum. We sometimes find it hard to take members of the people for Parliament and parliamentarians is seriously". This bothers me, because I know that most essential for a healthy democracy, says the Speech from

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the Throne, but the credibility of a Parliament and its members depends, in the final instance, on the popularity of the party which has the majority and denies members their independence".
In the few minutes I have left, I would like to concentrate on that particular subject: the independence of members in speaking to questions before the House, the way we vote, the way we speak, the way we take part in debate, both in committee and in the House.
Television changed a lot about the way we behave in the House, and I am no exception. In 1976, when television came to the House, the Speakers of the House who had got along pretty well so far, did not have a list of members for Question Period, for instance. They had no list for members' statements-at the time we called them S. O. 43s, and today S. O. 31s, I believe. There was no list of speakers, either. During Question Period, the Speaker obviously had to recognize the opposition leader but, after that, he had to use his own judgment when recognizing members.
If we look at the records and statistics we see that Mr. Lamoureux, who did not have a list, nevertheless managed to give the Official Opposition, the third party and government members their fair share of questions.
The question arises: Why, in 1976, did the Official Opposition which at the time was the Conservative Party, all of a sudden come up with this list? It was television that imposed this discipline, as it were. In 1976, television could not cope with 40 members rising at once. It was absolutely impossible logistically, mechanically and scientifically. In any case, as far as television was concerned, it was impossible to broadcast this way.
So the Official Opposition decided, for the sake of order, to suggest the Speaker have a list. At the time this contributed to a certain degree of order in our proceedings, but it also helped the Speaker set up a system. Today many members, and I am one of them, think the list is a bad thing. In fact the list of members we submit to the Speaker, both for the S. O. 31s and for Question Period, is not entirely what I would have liked to see in the way of discipline. I see the hon. member for
Saint-Denis signalling that he agrees with me on this point.
I say this because I am one of those members who are convinced that the Chair should and can use its own judgment to ensure that during Question Period, during members' statements and during debate, there is a certain fairness in the order in which it recognizes speakers or the people who ask questions.
I realize this is one more responsibility for the Speaker. I realize this is an additional burden, but I think backbenchers would feel they were being treated more fairly if we had that kind of system.
Of course party discipline is involved. The caucuses will say that it makes no sense. Today, Question Period is the big show; it is what television and the media watch almost exclusively. Now, at 4.30 p.m., there are probably very few journalists watching the House, but between two and three o'clock you can be sure that many do.
Personally I think that such a list does not make for order, because it frustrates some members who want to ask the government questions about their constituents' concerns. I do not say that it solves the problem, but looking at what has happened since Speaker Jerome agreed to this list in 1976 and 1977,1 say that it is not a great success. Let me explain why I believe the list is harmful.
If a member of this House takes too long to ask his question or if a member uses language that is not quite correct, that is sexist, racist or otherwise offensive, the Chair is obliged to take corrective action.
During debate, in Question Period, when members make statements under Standing Order 31, during debate on Private Members' Business or on a motion, the Chair can and I think should act immediately to correct the error, the infraction, if you will, because the Chair maintains order in the House. It must uphold order. But if the Chair does not act immediately, obviously we come back to what I heard another member say, that sometimes it pays to do foolish things in the House. Let us be honest. A member who uses language known to be most inappropriate is rewarded for reasons that I do not understand by the media who cover him or her, sometimes with national coverage.
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Using bad language is rewarded. It is an absolutely ridiculous system. I think that we must stop rewarding offenders as we seem to do around here. There must be a limit.
Personally I think that the Speaker should have the power to immediately discipline members who are out of order.
The Standing Orders were changed somewhat, with McGrath in 1985, if I am not mistaken, and the Chair was allowed to exclude a member for a sitting of the House without having to ask members to vote on the matter, under the following Standing Order ll(l)(tz) that was adopted. I will read it, because it is important:
The Speaker shall be vested with the authority to maintain order by
naming individual Members for disregarding the authority of the
Chair and, without resort to motion, ordering their withdrawal for the
remainder of that sitting, notwithstanding Standing Order 15.
The Chair has the power to throw a member out for a sitting.
I think that the second option for the Chair, not under the Speaker's authority but under that of the House, would be to have the government House leader move a motion asking the House to throw out a member who uses bad language or misbehaves, makes racist or sexist remarks or acts in a way considered inappropriate for this parliamentary forum. This second option always involved a motion, usually moved by the government House leader, whereby a member was suspended for a certain period: one day, two days or more. If the motion is carried, it involves a heavier penalty since the suspension applies to sittings not only of the House but also of committees.
As a second option, the government House leader can act by moving a motion in the House. Then the House, not the Chair, decides whether to exclude a member for one, two, three or four days. That is not a burden for the Chair but rather an obligation for this House through the government House leader. Let us look now at what happens in other legislatures and take the mother country, for example.

How does it work in the British House of Commons? Here, if you are ejected from the House following a
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motion, you are ejected for a period of one day, two days or three days from the House of Commons and its committees. In Britain you are ejected from the parlia-mentaiy precincts, the whole caboodle: your office, the House and committees. It means that you cannot operate as a member of Parliament with parliamentary expenditures and an office, et cetera. It means that you have to go to your hotel, rooming house, or apartment and operate from there for the period you have been ejected from the House of Commons.
In my view that is a very different way of operating from here. I think it is a better way. It would not give those of us in this House who use abusive language or behaviour any recompense if they abuse the order of the House. That would be a tougher penalty and would be a heck of a lot more efficient, as far as I can see.
Madam Speaker, I talked about why I think you as Speaker can and should operate to keep order in this place. I have talked about the obligation of the House itself to maintain the status of MPs as role models. Believe it or not, some people believe that members of Parliament should be role models, that they should be exemplary in their behaviour, their language and their work.
Most of us try to meet those high expectations. Some of us sometimes miss. I accept that because the society we represent is not perfect and we are a reflection of that society. I would hope that we are trying hard to correct that. If the motion of the government is to provide any hope, the government should look attentively at putting in place a few changes, not very big changes, in terms of protocol, behaviour, and how we act in this place.
For example, I was Whip for six or seven years of my Liberal colleagues. When I first occupied the position of chief opposition Whip the practice was that when the Whips came in for a vote, every member of the House of Commons would be in his or her place. The Whips walked in after the members were in their places and indicated to the Speaker that they were ready to vote.
Today, if you are a Whip, you have to be a football player or even better because it is a heck of a challenge to get from that door to the mace. Everybody is standing there talking. There is no order and no discipline. There

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is little to give the impression that we are indeed disciplined and orderly.


An hon. member:: Change the Whip.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: We have changed the Whip and I do not see any difference. The member says to change the Whip. I do not think we have to change the Whips. They are doing their best. We have to change our behaviour in this place.
For example, when the Speaker stands everybody should sit down. When the Speaker stands to adjourn the House, we should wait until the mace and the authority of the House have walked out before we walk out. Madam Speaker, every time for the last three, four or five years that I have been in this place, people walk out before you have even had a chance to stand and take leave of the House.
I have a few other ideas that I would like to share with the House, but you are telling me that my time is up, Madam Speaker. In closing, I would say that most of us participating in this debate have the interests of Parliament at heart. It must be an orderly place and it must be a reflection of what Canadians expect, which is the best in all of us. I hope that we will seek that in the near future.


Mr. Jerry Pickard (Essex-Kent):: Madam Speaker, I must congratulate my colleague from Vanier. He is a very astute member of the House of Commons who has also shown a very high degree of leadership. Certainly if all members of Parliament followed the type of leadership he provides there would be no question of decorum in this House.
My observations are somewhat similar to those of the member for Vanier. A very large portion of the members of this House are hard working, dedicated to the principles of developing laws and dedicated to making this House a place that Canadians can respect. However that is not the case in every instance. I guess we all are a bit abashed when we realize it is not the case.
I would like to comment on another part of this picture. As a new member coming into the House of Commons I faced the free trade debate and had to speak on it. Believe me, I was as nervous as anyone could have been about speaking in the House of Commons for the first time. I recall being heckled. I think I can recall exactly the members who heckled me.
It is true that those members heckle many others. Not everyone in the House is doing this. It is a particular group of people. It is not one political party. Every political party has people who seem to get very emotionally involved and very concerned about issues. We must realize that the House of Commons is a partisan place. It is a place of adversarial concerns where people do get emotional over issues.
I represent a rural Canadian riding. Farming is a major issue and auto manufacturing has been a major issue. My riding has been through very difficult times. When we speak of the farming issue or the manufacturing issue I do get very concerned. I probably get a little more emotional about those issues than some other members in the House.
When you feel that your issues are not being heard clearly, when you feel that the points you are putting across are not being accepted, you may have a tendency to respond in a negative way. That is not necessarily the way it should be but it is the way it is. I will do my very best to represent the concerns of my constituents and make sure they are heard.
I believe that the House of Commons does bring out the worst in people because of the press, as my colleague pointed out very clearly. The one liners that people are looking for are often what brings this House to a level lower than we would like to see.
The 30-second television clip or the newspaper headline, or some other vehicle by which people hope to get national recognition, often brings this House to a lower level. It is unfortunate that occurs. Many people also question me about the fact that the Liberals are always negative about what the government puts forward.
The Liberals are negative because they are the Loyal Opposition. Part of the role of the opposition is to look at the problems in bills and deal with them.
As my colleague from Vanier mentioned, the problem is not every member of the House. It is only a number of members of the House. I would say a small number. I also point out that the press and the method by which it generates news stories may also be a negative factor. That is very unfortunate as well.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Essex-Kent for his comments.
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I think we agree on most of the points this motion addresses. Like him, I think that the present rules and conventions we have in this House are sufficient. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We do not have to reinvent the mousetrap.
If we applied the rules we have in a good manner, in an efficient manner, this House would be a lot better. If I have anything to add to the comments of my friend from Essex-Kent, it would be to repeat that Canadians receive a reflection of Canada from this House.
I for one believe that my country is not being reflected in a fair manner when these words or unparliamentary acts are being used by people. With the tools we have we can dispose of that, discipline people and make sure the discipline sticks. We have to stop giving people who have broken the rules more publicity, more attention than they actually deserve, and stop recompensing them. That must stop.


M. Marcel Prud'homme (Saint-Denis):: Madam Speaker, I listened as I always do to the comments made by my colleague and long-time friend. I would like him to elaborate on what he said because he did not have the time to address the issue which we discussed this morning in the House management committee, the issue of how to impress matters on members, without having to change the rules. With a basic education-and by basic education I do not necessarily mean a university degree-well bred people, my parents used to say, behave like well bred people. This is so elementary that I am surprised that I should be stating such an obvious fact.
When someone has a good education, he behaves accordingly. I understand that in the heat of our debates we sometimes say things which we often regret afterwards.
But I do not see why we should destroy a Parliament because of such things. I look at my friend and colleague. I prefer, as you know, Madam Speaker, to call members by their name even if I am told that it is against the rules, but Mr. Darling is our esteemed colleague.

Those who watch him debating know he has learned how to debate vigorously, passionately, but has never seen fit to be vulgar.

The hon. member from Ottawa-Vanier tells us that we are often a reflection of what is going on in the country. I would therefore think that this institution should not be destroyed because the behaviour of some of its members is more or less acceptable. He could remind us, and I wish he would, of what went on in this place between 1964 and 1968. I assure you, my dear colleagues, that what you see today pales in comparison. Therefore, we must give hope to Canadians who are watching us by telling them that not all is wrong with this institution. That is the message I will convey to the House when I take part in the debate. We must not destroy the institution because of improper language or behaviour on the part of certain members. I would like my colleague, who is familiar with this subject, to elaborate on that if he has the time.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member for Ottawa-Vanier has one long minute left.


Jean-Robert Gauthier: Madam Speaker, I invite my colleague from Saint-Denis and hon. members to read the report of the proceedings of the International Association of French speaking Parliamentarians, AIPLF, which spent a whole day here in Ottawa studying the behaviour of elected members and the image they presented to the general public. I ask hon. members to read it carefully. They will see that we have not reinvented anything. Indiscipline and disorder existed in the 1800s, the 1700s and even the 1600s. We will deal with this subject in an adult way. We will try to correct our faults, but we must not try to reinvent the wheel.
Madam Speaker, as president of the AIPLF you will allow me to conclude by saying that you know very well, as I do, that this day long conference in Ottawa you chaired was a great success. I would ask hon. members to read that report carefully.

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Howard Edward Crosby: Madam Speaker, in the few moments remaining I would like to express a few thoughts on the motion before the House.
I want to begin by focusing attention on the statement in the motion that the House recognizes it is a national forum for the consideration of issues and challenges facing all Canadians.
I think those words were chosen very carefully because it is important to point out to Canadians that the House of Commons is not necessarily a forum for resolving problems. The House of Commons does not have the ability to put forward its own initiatives designed to resolve the problems that face Canadians, particularly in these difficult economic times. What the House does is consider propositions that are put forward by the government. Government members for the most part support those propositions and opposition members almost entirely oppose those propositions.
Therefore it is important to recognize it is in that atmosphere that the debate takes place. We are here to discuss the issues. It is quite understandable that there is an adversarial process at work in the House of Commons as we examine the initiatives the government brings forward.
This motion, I think, seeks to examine whether there can be a greater degree of civility among members in that adversarial process. The members should recognize matters of decorum to the point that the adversarial process can be more effective and bring about an appropriate conclusion to the propositions brought before the House.
If the public would recognize that process, we would have a greater and better understanding of the work of the House of Commons.
I do not want to be seen as defending in any way, shape or form a lack of civility in the House of Commons which I am sure is of great concern to you, Madam Speaker, as you see it on a day-to-day basis.
I think it is also important to remind Canadians that the House of Commons is not a place of worship. It is not a church. It is not a church service. It is not like listening
to a minister or pastor or priest delivering a sermon. You do not object to the statements made in a church or in other forums, but you do have a right to object to statements made in the House of Commons. If sometimes members are too exuberant in their expression against those statements, it may cause difficulties but it does not subvert the system entirely.
I think what members have to do, myself included, is recognize the need for civility and respond to that concern.
I would like to address another point that is made very clear in the motion and that is the partisanship involved in the House of Commons. It is very difficult to turn back the hands of time on a matter like partisanship. I know as I grow older I am less inclined to be partisan, but then something happens that awakens my baser instincts and I rise to the bait and become partisan once again. I hope that I and other members can control that, but we cannot really apologize to the Canadian public for a degree of partisanship. It has been a part of our system literally for centuries, through the British system and for over a century in Canada.
We can resolve to do better on the issue of civility. We can recognize the common interests of all parliamentarians and just the brotherhood and sisterhood that ought to exist among us. On the issue of partisanship, we can blunt our attacks. We are members of political parties. We are obligated to support a common goal, but I think the motion has served a useful purpose in reminding us that this is a national forum for the debate and discussion of issues. There is an adversarial process, but that process can be dealt with in a civil way and with a lower degree of partisanship.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I will have to interrupt the hon. member who can continue with his remarks the next time the House is studying this motion.
Before we move to Private Members' Business, I would like the House to know that I have received written notice from the hon. member for Hamilton West that he is unable to move his motion during private members' hour on Friday, November 22, 1991.

It has not been possible to arrange an exchange of positions in the order of precedence pursuant to Standing Order 94(2)(a). Accordingly, I am directing the table
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officers to drop that item of business to the bottom of the order of precedence.

Pursuant to Standing Order 94(2)(d) private members' hour will thus be suspended and the House will continue with the business before it prior to private members' hour.

It being five o'clock, pursuant to Standing Order 30(6), the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's Order Paper.



PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS


Mr. Don Boudria (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell) moved:: That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider the advisibility of moving the Harper memorial statue from its present site on Wellington Street to a site on the grounds of Parliament Hill and that the said memorial be designated as a statue commemorating the valuable contribution to Canada made by employees of the federal government.
He said: Madam Speaker, I have the pleasure to present this motion for debate in the House today, hoping that it will be adopted later on. This motion, as you said so well, Madam Speaker, has two purposes: first, to move the Harper statue and, second, to recognize government employees' valuable contribution to the Canadian society.

First of all I would like to start off by speaking of the Harper memorial and what it means. The Harper memorial is a wonderful statue close to Parliament Hill. It is located on Wellington Street, almost directly in front of Centre Block. It was erected in honour of a young man, Albert Henry Harper, a young civil servant working in the Department of Labour who had been hired by the then Minister of Labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King, later the Prime Minister.
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When Mr. Harper was working for the federal government, going back home one night he stopped and, as was customary then, had a walk beside the Ottawa River. There were young people skating on the Ottawa River. Unfortunately they fell through the ice and two of them were drowning. Young Mr. Harper attempted to rescue them unsuccessfully and died in the process.
The tale goes that within two or three days a large group of citizens of Ottawa gathered together to erect a statue in honour of this brave young man. It was perhaps an unusual thing because there have been many other acts of bravery in this country that had not been recognized, but for a whole variety of reasons the statue was erected in honour of Mr. Harper. The site was chosen by the then Prime Minister, Mackenzie King. They erected this statue in front of Centre Block, but outside the grounds of Parliament Hill.
If anyone says that the statue should not be moved, I say to them it has been moved twice already. It was immediately in front of Metcalfe Street. It was moved eastward a few feet. Then because the salt of buses and other commercial vehicles damaged it, it was moved again a few more feet, this time closer to the sidewalk.
The reason I want to move it is because it is a valuable historic monument and it is in the process of being destroyed, by the corrosion and salt of the road, and unlike 1916 or thereabouts we now have many large commercial vehicles which could overrun the curb and hit the statue and destroy it.
I want to move that statue inside the grounds to protect it.

Let me tell you why I would, at the same time, attach a plaque, if we agree, to the statue commemorating the valuable contribution made by Canadian civil servants.

It was only a few weeks ago that five brave Canadians on a civil mission yet working for the military crashed in northern Canada and lost their lives. Two of the five came from my constituency of Glengarry-Prescott- Russell: Captain Judy Trepanier of Cumberland and Warrant Officer Robert Grimsley of Limoges. Those are two examples of civil servants who lost their lives working for their country, not in war, but nevertheless they made an immense contribution.

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We sometimes take for granted what civil servants do and the valuable contributions they give. We have had a recent row between the government and civil servants and I do not want to get into the debate right now as to who is right and who is wrong. I could but that is not necessary. It will not contribute toward this debate.
The point I want to make is that we will all recognize the tremendous and valued contribution of our civil servants. Recognizing that, I feel that we should offer a small token of appreciation.

A few weeks after being elected in 1984 when I arrived on Parliament Hill-I had already worked here as a civil servant during many years-I was given a guided tour on the Hill, and during that visit we stopped in front of a plaque. The plaque was located close to the entrance to the House, but it has been moved since. On the plaque one could read the name of a member who had died in the Parliament fire. I was told: "Here is Hon. Bowman Law's plaque, indicating that he died in the fire. With him died six employees". I asked the security guard who led the guided tour who were these employees, but he said he did not know. When I asked the question at the Library of Parliament, nobody knew the answer.
After searching for several months we were able to get the names of the six civil servants who, along with the member, died in the fire in the Parliament Buildings. They had been forgotten. They remained forgotten for a long time.
Later, on February 3,1988, the present Speaker of the House decided, after I suggested it in a motion to the House in 1985, to put up next to the one for the member, a plaque commemorating the six employees who died during the fire of February 3, 1916. I am grateful to the Speaker for this kind gesture. It was not very costly. Taxpayers did not have to dig very deep for that, but I think it means a great deal.
What I am asking today in the second half of my motion is much the same thing.

I am not asking that we denigrate the honour of Mr. Harper by attaching another plaque to his statue. What I am saying is that at the same time as we recognize him, we say: "You, Mr. Harper and many other civil servants have given a lot to your country. This little plaque recognizes that you have".
That is all I ask. I know that from time to time we are asked by officials within parties, particularly those in government, to read a text that others have prepared asking us not to support this or to support that. I say to my colleagues that this need not be partisan. We have plenty of opportunity to do that. We just finished 10 minutes ago debating a motion which refers to the fact that from time to time we are much more partisan that we need to be. What an irony it is that only a few moments later we are discussing something for which no partisanship is even required.
Few funds if any have to be spent. The statue has to be moved anyway; it will be destroyed if it stays where it is. I am just asking to put it inside the yard. A few hundred dollars could well buy the plaque necessary to recognize the value of our civil servants.
If I can repeat something I have said before in this House-I have been around here for many years, not all of them as an MP-members will know that I started my career in this place on October 25, 1966 as a busboy. I consider myself one of those civil servants, not one of those dead civil servants who should be recognized. I ask the House to recognize those people who have given of themselves for us. If the government says it cannot afford a couple of hundred dollars for the plaque, I am sure I could raise the necessary funds by rounding up a few civil servants who could contribute $1 each.

I ask my colleagues to support this motion which is, I believe, in the spirit of what we talked about this afternoon. I listened to the remarks made by the hon. members for Saint-Denis, for Halifax West and others. They spoke with great eloquence to the motion of the government House leader which basically says that we do not have to be partisan all the time, as we were told and as we thought we should be. In a few minutes we might have the opportunity to prove that all these fine words,
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that fine motion we debated this afternoon , were not in vain.

I know the members are personally well intentioned. I ask but a small effort of their time to demonstrate it this afternoon.


Mr. Jack Shields (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Employment and Immigration):: Madam Speaker, I would like to say at the outset that I agree whole-heartedly with the principle expressed by the motion put forward by my friend, the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
The statue of Sir Galahad has charmed many visitors to the capital over the years. It is true that salt spread on the streets harmed the statue and caused some problems with the present location so it was moved a little bit further back off the street. Everyone is now familiar with Henry Albert Harper's gallant and selfless act. It is well known to all of us here and all visitors who came. Most of us can look upon it and identify with it even in the present turmoil of the world. There is a sympathy and an admiration for the Right Hon. William Lyon Mackenzie King and for the gallantry that was displayed by this individual.
Harper and Mackenzie King, it might not be so well known, became extremely close friends. They spent many hours debating proper behaviour of men of the time, the gallantry, the gallant, I suppose. Harper retained this youthful enthusiasm, but King did not. Harper retained the ideals and idyllic dreams of youth. King became irritable about his friend's lack of ambition and his deeper and more reflective form of idealism that even at the turn of the century was commonly found in poets and perhaps a little less commonly in men of business and politics.
The memorial that was placed by King was a remembrance of Harper's gallantry and death in his attempt to rescue Miss Bessie Blair from drowning beneath the ice. It has also been called a farewell, not only to his friend but to the feeling that King probably lost some of the enthusiasm that Harper had, after he got into politics.
Incidentally it is not strictly true that Sir Galahad is the only monument to civil servants in Ottawa. Behind the National Library at the end of Wellington Street there is a handsome portrait statue of Sir Arthur Doughty,
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Dominion Archivist, looking solemnly out over the river. He too was King's friend. Doughty's monument used to be in a more prominent position. I understand that it could have been in the front of the building, but rumour has it that a chief librarian who followed him had it moved to the back.
As to the substance of the motion of my hon. friend, I would like to bring to the attention of the House that the Department of Public Works, as well as adding to the statuary on the Hill, has been cleaning the Harper memorial and as far as possible restoring it to its original condition. It has been cleaned, the disastrous action of the road salt neutralized, and Galahad has been returned to very near his original state.
The member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell is quite right in his observation that the site, even though it was moved a metre or two away from the immediate danger of the salt and heavy traffic, remains a potentially dangerous place for bronze and stone. The decision to leave him there was not, I can assure you, Madam Speaker, a slavish adherence to a principle of heritage restoration work or done without thought. Sir Galahad has been moved in the past and, generally speaking, is not bound too tightly to the notion that statues once placed should not be moved. In leaving the statue by the side of Wellington Street, the Department of Public Works acted in full consultation with conservators, the Federal Heritage Building Review Office and the National Capital Commission. A detailed analysis by a team of internationally recognized experts in the field of bronze conservation was made just after the Diefenbaker statue was erected.
Their recommendation was that Sir Galahad was well protected by the restoration process and by the layers of hard wax with which he is covered. He should be left there, not forever, but for the time being, until a number of issues important to the subject are addressed.
I want my hon. friend to listen to this because I think it is well thought out. Not too long ago, at the time of the debate on a previous motion by the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell calling for the erection of a statue of the Right Hon. Lester B. Pearson, the former minister, Stewart Mclnnes, tabled a report to Parliament on commemorative statues of Canadian Prime Ministers and other eminent Canadians. In the course of the

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deliberations surrounding the report the government recognized that the actual parliamentary precinct, the Hill itself, should really be reserved for statues and monuments of monarchs and parliamentarians, and notably Prime Ministers, notwithstanding that statues of others do exist on the Hill.
This is not a new idea. King had participated in the subcommittee work to find a place for this monument. He objected that it should be placed in an obscure and isolated part and fought with determination that it be located in a pre-eminent place on the Hill on the southeast lawn area. However, his colleagues at that time did not agree, not I think from any motive that would decline their respect for the civil service but because they were aware that the Hill precinct is a finite space and could easily be filled to capacity should free reign be given to unbridled political passion.
I do agree that in the matter of these historic monuments, monuments that will be seen, admired and studied by our great-grandchildren, we should avoid ad hoc actions that may be regretted later, however meritorious and well conceived the motion.
Almost every statue and monument presently on the Hill has been put there by a decision of the House of Commons that has had little bearing on any plan or clear thought for the effect of the object on the whole. It is, of course, the right of the House to make such decisions but perhaps not in the best interests of the future. Plans have been made in the past for the disposition of monuments on the Hill and all have been put aside in the heat of the sentiment that inevitably surrounds the proposal for the next statue or monument.
I would prefer to have such decisions made away from passion and part of an over-all plan such as that now being examined by the Board of Internal Economy. I hope my friend is aware that this has been taking place.
Another equally important consideration is the funding for all these works. I have to tell you that the Department of Public Works has been able to clean and restore these important monuments by using small amounts from the funds voted for the upkeep of the Parliament Buildings; from cash flow if you like. No
funds are available that are dedicated specifically to the upkeep of parliamentary monuments.
The result of that is that although, as you can see for yourself, about half of the 20 or so have been restored, the others will have to wait. For instance, it was our hope and the hope of Public Works officials that work could begin on the restoration of the National War Memorial in 1992. We all would have liked to see this jewel of a monument that means so much to all Canadians cleaned, repaired and pristine for the 125th anniversary of Confederation. But there simply is not sufficient money at this time and the project will have to be postponed for a little while. With such scarce funds it would be irresponsible to allow work to proceed without planning.
I can, however, assure members and the author of the motion in particular that the government recognizes the proposal is valid. The Department of Public Works will ensure that the matter is not put aside and that as funds become available, the relocation of Sir Galahad will be addressed in the proper context, that of an over-all plan.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Speaker, I would just like to say a few words about the motion presented by my colleague, the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, as it relates to the Harper memorial statue and its relocation.
I listened very carefully to what the parliamentary secretary said in his intervention on behalf of the government and the belief that, yes, the motion of my friend and colleague is a good one and that when there is an opportunity and dollars available, he would be in favour of looking to move this particular statue to a better location.
We are not talking about a great deal of money here. For example, just this afternoon I was reading a clipping about how Treasury Board spent $250,000 to advertise how not to pay our civil servants because of the strike.
I am not fortunate enough to know exactly how much it would cost to have this particular statue moved, but I am sure the amount is quite small, probably a few thousand dollars maximum. Not too long ago in my own hometown we moved a statue. We got volunteers to put the statue on a vehicle and move it to another location. I do not want to be partisan but I would say to the
November 21, 1991

government opposite that the argument really has no merit in this discussion.
Therefore, it would become a matter of where the statue should go. Obviously my colleague is suggesting its present location is not a good one and that it should be moved. He is suggesting that it be moved on to Parliament Hill where it would be somewhat safer. I believe that is a legitimate argument. It obviously needs clarification as to exactly where it should be placed.
I have to agree with the member opposite that statutes cannot just be put here, there and everywhere. Knowing how sophisticated and somewhat arrogant members of Parliament are sometimes, we would all want our statue left behind when we leave. It is not bad enough that we have to take our chairs with us, we would probably want to leave a statue behind as well.
I am very interested in the part of the member's motion which suggests that we dedicate this statute to the employees of the federal government for their valuable contribution to Canada.
As a labour critic and a member who is very much involved in what the workers in this place do, I think that is a very legitimate area of concern of my colleague from Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
In looking around at this place and the different statues there are on the Hill, there does not seem to be enough discussion or enough reflection of the merits of that particular quote I just read from the motion. Maybe we too often take for granted the importance of the people who keep this place running and the importance of the civil servants across Canada who put in the extra hours it takes to make this country the great country it is.
I strongly urge the government to reconsider the fact that on the one hand it feels that this motion has merit and on the other hand it is not prepared to accept the motion and set up a committee and go through the process of moving this particular statue, putting it in its proper place. At the same time, it should also consider using it to pay homage to those individuals who have worked all their lives for their country as civil servants and those who are still employed by the Government of Canada.
I think we should go that one little step, especially in consideration of the difficulties we have been having with the public servants and the strikes and the back-to-
Private Members' Business
work legislation we were involved in that was debated very strongly in this place.
That would go a long way to show our civil servants, the people who are working for the public day in and day out, that we care that much about them to make it a little bit of a prestigious memorial by putting a plaque on a statute commemorating their activities.
In conclusion, I wish to say I support this motion whole-heartedly. It shows that we in this place are not just thinking of ourselves as a lot of Canadians think we do. In essence, we are thinking of our public servants and we are also thinking of the past which is something that we have to be very vigilant to remember.
The past is what has got us to the point we are at today. As soon as we forget about our past, it becomes an anarchy in this country. Having said that, I would hope that the government will be prepared to accept this motion in its entirety and get on with the job.


Mr. Bruce Halliday (Oxford):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join in this debate today on the motion of the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell which has been added to by my colleagues on both sides of the House.
It is very fitting in a way that this motion, with the intent that it has, should arise from that particular member and colleague in the House who, as he intimated himself a few moments ago, has had the unusual and unique experience of having started work on the Hill after he left school and then moving on to become a member of the House of Commons. I am not surprised that he, of all of us, should be the one to bring forward this particular suggestion.
I also agree with him that we are not dealing with a partisan subject. However, that some of us on the government side may not feel it appropriate to pursue and support his motion is not an indication of political partisanship.
It is not my intention today to debate the merits of moving the Harper memorial statue from its present site on Wellington Street to a site on the grounds of Parliament Hill. The reasons are straightforward. They are not emotional reasons at all but rather reasons that are based more on criteria that do not exist and would allow for that at the present time.

Private Members' Business
Indeed, the regulations that govern the placement of commemorations on the grounds of Parliament Hill are very clear in this regard. They state that only Prime Ministers and monarch? be considered for this honour. I notice the hon. member shaking his head. Maybe there is room for debate there but my information is that Parliament Hill is reserved for monarchs and former Prime Ministers.
Henry Albert Harper's life is worthy of further consideration. The hon. member for Glengariy-Prescott- Russell has touched on some of it. I would like to elaborate more on that because he did see a variety of achievements in his life.
I do not believe that those achievements in themselves, those contributions, were national in their significance and therefore worthy of his statue being placed on the Hill with former Prime Ministers and former monarchs.
In fact, were the siting of a commemoration to Henry Harper to be considered today, it certainly would not qualify for the high profile site it currently occupies.
In other words, people who are recognized for such deeds of bravery are not recognized in that fashion today, although I am not attempting to take away from the fact that he was appropriately honoured in those days.
To support our position, I would like to sketch briefly the life that Henry Harper led before his untimely death 90 years ago.
When he arrived in Ottawa in 1900 to become deputy minister of the newly formed Department of Labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King encountered a number of friends from his undergraduate years at the University of Toronto. Among them was Henry Harper, a young man from Cookstown, Ontario.
While Mr. King had furthered his studies in Toronto and the United States after graduating in 1895, Harper had pursued a career in journalism. The two men rekindled their friendship when they met in Ottawa five years later.
By 1900, acting as both parliamentary correspondent and city editor for a Montreal newspaper, Mr. Harper was a natural choice for King as his assistant editor on the department's new publication The Labour Gazette.
Both King and Harper were deeply affected by the condition of the working poor in the industrial society. They sought in their new roles to be knights of the 20th century, so to speak: gallant, chivalrous and dedicated to the selfless service of others and their own political ambitions. Harper in fact had even placed in his room a reproduction of his favourite painting Sir Galahad.
During the winter months, both King and Harper devoted much of their time to prolonged reading and intense debates on the subject of chivalry. One of their favourite authors was Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose epic poem about the medieval King Arthur and his knights, entitled Idylls of the King, played a special role in providing them with an ideal of manly conduct.
Winter also meant outdoor sports. Skating parties were especially popular, including those organized by the Governor General and his wife, Lord and Lady Minto. Speaking of skating parties and tragedy, I recall my mother telling me years ago that she was skating here in Ottawa at the skating rink when the Parliament Buildings burned down in 1916.1 could not help but recall that event when I touch now on what happened on this particular night.
Among those invited to this skating party by the Governor General were young debutantes like Bessie Blair, who has been referred to previously, one of the daughters of Andrew G. Blair, a senior member of the cabinet in the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
On Friday, December 5, 1901, while acting as Deputy Minister during one of King's absences from the city, Harper went out to skate on the Ottawa River. On his way home he apparently met and joined a group of young people coming from one of the Minto skating parties near Rideau Hall. Moments later, however, the ice gave way and Harper saw two of the group fall through the ice into the freezing water.
While one young man reached safety, Bessie Blair was clearly in great difficulty and drowning. Despite pleas from others not to risk his life, Harper dived in to save her.
Their bodies were not recovered until the following morning.
Within three days of the drowning, and on what would have been Harper's 28th birthday, a large group of citizens, as was mentioned earlier, met in Ottawa City
November 21, 1991

Hall to express their desire to commemorate Harper's gallantry.
King served on the committee appointed to oversee the project and played a very active role. He proposed, for example, that the memorial should derive its inspiration from Harper's favourite painting of Sir Galahad.
King was equally active on the subcommittee appointed to select a site, which is being discussed so avidly today. Resisting suggestions to place the monument in an isolated park, he fought vigorously for a central location and preferred one on Parliament Hill in the southeast corner of the grounds. The government refused King's reports.
Although his endeavours failed, King did succeed in placing it close by: exactly on the north side of Wellington Street at the head of Metcalfe, at the main ceremonial approach to Parliament from the south.
We recognize Henry Harper's accomplishments, both as a reporter and during his brief tenure as a civil servant. We also acknowledge his bravery that winter day in 1901 when he died attempting to save the life of Ms. Blair.
We respect Henry Harper's actions, indeed his sacrifice. That is why a commemoration of Mr. Harper now stands at the gateway to Parliament Hill commanding a prestigious location in our capital.
An illustration in that respect is clear in the 1990 decision to remove the Sir Galahad statue for restorative work required following the long-term exposure to pollutants, as my colleague alluded to previously. A joint NCC and Public Works Canada committee subsequently decided that the statue should be replaced close to its previous location and this was done late in 1990.
I would like to remind the members however that in April 1988 a report commissioned by the National Capital Commission entitled "Capital Commemoration" recommended, and I emphasize this, that only commemorations of former Prime Ministers be placed on Parliament Hill. A program to erect statues of all deceased former Prime Ministers on Parliament Hill was approved by cabinet in September and cabinet approved Parliament Hill as the location for future statues until space no longer permits. Since there are six deceased Prime
Adjournment Debate
Ministers who have not yet been commemorated in addition to the statue of Queen Elizabeth to be unveiled next year, space is at a premium.
It was for those reasons that the siting of Sir Galahad on Parliament Hill was not an issue when the subject was discussed last year.
Given the memorial's current high profile, the restorative work that has been carried out, and cabinet's approval of the NCC's commemoration's policy, we do not believe that the Harper memorial should be relocated to the grounds of Parliament Hill.
I thank you for the opportunity to offer my comments on this subject.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Resuming debate.
Since nobody wants to rise, the period provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired and the item is dropped from the Order Paper.


Mr. Gagliano:: Madam Speaker, if there is unanimous consent, and the parliamentary secretary on the other side can tell us that, we could proceed immediately to the adjournment debate.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Do I have unanimous consent to call it six o'clock?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

[Stage Direction]
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

Maurice Brydon Foster: Madam Speaker, on October 31 I put a question to the Minister of Labour concerning the very extensive lay-offs which have occurred in the Algoma district this past year, both in Sault Ste. Marie at Algoma Steel and in Elliot Lake at the operating uranium mines there. In fact, some 2,400 workers were laid off in Elliot Lake mines last year. They

November 21, 1991
Adjournment Debate
have now in almost every case exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits.
I was advised in late August that 260 of these workers were eligible for the program for older worker adjustment. It provides something like 70 per cent of the benefit that they would receive under unemployment insurance as an older worker pension from age 55 to age 64 when they become eligible for the Old Age Security pension, Canada Pension and other pensions.
The minister responded at that time, indicating that the Government of Canada, his office and his department had approved the application for these 260 workers and that the matter still had to be dealt with by the Treasury Board.
I understand that Treasury Board has now approved this and that it has gone on to Ontario and that a decision with regard to the program for older worker adjustment for these 260 workers is imminent.
I hope the parliamentary secretary, responding on behalf of the minister tonight, will be able to give a positive response to that, indicating that this assistance will be available.
Clearly in my view this is one of the best programs that the government has because often workers in the age bracket of 55 to 64 have very little chance of being retrained, very little chance of securing a job, especially when we are facing very high unemployment and very high welfare costs this coming winter with 1.5 million people unemployed.
If the minister is able to respond in a positive way and if the Ontario government has agreed to this program for some 260 workers, about 200 from the Rio Algom Mines, the two that shut down a year ago, and 60 from Denison Mines Limited, the government will be able to move rapidly to interview these individual workers to assess their needs and to be able to provide the full benefits of the Program for Older Worker Adjustment.
I think the decision by the minister is very important, not only at this time for these 260 workers but equally important for the several hundred workers who will be laid off at Denison Mines Limited some time late next spring. They would not become eligible for this benefit until their unemployment insurance benefits had run
out. I am very pleased that the government here has approved it. I hope the minister will be able to indicate that he has now received approval from the Ontario government and that these benefits will flow in the very early future to these workers who face a very difficult time without APALA Program for Older Worker Adjustment, older workers pensions.


Jack Wendele Shields: Madam Speaker, we moved off our schedule about 20 minutes early and our parliamentary secretary with the official response is not here. He is on his way and I would ask that we proceed with the next one. When he gets here we can respond, if that is acceptable to my friend.


EMPLOYMENT
Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Speaker, I too rise today in order to get some answers to a particular question that I asked the Minister of Employment and Immigration on June 18, 1991.
I asked about the fact that we are looking at some sort of national retraining strategy and programs to be implemented in this country because of the restructuring that is going on due to the free trade agreement.
People in this country will know that we are in a recession and that there are some difficult times when there is over 10 per cent unemployment. There are over one million Canadians on unemployment insurance and, in essence, during the election of 1988, the first election that I ran in, we on this side of the House at least asked the government if when we put this new regime called free trade into place there be worker adjustment programs put in place in order to deal with those who would be considered to be losers under this new agreement between the United States and Canada.
During Question Period on June 18, 1991 I asked the minister if he could explain to us in detail what took place with respect to the 10,800 displaced workers in the auto industry and the 9,200 displaced workers in the steel industry. I asked whether these particular men and women were moved from this sector of the economy into a training program of some sort for those who were of the age at which it was felt to be essential for them to be retrained, to continue their employment, and not to rely on welfare or unemployment insurance for a long period of time.
November 21, 1991

As those who had the opportunity to read Hansard will know, the answer I received from the minister was basically that the government has 400 different programs running out there now-what more do we want-and that in essence the government is doing what is necessary.
If that is the case, then why is it that we and the government in particular are undertaking this new prosperity initiative, consulting Canadians on how we are going to deal with all the problems that we have in these different sectors? If we were doing such a good job with these 400 or so programs that the minister alluded to then it would not be necessary to deal with this prosperity campaign that he has mentioned and the minister of trade is now talking about, in the consultation process that is on its way now.
I would like to say to the members opposite and to the minister's parliamentary secretary in this adjournment debate that it frustrates me to no end and all Canadians, when you ask very serious questions concerning the steel industry which is in big, big trouble, and the auto parts industry which is big, big trouble with a lot of those employees.
We are not naive in this place, and neither are Canadian workers. We understand that in a global market there are going to be changes that need to be looked at. In essence what I am trying to say is when we ask that question I do not want to get the answer I got from the minister which was: "That side of the House does not understand the issue and therefore come and talk to me after Question Period and I will tell you just why it is that you do not understand".
We understand very well that we are in big trouble. The Chamber of Commerce has come out and said so, as we have said for many, many months now. The restructuring going on in our economy is going to cause severe problems for a long period of time. We need those adjustment programs and we need them now. We want them now. We want an explanation as to what effect they will have in the different sectors.
In a community like mine in which forestry is the number one employer, we would like to know if there was a downturn in that particular sector what the game plan of the government would be. I am hoping in the few
Adjournment Debate
minutes that the parliamentary secretary has he will just give us a snapshot of what this government is doing in order that we can tell our constituents and all employees who are frightened because of what is going on out there that there is hope and we are planning for the future and we are looking ahead to help them with their problems.


Jack Wendele Shields: : Madam Speaker, I would like to respond in greater detail to the questions placed by my hon. friend, the member from Kenora- Rainy River on July 18 on the free trade agreement.
At this stage it is really too early to come to any definite conclusions about the impact of the free trade agreement. There are encouraging signs however. Trade and investment have shown positive trends in the last three years. Exports of end products to the United States increased $4 billion between 1988 and 1990. Between
1989	and 1990 manufacturing investment in Canada rose 15 per cent. Canada's 16 per cent gain in investment and new plant and equipment was second-and I would underline this-only to Japan among the G-7 nations. In
1990	there was a net inflow of foreign investment from all countries of $4.3 billion into Canada, the first net inflow in more than 15 years.
The dispute settlement mechanisms of the free trade agreement are working very well. The free trade agreement has led to a reduced number of trade disputes and the dispute settlement mechanism and procedures which have been established will help to deal with future trade disputes as they arise.
Job losses over the past year should not be attributed to the free trade agreement. It is only one of the several factors including wage rates, business cycles and the value of the Canadian dollar which influence employment patterns in Canada. While there have been positive developments, some workers may still be adversely affected by structural adjustments taking place within the Canadian economy. These individuals can and are assisted through a wide range of general labour market programs which the Department of Employment and Immigration Canada has in place.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I see that the hon. parliamentary secretary has arrived. Would he care to answer the hon. member for Algoma at this time?

November 21, 1991
Adjournment Debate


Mr. James:: Etas the hon. member made his presentation?


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Ele has made his presentation as we started a bit earlier. The hon. parliamentary secretary.


UNEMPLOYMENT
Kenneth Albert James: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his question concerning the eligibility of workers under the Program for Older Worker Adjustment who have been laid off due to work force reduction at the Rio Algom Mines and the Denison Mines in Elliot Lake. The government is aware of this very difficult situation and is very concerned about it.
These are trying times in the north. The decision taken by Ontario Hydro to cease purchasing uranium from northern Ontario has had a very negative impact on its economy.
The Program for Older Worker Adjustment is a federal-provincial program which applies to those older workers who have been permanently laid off.
I am very pleased to inform the House and the hon. member from northern Ontario who is very concerned that today the Governments of Canada and Ontario announced the designation of the lay-off at Rio Algom and Denison Mines in addition to 20 others as being under POWA. The job has been done and I know he is very pleased. What a timely day to make this announcement, as many as 260 older workers in the Elliot Lake area may be eligible to receive benefits.
I would like to again announce that at the earliest opportunity the government will inform the workers affected of the decision. The designation has been made and a decision on the eligibility of the older workers will be made.
With respect to the number of lay-offs, I would like to announce that the committee will be visiting the community in the very near future. Officials will be interviewing the older workers to determine their eligibility. As the member knows, workers are eligible once unemployment insurance payments have ceased.
We would like to thank him for his interest. I know he looks forward to the interviews and designation of the
older workers so they can receive funding under an H annuity program purchased from the private sector.	H
We are very pleased as a federal government to have H acted on his concerns.	I
[Translation]	H
PAPER INDUSTRY	*


Alfonso Gagliano: Madam	H
Speaker, on September 27 of this year I rose in the	H
House to ask the President of the Treasury Board what	H
he intended to do to help an industry in crisis, namely H the paper industry.	H
During my intervention I asked the minister to review	H
his monetary policy in order to give a break to the 400	H
employees laid off by Donohue Matane Inc. I'he uncm-	H
ployment rate in the Matane area, in the province of	H
Quebec, exceeds 25 per cent. Needless to say, those 400	H
lay-offs are not what the region needs. We could do	H
without them.	H
The Minister of Forestry told me, and I quote from the H House of Commons Debates of September 27:	H
It is tragic of course that a new mill like this, as well equipped as it is
in technology, should not have overcome its initial start-up period. HH
That is what the minister had to offer to those 400	H
employees who were laid off. I agree it is tragic, but	H
something has to be done to stimulate the demand for H those products.	H
The minister knows full well that Canada is a natural H resources exporting country. Unfortunately the absurd	H
monetary policy of the Conservative government de-	H
stroys a demand already weakened by the recession.	H
Liberals are not the only ones who say the monetary	H
policy of this government affects not only the paper	H
industry but all Canadian industries. The Conference	H
Board of Canada predicts that our export sales will	H
decline by 1.6 per cent and states that a strong dollar	H
makes our products like softwood lumber less competi-	H
tive abroad. Phis is borne out by the fact that Canada	H
posted its first trade deficit in 15 years. Wc learned the	H
bad news yesterday. Wc heard today that the Canadian	H
Chamber of Commerce criticized this government's	H
monetary policy. The facts are quite simple. A strong	H
dollar is destroying the paper industry and all other	H
exporting industries in Canada.	H
V 5C ' ;
November 21, 1991

The minister said that the Matane mill, which is modem and well equipped, should survive the recession. But not so. A few weeks ago we read in La Presse that the net consolidated sales of Donohue were $19.4 million lower than the year before.
I will conclude by repeating my question: Does the minister know what his government intends to do to help out, to salvage our Canadian paper industry, and to counteract this considerable decline in our export sales?


Mr. Bill Kempling (Parliamentary Secretary to President of the Treasury Board and Minister of State (Finance)):: Madam Speaker, the question posed to the minister regarding the value of the Canadian dollar has been in front of the House for many days. Unfortunately some of the industries involved in exports seem to think that lowering the Canadian dollar will solve all their export problems. If we do that we will create a lot of import problems and we could create further problems for the debt we have at the present time, much of which is offshore.
There are great pressures on the Canadian dollar. The Bank of Canada can balance some of them in the short term. However, in the long term you cannot do anything more than allow the free market to work. That is what is happening today. Today, the Canadian dollar is at about 88 cents, down a little bit.
Look at the pressures on the dollar. Municipalities across the country, large municipalities, borrow offshore. Provinces borrow offshore. Large corporations which say that our bank rates are too high issue treasury bills on their own or borrow money offshore. That places pressure on the Canadian dollar. For years the Government of Canada encouraged provinces and municipalities to borrow offshore rather than place extra demands on the very limited investment capital in this country that results from our small population.
We feel that the dollar is going to come down. However I have to say quite honestly that if I were running a business today, which I am not, I would not base the success of my business on the level of the Canadian dollar. That is not a good way to do business. In the short run we could perhaps cause an order here or there. However, in the longer run we are better to work
Adjournment Debate
to keep inflation down, keep interest rates down and improve productivity in this country. That is a much better way to go about it than to impose a fixed rate of exchange on the Canadian dollar, for example.
The hon. member is a certified general accountant, or at least I believe he is. He knows the financial situation quite well and is very familiar with it. I can understand him wishing to speak on behalf of his constituents in the paper industry. The paper industry is under a lot of difficulty today and we can see some bright spots down the lane for it. However, we do not think that the solution is to fix the Canadian dollar at a lower rate.


EDUCATION
Mac Harb: Madam Speaker, on October 11, 1991 I asked the Secretary of State a question about Canada's educational situation concerning government funding. At the time the minister said that on a per capita basis we spend as much or more than any other country. Then the House leader stepped in and said that as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product Canada is second only to Sweden. The Secretary of State replied by saying: "absolutely".
The fact that he mentioned we were second to Sweden triggered a need for a little research in my mind. I have the report published this year by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In it there is a graph comparing Canada to seven countries around the world. The report starts by stating that: "International comparisons show that Canada's spending", on research and development only, "is one of the lowest of major industrialized countries". In fact, it does compare spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. It goes as follows: Sweden, 2.93 per cent; United States, 2.83 per cent; Japan, 2.78 per cent; Germany, 2.71 per cent; United Kingdom, 2.42 per cent; France, 2.33 per cent; and Canada, 1.38 per cent.
As you can see, Madam Speaker, statistics which were published and accepted by the Government of Canada show that Canada is nowhere to be seen when it comes to spending on educational elements such as research and development.
The government's record of last year alone shows there has been a cut of $485 million for education in its latest budget. The contributions to training have

November 21, 1991
Adjournment Debate
dropped by 4.6 per cent this year in spite of an over-all increase in government spending of 4.3 per cent.
As a matter of fact, between 1986 and 1994, the government eliminated $9.5 billion in transfer payments to the provinces. According to the latest statistics, by the year 2004 absolutely no federal funds will be going toward education and to the provinces in transfer payments.
While federal funding for education has been decreasing, student costs have been on the rise. Looking at post-secondary education, for example, Statistics Canada reports that Ontario tuition fees alone have increased by 53 per cent since 1983-84.
Likewise the cost of living has increased. On top of the cost of living, the federal government has introduced a 3 per cent tax on student loans and has applied the GST to books. This has added hundreds of dollars to many students' financial burdens and hit hardest those least able to afford to pay for their education.
I am here to ask the government: Would you please, members of the government, clarify to the Canadian public how you can say on one hand that we are on the leading edge when it comes to spending on research and development and, on the other hand, we have a tremendous number of cuts in areas such as education and transfer payments?


Mrs. Suzanne Duplessis (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister for External Relations and Minister of State (Indian Affairs and Northern Development)):: Madam Speaker, I know the hon. member for Ottawa Centre is concerned about education and I wish to assure him that I am too, because before I was elected to Parliament I was a teacher.
Contrary to what the hon. member suggests, Canada plays a leading role because it is clearly determined to promote excellence in education while respecting provincial jurisdiction. As the Secretary of State said, we devote a larger percentage of our GNP to education than most countries do. Canada comes second for the proportion of young people registered in post-secondary educational institutions, right after the United States.
To help us remain in the forefront of human resource development, the government recently announced the prosperity initiative, of which education is a key element.
Regarding the last part of the hon. member's question, I would like to say that the government has not cut funding for post-secondary education. We froze spending in order to control the national debt and we are proud of our success in this field. Moreover, although we had to limit transfer payments to the provinces to do so, the total funding available for post-secondary education continues to increase.
Thus assistance for post-secondary education under Established Programs Financing rose by $80 million in 1990-91 and $70 million in 1991-92, to reach nearly $6 billion this year. Of this total, about $2 billion is in cash. Total transfers are to increase to reflect population growth in future years.
In conclusion, in addition to providing financial aid to the provinces and territories the federal government is increasing its direct support for higher education through programs like funding for the University Research Council and the Canadian Student Aid Program. In all, it is estimated that about $2 billion will be given in direct support in 1991-92.


FORESTRY
Brian L. Gardiner: Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to pursue some questions I had asked of the government regarding the completion of the signing of a very important forest agreement between the Government of Canada and the province of Nova Scotia. In fact, back on March 26 of this year I asked the forestry committee of the Minister of Forestry when that agreement would be finally signed. The minister said at that time that he had a good fix on the Nova Scotia situation; the funds had been identified and he did not anticipate a delay.
Later in the year on October 28 in the House I asked the minister when he would be able to sign this important agreement. He answered on that date that he would be able to sign the new agreement as soon as a date could be arranged.

Our staff has consulted and checked with the Government of Nova Scotia and as of Thesday, in any case, there has been no indication from the Government of Canada as to when the minister would actually sign this particular agreement. It is very important that he does.
I hope when the member responding from the government side comments on the importance of this agreement, he can give the commitment that the minister gave some nine months ago that an agreement would be signed at any time. I hope the member responding can tell us when the minister is going to sign the new forest agreement with Nova Scotia.


Mr. Jean-Guy Hudon (Parliamentary Secretary to President of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be given this opportunity to address this House on our achievements in the area of sustainable forestry in Nova Scotia.
As you may know, the agreement was negotiated in two phases in Nova Scotia. The first phase saw the signing of a two-year, 1989-1991, interim agreement, the Canada-Nova Scotia cooperation agreement for forestry development, 1989-1991, CAFD I. This interim agreement had a major impact in two very important areas. First, it was instrumental in building upon the momentum established through previous forestry agreements. Second, it represented a new beginning toward more integrated and sustainable forestry development.
Twenty-four million federal dollars, 55 per cent of total $45 million agreement was invested in the Nova Scotia forest sector in key areas of forest management, applied research, development and technology transfer, and communications and education.
The two years saw us maintain annual silviculture targets needed to sustain a healthy and diversified forest
Adjournment Debate
sector. Over 11,000 hectares of silviculture, 4,000 in planting, was accomplished on small private land alone. Research projects into the environmental impacts of forestry operations have been initiated. Better availability of forestry data has been made in education and training.
Since the termination of CAFD I, key programs have continued, thanks to interim funding provided by the province. I wish to assure hon. members that the new agreement incorporates these funds spent by the province.
I am pleased to say, however, that we will not have to rely on provincial funds for much longer. All that remains for the signing of a new agreement is to arrange a suitable date.

I am pleased to say, however, that we will not have to rely on provincial funds much longer. All that remains for the signing of a new agreement is to arrange a suitable date.
There is great enthusiasm surrounding the programming and direction of this new agreement. It is a four-year deal, from 1991 to 1995, and will see continued implementation of Forestry Canada's principles for sustainable forestry development.
An appropriate date for the signing of this agreement is being negotiated, and rest assured this new agreement will embrace the concepts of sustainable development.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m.


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 6.11 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Friday, November 22, 1991