1992-04-30

Mr. Albert Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to 15 petitions.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.}



CANADA POST CORPORATION ACT


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-73, an act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.
Mr. Andre moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.



ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, there have been discussions and I am sure you will find unanimous consent for the following motions. First I move:
That five members and three staff of the Standing Committee on our Aboriginal Affairs be authorized to travel to northern Ontario form May 3 to May 6,1992 and to northern Quebec from May 19 to May 22, 1992 in relation to their study on aboriginal housing.


Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Madam Speaker, there have been consultations among the parties and in the tradition of trying to co-operate we give our consent.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Does the hon. parliamentary secretary have unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


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.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, I also move:

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Routine Proceedings
That five members and two staff of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs be authorized to travel to Banff, Alberta from May 14 to 18,1992 to attend the North Atlantic Assembly spring session.


David Charles Dingwall: Madam Speaker, again demonstrating the co-operation of the Official Opposition, I wish to give our consent to this motion.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Does the parliamentary secretary have unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


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.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, once more I move:
That four members and one staff of the subcommittee on regulations and competitiveness of the Standing Committee on Finance be authorized to travel to Rochester, New York, May 4 to May 5, 1992 to attend a conference of regulatory policy, in preparation for their study on regulatory policy.


David Charles Dingwall: Madam Speaker, as with the two previous motions, the Official Opposition wishes to give its consent in the view of the tradition that we have been consulted and believe common courtesies should prevail. We consent to this particular motion.
I hope later this day the government will be in the same mood as it is demonstrating here this morning.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Does the hon. parliamentary secretary have unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


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.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

Mr. Patrick Boyer (Etobicoke-Lakeshore):: Madam Speaker, I have great pleasure this morning to present to the House of Commons a petition signed by 36 electors in Etobicoke-Lakeshore requesting the enactment of legislation providing for a referendum of the people with respect to constitutional amendments.
This is certified in form as being correct and I am very happy to present it to Parliament this morning.


Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre):: Madam Speaker, this petition talks about co-operative housing which provides an affordable alternative to standard rental tenure and helps to meet the overwhelming demand for social housing in Canada.
The latest federal budget has reduced by 34 per cent the planned 1992 commitment to social housing, which resulted in the cancellation of the co-operative housing program.
Only a strong federal presence in housing programs will ensure equal access to adequate and affordable housing to which all Canadians have a right.
Our petitioners call upon Parliament to urge the government to restore its planned commitment to social housing by reinstating the co-operative housing program.


Mr. Don Blenkarn (Mississauga South):: Madam Speaker, I have the privilege of presenting a petition on behalf of constituents of Mississauga South.
It is calling for a referendum of the people binding upon Parliament to accept or reject constitutional amendments proposed by the government. The petition is in order and duly endorsed by the clerk of petitions.
April 30, 1992


Mr. Gilbert Parent (Welland -St. Catharines-Tho-rold):: Madam Speaker, I would like to draw to the attention of the House a petition, given to me by generally the Canadian Hispanic Congress but specifically by constituents who have signed it, with regard to the fate of refugee claimants in Canada which they find deplorable.
The delay in processing claims has caused grave physical, social, psychological, and emotional harm to the claimants, their families and those who assist them. Canadian taxpayers have spent unjustifiably exorbitant amounts of funds on a determination system that has proved to be inequitable and effective. Canada has until recently had an enviable record of compassion for the underprivileged, especially refugees.
I draw attention specifically to the case of the Amrou family in my riding that was excluded a few weeks ago.


Mr. Stan Keyes (Hamilton West):: Madam Speaker, I too have the honour and duty, pursuant to Standing Order 36, to present to this House a couple of petitions.
One lists the names of many many Hamilton and area residents who have signed a petition which calls on this Parliament to recognize that crimes of violence against the person are serious and abhorrent to society and to amend the Criminal Code of Canada, the Bail Reform Act, 1972, and the Parole Act accordingly.
This adds to the list of literally hundreds of thousands of petitioners on that very subject.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Madam Speaker, I have a second petition which is very similar to the one presented by my colleague from Welland-St. Catharines-Thorold.
It too draws to the attention of the House that the fate of refugee claimants in Canada is deplorable. The petition asks the government to grant a general amnesty to all refugee claimants presently in Canada, subject to the exclusion of only those with serious criminal records abroad for offences that would be considered serious in Canada.
Routine Proceedings THE CONSTITUTION


Mr. Gus Mitges (Bruce-Grey):: Madam Speaker, on behalf of numerous constituents from the city of Owen Sound located in my riding of Bruce-Grey, I am pleased to present and support their petition.
The petition calls upon Parliament to enact legislation to provide a referendum of the people which would be binding upon Parliament to accept or reject constitutional amendments proposed by the government.
The acceptance or rejection of proposed amendments would be determined by a majority vote of the total votes cast in the whole of Canada, together with a majority vote in a majority of provinces with the territories being given the status of one province.


Mr. Bob Porter (Medicine Hat):: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition which has been certified by the clerk of petitions pursuant to Standing Order 36.
This petition represents the signatures of some of my constituents in the Medicine Hat riding, primarily the community of Brooks and surrounding area.
The petition calls for the Government of Canada to enact legislation for a referendum of the people binding upon Parliament to accept or reject constitutional amendments proposed by the government.


Mr. Peter Milliken (Kingston and the Islands):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to present a petition signed by numerous residents of Hull, Quebec and Nepean, Gloucester and Ottawa, Ontario.
These petitioners note the serious problems faced by convention refugees because minister's permits are refused them for certain purposes.
The petitioners call upon Parliament to urge the minister of immigration to issue minister's permits for spouses and dependent children of persons who have been determined to be convention refugees to allow them to be reunited with their family here in Canada for inland processing.


Mr. Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood):: Madam Speaker, I too have the pleasure of presenting some petitions to the House, pursuant to Standing Order 36.

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Routine Proceedings
The refugee condition in the city of Toronto is a real disaster. It is costing the taxpayers of Canada hundreds of millions of dollars. The system has broken down. It is causing unnecessary harm both psychologically and emotionally to all the claimants.
We are asking the government to grant a general amnesty to all of these refugee claimants except those who have criminal records in Canada or records abroad for offences that would be considered serious in Canada.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk)
Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 146, 215 and 239.


Mr. Mifflin: With respect to the Atlantic Catch Failure Program announced on October 4, 1991, (a) how much was new money, (b) how much was from reallocations from within the Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program?
Hon. John Carnell Crosbie (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Opportunities
Agency): With respect to the Atlantic Catch Failure Program:
(a)	$33 million.
(b)	$6.5 million. Of this amount $2.5 million was used to fund the Herring Export Program and $4 million was used to fund the Atlantic Inshore Gear-up Program.

Question No. 215-Mr. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-Canso):
How much money has (a) the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, (b) the Department of Employment and Immigration, and
(c)	the Government of Canada spent on (i) the over-all implementation of the Dockside Monitoring Program, (ii) the training of certified weighmasters, and (iii) the establishment of the Scotia Fundy Catch Monitoring Association?


Albert Glen Cooper: I am informed as follows:
(a)	(i) Since dockside monitoring was implemented in 1989, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has spent $4,444 million.
(ii) & (iii) Nil
(b)	(ii) Employment and Immigration Canada-$1,849,603.
(i) & (iii) Nil
(c)	Public Works Canada-Nil; Transport Canada-Nil


Ms. Callbeck: What is the amount of money spent on each individual wharf in the
riding of Malpeque under the Smallcraft Harbour Program from
1981 to the present year?
Hon. John Carnell Crosbie (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Opportunities
Agency): The following amounts of money have been spent under the Small Craft Harbours Program since 1981 in the constituency of Malpeque at the harbour locations listed below.
Bentinck Cove	$ 535	Malpeque Cove	$ 887,251Borden	17,535	New London Harbour	18,251Canoe Cove	985	Nine Mile Creek	504,986Cape Traverse	550	North Rustico	490,714Clifton	1,380	Rice Point	3,937Clinton	2,663	Rock Point	6,421Covehead	401,746	Rustico Harbour	1,442,917Darnley	55,157	Stanhope	2,586French River North	57,127	Stanley Bridge	437,760French River (South Landing)	38,330	Victoria	474,704
Total for the constituency $ 4,845,535


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The questions as enumerated by the parliamentary secretary have been answered.


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, if Question No. 219 could be made an Order for Return, the return would be tabled immediately.
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Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House that Question No. 219 be deemed to have been made an Order for Return?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Mr. Whittaker: Have any funds allocated under the National Unity Task Force of Secretary of State been used for the travel or meetings of persons or groups in Canada, and, if so, (a) which person or groups have taken part, (b) on what dates did these meetings or travel take place, and (c) what was the cost of each trip or meeting?
Return tabled.


Albert Glen Cooper: I ask, Madam Speaker, that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Shall the remaining questions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


Hon. Gilles Loiselle (President of the Treasury Board and Minister of State (Finance)) moved: that a ways and means motion to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Income Tax Act, laid upon the table on Monday, April 27, 1992, be concurred in.


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


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I declare the motion carried, on division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
English]

Gilles Loiselle: that a ways and means motion to amend the Customs Act, the Customs Tariff and the Excise Tax Acts, laid upon the table on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, be concurred in.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
Gilles Loiselle: that Bill C-74, an act to amend the Customs Act, the Customs Tariff and the Excise Tax Acts, be read the first time and be printed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the first time and printed.

Gilles Loiselle: that Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations and other bodies, be now read a second time and referred to a legislative committee in the Economics envelope.
He said: Madam Speaker, I rise to propose second reading of Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations or other public bodies.
As hon. members are aware, the government announced in the February budget that it will eliminate, consolidate, defer or privatize a total of 46 government agencies, boards, commissions, corporations or advisory bodies.

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The Corporate Dissolutions Act is the first legislative measure giving effect to this commitment. It provides for the dissolution or termination of six government organizations, all of which were created by legislation.
The six organizations are: the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council, the Law Reform Commission, the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, the Economic Council of Canada, the International Centre for Ocean Development and the Science Council of Canada.
This bill deals only with these six organizations because their dissolution or termination will not require substantial amendments to existing legislation. For the remaining organizations identified in our budget proposals, the required legislation will be introduced as expeditiously as possible.
Let me say a few words about each of the organizations affected by Bill C-63. They have all given valuable services to the people of Canada.
First, I would like to discuss the principles that underlie the government's decision to restructure and streamline its operations. This initiative is part of our commitment to respond to the clear desire of Canadians for a government that is leaner, more efficient and less expensive.
In pursuit of this objective, the government has taken a hard look at how it can eliminate overlap and duplication in its own operations.
We speak of the Government of Canada in the singular, but of course it actually consists of over 400 separate organizations and advisory bodies. These include not only 26 statutory government departments, but 80 departmental agencies, 56 Crown corporations and more than 200 boards, tribunals, councils and other advisory bodies.
The common denominator of these organizations is that they were all created to respond to what was perceived, at one time or another, as a particular public need. In more expansive times, the tendency was sometimes to create a new public body to meet new requirements, without necessarily examining whether these could be served within existing structures. Of course over time public needs have evolved and changed.
As a result of this process, some overlapping of functions and mandates has clearly occurred, but given
our heavy national debt and the high taxes this brings with it, that is something Canada can no longer afford. Accordingly, the government is undertaking to reduce the number of agencies, boards, commissions and advisory bodies it maintains, on the basis of five key principles.
First, we are eliminating waste resulting from overlap and duplication within the government. Second, we are eliminating waste resulting from duplication with the private sector. Third, we are strengthening particular sectors by consolidating related organizations and their mandates. Fourth, we are postponing desirable initiatives that we simply cannot afford at this time. And fifth, we will continue privatizing commercial operations that no longer serve the purposes of public policy.
Let me point out that these principles and the measures before us today are fully in keeping with the commitment to spending restraint, waste reduction and good fiscal management that our government has pursued since first coming to office. We have proved before, and are proving again, our willingness to take the tough decisions needed to ensure that taxpayers get the best value for their money.
I want to remind the House of some of these initiatives over the last eight years. Payments to VIA Rail and the CBC have been scaled back, and military bases have been closed. We have eliminated programs on home insulation, oil substitution and heavy water plants, so that federal energy subsidies last year were $2.4 billion less than in 1984-85. We have streamlined the operations of government and fully or partially privatized over 20 Crown corporations.
As a result, there are 90,000 fewer employees on the taxpayers' payroll today than eight years ago. We have rigorously controlled spending on the government's own operations, holding it to well below the rate of inflation. This means that the cost of government today is actually lower than it was when we came to office.

It is because of such action that the government this year will record an operating surplus of over $10 billion compared to the operating deficit of over $16 billion recorded in 1984-85. This translated directly into a lower deficit and a lower national debt than would have been the case had we not moved to control spending. The legislation before us represents further steps in this necessary process of good financial management.
April 30, 1992

It is perhaps inevitable that in the case of the organizations now being wound up or consolidated, those affected will interpret this as if government were reducing its commitment to these areas. Let me state very clearly that this is not the government's intention. The government believes that Canadians generally will welcome an initiative that will save taxpayers' dollars by eliminating functions that are not essential and by reducing overlap and duplication wherever possible.
The government believes that in many cases public policy actually can be better served by organizations that balance competing interests within themselves rather than by single interest agencies.
This is particularly true at a time when funds are scarce and people in every sector need to pool resources and work together rather than compete against one another. It makes little sense to incur expensive managerial and administrative costs by dividing functions among individual agencies simply because different interests argue that they should be represented separately.
The savings from these initiatives are estimated at $22 million in 1992-93 and will increase to $71 million by 1993-94. The savings over the next five years are estimated at $310 million.
Regrettably the restructuring will affect the employees of the organizations involved. We are estimating that there will be an over-all reduction of 500 jobs from the government payroll. However, employees who are public servants will be covered by the government's work force adjustment directive which emphasizes finding these people opportunities for alternative employment in the Public Service. Employees who are not public servants will be absorbed by other institutions or, if they are laid off, will be covered by the applicable employment policies of the organizations they work for.
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I will turn now to the sixth organization that will be dissolved or terminated by this legislation.
The Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council is a statutory body that was established in 1977. Its members, who are drawn from management, labour and other interest groups, advise the Minister of Employment and Immigration on the department's policies and programs. The council is no longer needed as a statutory body since its labour market consultative function is now performed by the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. The immigration side of the department also has on-going consultative arrangements.
The Law Reform Commission was created in 1971. It has played a useful role in conducting an ongoing review of the statutes of Canada, in co-ordinating non-governmental research on legal issues, and in providing independent advice to the Minister of Justice.
The government has concluded, however, that these functions can be fulfilled without maintaining a separate organization. Responsibility for commissioning outside research will be assigned to the Department of Justice, with the minister and the department seeking the views of researchers and practitioners in universities and elsewhere. The Law Reform Commission will accordingly be wound up and any necessary continuing resources transferred to the Department of Justice.
The Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security was established in 1984. Its goal was to increase knowledge and understanding of the issues of peace and security from a Canadian perspective with particular emphasis on arms control, disarmament, defence and conflict resolution. Everyone would agree, of course, there are many other sources of independent foreign policy research and analysis. For these reasons we have concluded that we can no longer afford a separate government funded institute to provide these services.
The Economic Council of Canada was created in 1963. Over the years, the council has performed a valuable service in fulfilling its mandate to provide independent advice to the government on matters relating to the growth of Canada's economy. Since 1963, however, there

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has also been an enormous growth in the amount and quality of work being done in this area at universities, by foundations and in the private sector. This has therefore diminished the council's role and reduced the justification for its claim on the limited funding available for arm's length research and advice.
The International Centre for Ocean Development was established in 1983. Its mandate is to support co-operation with developing countries to improve the management and use of ocean resources. This role distinctly overlaps that of CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, and clearly does not justify the overhead cost of a separate organization. Therefore CIDA will take appropriate measures to ensure that assistance in relation to ocean resources continues to be provided to developing countries.
The Science Council of Canada has played a useful role since it was created in 1966. That role has been to provide advice to the government and to stimulate research and debate on issues of science policy. However, as in the case of economic issues, the establishment of institutes and centres of research in science and technology by universities, industry and other sectors has greatly expanded-everyone will agree-the sources of independent information and advice in Canada.
In addition, the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology, composed of prominent Canadians and chaired by the Prime Minister, now provides advice on a broad range of science and technology issues.
The streamlining and restructuring of government operations announced in the budget will improve the efficiency of the Public Service. It will also save money, savings that are essential if we are to reduce the burden of deficits and public debt that have contributed so painfully to heavy taxes, inflationary pressure and higher interest rates.

We deeply regret that there will necessarily be some lay-offs. We regret any lay-offs, in the public or the private sector, but government and those who work for it should not be exempt from the obligation to increase efficiency and control costs that the business sector and its employees face every day.
I would also call attention to the other measures announced in the budget that are aimed at improving service to the public.
These measures include a department-by-department review of regulations to cut down on red tape, and steps by federal departments and agencies that offer related services to individuals and businesses to bring those services together in one place. They also include simplified procedures for businesses in their dealings with government, greater use of simplified tax forms and more accessible hours of service by government offices.
In conclusion, these measures and the reduction in the number of government agencies are not spectacular changes made to obtain immediate results and have an immediate impact. They are simply ways to provide a Public Service at lower cost.
In taking these measures, the government is doing what must be done for a stronger, more productive and more competitive economy, which is the key to the long-term prosperity of all Canadians.


Mr. Derek Lee (Scarborough-Rouge River):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to commence debate for the Official Opposition in relation to Bill C-63.
I am not in a position to indicate any kind of support for this government bill. The opposition regrets both the need for the bill and the substance of it.
The bill masquerades under several guises. Basically the bill removes from the public scene agencies and initiatives which have served Canadians well for many years.
Is the purpose of this bill privatization? It is not because in many instances the functions that these agencies represent will stay within government. They will be buried in government ministries and their independent role will be taken away from them. Is it reform? There might be just a tinge of administrative reform buried in the process but I am of the view that it is not reform at all. It is simply chopping a set of quality government functions and buiying them in the Public Service or eliminating them.
It is in fact a retrenchment of government function back within government, out of the eye of the public. There is nothing new in this type of consolidation. If there was any redundancy, and it is always possible that there is some redundancy in government function over the broad spectrum, then it was certainly possible to address the redundancy. If the redundancy was in the
April 30, 1992

ministries then it was possible to remove the redundancy from the ministries. Instead, the government is taking aim at agencies which it had created as independent agencies.
What we are doing here is purging from government the independent consultation and advice that government so often needs in this very complex world.
Publicly there is a recognition that from time to time, governments can lose their independent perspective, their edge, their objectivity and even their creativity by constantly having to rely on a ministry that works within itself in one place, in one environment with the same people over long careers. What develops in that environment is a tendency to tell the boss exactly what the boss wants to hear. There is a loss of independence, of creativity. Nobody wants to be the person to bring the bad news to the boss. There is a loss of independence and creativity and it is that independence and potential creativity which is about to be squeezed out, amputated from the government function in Canada.
There is a difficulty here and it has been raised in the House before this in dealing with six agencies in one bill. Perhaps an aspect of an agency function might be redundant, which should be reformed in some way. But it is extremely difficult for the opposition to deal with one agency among six in a bill that the government is insistent will be carried in one package. It lumps all of these agencies together. It does not permit the opposition to effectively deal with each one on an individual basis.
I should not be too cynical, but if it is an attempt to divide and conquer the opposition by dividing opposition to the bill among half a dozen or more critics or various segments of expertise, I say that is not going to happen. Rather than divide and conquer, the way this bill has been presented is shaping up into a rallying cry for the opposition.
The way the bill has been crafted and presented is not good for the way Parliament functions.
The source of this legislation was in the last budget speech on February 25. In that speech there were references to a government plan, and I quote: "To eliminate, consolidate, defer and privatize some 46 Crown agencies, boards, commissions, corporations and advisory bodies". One asks the reason why. Was it
Government Orders
because these agencies were not fulfilling their function or had ceased to fill their function? From my perspective in almost every case, the answer to that is no.
There may be the odd one among the 46 that does not have to be with government any more. There may be the odd one that the government in a true privatization initiative wishes to sell, take back the money and spin off into the private sector. That might be all right on a case-by-case basis.
In this particular bill we are only dealing with six. We are not dealing with the 46. Therefore, we are not getting rid of these agencies because their job was finished. The remarks in this debate I am sure will show clearly that the job is not done. The functions and the goals of bettering government persist.
In his speech the Minister of Finance has called this initiative streamlining. That has a nice ring to it. Streamlining sounds sleek and smooth. It sounds nice. It even has a dynamic ring to it, but for all the 46 agencies concerned here, this is not an honest term.
It is elimination, cutting out, discarding, getting rid of an agency. I suggest that we are not going to buy the euphemism of streamlining. That is a little bit like a surgeon who takes a look at a leg infected with gangrene and says it has to come off and tells the patient: "I think we are going to have to streamline your body". What we are talking about here is an amputation. We will not be fooled by that and I do not think the public is going to be fooled.
There is an element here of cost-cutting. The government is attempting to reduce costs. It is worth looking at and we want to address that in this debate. I know I certainly will. What the government is doing here is like what I do with my beer and pop bottles when they are empty. I take them back for recycling. I get rid of them. But the bottle here is not empty. The valuable work of these agencies carries on. It was as recent as yesterday that this House dealt with issues contained in a report of just one of these agencies.
Therefore, let us take a closer look at some of the agencies that are about to be amputated. There are six. Not in any particular order, there is the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council; the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security; the Economic Council of Canada; the International Centre for

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Ocean Development; the Law Reform Commission of Canada and the Science Council of Canada. Most Canadians have heard of at least half of those agencies. Many Canadians, whether they know it or not, have relied on and have taken benefit from the work of those agencies.
Let us look firstly at the Science Council of Canada. This particular agency has provided guidance and research analysis and has made recommendations and studies in many, many areas. I just want to put a few on the record. They are too numerous to deal with here in total, but it has a publications list. I want to refer to the generic list of publications rather than each one just so Canadians can know what we are not going to have from this agency any more. All of this will be history. You will be able to find it in a library.
If Canadians hear of anything in this debate that they might want to read up on, and perhaps they might, the publication can probably be found in the local library: on biology, biotechnology, climate, computers and information technology, education, energy, forestry, micro-electronics, the north, pollution and environmental hazards, recycling, space, technology transfer, transportation, urban development, water resources and wildlife. That is just a partial list of the areas that have been studied by the Science Council of Canada, not just studied but recommendations have been made, read, studied, taught, analysed and hopefully incorporated into government policy over time.
The mandate of this agency is to assess scientific and technological resources, the requirements and potential of these for Canada and to increase public awareness of Canada's scientific and technological problems and opportunities. That is precisely where Canada should be spending its money, on its opportunities in all of those areas.
The list I just went through contained as reasonable a list of winners as Canadians are ever going to find. As we go through this debate they are going to hear about other winners. These winners are all on the chopping block. As Canada makes a concerted effort to become more competitive domestically and internationally it is exactly this kind of advice and leadership that Canadians need.
The second agency I want to speak about is the Economic Council of Canada which has served Canadians for almost 30 years. Barely a month or a week goes by without some journalistic endeavour or some public debate that makes reference to the work of the Economic Council of Canada.
This particular agency provides and has provided to Canadians over all of these years honest, objective, independent and quality advice on numerous subjects. One of the more recent ones involved the potential economic implications of the separation from Canada of the province of Quebec.
I ask where is this government going to get advice on that issue, advice that is independent and objective, if it does not get it from an independent agency? That kind of analysis and study could not objectively take place within government and find its way into policy-making. Whatever those studies inside government would reveal they would be buried.
There is not a minister sitting on that side of the House who would get his fingers caught, get his pantlegs caught in that kind of an initiative for all the tea in China. He would not do it. The only way that work is going to get done objectively and fairly is outside government. That kind of information is often so politically sensitive that the only one who is ever going to go public, and this is understandable, would be the Prime Minister or the Minister Responsible for Constitutional Affairs.
However, the information is very real. It is essential that Canadians know this stuff. In any event, without the independent agency, the matters are buried within government and once it is in there it does not get out because it is all advice to minister.
We all know that the Access to Information Act, under the law of Canada, says that advice to a minister is privileged and confidential. It cannot be seen. Maybe 25 years later you might get a good look at it, but nowhere will that information enter into public debate.
We have reports from the Economic Council of Canada on productivity. Did you ever hear of this issue? Was there an issue any more important to Canada's economy and our competitiveness than productivity?
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There was education. There was health. There were implications of many, many government initiatives. There was competitiveness itself. Yesterday we had a moment to take note of what I gather was the last report of the Economic Council of Canada.
It is sad to see it there, but here is the kind of conclusion that an independent agency is prepared to give to this government. Keep in mind and ask yourself whether or not a government ministry would give its minister this kind of advice.
Here is the conclusion. It is on the issue of education and training in Canada, a subject of critical importance to our future. "Without special efforts to develop the requisite skills, Canada's prosperity is in danger. We must forge strong links amongst stakeholders in our learning system, agree upon goals and strive to achieve them. The need for action is urgent, change takes time and we still have a lot to learn". That is the synthesis of the conclusion of that report.
Let us take a look at some of the advice that we got in the report. This is a summary. Some of it hits rather hard at the state of Canada's education and training system. We should take note that the education and training system in Canada is not primarily a federal responsibility. It is a provincial responsibility.
We in this House do not think for a moment that we can sit here oblivious to deficiencies in our education and training system. The report says: "By the year 2000,"-this is a target that it wants government to adopt-"all 16-year old Canadians, except for those who are mentally disabled, should be functionally literate and numerate". That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Let us take a look at the current status in Canada. In 1989, some 28.5 per cent of 16-year to 24-year-olds did not reach functional literacy. That is 28.5 per cent, level 4 and 44.5 per cent did not reach what they call the numeracy level 3. That is almost half of our youth. They are 16-year to 24-year-olds. That is a shocker, and there it is as a statistic.
Here is another current status. This is bad news, and it had to be made known to government. Full-time college enrolments in engineering and applied sciences have fallen steadily since 1983. Typically fewer than one-fourth of senior high school students enrol in advanced mathematics and science. Full-time college enrolments in engineering and applied sciences have fallen for the
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last eight years, since 1983. What has been happening for the last eight years?
This is scary stuff. I thought our education system was improving. I thought we were getting more kids into school. I thought we had more degrees coming out of school. I thought we had more engineers, but we do not. The number is falling. This is a serious problem and this agency has brought this to our attention.
As we work in this particular field as an example with this agency, the Economic Council of Canada, giving us this kind of advice, we are not talking about bingo halls and gambling casinos as an economic entity. They are actually talking about our future intellectual wealth, the competence of our children and our grandchildren. Our ability to prosper economically in the future is going to be totally dependent domestically and internationally on the ability of today's youth in a literate, numerate and skilled way to address those challenges. That is the kind of advice this government is getting. The advice is objective.
Just as an example, what public servant is going to go public with a statement like this? This is in the same report. On page 3 of the summary "Education and Training in Canada", this is crisp stuff: "This is a sign of failure. If current trends continue we will add to the labour force in the next 10 years at least another million young people who will have less than full functional literacy and/or numeracy. This is a sign of failure".
Ministers of education across this country do not want to hear that this is a sign of failure. You will not get published out of any of those provincial ministries or any of the federal ministries because the minister just will not say it that way. He will not say: "We have a failure". He will say: "We have a challenge". They will not publicly admit that there has been a failure, that all of the billions we spend is not achieving the standards that we all seek as Canadians.
That kind of advice from the Economic Council of Canada, just like all of the other agencies, is telling the boss like it is. Maybe the minister is not the boss. Maybe it is the taxpayers that are the boss. That is who is getting told this by these independent agencies which publish their work publicly. They do not just give it to the minister and government and bury it. It is public. They are telling it like it is. We are not learning about it translated through the government press release or the

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green paper, which is never going to mention, as I said, the concept of failure. No government wants to admit that it has been a failure.
Last, on that same agency, just for the record, the press release of that report yesterday which I have just adverted to states: "This is the Economic Council of Canada's final policy statement. The council is in the process of winding down its research activities, including publication of some final studies. The council is planning to formally close its doors by the end of June 1992". No more advice, no more public analysis, no more independent study, thank you very much, after 30 years.
Now we are going to streamline, eliminate and liquidate this particular agency and others. I just want to reiterate before I move on to the next agency, and this applies to all of the agencies, why independence is so important. The message that they bring to the public is not always good news. There is a lot of bad news to go around out there for everyone. We count on them to tell it like it is. Their product in almost every case is quality.
It is independent and it is not confidential. As I said before, advice to ministers, advice to government is confidential. As a member of Parliament I cannot even see that advice because whenever members on both sides ask the government what advice it got, how it reached that conclusion, it responds that this is advice to the minister, this is advice to the government. It does not talk about it.
If you have ever seen a committee operate and there is a public servant at the committee as a witness and you ask the public servant what advice he gave or what he thinks should be done, the public servant is very constrained and will often have to say he is sorry that it is advice given to the minister. It is for the minister to answer and the public servant cannot tell how he reached his conclusion.
They do their best but under the present system, nada and committees do not usually compel witnesses to provide more information.
The advice given is timely. It is not the government's timing agenda, or the opposition's timing agenda, that these agencies use. It is their own. It is driven by then-own independent assessment of timing and appropriateness. It is driven not by the government's interest but by the public's interest, the people who pay the bills.
In most cases, but not all, the advice and analysis, as I have said, is of critical importance to the future of this country and the direction of government policy.
We have some recent remarks of the chairman of the Economic Council of Canada at a committee because as the public knows the committees review the estimates of government. In the estimates this year there is the statement that we will be chopping, amputating, these agencies.
Here are some of the studies that the chairman of the Economic Council of Canada indicated to the committee that were ongoing. These were just some of them. All five projects are directly focused on the productive capacity of the economy. They include government's impact on competitiveness. That was a reference from the Prime Minister of Canada last year. I would think a reference from the Prime Minister would probably be treated as a top drawer initiative.
Last year it was top drawer. This year, you are out of business. What has changed? We are talking competitiveness here. We are talking the next decade or two of this countiy.
Other ongoing studies include economic relations with the Pacific rim, not an unimportant subject; firm strategy and adaptation, that is corporate and firm economic development strategies on a microeconomic scale I believe, cost effectiveness of the health care system in Canada and human resources strategies at the firm level.
Let us go back to health care. I think we spend about one-third of our provincial budgets on health care. That is certainly the case in the province of Ontario where I am a member. This is a financial issue of extreme importance. I am certain that all Canadians would have benefited and will benefit from the completion of that study if it gets completed.
Ms. Maxwell says that each of these studies will build new knowledge to original in-depth research not being done by any other organization in Canada. The government has asked her to find new homes for these projects so they can be successfully completed. This is evidence or proof that these studies are important but not important enough to keep the agencies alive.
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"In all cases our sponsors and partners chose to support the projects because they saw the Economic Council as a politically neutral, independent, research organization that could be counted upon to deliver a high quality product". Those are the words of the chairman of one agency and I think the words may be applicable to all or most of the agencies we are discussing here today.
I think our government needs help on all of these issues quite frankly and that is why those agencies are there. In the context of what is happening, it is a little bit like a government, if it were a captain of a ship, throwing off the ship one of its better navigators. However, this navigator is not afraid to tell the captain the truth, not what he wants to hear.
The mandate of the Law Reform Commission of Canada involves an ongoing review of Canadian statutes and makes recommendations for modernization, improvement and reform of Canadian legislation. It has been at work for 22 years and it has developed a lot of work. I practised law for quite few years and I am quite familiar with the work of the Law Reform Commission, as I am sure many colleagues in this House are who work with the reports on the subject areas in law reform. Here are some of the things that it has worked on. It has worked on many. These are just a few: mental disorders in the criminal process and sexual offences. This dates back to 1978-79 when we were beginning to get a handle as a society on the problem of definition of sexual offence in our Criminal Code. The law was 50 or 100 years out of date. The Law Reform Commission broke ground on it. It paved the way to where we are now.
Criteria for determination of death, euthanasia, aiding suicide and the cessation of treatment are issues that have recently been in front of this House, that are before provincial legislatures and will continue to be issues of significance for Canadians.
Turning to re-codifying the Criminal Code, the groundwork was laid back in 1986 and the House of Commons is just now beginning the process of recodification. Who drew the road map? I know who drew it. It was the Law Reform Commission of Canada. That is the
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road map we are following now, based on the investment and efforts of that commission many years ago.
Other studies include restitution and compensation; sterilization, implications for mentally retarded and mentally ill persons; extra-territorial jurisdiction that is beyond the international boundaries out into the oceans; electronic surveillance; hate propaganda; crimes against the foetus; plea bargaining, known euphemistically as plea discussions and agreements; and bio-medical experimentation involving human subjects.
I regard these as extremely important subjects for the future of Canadians and maybe even for the human race.
One of the more recent reports was on human dignity and genetic heritage. That is an extremely important issue. Who in this world is looking at the law protecting our genetic heritage as a human species? This is not something I wake up thinking about, this is not something your local police force wakes up thinking about, but the Law Reform Commission has been thinking about it and working on it now for a few years and has begun to publish its report.
This is very sophisticated stuff. The Law Reform Commission is our navigator. This is our road map to protecting the genetic structure of the human race. I am talking about genes, chromosomes. There is a certain amount of genetic tinkering going on around the world. We are all aware of that. It has happened with other animal species, and we are certainly researching and looking at changes in the structure of human chromosomes. We are now working on these issues in laboratories. We have to know. No Canadian law governs it. Research into chromosomes and the genetic structure of human beings in this country is not treated any differently than a grain of salt and that is not right. The Law Reform Commission has begun work on that. That is very valuable. In terms of the gene pool of the human race, all countries had better start working on this immediately.
To abandon the independence of the Law Reform Commission, the timeliness of it, all of the quality work it has done doing is a huge mistake. The Law Reform Commission has generated some 32 reports, 61 working papers and 76 studies. It has been referred to in over 200 significant court judgments. The work of the Law Re-

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form Commission of Canada has been cited, in particular, in some 39 Supreme Court of Canada decisions.
Where will Canada get its own straight talk on law reform? It is sometimes a difficult issue to get into. Are we going to get it from our friends in the U.S.A., France, the United Kingdom or Germany? Where are we going to get it?
I have to point out that of all Commonwealth countries there are only three that do not have a law reform commission. They are Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world and Canada, if we scrap the Law Reform Commission. That is a shame.
The Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security has a mandate to increase knowledge and understanding of the issues relative to international peace and security from a Canadian perspective with particular emphasis on arms control, defence and conflict resolution. We have diplomats all over the world. We have armed forces observers, people all over the world working for Canada. We spend billions of dollars on that. Why can we not spend a modest amount for our navigator, our road map? We cannot afford not to study that area.
The fifth agency is the International Centre for Ocean Development. I have mentioned oceans and the need to study the offshore. We have oceans on three sides of our country.
There is also the Canadian Employment and Immigration Advisory Council. These mandates have been described by the minister. We must ensure that what all of these agencies do continues to be generated in an independent fashion. Nobody wants to make the minister angry.
In closing, the minister has said that there is a cost saving of some $22 million. That was for 46 agencies, not the six we are dealing with. The 46 agencies being chopped yielded $22 million. This is only dealing with six. I suggest that it is not a cost savings.
I submit that we need the direction, reform, competitiveness, initiative and leadership these agencies provided and that is what we want.
Our other critics will be speaking with more precision about these agencies. I submit that this initiative strikes at the heart of efforts of Canadians to provide better government under the guise of simply saving money. I
submit that we are penny wise and pound foolish and we will not support it.
In closing, I would like to move an amendment as follows:
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the
word "That" and by substituting the following therefor:
Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations and other bodies, be not now read a second time, but that it be read a second time this day six months hence.


Mr. Steven W. Langdon (Essex-Windsor):: Madam Speaker, as I listened to the minister speak this morning I thought that we really should designate this minister as the minister of grave digging.
This is a gratuitous, unfair, unthought-through decision to buiy six important agencies of the people of Canada. The minister got up this morning and pronounced the words over their graves. As he went through his description of why each of these agencies could be buried we might have expected, as is common in funerals, a little recognition of how important a role has been played, not just for the people of Canada but for this government and its policy activities, by the very agencies that are being attacked and buried with this piece of legislation.
For instance, one might have expected that when the minister talked about the Economic Council he would say: "Well, yes we thought the Economic Council was just tremendous when it came out with its very positive analysis of the free trade deal". The Prime Minister used to quote day after day after day the Economic Council saying that there would be 500,000 extra jobs from the free trade deal. There was not any indication then from this government that the Economic Council was somehow a body that should be buried, that the Economic Council was an organization which did not contribute to this country, because the Economic Council at that time was saying things the government liked.
The same thing is true of the Science Council. When the government party was in opposition before 1984 the Science Council used to come out with some quite critical attacks on the government of the day for not emphasizing science policy, for not emphasizing the importance of investment in research and development in this country. Members of the opposition party then,
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now the government, would get up in the House and lovingly quote the Science Council of Canada.
There was somehow no memory this morning of those great days of the Science Council when it came time to dig the grave to bury these institutions.
One would have at least expected a little common decency on the part of a government which has made use of these institutions when it could and when it suited its purposes. Now that these institutions are, as independent institutions do, coming out with things that the government does not appreciate the government's answer is: "We will bury these institutions. We will do away with them". It is not because there is any significant saving to the Treasury of this government but because the messenger in this case is bringing messages which this government is not prepared to hear.
The messenger is bringing messages about the reality across this country which has been created by the repeated failures of this government.
This is an exercise in vengeance on the part of this government. It is a scorched earth policy of destruction of the institutions that can help to rebuild this country when we finally get rid of this inept government on the other side of the aisle. Those institutions will not be there to help in the rebuilding of this country; to help to do something about the economic problems, the failures in science policy, the failures in fisheries policy, and the failures in legal reform. Those failures are so clear when you look at the government's record.
Those institutions are not going to be there to help those of us who will have to rebuild after this government is thrown out in the next election. It is not going to be possible because this government is adopting a scorched earth policy of destroying what it can. It is destroying those institutions that are not going to stroke the government and say to it: "You are wonderful". It is destroying those institutions that are going to call it as it is, that are going to see the truth and announce the truth to people across this country.
The Economic Council of Canada, which is the biggest of the institutions being buried today, is an institution
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that this government used to love. This government loved it so much that last year the Prime Minister of this country got up and gave a special reference, and special money to go with it, to this important crucial institution, as he put it, to do a full-scale study of competitiveness in this country. What happens a year later? This same government gets up and says: "This government has decided that this institution is no longer needed".
If it was needed a year ago to do a major piece of research work which has not been completed, which the Prime Minister of this country said was essential for the future of this country, that tells us one of two things. Either the Prime Minister was totally incompetent in his decision making last year in assessing the Economic Council of Canada as a body that could do good work in this area, or the Prime Minister and his government are totally incompetent this year in deciding to do away with this very institution.
It does not make sense for a government to change its views so quickly unless the reality is that these institutions have in each case made criticisms, non-partisan criticisms because these institutions knew that at any stage the government could bury them. Therefore, they came out with tempered, careful criticism attempting to point out to the government that the approaches being taken in certain areas were simply not correct.
What did the government decide to do? It decided not just to attack these institutions, to bury them, but to do so to ensure that the governments which must inherit the mess this Conservative regime has created in this country will not be able to call on the help and expertise of these bodies, that in many cases have existed in this country for 20 or 30 years.
They have provided advice, sound disinterested nonpartisan advice, to governments of different stripes. Now this decision is taken in an act of petty vengeance, through a policy of scorched earth destruction of institutions before these guys get booted out. This is a policy which led to the little sermon over the gravestone the minister from the Treasury Board gave us this morning.

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What is sad about this decision is threefold. First, this government is playing on anti-intellectualism. It is saying: "These are people who think, these are people who do research work. My goodness that must not be worth anything. We are going to get rid of them".
The government is hoping that its red-neck constituents in parts of the country who are deserting it to go to the even more red-neck Reform Party will somehow be attracted back by this sort of red-neck attitude, this red-neck approach which says: "If an institution thinks then buiy it. If an institution has thoughtful criticism then kill it. An institution might help our country better think through its future but we do not want to think about our future. We have easy answers. You do not have to think. All we need is an anti-intellectual response, bury them, kill them, put them six feet under so they cannot be used by the opposition when it comes into government to help rebuild this country". That is the first problem.
The second problem is that this kind of approach gives a bad name to economizing. If the Minister of Finance had really wanted to come into this House of Commons and take some serious steps to economize he would have looked at the fact that we have the biggest cabinet in Canadian history. He would have eliminated ministers and the number of limousines that go with those ministers instead of eliminating important institutions.
We all know ministers in this government do not think. Institutions do. I suspect that if we had two-thirds the number of ministers that we have in the present government we would have saved a great deal of money and probably would have saved ourselves from a lot of serious mistakes. There would be two kinds of benefits to the country.
More seriously perhaps, there are institutions which deserve to be eliminated. Of the six that are part of this legislation I think from what information I have that the elimination of the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council makes sense. I think that is a good step to take. It is not an institution providing something valuable to our country.
When lumping that institution with the other five, any sort of assessment of that particular advisory council is lost in the fact that one is engaged in an over-all active vengeance, a policy of scorching the earth and destroying institutions. This has nothing to do with trying to improve our country's economic situation.
I suggest that even the minister should be here to hear this. Perhaps even the Leader of the Opposition might find useful some of the points which are being put here because the Leader of the Opposition in his cabinet days was responsible for eliminating many institutions thoughtlessly too.
It is important that we recognize if there is going to be a serious assessment of institutions created by government, a serious assessment of ministries, a serious assessment of the number of cabinet ministers who should be in the next government, then there should be some kind of independent review.
There was no such independent review with respect to any of these institutions. We asked the heads of these institutions and we will probe them more carefully when this reaches legislative committee.
We asked them: "Was there any discussion with you? Was there any review of what your institution is doing by independent groups?" There was no such independent review. There was just a decision to eliminate, to cut, to bury and to destroy.
This is not just the view of the New Democratic Party. This is the view of every independent observer who has looked at these institutions. There are the people, for instance, who have looked at the Law Reform Commission like the president of the Canadian Bar Association who said: "I have had it reported to me by some sources that the Law Reform Commission was too independent."
I bridle at that because I do not believe there is such a thing as being too independent.

Mr. Michel Massicotte, president of the Association des avocats de la defense de Montreal, said that in its latest budget, the federal government decided to wind up an institution whose relevance to the Canadian judiciary system was recognized by all, and I am referring to the Law Reform Commission of Canada. He felt that the decision, ostensibly a money-saving measure, was entirely unjustified.

One can hear the same thing for institution after institution. The Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, for instance, is another institute which had made an independent criticism recently of the government's decision to jump ship from those other countries in the international economy, to jump ship and
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decide to make an early recognition of some of the eastern European countries.
This institute came out with some criticism of that approach. Christopher Young, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, said: "This is not the kind of stuff we hear from the Department of External Affairs".
The same thing is true of the Economic Council. For instance, we can hear from one of those very private institutions that the minister this morning said would somehow take up the slack from the Economic Council.
Michael McCracken, the president of Informetrica, said the council is indispensable for its ability to assign teams of economists to big projects. University researchers and private sector firms cannot mount the long-term large projects that the council undertook.
What we have here is a destructive, unjust, unfair, unthinking approach on the part of the government. It is scorched earth policy to make things hard for the future, for the government which will replace these inept people on the government side who do not recognize the importance of thought, the importance of analysis, and the importance of independence from these institutions which they are trying to destroy in this legislation before us today.


Mr. Peter L. McCreath (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Madam Speaker, I would like to comment.
I listened as I always do to my hon. friend from Essex-Windsor. I must say to him that if this was the debating club of the London School of Economics in the 1920s under Harold Laski, I might even think some of what he said made sense.
I am absolutely appalled to sit in this House and hear this gentleman refer to my constituents as a bunch of rednecks and to suggest that the members on this side are anti-intellectual. I cannot help but shake my head and I have an understanding.
When he talks about the fact that this government is going to be replaced I understand why the people of Canada have alternated between the members on this side and the members of the now Official Opposition to
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govern this country and for 60 years have rejected the philosophy that he trumpets in this place today.
When he makes comments like he has just made about the people of Canada, about the people I have the privilege to represent here, he comes across in my judgment as nothing but an arrogant, sanctimonious fool, and on behalf of them I say that.
This bill, this budgetary decision, has absolutely nothing to do with vengeance or mean-spirited closing down critics of the government, as he suggests.
What were his views when the Economic Council of Canada so thoroughly endorsed the free trade proposals of this government? Did he get up and laud that decision? Did he accept the wisdom of that advice? That is not my recollection.
Is it not interesting? These agencies from time to time have criticized the government and from time to time have endorsed the government. Politicians on both sides have taken advantage when it suits their purposes and that is the essence of partisan politics I suppose.
This government has consistently followed a philosophy which I think is clearly endorsed by the people of Canada when it comes to thinking about the taxpayer, when it comes to thinking about the need to rationalize redundant institutions.
There are some here who think that once a program is established it is supposed to be there forever, even when it is not needed any more. It is the same with institutions.
What this bill is about and what the budgetary measure that it reflects is about is recognizing that times change, recognizing that as needs are fulfilled in the private sector there is no longer a need to burden the taxpayer with the cost of those measures. That is why this government is being responsive to the taxpayer when it gets rid of agencies that are redundant.
Take the area of economics of which my hon. friend speaks. There are a multiplicity of agencies providing that kind of research for the people of Canada. We have the Conference Board of Canada, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the C. D. Howe Institute, the Fraser Institute which are now fulfilling that purpose. Why should we burden the taxpayer with the cost of those other institutions when in fact the services are

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being provided elsewhere? I guess I should bring myself to a question for my hon. friend. I have two questions.
First, will he stand in his place and apologize to the people of Canada that he has insulted with his remarks earlier today? I am sure he did not mean what he said.
Second, will he stand in his place and assure Canadians that the New Democratic Party does not believe that the taxpayers should be burdened by funding redundant institutions or paying for services that are no longer required?


Steven W. Langdon: A remarkable performance, Madam Speaker. An arrogant, sanctimonious fool. I throw the accusation back and we will see who wears it best.
It seems to me that what has to be recognized first by this member and by this government is that the institutions that are being eliminated are institutions which were working to reduce costs in this country.
The Economic Council for instance, which is costing taxpayers about $10 million a year, has the responsibility to reduce health care costs in this country. It is carrying out a major study to do this. The Economic Council has a good track record. It has come up with some important research suggestions and conclusions.
I dare to suggest that there would be much more saved by permitting the Economic Council to carry through on its study of how to reduce health care costs in this country, rather than bury the Economic Council.
The member has suggested that the private sector can do these various things. Of course, there are institutions across this country in the private sector, each of them with an axe to grind: the Fraser Institute grinds its axe on the right-hand side; the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives grinds its axe on the left-hand side. We could leave policy debate in this country to people with special interests.
The important point of these institutions is that they came at things from an independent perspective. That independent perspective is what is crucial if we are going to come up with real answers for the future economic problems that we face in this country.
I want to deal with one last point which the hon. member raised. He suggested that I was making some comments about the people of Canada. Not in the least. The people of Canada have shown without question in
poll after poll after poll that they want to get rid of this government. That demonstrates the supreme common sense of the people of Canada, the supreme common sense which says that fewer than 10 per cent of people in this country approve of the Prime Minister and his policies. I applaud the people of Canada for their astuteness in seeing this.
What I find absolutely frustrating and saddening is in trying to deal with this situation of unpopularity, this situation of failure demonstrated by this government that it has tried to appeal not to people across the board in this country but instead to that small sector of people who think that the solution to our problems is to get rid of those institutions which are doing the thinking, which are caring about the future, which are doing analysis. It has tried instead to appeal to that small red-neck minority that thinks if we can get rid of any government institution it is a good thing.
I have said that it makes sense to get rid of one of these institutions because I do not think it is doing a good job. However the other five are doing important work in this country. For our party and I think I also speak for the people of Canada in saying this, important work in looking to the future is something which should be supported, not buried as this minister is trying to do.


Hon. Jean Chretien (Leader of the Opposition):: Madam Speaker, this morning we are discussing Bill C-63, a piece of legislation that seems quite harmless: just eight pages which contain 46 separate sections. Nothing special.
However, it has been my privilege to serve the Canadian people as a cabinet minister for many years.

When I see this terminator government moving, I really get worried. I have worked in government for a long time. It is throwing everything out. As is said in the English proverb, you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. This is the case. We agree that some of the things on this long list have to go. Many of them were established by the Tories. The extravagant Minister of National Defence has created committee after committee. Of course these committees have to go and him too.
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Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: However, on that list we know are some institutions that are very important to the very fabric of this country. To terminate them is a big mistake and is why I am standing in this House today.
For example, I worked for many years with the Economic Council of Canada when I was minister. It criticized the government. It said to us many times over that we were not right here and we were not right there. It made recommendations that we did not accept; but one thing I know is that it was an independent voice, a voice that was created for that purpose, and we listened to it.
I heard the member from Nova Scotia a minute ago saying that he will rely on the Fraser Institute of Vancouver. Who does it represent? It represents big businesses. That is all. It is paid by them and it serves them very well.
We do not have in Canada an institute like the Brookings Institute in the United States that tends to be close to the Democrat Party. They are lucky; they have no New Democrats in the United States. They have the Democrat Party and another institute that is close to the Republican Party. However in Canada we have an institute that is funded by the government. It was founded in 1963.
We have to understand that when it was created there was a purpose. Mr. Pearson created it because he said words to the effect that it was to be a forum where everybody would be represented. Labour, management and social groups were represented there to debate in complete freedom and after that make recommendations. This has been very useful to this government.
Many times-and I have experienced it from these discussions-even if we did not agree with all the conclusions we knew from groups preoccupied with the economic development of the nation what kinds of problems we were faced with and what kinds of solutions we could find.
This is going out now. We can look at all the work it has has done. It was talking about the big problems of prosperity and how to be competitive. These were the words used by Mike Pearson as Prime Minister in 1963 when he proposed that. He used the same terms, that we had to fit Canada into a world of more competition. It was the same thing in 1963 when the government introduced it.
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During the period of time before the Tories came to power Canada was pretty good in terms of competition around the world. However, through this instrument that prepared report after report after report Canadians were offered a place of reflection. Every one of us- members of Parliament and people working on political programs-debated those reports. We knew there was a body that was not paid by big businesses, that was not paid by big unions, but was paid to reflect on the problems. It was typical, a Liberal solution.
Big business does not like it. It criticized the government. I know, I have been there, that it is not bad to be criticized sometimes. It is very useful. But this government cannot take it. The Tories cannot take it. If they had listened to the Economic Council of Canada a little more, perhaps they would not have made the big mistake they made to please their big business friends. Now they want all their advice to come from the Fraser Institute. I do not want that. I want to keep that type institution, the Economic Council of Canada. They are worried because the Reform Party is taking votes away from them.
What are they saving by killing all these institutions? Some $20 million. The two helicopters the Minister of National Defence is buying these days would have done the trick. There would have been 98 left. They have a kind of dog and pony show on competitiveness with $20 million. All the money is there. They announced it. A lot of consultants are getting money and we have not seen anything yet from this prosperity agenda they are supposed to sell to Canadians. They only cut back and they do not have to cut the Economic Council of Canada.
What about the Law Reform Commission? I have been Minister of Justice. When it was created in 1970 we realized it was an important instrument. I myself found it helpful on many occasions, for instance when we were working on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, now part of the Canadian Constitution and a source of pride for all Canadians. We, on this side of the House, made a dream come true, the dream of everyone who thinks in terms of civil liberties in this country. It was also John Diefenbaker's dream to have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution.

The Law Reform Commission has been a great inspiration to us. I could mention all the other studies the commission has produced, covering areas such as evidence, pornography, euthanasia and violence in our society. Right now, it is preparing a study on drugs, sponsored by the Prime Minister a few years ago, when

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he told Canadians he was going to do something about this problem and that the government was going to deal with it. And now, the only institution that was doing work on the subject is being terminated, if I may use that term for what the government is doing today to an instrument for social progress.
In a society like ours it is very difficult to balance everyone's needs because the problems vary, depending on whether you live in Newfoundland or British Columbia, the Gaspe or Windsor. The people, the problems and the attitudes are not identical.
How do we find a social consensus? It takes people who are dedicated and who are not doing it for political gain but to provide politicians with information. This means we have an instrument that is useful to us as politicians, but also to social workers or university professors or educators as a source of reference points. As a result our society with all its problems is still at the top of the list because we have the courage to look at our own shortcomings, listen to criticism and learn from our mistakes. This government, however, is too proud to ever admit it is wrong. Too bad. It is very healthy to have people who will tell us when we make mistakes. Why get rid of them?
Now take the Science Council of Canada.

What about the future? If we do not invest in research and development, if we do not invest in the brains of the young people of Canada, what will Canada be in the next century? This was an instrument that was helping them.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: We need the courage to invest in the brains of Canadians and the Conservatives scrap it for a few million dollars when they spend money like crazy on all sorts of their own programs, on things like publicity and ads all over Canada all the time.
Of course we know why. It is because there is an expert in communications in the Prime Minister's Office, in giving contracts to advertising companies. That is very important, but it is important to me to keep the Science Council of Canada.
What about medical research, pure research? Let us look at the scientific people in our land who have found their way through working with that, like John Polanyi. They are now cutting the rudder because the ship is too big. That is pretty smart. The ship is just as big but it has no rudder. That is exactly what they are doing today. It is absolutely ridiculous.
It is important that the government look at the money that the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans put into research and development. The Prime Minister said seven years ago that it was to be his priority. It shrank and shrank and shrank on a daily basis. Now the Conservatives conclude by scrapping the Science Council of Canada.
It is the same thing with the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security. This is an area wherein the country has tried over years and with very little partisanship, I must admit, to place Canada in a position where we would be respected. We were a middle power and wanted to play a very useful role, and through institutions like that one we could have it all. When we want to develop a non-partisan approach to international relations we have to rely on institutions that everybody can have confidence in. The Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security was created for that reason. It is even more important today because nobody knows where the world is going.
There has been a great change in the world balance in the last 18 months and we see troubles coming from very different sources. Even more today than ever before we will need to reflect on what can be the best position. Canada can be a very good instrument internationally to do that. We were spending a few million dollars on the Canadian Institute for International peace and Security and they scrapped it.
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When it was introduced not long ago, it was the present Prime Minister who wrote to the Prime Minister of the day telling him it was very important that this agency be neutral. He said that we should not go with the prevailing winds but should make sure that Canada had an original, authentic position in that field. It is what we have always tried to do because we have a great history we are all proud of, starting with the UN Charter, where Mr. St. Laurent and Mr. Pearson were among the architects.
Our minister of external affairs of that time received the Nobel Prize for peace. Canada has developed peacekeeping forces that can play a better role in the future. But we will not have the neutral instruments to convince everybody of new orientations and help us to put aside the partisanship that is natural in politics. This government is killing these agencies for a few million dollars when it is spending money like drunken sailors all over the country.
It has only to keep the Minister of National Defence in Canada once in a while and it will save a lot of money. He just comes here once in a while for refuelling and to cause problems.
We want to tell this government that we object to this bill.

We intend to talk about these things, because what is so disturbing about these developments is that when this government ceases to exist, there will no longer be an instrument that truly represents our country. There is a pattern here. All the opportunities that existed in this country for scientists and researchers and intellectuals to get together and discuss the real problems of our country-and I am not referring to the Constitution, because we are sick and tired of hearing about the Constitution-are disappearing, thanks to this government. We are losing them all, one after another. We no longer have the national railway system that united Canadians. The government is destroying the infrastruc-
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tures that unite us. We no longer have a symbol of Canada.
The hon. member mentioned the other day that the word Canada no longer appears on our mailboxes. The word Canada seems to have become an embarrassment. The other day, an English-speaking member from Ontario told me that when he wanted some Canadian flags, he would go and see a Conservative member who was too embarrassed to distribute them in his own riding. Now isn't that appalling?
That is how we will lose the country, when we no longer have the courage to maintain institutions where all Canadians can get together, scientists as well as people with a concern for international peace, who are less concerned about whether they are French-speaking or English-speaking than about poverty and the future of our planet. When these people can no longer meet, and this includes the economists who are working through the Economic Council of Canada to find positions for Canada in tomorrow's very complex world and who are trying to find the niche Canadians must have in the 21st century, to have the kind of country we want, all that will disappear. We will be left with advisers who are on the payroll of big corporations and big unions. They will have their say, while the real people of this country will no longer be represented objectively, the way they ought to be.
That is why we object to this legislation. We are all for saving money, and there are many items on this list that can stay there, as far as we are concerned, but why throw out the baby with the bath water, just because the government does not have the guts to choose? Let them provide an objective analysis of every one of these institutions and tell us why the Economic Council of Canada is no good.
The hon. member from Nova Scotia said a few minutes ago that they recommended supporting the free trade agreement. That was a mistake, and the Conservative Party should have seen that.
They made mistakes, but they were only giving an opinion. In all the other fields we need such advisory boards. Personally, in the field of law reform, I know that such a board is necessary because the problems are increasingly difficult. If we do not anticipate them, as the Law Reform Commission is trying to do, we will have

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serious social problems. Those are the people who are trying to tell us how we in Canada can be more generous than others and how we should have a legal system that enables citizens to obtain justice, regardless of their colour, language or race. If we cannot criticize ourselves, if we cannot listen to people who are paid to criticize us objectively without thinking of scoring political points, the country will suffer.
That is why we object and we ask government members to withdraw this bill. They should take out what is not good and we will vote with them, but the important tools of national unity and social and economic development that existed in the past should continue to exist. That is why I am telling you, Madam Speaker, that we are asking the government to withdraw its bill, do it over and choose between the institutions that are worth keeping and those which are not. Eliminate those that are not, but keep what is important for the country.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: We are now resuming debate. Is the hon. member rising on a question or a comment?


Peter L. McCreath: I wonder if the Leader of the Opposition would consent to a question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I would need the unanimous consent of the House to proceed with a period of question or comments.


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


An hon. member:: Just a question, not a speech.


Peter L. McCreath: Madam Speaker, I do indeed have a question. I am interested in knowing the Leader of the Opposition's position with respect to fiscal restraint.
I listened with great care to his speech and I know it was certainly on a higher plane than that of the previous speaker. He suggested the government spent like drunken sailors. I suppose he could have been truly insulting and suggested that we spent like Liberals or worse, like New Democrats from Ontario. But he did not do that.
Bill C-63 is responding to what the government believes is a very clear concern on the part of Canadians to have leaner government, to control expenditures.


An hon. member:: You are a great example of that.


Peter L. McCreath: I am what I am.
This bill seeks to remove institutions that are redundant. Given that this government believes taxpayers should not be required to pay for agencies and institutions whose services are being provided elsewhere, and that this government has turned the $16 billion operating deficit it received from his government to a $10 billion operating surplus, what is his position with respect to fiscal restraint when he opposes the community consultations? Is he opposing the government consulting with Canadians and does he believe that Canadian taxpayers should be required to pay for institutions that have become redundant or whose functions are being carried out by other agencies?


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: Madam Speaker, we are responsible. We do not have to take any lessons from these members. We do not control the deficit by killing institutions like those. You have a dog and pony show and prosperity that cost $25 million. It is more than that. I could go through the list.
We can find a lot of places where money was spent for nothing. What is important is that the country functions well. I am happy the hon. member recognizes that what I said made sense. He should look at the list. I am not saying we should keep every one of these institutions. Some have to go. Sunset should exist on a lot of programs we have.
You must remember that at one time I was President of the Treasury Board and my nickname was "Dr. No" because I could cut. I know how it is. Over the years fat develops in administrations and it has to be cut. But do not cut what is good. Do not cut brain power, do not cut what is an investment in the future. That is what we are telling members opposite.
We will applaud them when they will reflect that, but this is a decision of a panicky government which is afraid to choose. If we had heard good arguments that the Economic Council of Canada is no damn good, fine. If they can convince me, we will let it go. If they can find a good argument that the Science Council of Canada is no good, we will listen to that. If they convince me, we will let it go. If they can convince me that the Law Reform Commission of Canada is redundant, I will listen to them.
I was a minister for many years and very often I was not happy with the reports I received. After thinking about it, I know that these reports reflected a point of
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view that was not partisan and which the agencies went out to search for, having different people from different parts of Canada discuss these things for months. Even if it was hurtful, I thought it was useful.
It is the Canadian way of doing things. We should not copy the Americans all the time. We like them very much but a lot of the things they do we do not want for Canada.
I do not want the Fraser Institute or the CLC producing reports telling us what to do. It is not what I want. I am a Liberal. I want to do things the Canadian way, by consensus, searching out the answers from people who you know are not part of your political belief.
Take medical research or any of the other items they are cutting. These are probably the things that make Canadians feel comfortable about themselves. If there is a problem in law, we send it to the Law Reform Commission. Lawyers come from all across the land to debate the problem. Suddenly they realize that we have Canadian values.
When you want to have a good Canadian meeting about medical research, you gather together doctors and medical research people from across the land. They talk about research, and how Canadians can do it better than anyone else. They do not talk about the Constitution in the French and English languages. They try to find a Canadian way to do things better than anyone else, including the Americans. That is what we want for Canada. We want to make Canada the best.
It is not in killing these good institutions that Canada will be where it should be, number one.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Mr. Garth Turner (Halton-Peel):: Madam Speaker, I have a simple short question for the Leader of the Opposition.


An hon. member:: No.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I am sorry, but there does not seem to be unanimous consent for questions and comments. Resuming debate.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Madam Speaker, I am privileged to rise in this House to debate second reading of Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations and other bodies.
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We on this side of the House say that the government is truly doing nothing more than in a pathetic fashion attempting to silence the critics. Is that not what it is all about? Here in the highest court of the land we in the Liberal Party charge the government with being shortsighted. As evidence I submit some requotable quotes on the death of the Law Reform Commission. The president of the Canadian Bar Association said: "It is a sorry day". The president of the Society for the Reform of the Criminal Law said: "The fact of the matter is that this is a small change and what we are doing is taking the engines of new ideas and future thinking for the government and cutting them off".
What did Judith Maxwell, president of the Economic Council of Canada, say about the death of the Economic Council? She said: "Canada could lose vital research into health care and competitiveness".
What was said about the government decision to axe the International Centre for Ocean Development? The Halifax organization's vice-chairman wants to make sure the public understands the implications. First there are lay-offs. He says: "Nearly 70 people will be put out of work. They will be out on the street". Then there is the loss to the Halifax economy of the agency's $13.3 million budget. He says: "That economic benefit is going to move back to central Canada", because the agency's projects will be taken over by the Canadian International Development Agency in Ottawa.
The vice-chairman says: "Presumably, this was done to save money. I cannot see how that would come about-If anything money will be lost". There is the buy-out of leases, severance packages and contracts. They all must be fulfilled. The money will still have to be spent. Most important, the vice-chairman says, staff are worried about the future of the centre's programs.
The agency was founded in the early 1980s to help developing countries in the South Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Oceans manage their ocean resources after the Law of the Sea Conference established the 200-mile limit. Suddenly dozens of small and new island and coastal states were responsible for fisheries and minerals within those limits. The vice-chairman says: "Most of these countries did not and do not have the capacity to do that. They cannot play a role in international fish-

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eries, like tuna". Fish do not respect borders. If stocks are mismanaged by one country the world pays the price.
Mr. Vandermeulen goes on to say that Canada has lost face internationally. He says: "This was the only international assistance group in the world that was working in this field with small island states". We are sacrificing something that we could stand up in this country and be recognized for around the world.
Obviously, and with great fanfare, the government stands today and gloats that its intention to eliminate, consolidate, defer or privatize these and eventually 44 other Crown agencies, corporations and commissions will save $22 million.
Let us just stop for a second and think. If we were to put a dollar value, I think it was Judith Maxwell who said it. On the pioneering and path-breaking accomplished in great measure by these agencies, the bottom line-and I know the Tories like to hear that-is a net profit. In fact, some of those benefits we cannot even put a dollar value on. How do you put a dollar value on the fact that the world recognizes you as a leader for helping these island states in the fishery? How do you put a dollar value on that? It is because it is not there in black and white underneath a thick black line saying here is what the total is that the government says: "Look, we are going to save $22 million by doing this."
If there was ever a single instant when this government could not look to the future, when this government has failed to see potential in Canadian institutions and Canadian people, this bill must be it.
This act puts into action the directive in the budget, in that sorry tale presented to us by the Minister of Finance back in February, to wind up, defer, consolidate and privatize certain Crown agencies and corporations.
Let us put on the record just a few of these agencies. I have already mentioned the Law Reform Commission and the Economic Council of Canada. There is also the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council and the Science Council of Canada, and the list goes on and on.
Speaking in this House during the budget the Minister of Finance declared: "As a result of these actions, there
will be 160 fewer government appointments and 500 fewer employees".


Garth Turner: Hear, hear.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: This statement by the Minister of Finance, and the "hear, hear" just attributed to the member for Halton-Peel, was heralded and applauded by members on the government side. They were delighted that 500 fewer government "employees" would be off the government payroll.
This is a very forward-thinking statement not for the benefit of Canada but for the benefit of those disgruntled Conservative Party members who have moved over to the Reform Party now. These are the members that the government opposite wants to focus on and please so that they will come back to the Tory family.
I do not think that an announcement of 500 lost jobs, whether in the public or the private domain, is anything to be applauded, especially today when the unemployment lines are long, when the amount of UI benefits being given out is soaring.
Just yesterday, in this House during Question Period the right hon. Prime Minister corrected, as usual, the Leader of the New Democratic Party. He said: "No, we are not spending $4 billion on unemployment insurance. We are spending $18 billion on UI". That is $18 billion.
Of course, there are those who no longer can collect UI and must move over to the welfare rolls. Talk to your communities and find out how much money your community is putting out on welfare overlap payments. It is outrageous.
They are people who try to find a job and cannot find one and therefore collect unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance runs out and then they must move over to welfare. A great percentage of those on those rolls are saying: "If the government would give us some retraining programs and some job opportunities". There has been a lot of advice given to this government from this side of the House, from this party and from the NDP.
There has not been much from the NDP, but there has been a little. We say: "Here is a way of creating jobs across Canada". The government fails to listen.
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Canadians who live in my constituency, and other constituencies of members on both sides of this House, are saying: "You know what? Give me retraining or give me a job, because I am prepared to work. Take some of that money, some of that $18 billion that is going toward unemployment insurance and some of that money that is going toward welfare payments, and redirect it toward job creation or retraining so I can go back into the work force and take some pride in myself. Then I will be able to go back and face my children at home and say that I have a job and can keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table".
That is what Canadians want to do. However they are not being given that opportunity because the money for retraining is slowly, surely trickling away.
The government will be boastful that the money for retraining is going to be there and everything is wonderful. This is just a rosy picture. However, we in our constituencies all know better. We were home over the last two-week period. People came into our offices who had gone to the UI office and said: "I am having a lot of difficulty here between what goes on in the unemployment insurance office and what is going on in the retraining office".
Madam Speaker, do you know the irony here? This is not the fault of Canadians but the fault of this government's economic, monetary and fiscal policies which have created the situation, not just in Hamilton West but in other areas of the country, that says the jobs ain't there. Go to the unemployment office and there is the big board with its job listings.
I venture to say that not one of the members sitting opposite in this House has been to their UI office or looked at that board recently.


Garth Turner: Yes, we have.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: You have? I hope the hon. member for Halton-Peel will rise and tell me what the story is at his unemployment insurance office.


An hon. member:: He will be there in about 18 months.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: A good comment: "He will be there in 18 months". Would he deny that when it comes to UI money and UI training the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing half the time, that there is
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very little co-ordination between those two offices? In fact, sometimes when somebody's UI cheque is about to run out and they have to be at the retraining office to continue to receive that kind of money to continue to be able to go back to school as well as collect their UI money they are told: "Well, it just so happens that your cheque ran out, sorry about that. We did not let you know that you could go over to the retraining office, continue your payments, and go back to school at the same time".
I would not go so far as to say that this was intentional. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. However, it is happening, and it is happening in each and every one of our areas. The government side has the greater number of members, so they would know to a greater degree that this is going on in their ridings. Are they doing anything about it?
I talked to my counsellor in the retraining office. They are not sure if they are going to have enough money left to carry them to the end of April. This is what I learned two weeks ago. That is shameful. It is outrageous.
The minister asks: "Do we raise taxes?" No. We cannot raise taxes. Canadians, as the minister knows and as we know on this side of the House, are taxed to death. They are already working until July before they start making money to put back into their pockets. They are taxed to death. They do not want to see any more taxes. God forbid what the NDP in Ontario are going to bring down to us today. More taxes, more taxes.
No, Canadians do not want more taxes. Canadians want to see the government of the land start to take in their money, just as a householder would do, and say: "This is how much money I have coming in". Most households know where that money is coming from and how much and what that total would be. Most would know. Ask a Canadian taxpayer about the total amount of money that the Government of Canada brings in to its purse each year and they might have a hard time knowing that number. What are we going to do once we receive that money? What are we going to do with it? I am sure someone sitting at home today in Hamilton or anywhere else would say: "Well, the weather is getting nicer, it is getting warmer. I would like to buy a boat so I can go to Lake Ontario or Lake Erie or up to the cottage and go for a toot with my kids and maybe do a little water-skiing. I am going to buy a boat".

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Mr. Marchi:: On Pigeon Lake.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: On beautiful Pigeon Lake. But the realization is there is only so much money and that person cannot afford to buy the boat. Do you know what the householder does, as we all do? We priorize. We decide that we cannot have this because we have to have that. We have to have a roof over our heads. We have to put three square meals on the table for the family. We have to make sure the insurance is paid up on the car so that we can take the kids to Brownies, Scouts or music lessons.
What we want to see this government do is priorize its expenditures. These worth-while government agencies have contributed in large measure, not in a critical sense to this government unfortunately for their demise, but have contributed in huge amounts to the future, to the intellect, to the pathfinding and pioneering of this country. But this government says no. It will save $22 million by cutting these things.
But oh, by the way, how much will it spend on this prosperity agenda? Twenty-two million dollars. A bunch of people going across the country, hearing from Canadians on how to be more prosperous.


Mr.   Dimer@Halton-Peel: Competitive.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: And more competitive. There are many companies in Canada that have decided, given what we are facing from this government, that the way to be competitive is the way our own Minister of National Revenue's brother decided to be competitive. Where was he going to expand his company? In the Oakville area? In the riding of my hon. friend for Halton-Peel? No. He expanded down in the United States. That is where we have to be competitive.


Mr.   Dirner@Halton -Peel: So what?


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: "So what?" says the hon. member for Halton-Peel. So what? It would have created a few hundred jobs if he had stayed here, would it not? If he had had the incentive to stay in Canada, maybe stay in the hon. member's own riding. It would have.


Garth Turner: You cannot build a wall around the country.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: The hon. member says: "You cannot build a wall around the country". But you can create the
monetary and fiscal policies to provide the incentive for those individuals to stay in this country.
Let me get back on track because I have wandered away from the main subject of this debate as we all sometimes do because we get very hostile toward a government that at times does not seem to give a damn about the average Canadian out there.
These bodies are perishing because of the government's short-sighted worries about re-election. It is getting close. We all know this. It could be the fall, it could be a snap. Back to the polls. It could be the spring if the government goes with the same leader that it has. "Let us tell disgruntled Tories that we are saving money", they say.
The Minister of Finance stated again during his budget speech: "The savings will amount to $22 million". Again that was plotted all around the government side. As I have already suggested, there is no saving.
My time has almost run out so I will conclude. The government already has an economic adviser. It is called the Economic Council of Canada. Yes, reports from it are critical of the government's policy. That is good, because as I finish this speech today, I will go back to my office and ask that somebody be critical with me. What did I say that maybe was out of line or what action did I take that I should not have? Did I wave my hands around too much, et cetera? I improve by being criticized. I welcome criticism because I improve as a result of it, just as this government would if the Economic Council of Canada continues its work, its solid pathfinding pioneering work. I use those words because they are a good description of what it has done for the government. Then the government improves and that is what we are all after in the long run, is it not?


Garth Turner: Madam Speaker, the hon. member who just spoke referred to a lack of competitiveness in the Canadian economic climate. He alleged that a number of companies cannot compete in Canada and therefore have moved to the United States.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: I rise on a point of order, Madam Speaker. I did not say those things.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: That is a point for debate. The hon. member will have an opportunity to answer
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after the questions or comments of the hon. member for Halton-Peel who now has the floor.


Garth Turner: I wanted to get the hon. member's reaction to an article that has just come to my attention today. It is quite telling in this whole area of competitiveness. I bring it up because the article refers to a plant that is not far from the hon. member's riding and my riding as well. It is in London, Ontario.
The headline in today's Sudbury Star is: "GM workers say free trade saved manufacturing jobs". I will just quote a couple of paragraphs. It is by Canadian Press which always prints the truth.
Some unusually nice things are being said about free trade by workers at the General Motors locomotive plant in this southern Ontario city.
Electrician Bob Beaume says he was called back to work after a layoff because of new work the plant gained under free trade. "For right here, for this plant, the free trade deal has definitely helped."
I would like the hon. member's reaction to that because we consistently hear nothing but negativity, doom and gloom in terms of economics, expansion and investment in Canada from the members opposite.
While he is reflecting on that he might as well give us his response to another investment that has also happened quite recently near his riding and my riding. It is the announcement by Ford Canada that it is investing $2.1 billion into new plant and equipment in Oakville and Windsor, Ontario.
While he is reflecting on those, he might also give us a response to the $70 million investment in research and development being made by Glaxo Canada Inc. in Mississauga which is also near his riding and mine. In those three instances where is the bad news?


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Madam Speaker, I welcome the hon. member's question. It gives me the opportunity again to point out to constituents in my riding of Hamilton West who have given me the privilege to serve them in this House, but also to other Canadians from coast to coast, that for every success story coming our way that the government produces on the free trade deal, we can counter with three failures. It is three to one. What do we look at when we look at a program whether it is successful or not?
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Garth Turner: This has nothing to do with free trade.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: If the hon. member for Halton-Peel wants to wait a moment and hear the whole argument then he can decide on how he would like to respond.
When we have to judge whether a program is successful or not we try to bring forward the program in its totality. We tiy to assess the results. In most cases on any given subject or any given topic we assess results on what we have in our hand at the end of the day.
Yes, here is a success story free trade has brought us. Is that not marvellous? Here at three to one or four to one is what free trade has not brought us. Unfortunately, there is always going to be something good said on one side and bad on the other on any given subject.
On that particular issue, yes, congratulations to Ford Canada. Congratulations to what it has managed to achieve. We know in this country we are proud to have Canadians who are eager enough, who are smart enough, who are able enough to do the job in a world market. There is no question of that, but at the same time, the free trade deal has its problems. While the workers at Ford are celebrating, the workers at Honda are not. Why is that? Well, we have a problem with free trade. The hon. member brought forward how free trade was a success story and we just look to Ford to believe it.
I am asking him to look to Honda to see what free trade is not going to do for Canada to protect the workers of Honda. The other day I was talking to the hon. member for Chatham. He represents the Chatham area and he sits as a colleague of mine in the Liberal Party. We were out in front of the House last night. He looked rather upset and I asked what was wrong. He said that he just got the numbers on the big three automakers in Chatham. I asked what numbers he was speaking of and he replied the unemployment rate.
The big three automakers in the Chatham area now have an unemployment rate of 52 per cent. He said he did not know what he was going to do. He would have to initiate-and he is very adept at creating-a forum for those who are being displaced to come together in some forward-thinking way, in a futuristic way, in order to evaluate and maybe redistribute the wealth and the talent in the Chatham area to other opportunities in the

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region. We hope and pray that there are opportunities there for them.
There is another example. Let us find out how many jobs have been created by the deal and how many jobs have been lost because of the deal. EIow many jobs or companies have moved to Canada because the free trade deal is going to be a net benefit to Canadians? How many factories and manufacturing jobs and how many manufacturing firms have been lost to the United States from Canada?
Why? Because it all boils down to the Government of Canada which sets the tone, which sets the policy, which sets the ideas for the monetary and fiscal agenda of the country.


Garth Turner: The American recession.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: The hon. member for Halton-Peel says: "The American recession". Canada was in a recession before the American recession hit and he knows that. He knows that Canada has a recession which was made right here in this country by that government. That is what is being said and it has been said for the last two and a half years. Everybody knows it.
The government members from Halton-Peel, South Shore, or whoever wants to speak up while I am trying to answer the question knows full well that Canadians out there know when the recession started because they are the the victims of it. They know when it started. They know that it was prior to any kind of a recessionary movement in the United States.
They are aware that it was the monetary and fiscal policies, the high interest rates, the high dollar value, all the straps and bindings that were put on manufacturing firms in this country due to the free trade deal. The companies and Canadians out there, they know and they will remember.
Within a period of just 18 months or less we are going to be going to the polls. It is not going to be very hard to forget who put them out of work, who put them in the unemployment line, who had them collect welfare, who had them lose their jobs because their companies decided that in order to maintain some kind of globalization and rationalization the plant would be more profitable in the United States.
They will have to look only as far as the tops of their dressers, where the loose change and dollar bills no longer are. They will only have to look to their children who will have to do without because the salaries they had collected no longer are there. They will only have to look at the residences they live in because they are no longer the houses that they were proud to have and to own- and according to the member for Halton-Peel should even have a right to own-but they cannot afford it and must decide to move to smaller digs in order to make a go of it. It is a shameful, shameful epitaph that will be written in a short period of time on the tombstone of this government.


Mr. Ian Waddell (Port Moody-Coquitlam):: Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in this debate.
Before I begin talking about the Law Reform Commission and other matters I would like to speak about today, I want to say to the hon. member who last spoke that I was a bit disturbed to hear the leader of his party say that he wanted other research, middle of the road research. He referred to the Fraser Institute on one side and the Canadian Labour Congress on the other. I do not think that is a good comparison. The Fraser Institute is a very right wing institute from my part of the country, British Columbia. The Canadian Labour Congress is part of the main stream of this country where business and labour-


An hon. member:: Give me a break.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: My friend says: "Give me a break". If the Liberals are going to govern this country, as they want to, they cannot write off the working people. You cannot write off the working man and woman. The working men and women and the institutions they have, their unions, their organizations, cannot be written off and excluded. That is part of the problem with this country.
I was disappointed to hear the leader of the Liberal Party, in my view, do that. That is not a very good omen. I know that sometimes my friends in the Liberal Party want to be everything to everybody and I know that they sometimes change their views. It just depends on whether it is Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday or whatever. They kind of flip-flop. I would hope that they would not write off the working people in this country.
April 30, 1992

In the budget of February 25, 1992, the Conservative government announced the elimination, consolidation, deferral or privatization of 46 government entities. These changes will affect 1,200 employees, cut 500 jobs and save $22 million per year. The government wants to give the impression, I gather, that it is against big government and it wants to cut the fat and so on.
It may surprise some members opposite, but I am against big government. I want to cut the fat. I want to make government efficient. I want to see the taxpayers get a break. I think one has to look at government bodies and institutions and make sure they are worth while, that it is a good expense and that the taxpayers' money is spent properly. We have become acutely aware of that.
I am a Scotsman. I sometimes wear my kilt on Burns night. When you wear your kilt you keep a quarter or something in your little sporran. You cannot carry a lot of money around with you.
I remember Sir Harry Lauder, a great Scottish comedian, who made his career in portraying how cheap the Scots were. It is not true. Scottish people are very generous. But it is not a bad image in a way in the sense of their being careful with the way they spend the dollar. I take that from my Scottish heritage; be careful the way you spend a dollar. The government should be that way.
One should look at what this government is doing. This is a government that spends money like water on the Constitution. If it has anything to do with the Constitution, money is spent like crazy. With regard to propaganda, ideological propaganda, the Liberal member who last spoke mentioned an instance where the government is spending something like $22 million around the country on a prosperity agenda, going around the country saying: "We are going to hold these meetings to talk about prosperity". This is pure bunk. This is a pure waste of money.
The government is wasting much money. Then it comes back to the House with this bill and says: "Now we are saving money". I am going to show in my speech in the area I know a little bit about as NDP justice critic, the Law Reform Commission, that the government is not saving money. It is wasting money with this particular cutback.
Government Orders
Bill C-63 gives effect to the government's commitment to cut back matters. It destroys six government entities, two of which are wound up.
There is the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council and the Law Reform Commission of Canada. This is what I want to talk about. There is the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security which, if I had more time, I would like to talk about. It is a great institution and should not be cut back.
There is the Economic Council of Canada about which I have two minds. I notice that the Economic Council always wanted to cut the deficit and cut back. Now it is sort of a victim of its own policies in many ways and of its own recommendations, but it has been useful in the past and it has been independent.
There is the International Centre for Ocean Development and the Science Council of Canada. I want to talk about the Law Reform Commission.
It is ironic because I just came from a meeting of a parliamentary committee. Of course, the House is televised and the electors and the viewers can see the House, but they do not see our committees. I just came from a legislative committee that was considering an act called the Contraventions Act. It is a bill of this House.
What the act does is make it easier and more efficient for the giving of tickets for federal offences such as at airports or marine offences, environmental offences and so on. It streamlines the procedure. The government is going to end up collecting more money in the long run, and the citizens are going to be better off.
Where do you think that idea came from? Since 1976, the Law Reform Commission of Canada has advocated a distinction in law between acts or omissions that should be termed criminal and those which should not. It proposed in its study of 1986 called "Working Paper Number 54: Classification of Offences" the whole basis for the act of Parliament that we were considering this morning.
What is this bill that we are debating now? It is going to end the Law Reform Commission. It is, in fact, going to put the Law Reform Commission out of business. The Law Reform Commission was established 20 years ago, in 1971. It reports to Parliament through the Minister of Justice. Its mandate is to provide an ongoing review of the statutes of Canada, to make recommendations for

April 30, 1992
improvement, for modernization and reform of legislation.
It undertakes some research in-house. It contracts out work. It holds seminars. It visits universities and schools, and it publishes articles in learned journals. In other words, it does legal research that is independent and is necessary to streamline our system of justice.
What has the government done? To save money, it cut the Law Reform Commission about $4 million. It cut the Court Challenges Program by $2 million which allows people, disadvantaged groups, minority groups, to actually challenge our laws in court. It gives them some access to Canadian justice for the first time.
There is $6 million it "saves" at the expense of efficiency and justice. On the other hand, it increases the budget of the Department of Justice, the litigation budget, by $16 million so that it can shuffle all that money to Conservative lawyers and big, fat law firms in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. It ends up costing the taxpayer more.
If you cut the Law Reform Commission, you save $4 million. Where do you get the research according to the government? Where are we going to get the legal research? We are going to do it in the Department of Justice.
There are two problems with that. One, it is more costly in the long run and two, it is in house. It has the government viewpoint. We will never see those studies because of the secrecy of this government and it will not be done as well as it would be done by an outside agency.
Under the Law Reform Commission of Canada, we were getting a bargain. We were getting good research. It was independent research. It was efficient, cost effective and we were drawing from people all over the country. Quite frankly, we had cheaper rates and free rates often times. We will not get this by doing it in house in the Department of Justice.
This is a perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. It is a perfect example of phony moneysaving by a government that is adrift, that has lost the confidence of the public, that really does not know where it is going, sees the Reform Party out there so it has got to bring in some cuts and brings in cuts that it has not even thought about.
If it wants to cut, it should cut some money in the Prime Minister's Office. It should cut some money out of the constitutional budget. It should cut some of the money out of the fat that is in this government, the propaganda money, the poll money and so on which is being spent directly to try to get this government elected. This, of course, is an impossible task.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I will interrupt the hon. member, who of course will have time to continue once we resume Orders of the Day later on this afternoon.

It being one o'clock, I do now leave the Chair until two o'clock this afternoon.
The House took recess at 1 p. m.


[Stage Direction]
AFTER RECESS

The House resumed at 2 p.m.

Mr. Larry Schneider (Regina-Wascana):: Mr. Speaker, I rise today to once again express my support for our country, Canada. Only a united Canada continues to be the best place in the world. I do so by echoing the comments of the Prime Minister in his speech in Hull, Quebec, recently in which he introduced some sobering facts to the unity debate.
Those who wish to divide this great nation or misunderstand the consequences of division will accuse him of economic terrorism or overstatement. I think not. We will all surely suffer socially and economically if Canada is divided.
I say that to the people and leaders of all regions and, in particular, to the new premier of Saskatchewan. Nation building means learning to compromise. It means looking for ways to make the country work. It means positive thinking.
I am saddened when I hear Saskatchewan's premier say he will not put his name to any constitutional agreement just to keep Canada together. As well, I ask the people and leaders of Quebec to please be willing to give a little. The reality is we cannot have any of the comforts of marriage after our divorce.
April 30, 1992

Let us not be fooled. Let us not be misled.


INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION
Gilbert Parent: Mr. Speaker, the International Labour Organization will be holding its annual meeting in Geneva starting on June 3.
Several conventions will be under consideration. One in particular, No. 147, deals with the standards of work for employees of merchant ships and included, of course, are Canadian seamen.
I urge the Minister of Labour to ratify this convention on behalf of Canada as well as the several others that deal specifically with the welfare and safety of Canadian workers. This is long overdue and I urge that this be done at the earliest possible convenience.


CONSUMER DEBIT CARDS
Mr. Ken James (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Labour):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to inform this House of the launching of the Canadian code of practice for consumer debit card services which will take place in Toronto on May 1.
The development of the code is a positive step forward in consumer protection. It also provides a flexible and effective alternative to separate federal and provincial regulations. It is an excellent example of the partnership theme of National Consumer Week, namely, "It's Everybody's Business".
The code sets out provisions to protect consumers who use debit cards at automated banking machines and point of sale terminals. It will apply throughout Canada offering the same level of protection to consumers wherever they live.
The code was drafted by business, consumer, and government representatives. This initiative has demonstrated the benefits of partnership and consultation between government and affected interest groups.


NORTHWEST TERRITORIES PLEBISCITE
Mr. Jack Iyerak Anawak (Nunatsiaq):: [Editor's Note: Member spoke in Inuktituk.]
On Monday, May 4, residents of the Northwest Territories will vote in a plebiscite on a boundary line to divide the NWT into two parts. The Inuit of the eastern Arctic have lead the drive toward division so they can have a government which is closer to them.
Right now people on Baffin Island in the extreme east of the existing Northwest Territories are situated north of the province of Quebec. Yet they have to deal with a territorial capital located in Yellowknife which is north of Alberta. No other Canadian citizens have to deal with a provincial or territorial capital which is two time zones away.
Division will lead to two new territories: Nunavut in the eastern Arctic and Denendeh in the western Arctic, each more responsive to the needs of its people and able to contribute more strongly to this great country.
In this 125th anniversary year for Canada we are on the verge of welcoming a new partner to our federation.
The people of Nunavut are ready and I urge the residents of the Northwest Territories to vote yes in favour of the boundary.


THE OUTAOUAIS
Mr. Jean-Guy Guilbault (Drummond):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to mention Murray Maltais's editorial in Le Droit today on the speech that the Prime Minister gave to the Outaouais Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. "By speaking out publicly on the risks that western Quebec runs on the constitutional issue, the Prime Minister is contributing to greater recognition of its particular status in Quebec and in Canada, whether we agree with the line of argument chosen or not".
On that occasion, the Prime Minister mentioned, among other things, the actual situation of the Ottawa area, which is highly vulnerable with the federal government as the driving force of the economy.

April 30, 1992
The region, Quebec and all of Canada are indebted to him for his frankness on the vital issues.


Mr. Lyle Dean MacWilliam (Okanagan -Shuswap):: Mr. Speaker, to many World War II is synonymous with the horrors of the Holocaust.
Today marks the observance of Yom Ha Shoah, a day of remembrance for all those who died as a result of the Nazi firing squads and death camps. Within 12 years of Adolph Hitler coming to power over 6 million Jews from Germany, Poland and all over Europe were senselessly and brutally slaughtered.
They died not because they were soldiers on one side or the other, but simply because they were Jewish. Their deaths serve to remind us of the horror that can result from racial intolerance.
Racism is not dead. It continues to rear its ugly head in many forms throughout Canada and around the world. Its sting is felt most by our visible minorities and those least able to defend themselves.
Today, we must remember the past and work together to eliminate all forms of racism from our lives.


EDMONTON SYMPHONY SOCIETY
Mr. Scott Thorkelson (Edmonton - Strathcona):: Mr. Speaker, to celebrate Canada's 125th birthday the Edmonton Symphony Society developed a patriotic program entitled; "Made in Canada". They submitted this proposal to the Canada 125 Corporation for review but bureaucrats refused to take it to the Canada 125 board for consideration, effectively killing the proposal.
Rather than work with the symphony to discuss their concerns and to improve the proposal, the corporation chose to kill it. For three weeks I have placed calls to the co-chair, Frank King, and have heard nothing but silence.
Edmonton is the fifth largest metropolitan area in Canada and as such the proposal deserves to be considered.
I call upon Canada 125 to work with the Edmonton Symphony to develop a great program to celebrate the accomplishments of Canadian composers and musicians.


UNDERTAKINGS BY BLOC QUEBECOIS
Mr. Gilles Duceppe (Laurier-Sainte-Marie):: Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Bloc Quebecois and union leaders met in Montreal yesterday on the occasion of workers' day. The union leaders clearly stated that the debate must be on the costs of federalism and that the onus is on the federalists, who since 1980 have promised to settle the constitutional question and economic issues.
The Bloc Quebecois undertook to demand that the free trade agreement with the United States and Mexico include transitional provisions, a social charter and an environmental charter. The bloc also promised to press for an anti-scab law at the federal level, and the present lockout at Nationair proves how urgent such a law is.
While the Prime Minister attacks unionized workers, at the same time as he frequents private clubs, the bloc, the large labour organizations and Quebec workers are just waiting for the opportunity to say yes to sovereignty in the Quebec referendum in October 1992.


NATIONAL FOREST WEEK
Mr. Reginald Belair (Cochrane-Superior):: Mr. Speaker, during the week of May 3 to 9 we will be celebrating National Forest Week. The 1992 theme is: "Take a closer look".
We are all becoming more conscious of the rich resources we have at our disposal. At the present time, approximately 1 million Canadian workers depend on the forest industry. Yet with so many Canadians depending on our forests for their survival, we see major funding cuts in forest resource development agreements. These cuts will result in a 25 per cent reduction in planting in the north central region of Ontario this year.
April 30, 1992

During National Forest Week the question every Canadian should be asking himself or herself is: "How can I help to make our forests better and more productive?"
One method to improve this important natural resource would be through better educational programs that support the concept of the model forest.


GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS
Mrs. Edna Anderson (Simcoe Centre):: Mr. Speaker, the media has been inflaming negative feelings toward Quebec by reporting only the business contracts awarded to Quebec companies and neglecting to report business contracts awarded to companies in other provinces.
At a time when all Canadians are being asked to put aside petty differences, the press seems to think that it is more important to fan the flames of division rather than to promote unity.
Government contracts are awarded to all provinces. It seems strange that we have to defend only the contracts awarded to Quebec and not the contracts going to other regions of Canada. Quebec contracts become front page news and require cabinet ministers to rise in the House of Commons in defence of them.
I do not like the implications of this. As far as I am concerned, it is completely unacceptable and un-Canadian. The press must start behaving in a responsible manner giving Canadians the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.


NEW BRUNSWICK'S ECONOMY
Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: Mr. Speaker, once again, the government has chosen to ignore New Brunswick's problems. Today it decided to penalize Sackville, a town already affected by high unemployment. Now-.

The government is closing down the RCMP crime lab in Sackville and 30 jobs will be lost. That is the equivalent of 5,000 jobs in Ottawa. It has done it without advising the mayor and without even having the courtesy to inform the member of Parliament for Beausejour.
I would like to ask the government to review that decision and make sure that the economics of these problems are being reviewed and that justice be done for the city of Sackville.


SOFTWOOD LUMBER
Mr. Brian L. Gardiner (Prince George-Bulkley Valley):: Mr. Speaker, the news today is unfortunately true that a former Socred politician is in Washington, D.C. paid for by U.S. lumber interests to argue against Canada's position on the softwood lumber tariff.
It is an indication of how desperate the Americans are in this dispute against Canada. The key to resolving this dispute is for our own government to hold firm and not sell out like it did in 1986 when it signed the softwood lumber tariff memorandum of understanding.
Despite the growing number of trade disputes between Canada and the U.S., the federal government is telling us that free trade will save us. Most Canadians just do not believe that.
Since the Prime Minister will be in Washington, D.C. on May 20 when the next softwood decision is to be made, we call on the government to deliver the strongest message possible to the U.S. that our forests are Canada's and it is not for the United States to dictate to us how to run them.


GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS
Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the government announced a $1 billion sole source contract to Bell Helicopter in Quebec and there has been a great hue and cry.
At the same meeting of cabinet a $900 million sole source contract was awarded to a London, Ontario firm to provide LAVs. There were the same rules but a different province and nobody, it would seem, has paid any attention.
Last year, a $1 billion high-tech military contract was awarded to an Alberta company yet not a peep did we hear from the Reform Party about that. Not so long ago, the largest military contract in Canadian history, $4.7 billion was sole sourced to Saint John Shipbuilding in New Brunswick and nobody in Atlantic Canada complained.

April 30, 1992
Oral Questions
The Bell decision was the right decision. No other Canadian company was prepared to bid on or fulfil the contract. The Mirabel company was the only one that could supply what the Canadian Armed Forces said it needed. The contract will be good for Canadian defence, it will be good for Quebec workers and it will be good for Canada.


THE CONSTITUTION
Mr. Lome Nystrom (Yorkton-Melville):: Mr. Speaker, the news yesterday out of Edmonton is that the federal government and the provinces have reached an agreement in principle for a social covenant in the Constitution. We must commend them for that. What they are saying is that the principles of the negotiations are the five principles included in the parliamentary report on the renewal of Canada.
The five principles include: enshrining the basic principles of medical care in the Constitution; protecting the social services such as housing in the Constitution of Canada; providing protection for not only elementary school education but also secondary and post-secondary education; protecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively; and finally, preserving the integrity of the environment in the Constitution of Canada.
I understand the details are still to be worked out, but we must commend the leaders of our provincial governments and the federal government for making sure that this is now approved to go into the Constitution of Canada.


GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS
Mr. Greg Thompson (Carleton -Charlotte):: Mr. Speaker, the recent controversy over the awarding of a helicopter contract to a Quebec firm has been a good news story for those who want to divide Canada.
Where were these agents of division when Ontario received the $1 billion contract for vehicles, or the $1 billion contract that went to Alberta for communications equipment, or the $4 billion contract that went to New Brunswick? If the critics want to tell the story, I believe
they should tell the whole story and they should tell the truth. As the hon. member for Halton-Peel said yesterday, Canada is not a balance sheet.
I urge all Canadians to stop looking at contracts going to Quebec as being somehow different from those going to other parts of Canada.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Finance.
Earlier this month we learned that 74,000 people lost their jobs in the month following the budget. Today we learned that 7,000 people and businesses went bankrupt in that same month, the month of March.
It is obvious that the federal budget is not working and now everyone is shaking in their boots about what Pink Floyd is going to do in Ontario today.
Will the Minister of Finance do something to kick-start the economy? It is very evident that there has been no growth since the budget, that all the projections he made are not true, and that the economy needs some help to start again. Will the minister review his bad judgment of two months ago?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, I share the concern of the hon. Leader of the Opposition. I am certainly not comforted. In fact I am disturbed by the bankruptcy figures and I am not comforted by the level of unemployment.
In fairness the hon. Leader of the Opposition should recognize that the budget was brought down on February 25. The figures we are dealing with today show there has been a modest pick up in GDP in the month of February. There has been a modest pick up in the month of January. As a matter of fact, Statistics Canada adjusted those figures upward. We see the bankruptcy figures for March as being very disturbing, but I think the hon. member would recognize that it does take a little time for the initiatives of the budget to take hold.
April 30, 1992

I remind the hon. member that we did act on the manufacturing and processing side. We did act in terms of stimulating the housing sector. I firmly believe, given the level of interest rates, the fact that there has been moderation in interest rates by more than seven percentage points since the high of May 1990, the fundamentals and the components for sustainable growth and recovery are clearly there.
We should also be pleased about the fact that it seems the American economy has indeed turned around. It has shown a two percentage point increase in GDP in the first quarter and I think that augurs well for Canada.


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: Mr. Speaker, this week I was in Quebec, which in March registered nearly 500 new business bankruptcies. The exact number was 471, which is more than in any other province.
If you walk down the streets of Montreal, you see empty shop windows with signs reading "For Rent" or "For Sale". One gets the impression that the only business flourishing in Montreal is the one making these signs.
I would like to put the following question to the minister. I met the mayor of Montreal who told me that if the government accepted the proposal made in the House by the Liberal Party-a proposal made previously by municipalities-to finance one-third of the cost of building city infrastructures, Montreal and the mayor of Montreal could put hundreds of thousands of people to work as early as next week or next month on useful and lasting projects. This is not about buying groceries but about building the infrastructures Montreal and other Canadian cities so desperately need.
Why will the minister not agree to a proposal that would only cost him one-third of the total cost? He would recover a large part of his investment, people would go back to work and the economy would take a turn for the better.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. Leader of the Opposition knows that in addition to the economy
Oral Questions
being weak we have been going through a major industrial restructuring.
The budget tried to identify that, tried to assist and improve the climate of industry, and tried to assist and improve the climate of investment so that this restructuring process could be facilitated.
I am pleased that many of the provinces have been complementary in their budgets. They have brought in policies that are complementary. I only hope the Government of Ontario brings down a budget today that will be complementary to strengthening and enhancing the manufacturing and processing sector.
I think that is really important. I am sure he would agree with me that it is in that particular area the real decline in unemployment and the real impact of the restructuring and the slowing down of the economy have been effected mostly.
He suggests that we should engage in a spending program. The hon. Leader of the Opposition knows that the federal government does not have the fiscal capacity to do what he is asking us to do. I doubt very much that the provinces have the fiscal capacity.
He is really saying: "Drive up the deficit or tax more in order to create some jobs". While I am sympathetic, I think he recognizes that in order for us to lay the groundwork for sustainable growth with price stability we have to contain inflation and we have to consolidate our fiscal problem. That is what we are doing.


Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance will understand very easily that if he put $1 billion on the table the provinces will put $1 billion on the table, as they have agreed, and the municipalities will do the same. He will get back a lot of money in taxes, less unemployment insurance and welfare payments. He will recuperate almost 80 per cent of his investment.
At the same time there will be hope in Canada because the people will be circulating in the cities and they will see people working. After that they will have confidence to spend their money to help the economy.
Will the minister not accept such a proposition? It will not cost him a lot of money. It will create jobs and hope in the country.

April 30, 1992
Oral Questions


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I see hon. members applauding that.
The Leader of the Opposition is saying: "Go out and borrow $3 billion and spend it and you will get $3 billion worth of taxes back". If the hon. Leader of the Opposition has that figured out, I would like to see how he does that calculation.
The fact of the matter is that there is only one taxpayer. Taxpayers are fed up with taxes at the federal level, at the provincial level, and at the municipal level.


Mr. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Last month in Ontario alone there were almost 3,000 bankruptcies, the highest number in all of Canada. That means that in Ontario in the first full month after the minister's budget nearly 100 people and businesses went bankrupt each and every day. That is each and every day. No wonder Canadians are fed up with this government. These are not just numbers. They represent lost jobs, lost hopes and dreams.
Why can the minister not recognize this? Why does he not take action before more time is lost? Why does he not take action to stop this economic destruction and help get Canadians working again?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I share the hon. member's concern about the loss of jobs, the loss of dreams, and the fact that businesses have been lost.
I think he also recognized that a major restructuring has been going on in the retail sector and that many of the bankruptcies have been effected in the retail sector. That has occurred not only here but in the United States as well.
He condemns the budget because within a month it did not turn everything around. The budget was not designed to turn the economy around in one month. It was designed to deal with the very basic and fundamental problems, the structural problems, and to aid in that process.
We targeted the manufacturing and the processing sector. We targeted the housing sector. We continued our effort to maintain a macro-economic policy geared toward sustainable growth and price stability, attacking inflation and consolidating the deficit.
If the hon. member is asking that we drive up the deficit, spend more money and try to spend our way out of this, I can tell him that is not an option as far as I am concerned.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, Canadians, members on this side of the House and I are asking the government to do something to help the one and a half million Canadians without work find jobs.
I want to ask a question of the Minister of Employment and Immigration. In the first month after the budget, in addition to some 7,000 more bankruptcies, 74,000 people lost their jobs across Canada. Surely this cannot be the economic recovery, the restoration of fundamentals his colleague the Minister of Finance keeps talking about.
What is the Minister of Employment and Immigration going to do to help stop this economic destruction and create jobs now for the one and a half million Canadians without work who want help from this government, not just more empty talk?


Hon. Bernard Valcourt (Minister of Employment and Immigration):: Mr. Speaker, I will tell the hon. member and colleagues in the House that the UI program reacted rapidly to the deteriorating labour market condition.
Some $17 billion of income support to UI claimants have helped the people who have to go through these economic times. In this fiscal year we have increased by $300 million training funds so that we can help those individual Canadians.
The Liberal Party calls for us to buy the illusion of prosperity by throwing money at it, money that taxpayers do not have. The Minister of Finance has put the case clearly.


Steven W. Langdon: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance as well.
The bank rate has gone up by 12 basis points today, a significant increase. Does the Minister of Finance not recognize that this increase in the bank rate is a danger-
April 30, 1992

ous signal to consumer confidence across the country and to business confidence across the country?
Will he admit that part of the reason for the bank rate to increase is the minister's own irresponsible comments before the G-7 meeting in Washington this weekend during which he shocked people across the international business community by talking about the future of interest rates in a way a Minister of Finance should never speak at an international situation?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I was only using the communique that was produced by the G-7 finance ministers which said that real interest rates remain high. Ministers were of the view that satisfactory progress on inflation, curbing excessive wage pressure, and progress in consolidating fiscal positions would create the basis for lower interest rates.
That is exactly the thrust of the comments that I made, which is consistent with the conclusions of the G-7 finance ministers.


Steven W. Langdon: Mr. Speaker, the minister in fact said that Canadian rates were going to decrease. That has created a crisis, some lack of confidence, and the minister should be prepared to admit it.
However, I want to ask the minister not just about that increase in bank rates but about the tragic increase in bankruptcies that has taken place. We have had a higher level of bankruptcies announced today than in any previous month in Canadian history. One of the victims is Gary Bilmes of Windsor who has worked for 15 years for Maher Shoes-


Mr. Speaker:: I think I must ask the hon. member to get to the close of his question.


Steven W. Langdon: Mr. Speaker, my question is this: What has the minister to say to Gary Bilmes who is one of 700 people in Maher Shoes who have lost their jobs across this country? Cannot the minister see that his policies are failing?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, what I have said in the House and outside the House on many occasions is that with the progress this government has made on inflation and on fiscal consolidation, we have witnessed a
Oral Questions
reduction in interest rates by more than seven percentage points since the high of May 1990.
I think it is fair to say with the continuing record that is being followed in this regard, which is consistent with our macro-economic policies, it provides scope for further interest rate reductions because of the low rate of inflation. That is not something I have strayed away from because it is part and parcel of the fundamental policy that is adopted by this government. It has been echoed as well by the Governor of the Bank of Canada. That is what is said and nothing more.
In so far as his reference to an individual, of course I am sympathetic, but I also advise the hon. member that it is important for us to get the fundamentals right. The basis for a solid recovery, the basis for sustainable growth with price stability is the containment of inflation, the insurance that-


An hon. member:: Order.


Mr. Speaker:: I think we will have to move on.


Steven W. Langdon: In fact, Mr. Speaker, the fundamentals are wrong. That is why we are facing the situation we are in this country.
I want to ask the minister about my own province of Ontario which has faced losses of $4.5 billion this year alone because of failed transfer payment commitments on the part of the federal government. I want to ask this minister if he is prepared to change his policies and see to it that the provinces of this country get a fair deal on transfer payments that they can count on so they do not have to face this kind of pressure right across this country.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's province of Ontario will get something in the order of $10 billion in cash and tax transfer payments in this particular fiscal year. That represents an increase. The growth in transfer payments to the province of Ontario represents a higher rate of growth than Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, British Columbia and Alberta.
The hon. member should know that. If he looks at the figures, he will find it very revealing to note that Ontario has not been short changed, nor have any of the other provinces been short changed. We have asked provinces to live within certain fiscal disciplines as we in the federal government have been.

April 30, 1992
Oral Questions CANADA POST


Mr. Jerry Pickard (Essex-Kent):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister responsible for Canada Post. Earlier today the minister introduced measures to allow employees of Canada Post to buy shares in the Crown corporation.
Will the minister take this opportunity to admit to Canadians that he is embarking on the first steps of privatization of Canada Post?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, I do not know why I would admit that. It would not be the truth if I were to do that as the hon. member will see from the bill. What the bill does is propose that there be stocks available for employees to participate in a savings plan, become a part of the company, feel a part of it, share in the growth in profits and profitability, productivity and so on.
The act makes it veiy clear that should in fact the decision be made about privatization of Canada Post, that would require separate legislation to come back to this House and there would be ample opportunity for people to make their choice between private ownership or state ownership if that comes up.
This minister has no intentions to bring forth that kind of legislation at this time.


Mr. Don Boudria (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell):: Mr. Speaker, even Margaret Thatcher had enough sense not to privatize the British post office.

In his press release earlier today, the minister indicated that the investment plan would give employees a so-called share in the activities of Canada Post. Although some people may agree with the minister's reasoning-I for one do not-how can he claim to increase employee involvement when employees will be denied voting privileges on the shares they purchase?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker,the member should check his facts about Britain because part of the post office was indeed privatized. I
recognize that there are those who still believe that state ownership is superior to private ownership in all enterprises. I guess they will never learn and I am not going to attempt to change their minds.
On the question of the voting shares, employee stock owner savings plans, employee stock savings plans, which are used by about a quarter of the companies trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, for example, do not require them to have voting privileges with them in order to accomplish their goals. In any event, voting would not make any sense because 90 per cent of the shares would still rest with the Crown. The Crown would still have total control.
What the hon. member is asking for does not really make sense. What this will provide is for employees of Canada Post to participate in the growth of this corporation as it continues to improve and continues to remain the most efficient, effective postal system in the world.


EMPLOYMENT
Mr. Jim Peterson (Willowdale):: Mr. Speaker, business bankruptcies in Canada are up 11 per cent this month over last year. Maher Shoes is just one more casualty of this government's GST, cross-border shopping and other policies that favour U.S. retailers.
As of 2.30 p.m. today, seven minutes ago, neither the Minister of Employment and Immigration nor any of his officials had offered to help the 1,400 Maher employees who are being let out of work. I ask the Minister of Employment and Immigration why does he just not care?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, EIC officials are aware of the situation with respect to the Maher stores closure and will be meeting over the next few days with representatives of that company. EIC will extend its services through an industrial adjustment committee. We will ensure that all workers affected by this development have access to the full range of training and employment assistance programs.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: The fact remains, Mr. Speaker, that as of right now there has been no contact with those employees.
April 30, 1992

This government has very seriously underestimated the levels of unemployment in Canada for this year. I ask the Minister of Employment and Immigration what new additional resources he has obtained to help retrain and relocate the thousands upon thousands of Canadians who are joining the ranks of Canada's unemployed.


Bernard Valcourt: What we have obtained amounts to $400 million of more money that will be spent to train individual Canadians who become unemployed in this year.
Mr. Speaker, $3.4 billion is a large amount of money. It is essential that the responsibility to face those challenges of restructuring our economy be shared by all levels of government, even by the business and labour sector. That is what we are doing through the Labour Force Development Strategy, where for the first time in this country you have business and labour sitting together and looking at the training requirements of Canadians and advising the government, and hopefully impressing on the provinces the need to invest more into training Canadians.


CANADA POST
Mr. Rod Murphy (Churchill):: Mr. Speaker, my question is to the minister responsible for Canada Post.
In 1985 the Prime Minister said: "Air Canada is not for sale". The Deputy Prime Minister tried to infer in the House in 1988 that what he meant was that it was not for sale "at this time". Considering that the minister responsible for Canada Post has just used those words again, how can we trust the government not to try and privatize Canada Post in the near future?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, I will explain again that for any government to privatize Canada Post it would have to come forward to this Parliament with a bill where the hon. member and all members of Parliament could debate and vote on it.
Only when Parliament approves such a bill could Canada Post be privatized. Therefore, the hon. member should not be concerned about any sneak attack, some
Oral Questions
sneaky selling of shares to Canadians, because that is not possible without an act of Parliament. I do not have any plans at this time to bring forward legislation in that regard.
If the hon. member had come to the briefing I offered to members of the opposition earlier, I would have explained the rationale of the bill. I am sure he would have been comforted in terms of the direction we are going and what we are trying to accomplish.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, I can read the legislation. The minister knows that all it takes is a one line amendment in this legislation to open up the shares to anybody. They are establishing a share regime. The Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources is applauding. It indicates the purpose of this government. It is setting up a share regime to make privatization possible.
Why does this government not tell the truth to Canadians? Why not come clean? Why pretend? Why do another Air Canada run-around and lie to the people of Canada?


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member has gone too far. I know he would want to withdraw that last comment, and I ask him to do so.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, very briefly, I withdraw the comment. The history speaks for itself.


Mr. Speaker:: That is not good enough. The hon. member feels very strongly about this matter and so probably do other hon. members, but we have to operate within the bounds of civility. I ask the hon. member, who is an experienced member, to make his withdrawal quite unequivocal, please.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, I do withdraw the remark. The government die not lie to the people. People can check the record and make their own interpretation.


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Mr. Speaker:: I think I am going to have to ask the hon. member to perhaps just consider his position for a little while. I am going to come back and perhaps by then the hon. member will realize that an unequivocal withdrawal is just that and it is our tradition and it must be insisted on.
For the moment I am going on to the hon. member for Mississauga East.

April 30, 1992
Oral Questions


POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION
Ms. Albina Guarnieri (Mississauga East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Employment and Immigration.
Yesterday the minister admitted that he has a problem; 300,000 jobs, he says, were left unfilled last year because Canadian workers lacked the skills to apply. Why has the minister failed to admit that what has short changed these Canadian workers is this government's savage cutbacks in transfer payments for post-secondary education. When will the minister learn that his funding freeze has left many Canadians frozen out of the jobs that they so desperately need?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, it is incredible that someone can stand up in the House and tell Canadians when you look at the transfers to provinces that they have been cut. Even back home in Madawaska-Victoria, one plus one is still two. It does not seem to add up on that side of the House.
The member talks about the unemployed in her home province of Ontario. Yes, Canadians do lack training skills. In all of Canada we have tripled labour training money from $500 million in 1990 to $1.8 billion this year. If the argument is that we should do more, we agree we should do more, but we should do it with all the stakeholders in that economy.


Albina Guarnieri: Mr. Speaker, yesterday the minister repeatedly asked the Liberals to be part of the solution. I want to assure the minister that we will join with Canadians in creating that solution on election day.
The Prime Minister preaches that education and training are key to Canada's ability to compete internationally, yet his prophecy is not reflected in his budget papers.
I ask the minister to reconcile the Prime Minister's deeds with his fine words and restore funding to universities and colleges so that Canadians can qualify for the few jobs still available in the country.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member looked at page 98, I believe, of the budget papers she would find that transfer payments to provinces have
grown very substantially. Transfer payments to provinces have grown from $25.6 billion in 1984-1985 to $38.9 billion this year. That certainly does not sound like a cut to me.
In her own province of Ontario during that period of time, the rate of growth of transfer payments has been more than 6 per cent annually. As I said earlier that growth rate is more than the growth rate in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia and Alberta. Ontario has been treated very generously.


HOUSING
Mr. Joe Fontana (London East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister responsible for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
The federal government has raided the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's mortgage fund to the tune of $55 million. This government is robbing Peter to pay Paul when it takes the CMHC's mortgage insurance surplus to meet its own deficit targets.
Why is this government jeopardizing the integrity of the fund and potentially denying people the right to purchase their own home in the future?


Hon. Elmer M. MacKay (Minister of Public Works):: Mr. Speaker, my colleague knows that the mortgage insurance fund, thanks to good management by Canada Mortgage and Housing, can well afford to make this contribution to reducing the deficit, which is something that I think all members know is a very vital element to getting this economy growing again.
There is no connection between the payment to assist the Minister of Finance in this regard and the capability of Canada Mortgage and Housing to discharge its responsibilities.


Joseph Frank (Joe) Fontana: Mr. Speaker, the minister should read his own briefing papers and documents. There was a pre-tax loss last year in the mortgage insurance fund of $27 million. CMHC's own economist forecasts an increase in the number of mortgage defaults this year, rising from $161 million in 1991 to $614 million in two years because of this government's economic policies.
April 30, 1992

In the face of continuing job losses, economic uncertainty and continuing recession, why is this government not protecting itself, homeowners, and future homeowners of this country?


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Mr. Speaker, I repeat to the House that careful actuarial calculations show that the mortgage insurance fund was well able to make this contribution to deficit reduction. I know my colleague will recognize that while there is no room for complacency in the housing sector there has been a noticeable improvement on the market side, even in social housing.
This government in difficult fiscal times has contributed $70 million more to the welfare of 1.5 million Canadians who are living in social housing.


VIA RAIL
Mr. John R. Rodriguez (Nickel Belt):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Transport.
Last Sunday VIA Rail implemented a new schedule between Capreol and Hornpayne. That schedule effectively eliminated access to the properties of hundreds of people who live along that line. In fact the train is the only means of transportation into those properties.
I ask the minister if he will reverse VIA's unfair decision and allow these people unfettered access to their properties along that line.


Hon. Jean Corbeil (Minister of IVansport):: Mr. Speaker, I guess that running a train operation is a little bit like politics.
Either you do like the socialists and not adapt to new circumstances and get wiped out completely after a number of years, or you adapt to normal circumstances to try to make the train more attractive to the people. People would use the train and you could keep it alive.
This is what VIA has done with its transcontinental. By making improvements to it, shortening the number of hours that people must travel on that route, they have done something that unfortunately does not serve all the cottagers who want to go to the train track, flag the train and the train will stop. This is no longer possible in modern days.
Oral Questions


John R. Rodriguez: Mr. Speaker, all I have to say is the minister has spoken like a politician whose party is peaking at 16 per cent.
We are not talking about politics. We are talking about access to property by permanent residents along that line, by people who have tourist businesses along that line and the train is their only means of transportation.
Is the minister prepared to instruct VIA to look at alternative methods of providing access to the properties by, for example, providing a bud car or speeding up the schedule between Toronto and Capreol, or by eliminating the 30 minutes idling in the Sudbury station and applying it to these stops?
We are talking about people and the access to their homes. We are not talking politics here for the minister's sake.


Jean Corbeil: Mr. Speaker, in its new schedule adopted on April 26, VIA has cut the length of that train ride by two hours and forty-five minutes in order to attract people.
It has done a number of things. It has maintained the stops at all regular stations, even at the flagged stations, and is continuing to service the permanent residents of the area. However, it cannot adapt to the needs of all cottagers who want to get to the train track, wave the train down and have it stop. It cannot do that.


FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE
Mr. Gilles Rocheleau (Hull-Aylmer):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the President of the Treasury Board and concerns the misleading and disrespectful comments made by the minister when he said that the day after a vote for sovereignty, 70,000 Quebecers working for the federal government would be out of a job. I want to ask the minister to apologize and say, as he has done in the past, that he will respect his government's commitment to recognizing Quebec's right to self-determination and above all, that he promises to stop making these threats which are merely-


Mr. Speaker:: One moment, please. I am sorry, but I think we may have a problem here. I believe the hon. member said the minister spoke in a way that was "misleading". If that is the case, I would of course ask the hon. member to make the appropriate statement, because this term is not acceptable.

April 30, 1992
Oral Questions


Gilles Rocheleau: I apologize, Mr. Speaker, and I withdraw the word "misleading", but I maintain that the minister was irresponsible in referring the way he did to government employees-


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member will agree that he is getting into debate. However, I want to thank him for withdrawing the word he used. The minister has the floor.


Gilles Loiselle: Mr. Speaker, as a former journalist I would never dream of saying I was misquoted. However, although I may have disappointed the hon. member I would like to mention something else I said as well which may have escaped him. I was asked the following question: Do you think sovereignty for Quebec would mean jobs would be lost? My answer was: I do not think we have reached that stage yet. In fact, I am very confident, in view of the events of the past few months, that we will be able to solve this problem and will not have to go through that kind of crisis. However, if people suggest other solutions, we will have to understand exactly what they mean and draw our own conclusions.
I would say that I made an assumption that is not altogether unrealistic. The federal government provides services to ten provinces and two territories. The Government of Canada also has a capital, whose activities cover both Ottawa and Hull, I would say. I think the hon. member would agree that if Quebec withdraws, it will not ask us to provide government services in Quebec. So federal public servants will be removed. The capital of Canada would not be in a foreign country but in Canada, and people would move.
In any case, I merely said what was said by his leader, Mr. Parizeau, who has been visiting the Gatineau-Hull region every month to tell people: Don't worry, we will pick you up. They would first have to be dropped.


Gilles Rocheleau: Mr. Speaker, the minister knows perfectly well that at the present time, Quebec is contributing its fair share which is 25 per cent to support the federal Public Service. In Quebec we now have 17 per cent of the federal Public Service. The
minister knows perfectly well that once federal public servants in Quebec have been absorbed, we will also save $1.2 billion.
I want to ask the minister whether, as soon as Quebec becomes independent, the government will make arrangements for a civilized transfer of these employees?


Gilles Loiselle: Mr. Speaker, my answer is simply that this government does not intend to fire any Quebecers from the Public Service.
If there is a problem it will be the hon. member's fault.


SOCIAL HOUSING
Mr. Alfonso Gagliano (Saint-Leonard):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance. The latest Conservative budget cut $622 million from social housing. According to Gilles Fournier of the Point St. Charles welfare recipients' committee, this irresponsible policy abandons 574,000 low income Quebec households. Is the Minister of Finance prepared to immediately restore the funds for social housing and to stop punishing the least fortunate in our society?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, the social housing increases will amount to $70 million this year over the previous year.
I should also remind the hon. member that the people of Canada spend $2 billion on social housing and notwithstanding that fact there was still a provision for an additional $70 million. Two billion dollars is a lot of money.
I think it has been a good program. It has had to be constrained because of the growth, it has had to be constrained consistent with our inflationary levels. What we are proposing is a growth at the rate of 3 per cent per year.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member has the floor for a short supplementary question.
April 30, 1992


Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, in Montreal alone, these budget cuts mean that 500 new units will not be built this year, although 10,000 people are on the waiting list for social housing.
How can the minister justify completely abandoning these residents of the Montreal area, where more than 615,000 people live in poverty?


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Mr. Speaker, my colleague should know there are other programs besides the co-op which are well able to cope with people who have core need. I also want to remind him that while this is not a complete answer there is a surplus of social housing in certain areas of Montreal.


Mr. Speaker:: I will take a single question from the hon. member for LaSalle-Emard and a single question from the hon. member for New Westminster-Burnaby.


ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY
Mr. Paul Martin (LaSalle-Emard):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the acting minister of industry. The environmental technology industry in Canada is moving at a snail's pace. The president of a major Canadian company says that the reason is clear: "What drives the development of American environmental industries is environmental regulations that are five to ten years ahead of Canada's".
My question, is this: Why does the government want Canada to always be the client of the rest of the world? When will the government finally realize that environmental protection is not a social cost but an economic opportunity?


Hon. William C. Winegard (Minister for Science):: Mr. Speaker, we recognize that there are opportunities in terms of making industrial operations from environmental problems. That is exactly why we instituted the Technology for Solutions Program which has $100 million on the table for just such things.
Business of the House HUMAN LIFE INTERNATIONAL


Ms. Dawn Black (New Westminster-Burnaby):: Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday I questioned the Minister of National Revenue on the charitable tax status of an American organization called Human Life International. The minister indicated that he would conduct a review.
I ask the minister today: Has he had an opportunity to review the matter and could he advise me on what the results of that review are?


Hon. Otto Jelinek (Minister of National Revenue):: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows the confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act do not allow me to make comments on a specific organization.
However I can inform the hon. member that concern has been raised from both sides of the issue that she refers to, and I emphasize both sides. As a result, in order to maintain the integrity of the charitable organizations as a whole, I have today instructed my officials to review and investigate the activities of all politically active charitable organizations.
After that review and investigation is completed appropriate action will be taken if and when necessary.


BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the government House leader. Can he indicate to the House what the business is for the remainder of the week, as well as for Monday and Tuesday of next week?
I have a supplementary question to put to him after that.


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, we will continue this afternoon with second reading on Bill C-63, the dissolution act. On Friday, pursuant to an agreement among all parties, hopefully we will proceed with all three stages of Bill C-68, the amendments to the Competition Act, as well as Bill C-67, the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, and then we

April 30, 1992
Government Orders
will be able to complete third reading of Bill C-54, the Farm Products Marketing Agencies Act.
On Monday it is my intention at this point to call Bill C-63, the dissolution act, for continuation of second reading. On Tuesday we expect to complete second reading of Bill C-71, the Criminal Records Act; Bill C-70, jury selection; and Bill C-69, air and maritime safety.
For the remainder of the week I will be having the usual consultations with my colleagues opposite.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, I do not know if the government House leader is aware, but I believe there have been some discussions. I know the critic for external affairs and I think some representatives of the minister's office were hoping that perhaps within the next 10 days or so a day could be set aside to debate Canada's participation at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio.
I am wondering whether or not representatives have been made to the government House leader by the Secretary of State for External Affairs and/or the Minister of the Environment so that we might proceed with a day's debate on Canada's position.


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, at this point, no, I have not had any representations in that regard. However, as I have indicated on previous occasions I am not adverse to that kind of approach, provided that we can reach some accommodation in terms of other legislation.
If we can do that I am certainly prepared to consider that or consider extra hours of debate and so on. I sometimes think we perhaps waste time debating the details of a bill that would be better discussed at committees and could more usefully use the time of this House to discuss broader issues of policies such as the environmental policy in respect of the UNCED meeting.
I am not adverse to the suggestion, but I will have to take a look at it and see the ramifications it has for the rest of our legislative program.


Mr. Iain Angus (Thunder Bay-Atikokan):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the government House leader.
Bill C-73 which was tabled today was not part of the House leader's discussions yesterday. I am wondering if the government House leader could give us an indication as to what is the intention of the government in terms of proceeding with second reading of Bill C-73, just so that
we have a sense of the long-term plan for the next five or six weeks.


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, after I have had an opportunity to talk it over with members of the New Democratic Party, I am sure there will be a consensus and agreement to pass it in all three stages one Friday afternoon. I look forward to those discussions with the hon. member.


POINT OF ORDER
Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, despite the most recent intervention of the minister, I withdraw my earlier comment today.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Mazankowski that Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations and other bodies, be read the second time and referred to a Legislative Committee in the Economics envelope; and the amendment of Mr. Lee (p. 9896).
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Prior to the luncheon adjournment, the hon. member for Port Moody-Coquitlam had 10 minutes remaining in his speech plus 10 minutes for questions or comments.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, Port Moody was the original terminus of what used to be a great railway, the Transcontinental Railway. The terminus then moved into Vancouver, but Port Moody is a thriving municipality in the suburbs of Vancouver.
Having said that, I will return to my speech which I am sure the House is awaiting with bated breath to hear. Before lunch I was speaking on this bill which proposes to cut back a number of commissions and government bodies. I had said that I was not against cutbacks per se, and I know the government was surprised about that. I
April 30, 1992

Government Orders
am not against cutbacks. If we can save the taxpayers' money then fine and good, but the point was that some of these cutbacks were very ideological in nature, were not going to save the government much money at all, and might even cost the government more money than it would save.
Let us take the Law Reform Commission as an example. It is going to be cut back. The government is going to lose all the advice of this commission. It is going to lose some of the studies, independent advice, and so on. I was just saying before lunch that we were working on a bill in committee today called the Contraventions Act which came out of a law reform report in 1976. The government was getting value for its money.
Instead the government is cutting things like the Law Reform Commission and the Court Challenges Program. That amounts to about $6 million for the two of them, and it is giving an extra $16 million to some fat lawyers, specifically government law firms, its friends in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. I say that is no way to save money at all.
I am going to focus more specifically on the Law Reform Commission. The decision to get rid of the commission was a sudden one. It took everyone by surprise. The president of the commission, Mr. Gilles Letoumeau, a distinguished academic and lawyer, got the news one hour before the budget speech. Now there is planning for you; there is Tory planning.
The president of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada, Mr. Arthur Close, upon hearing of the dismantling of the Commission said:
Systematic and continuous law reform is not a luxury. It is a
necessity in a society that is governed by legislation and the common
law.
He is saying that they did not cut back a luxury; they cut back a necessity.
The government has said that the decision to include the Law Reform Commission in its cuts was based upon the sad fact that Canadians could no longer afford what it believes is a luxury, what the Minister of Justice has called a Cadillac approach to research. I do not know how she would know what a Cadillac was. She spends most of her time running around in some rich government car, but she called it a Cadillac approach to law research.
I believe that may not be an accurate representation of the facts. Cutting the Law Reform Commission is not fiscally responsible government. It is merely another manifestation of the mean spirited and vindictive philosophy that dictates this government's decisions. It is symptomatic of a siege mentality that rewards those who support it and attacks those who do not.
For example, before Christmas the Law Reform Commission came up with a report suggesting that there should be a separate native justice system. The minister is against that. Bang, there goes the Law Reform Commission. Notice the pattern it follows.
The Economic Council of Canada brought forward some news with respect to Quebec and the price of separatism. That was not the line the government was peddling at the moment. Suddenly, the Economic Council of Canada is expendable. Am I being paranoid here? Am I seeing conspiracies? Perhaps. It is interesting that when there is a report against the government by an independent commission, bang, that commission is gone.
The minister said that the Law Reform Commission was a Cadillac. If it is a Cadillac we have had some very good mileage out of it. It is a very good investment. In fact, we have bought a Cadillac at mid-size prices. A tradition has been established in the legal community of giving time and resources to the Law Reform Commission. I am certain that tradition of giving those resources will not extend to the Department of Justice, which will have to do the research that the Law Reform Commission did. Who is going to save money? In the long run we are going to have more bureaucrats and it is going to cost more money rather than saving money.
The president of the Canadian Bar Association, J.J. Camp, when asked about the demise of the Law Reform Commission, said: "The cost of outdated laws which hinder all Canadians in their daily business is immeasurably higher". In other words, having a bunch of outdated laws costs more money than it costs to allow the Law Reform Commission to make reports to change those laws.
A perfect example is the Contraventions Act, the bill which we are debating before this very Parliament, which was originally proposed by the Law Reform Commission. The minister herself will acknowledge that.

April 30, 1992
Government Orders
The recommendation of the Law Reform Commission in 1975 that Crown attorneys fully disclose their case to the defence counsel has led to a change in practice that has served both federal and provincial governments, as well as private citizens, and saved millions of dollars every year.
Ironically, just one day after the announcement that the Law Reform Commission was to be dismantled a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Clunes against the Queen that upheld the joinder of charges cited extensively from the Law Reform Commission's working paper on the charged document entitled: The Charged Document in Criminal Cases.
The Supreme Court of Canada came down with a decision citing the Law Reform Commission, thanking the Law Reform Commission and using the Law Reform Commission. The day after the government gets rid of the Law Reform Commission.
That ruling will hopefully lead to a more efficient use of the courts. I hope the government will take notice. We in the NDP would like to see the courts opened to everyone. We would like to see an efficient court system. We would like to see access to justice for the ordinary citizen. We think that the Law Reform Commission's work in that area was worth the bucks.
The government wants to save money. It costs $800,000 a year for the Prime Minister to get his morning's press clippings. We could save that money. It cost something like $54,000 a day for the Prime Minister and his entourage to visit Paris. How about cutting some of that money?
Those of us who have had the pleasure of sitting on the committee that reviewed amendments to the insanity laws know what it is like to have to work on legislation that is under a deadline set by the Supreme Court of Canada. It results in hurried law making.
This kind of process is a shame when one recalls that the Law Reform Commission called for reform of the insanity laws going back to 1976. First, the Liberal government and then the Conservative government did not act on it. Then we had to wait for the Supreme Court of Canada to rule that the insanity laws were unconstitutional and we had to hurriedly change them through Parliament. We did that with some co-operation from all parties but it was difficult. We could have operated in a better mode, found a better way of doing things.
The Minister of Justice gave a speech on April 14 honouring the 10th anniversary of the charter. She made note of a disturbing trend among legislators, that they tend to leave difficult decisions to the courts. That was the whole point of her speech. She said, if I can paraphrase it, that we celebrate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but she was disturbed that Canadians were looking to the courts for everything. They should be looking to Parliament.
She made note, and I agree with this somewhat, of this trend among legislators of leaving difficult decisions to the courts. She said: "There is a great temptation to avoid dealing with contentious issues by saying let us wait until the courts tell us what we have to do". She is right in identifying our abdication of responsibilities as parliamentarians.
Canadians have sent us to the House of Commons to change existing antiquated and unfair laws and write new laws to establish guidelines as to how this country is governed, according to the wishes of the people. That is the democratic process. I am pleased to say that the minister has made this public commitment.
However, the minister should pay heed to her own words about the democratic process being a process of balancing interests and seeking compromises through public consultation. She said: "The essence of law making is the balance of interests. By reasons of their unique institutional characteristics, legislatures are in the best position to assess competing demands and strike the appropriate balances. Legislatures are broadly representative bodies. With their research and consultative mechanisms they have the capacity to gather and assess the socio-economic data upon which public policy-making is based".
Exactly. That is what the Law Reform Commission did. It could get that data for the government.
What are we going to do? Now we are going to do it in house. It is not going to be opened up and we are going to have a worse system.
On the one hand the minister can laud the resources available to Parliament and on the other hand cut off those very resources. You cannot say that we celebrate the charter and access to justice and then on the other hand cut off the Court Challenges Program thereby stopping people from having that access.
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The Minister of Multiculturalism and Citizenship is in the House. I hope he can find a way, as he has often done in the past in the intricacies of the budget of this department, to find some way to keep some of this independent research and some of the energy of the Court Challenges Program people going. I hope he can do that.
I wonder how much of the $4.8 million that the government said it will save through this cut will actually be realized. The minister said that much of the work will be done on contract through the Department of Justice. It seems to me that this is a fraud and that we are not really saving the $4 million. In fact, we are going to spend that money through private contracts and so on. Why destroy something that is working? Why destroy another good element of Canadian society that is working?
Other countries have law reform commissions. There are only two in the Commonwealth now that do not have them.
I am going to conclude and allow members to ask me questions. My speech is pretty straightforward. I am not against cuts but let us look at what they are and let us not destroy something that is working. Let us not destroy something that is helping this Parliament for a regime that will cost the taxpayers more and be less effective.


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I must say I was delighted to hear my hon. friend concluding his remarks by saying that he is not against cuts. I noticed that he and his colleagues are not against cuts, except for the ones we make when we have to deal with budgetary realities in this country.
I want to speak specifically to the issue of the Law Reform Commission, which he spoke very eloquently on behalf of. I expect that when he was in practice his clients were very well served by him.
I must tell the member that I did indeed receive a letter from the Nova Scotia Bar Association expressing its concern about this decision. It is important and the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Finance have said that they respect and recognize the very excellent work
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that has been done over the years by the Law Reform Commission. That is not really what is at issue here, not why this decision has been made.
It needs to be commended for the work it has done. The question is whether that is the only way the work can be done. The question is what the expectations of Canadians are with respect to the finances of their government.
Canadians have told this government that they want government that is leaner and meaner, they want us to very carefully guard their tax dollars. Times have changed since the Law Reform Commission was established. Since that time the capacity of law schools to do research has increased incredibly. The Canadian Bar Association itself is doing much more work and excellent work. Le Barreau du Quebec is doing good work, and work is being done by federal and provincial governments.
It is not as if the kind of work that has been done by the Law Reform Commission of Canada will cease if the Law Reform Commission ceases to exist. It is very important that kind of research continues to take place.
I remind my hon. friend of some very important legal reforms that have taken place during this Parliament, for example firearms control, the sexual assault issue, extradition, and mental disorders. These are issues that have been brought forward by members of Parliament in this Chamber and because of the work of people here.
Law reform is possible in Canada even without the Law Reform Commission.
We must put this in context. If the government is faced with doing what the Canadian people want, in terms of downsizing government and rationalizing institutions, and if we are prepared to recognize that times change and therefore structures must change in response to the times then this is an appropriate decision.
I would invite my hon. friend to reflect upon these observations. I look forward to hearing him renew his support for fiscal restraint and cutting when cutting is necessary, as we feel it was in this case.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question and for his compliments at the beginning of his question and statement.

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Yes, I have to agree that law reform is possible without a Law Reform Commission. However, the advantage of the Law Reform Commission was that there was a structure in place that was working.
I thought the essence of conservatism was to not destroy things that were working in the interest of uncharted radicalism, so I wonder why a Conservative government would destroy something that was working. Not only was it working but it was independent. That is very important because the Law Reform Commission was an advisory body to Parliament, not just to the government.
Of course law reform will be done, partially in house by the Department of Justice. I mean no disrespect toward the civil service and the Department of Justice but they are busy with a lot of things, mainly day-to-day things, and have trouble looking down the road a year, never mind five years.
Also there are outside agencies. Will the government commit itself to give contracts for law research to law schools and other groups?
The Lmw Reform Commission was doing that so that is nothing new. The problem is that the Law Reform Commission studies were all public. They were all open. This government is showing an increased penchant for being secret, you have to drag information out of them by using the Freedom of Information Act. Even then the responses have been restricted.
The answer to the hon. member's question is that we need the Law Reform Commission. There are other ways of saving money. There are lots of other ways of saving money. We are going to end up with a system that is worse than we are getting because we had an open system that had real effects.
The member mentioned gun control and so on. The Law Reform Commission was active on all these issues decades ago. It did work on the insanity laws and the extradition laws. It did work on native justice, which we are now debating in the new constitutional proposals.
Of course, they did work on bills, such as the bills we have before this Parliament on the effect of federal laws for minor criminal matters called the Contraventions Act.
If it is working, why fix it? The reason is that these are ideological cuts, or just to pull the wool over the
taxpayers' eyes and pretend that this is a frugal government that is saving the taxpayer a lot of money when in fact it is quite spendthrift and has wasted a lot of money.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Questions and comments are now terminated. On debate the next two speakers will have 10 minutes plus five minutes questions or comments.


Scott Jon Thorkelson: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to make a few remarks on Bill C-63.
I will confine my remarks to the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council. This council was set up in 1977 and was designed to respond to a set of needs in a public environment that is quite unlike today's public environment.
1980 was the decade during which the Canadian public had only begun to seize opportunities for a say in government decision making.
The technological and educational advances that grew out of the Second World War had, by the 1980s, produced a more aware, more demanding public that wanted to be a part of policy making. Concrete, practical public input could produce solid, workable policies.
In many cases, there was no vehicle through which to provide that input. To respond to that need, the advisory council was established after much discussion among Employment and Immigration Canada, employers and union groups.
This was a deliberate move to provide public input into policy development at a time when the public environment in Canada was only beginning to open up to such input. The membership of the advisory council was split into three, one-third from business, one-third from labour and one-third from other interested groups.
At the time this made sense. Since then, however, the whole area of public consultation has grown tremendously. Looking at it now, I think we need a different kind of representation, one that varies according to subject matter.
For example, today there are a number of groups such as immigrant service organizations, community college representatives and ethnic groups which must be included if one is studying such a subject as immigrant language training.
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Over the last decade, Employment and Immigration Canada has responded to these changes. In terms of the immigration program, which was a very structured and narrow consultation on proposed immigration levels each year, has grown into a much more flexible, multifaceted, ongoing consultation on many more aspects of the whole immigration program.
Employers and union groups are still consulted because of the important link between the labour market and immigration. As well, relatively new but major players in immigration issues must and should now be included. This process is a reflection of what Canadians want, direct focus on an input into important government programs.
Looking at the employment program side of Employment and Immigration Canada, the same impetus from the public was at work and essentially produced, after much study and discussion among labour market partners, the Canadian Labour Force Development Board.
The board is now in the process of setting up provincial and local boards, thus pushing consultation and decision making further down into the community on the grounds that the closer one is to the labour market, the better the decision making.
The make-up of the new board at the national, provincial and local level is again employers, union representatives, educators, trainers and specific social action groups represented by the Canadian labour force.
Federal government training and employment programs cover an awful lot of ground, and they affect thousands of Canadians. The users of these programs will have the opportunity to play a larger role in the design and delivery of these programs.
Another important area of growth and change in the 1980s was aboriginal training. Through the new National Aboriginal Management Board, Employment and Immigration Canada is once again putting decision making and priority setting into the hands of users. This board will provide a bottom-up type of decision making with a special focus on aboriginal employment issues. Here
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again this is a development that came out of the massive changes of the 1970s and 1980s in Canada.
I know that the cynics say that we are closing the council because we are not interested in having public input at Employment and Immigration Canada. The fact is the council has really outlived its usefulness in the face of increased demands for more and wider consultation.
I speak from a little bit of experience as I had a constituent, Bronwyn Shoush, who served on this board. She served on the board for 18 months. In fact, the last few months all three component groups had not replaced their membership. They were running out of steam. The government had been consulting widely with other groups, the Labour Force Development Board on the employment side, immigration groups, ethnic groups and other groups on the immigration side. She indicated to me that this board was redundant. It was spinning its wheels a little bit and she has no regrets that the board is being wound down.
Some members opposite may be familiar with some of the good work that the council has produced over the years. It has been very good work. In 1985 and again in 1986 the council reported on the situation of older workers in Canada. This is a very huge problem in Canada. These reports contributed to the development of the program for older worker adjustment. This program has been a good step at helping older workers adjust, older workers retrain, and we could do more in this area.
In 1987 the council studied the issue of workers with family responsibilities and, there again, put forward some very valuable ideas. As an advisory body to the minister, the council has studied issues it was asked by ministers to look at and it has used its own initiative to examine questions its own members have thought important. In any event, these reports were very welcome.
Since the advisory council was not established as either a decision making or an advocacy body, but as strictly advisory in the policy making process, it fulfilled the role it was designed for. Now it is time to recognize that that role is at an end, that other groups and mechanism have evolved.

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I spoke earlier about the breadth and depth of the consultation we need at Employment and Immigration Canada. Let us face it, as far as the Canadian labour market goes, things have completely changed since the 1970s. The ability and willingness of labour market partners to participate in the policy making process has grown as the general public's demand for more say in decisions. A small organization, such as the advisory council, simply cannot respond to the many complex issues coming to us in the 1990s. It was never designed to do so.
We should also recognize the bridging role that the advisory council served when it was set up in 1977. The Department of Manpower and Immigration at the time and the Unemployment Insurance Commission had been amalgamated in the late 1970s. There was a lot of uncertainty about the implications of that move. Fifteen years later, this is no longer the case.
Today we know that it will take more and better consultations to get Canada through the massive adjustment and education process necessary for a continued and future prosperity, consultations on a scale which surpasses the council's role and so the closing of the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council is a necessary step. The council should and has been acknowledged for the task it has accomplished. We must also acknowledge that the advisory council has been overtaken by events in a fast moving, changeable world.
On one side we have the Labour Force Development Board; on the other side we have widespread and ongoing consultation on the immigration side. These are very appropriate today. I will finish with those remarks.


Mr. Jesse Flis (Parkdale-High Park):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the remarks of the hon. member since so few members of Parliament on the government side are participating in this debate. I am pleased the hon. member decided to participate.
The member mentioned, with regard to the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council, that this council has become obsolete, that consultation must now surpass the present role of the advisory council.
In his budget the Minister of Finance cut these 46 Crown agencies stating that his intent is to reduce the
deficit and save $22 million per year by cutting these 46 councils and agencies.
If the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council, or some similar body, is going to have to play a much greater role, does the member not agree that it will also require greater funding? How does the government explain to Canadians that it used this vehicle to reduce the deficit when we are hearing from the hon. member that really it is going to cost more? It is going to set up some sort of machinery which will cost more than it is costing for the present councils and agencies.


Scott Jon Thorkelson: Mr. Speaker, that is a good question. Let me answer it by indicating to the hon. member that what was created were labour force development boards at a local level.
We did not want a 22-member council, elite in nature, which was unable to respond to local labour market needs. Therefore, we created local labour force and provincial labour force boards all across the country to respond to local employment needs. This is much better than a 22-person council at a national level trying to respond to both local and national needs.
We are saving $22 million a year. That is over $100 million in five years. It is a necessary move. In its place we have Canadian labour market boards which are much more responsive. Canadians want government to respond to their needs. We are always talking about greater autonomy and greater responsiveness and greater service of government organizations, and this is precisely what these new boards are doing.
This agency became redundant. It was an elite organization of 22 people from three sectors of society. We need to broaden our consultations. The labour development boards have members from varied backgrounds all across the spectrum of society. These people and these boards are able to respond in a very efficient and positive way to local labour market needs.


Mr. Guy Ricard (Laval-Ouest):: Mr. Speaker, I thank you for this opportunity to participate in the debate on this bill which dissolves the International Centre for Ocean Development, as well as four other public corporations.
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I must admit that, like all those concerned, I have mixed feelings regarding the difficult decision made by the government to eliminate a total of 46 corporations of similar status. This decision was announced in the last budget. I am well aware of the fact that these agencies worked in a vast number of fields and that they were useful.
I have a lot of respect for the efforts made by the staff of these corporations and I regret that, following this decision, their careers are disrupted. I sincerely hope that this career change will prove beneficial, in the long run, for each and every one of those people.
That being said, I must also state that I support the decision made by the government. I am convinced that in the long run, this decision will serve the interests of the Canadian population.
I want to talk in particular about the International Centre for Ocean Development, the ICOD, whose head office is in Halifax. This centre was created in 1985 to help small sovereign island states benefit from the new economic zones extending off their shores. Those benefits were the results of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
In the last seven years, the ICOD has implemented a diversified program which includes scholarships, training programs and other initiatives in the field of training and information. The centre has gathered Canadian expertise in the field of ocean development and has contributed to the establishment of links between businesses and consultants in Canada and in some developing countries which can take advantage of their abilities and skills.
This is all very good. A corporation was set up and it fulfilled its mandate. Why then did the government proceed, seven years later, to dissolve the ICOD? The answer is a painful one, but it is based on hard facts.
The government took this action because times have changed, because decisions are not eternal and because public corporations are not immortal.
The government made this decision because we have to live according to our means, because we live in an increasingly competitive world where the slogan "to
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make more with less" is no longer just a slogan but a condition of survival.
The government realized, rightly so, that it is vital to streamline and modernize our public sector. Why? Because it entails fixed costs, overhead costs which, traditionally, have been high in Canada, since our Public Service is rather large, given the population of our country. In a way, this situation is unavoidable and totally justified, given the geography and social realities of our country.
It is precisely because of those factors that the government must make cuts wherever possible, so that we remain able to finance our most vital services, social programs and institutions. This is what we must do if we want our country to be in the best possible conditions to face the stiff competition that awaits us.
I agree that it would be highly desirable to have a top-flight national institution, a public corporation that would look after each and every aspect of all the great problems and challenges that confront us. There is no doubt in my mind that these agencies would do a good job. However, this is simply not a realistic scenario. It is a luxury that we cannot afford.
In a way, the decision made by the government is similar to the one that an individual must make before buying a car. It would be nice to choose the top-of-the-line model and to tell the salesperson: "With every possible option, please". Well, the government has shown enough determination to say: "Only the basic model". I salute that firmness.
In the case of the ICOD, which is a very specialized agency, it must be noted that its programs and commitments will be integrated to the work being done by the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA. For numerous years, CIDA has been providing assistance to developing countries in fields such as fisheries and ocean management.
In fact, there is still another agency for co-operation supported with public monies and whose mandate includes marine resources. I am referring to the International Development Research Centre. There are also groups of experts in various Canadian universities, for instance Dalhousie University, Memorial University, YUniversite du Quebec in Rimouski, and the University of

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British Columbia. There are top-calibre businesses in our country, some of which will benefit from the expertise of former employees of the ICOD. On the international scene, there are various organizations and programs to help developing countries to better benefit from their fisheries and marine resources.
I therefore think that Canada will have many opportunities to help these countries manage their marine resources well and protect this crucial part of our environment.
I hope that the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development will lead to wise initiatives in this area, but I do not believe that all this depends on maintaining ICOD.
The various objectives that I mentioned can perhaps be achieved more efficiently in the long run in other ways. If we can act and achieve our objectives so as to reduce costs and channel funds from the aid budget to the programs themselves instead of spending them on administration, if we can do that, I approve of the government's decision.
In the years to come, Canada will take part in international activities on many important problems. In theory, we could tackle each of these problems and show that we take a certain issue seriously by establishing a specialized agency to implement any major agreement on a particular question. But in the end such an approach would be doomed to failure.
We have only limited resources. We do not need to set up a top-heavy superstructure of public agencies and specialized institutions. On the other hand, we must be able to count on a slimmed-down, efficient and flexible Public Service that can deal with the whole range of issues that interest Canada; a Public Service that can use taxpayers' money as efficiently and effectively as possible.
I have the feeling that the government is moving resolutely in that direction. I believe that the decision announced in the budget to end many organizations and boards, although it will certainly be criticized and protested in various quarters, was appropriate.
We must cut our spending. We must make cuts in all fields and it is possible to do so. We must lighten our
burden. Such action is essential and in the national interest.
We in Canada have a problem that is casting a shadow on the future of our children and of our country. This problem, quite simply, is the public debt. By taking consistent, determined action, this government has managed to gain considerable control of the situation, despite all expectations. We are now at the point where revenue and expenditure balance, if the cost of servicing the accumulated debt is not counted. In fact, this cost corresponds to the federal budget deficit that we still incur every year.
As far as I am concerned, of course I support this action. Regardless of the things that ICOD and the other agencies have going for them, the government must make balancing the budget and restoring our country's economic health the top priority.
I support the government's effort to overcome our basic financial problem and I call on all hon. members to do the same.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, I believe on Monday, we talked about a motion asking the government to call an election because of the terrible economic conditions. I know that a lot of members on the government side thought we were being political and cynical.
However, after listening to government members today and the way in which they talked about institutions that have served this country so well for so long I know that we were on the right track on Monday.
We talk about the fact that our interest rates are the lowest they have been in over 20 years. There is absolutely no inflation in this country today, nothing to speak of. It is probably under 2 per cent. Yet we have a crisis of confidence in this country. People are not spending. Those people with a job seem to be more nervous than those without a job. When you see a bill like this, Bill C-63, an act to dissolve or terminate certain corporations or other bodies, it is just the language of it, to dissolve or terminate institutions like the Economic Council of Canada, the Science Council of Canada, the Law Reform Commission, the International Centre for Ocean Development, and the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council.
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When I listened to the President of the Treasury Board today, and he is a member that I have a high level of respect for, I took notes when he spoke. He said there is a five point reason why we are dissolving these agencies. He talked about waste, duplication, consolidating and privatization. I forget what the fifth one was.
The point is the government has forgotten what the whole purpose was behind these institutions. Many years ago in Ottawa the opposition never really had a chance at properly debating the government because the government basically controlled all of the resources. The purpose of giving money for research to opposition parties, for setting up instruments like the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada was to make sure the quality of debate, the level of debate, in this Chamber ultimately served the people of Canada. The purpose was to make sure the independence of thinking was assured so the departmental advice that ministers were receiving could have a third party check. They had to be quality organizations.
In many ways these agencies were not unlike our Auditor General. Our Auditor General basically has the ability to go into any department at will, any time, analyse, audit and report to Parliament as to the effectiveness of the management skills, the use of the taxpayers money. I do not think anyone in this House would dare think of saying let us abolish the Auditor General.
I think the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada are not unlike the function of the Auditor General of Canada. These institutions, and I am only going to focus on those two today, are think-tanks of the highest order. They attract the best and brightest minds in this country. Because they are organizations that have respect, they have access in turn to some of the best and brightest minds all over the world.
They have built networks that have served government after government. It did not matter whether it was a Liberal government or a Conservative government. These independent agencies never really cared who was in power. I know when the Liberal government was here from 1980 to 1984, the Economic Council of Canada repeatedly gave information to the government or gave
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advice to the government, or even criticized the government at times when it was not on the right track. That, to me, is really a healthy thing in this Government of Canada operation. If all of a sudden you get in the habit of basically dismantling anything that gives you resistance, where do you stop? Where will this lead to? When times are tough and you need that quality talent, you need minds focused on how we get our economy going; where will you turn, where will you go? These think-tanks are just not sitting on every street comer. You just cannot call the local university and say: "Listen, prepare a study for me on how we can put people back to work in this country". It was a tremendous investment of time and money to attract the best and brightest minds in this country to develop the reputation and the quality of work that the Economic Council of Canada has acquired.
I think that the government in this case is really not choosing the right priorities. When you have a crisis of confidence like we have in this country, and it is incumbent on all of us to work on rebuilding that confidence, you do not turn to organizations like the Science Council of Canada and the Economic Council of Canada with their reputations and just say: "We are going to terminate you". If anything, quite frankly their budgets should probably be increased during a tough time like this.
The minister responsible for the Treasury Board said $22 million. That is to operate all six of these organizations. Yet we can bum $15 million on an advertising campaign that talks about "We can do it". I suppose the government is doing this campaign because it recognizes that there is a problem with confidence in the country. I share that concern. But if the government could find $15 million to talk about an advertising campaign that probably will not last for more than about 8, 10 or 12 weeks, could we not somewhere in the system find the money to keep independent think-tanks like the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada going?
I think the government has really missed on this one. It is this kind of action that can exacerbate the lack of confidence in the market. With the low inflation rate and the low interest rate, the government does have a little bit of room. The government should recognize that these

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institutions have served us well and it should rethink it and probably pull this bill.
The other document that the government is talking about a lot these days is Living Well; Learning Well. How can you spend all that money on Living Well; Learning Well, expect to have credibility, and at the same time terminate these other organizations? It just does not wash in my mind.
The creative process is the most powerful process of all. What this government is saying by terminating these organizations is putting that creative process into a second class in the face of deficit reduction.
That is why we are doing it. Think of what the contracting out costs will be when as the months roll by we will no doubt need the service of some of these institutions. We are going to be calling the Department of Supply and Services to request similar services.
There is not a member on the government side who can say that we are going to end up getting the quality and the amount of service that these organizations have been providing for less money. When we get to contracting out, we are probably going to end up paying a lot more money.
What kind of signal does it send to the rest of the people in this country who are involved in research? There was a time-that time was probably just up until a couple of months ago-that there were people all across the country, many of them, who aspired to do work for the Economic Council of Canada.
Now all of a sudden, we throw it out. It is not right. It is this kind of dismantling operation, this kind of retreat from governments that exacerbates the problem that we have with the confidence factor in this country. If we were to maybe take some of these organizations and tell them that we want to see more life or if we want to see a greater service, give them the direction. Give them the leadership. Do not just say "Good-bye, you are gone".
Believe me, this kind of action by the government will affect the entire Public Service. It shows an attitude and a lack of appreciation toward quality service that has been around here for a long, long time. It is not the kind of action that, quite frankly, breeds loyalty. Right now we need loyalty in this country. We need loyalty and we
need a condition where people will rally together. This bill works against that.
I go back to a comment that a member from New Brunswick made earlier today: "Canada is not a balance sheet". This was a member on the government side. He said: "Canada is not a balance sheet". I agree with him. Canada is not a balance sheet.
We are here, of course, in this Chamber to make sure that the taxpayers' money which we have been entrusted with is spent wisely. We are not like a business in the sense that we are looking for a profit at the end of every month. We are in the business of making sure that people function to their maximum potential.
Organizations like the Science Council of Canada and the Economic Council of Canada are organizations that have a creative force that stimulates each and every member in this House and all kinds of people in the business community. That stimulation leads to the creation of jobs. It leads to the creation of new opportunities. It leads to the collective creative process in this country working to its maximum potential.
As the member from New Brunswick said earlier today: "Canada is not a balance sheet". He was so right right when he made that statement. We are in this place to try and mobilize and to galvanize the national will. We need instruments, we need think-tanks and we need the people who work in those institutions like the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada. We need those people working with all of their energy. I think to come along and terminate them is the wrong way to go.


Jesse Philip Flis: Mr. Speaker, during our recent Easter break I had the pleasure of having the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood speak to the entrepreneurs in my constituency of Park-dale-High Park. They got into a very fruitful exchange of ideas over reforming our tax system. We need more of this kind of listening to grassroot Canadians and getting their input on the various issues that run this country.
We heard earlier today from the government side that some of these councils and commissions could be handled by the private sector. Why does the government have to do all of these things? The private sector can do these things more efficiently, et cetera, so the government debaters were saying.
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I would like to hear from the hon. member, who is a great believer in brain power, think-tanks and capitalizing on the human resources of Canada. Does he feel that any of the six councils or commissions that are being cut by Bill C-63 could actually be taken over by the private sector as opposed to being in the hands of the government?


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Parkdale-High Park. I enjoyed thoroughly our town hall meeting in his riding, and I especially enjoyed that portion of the lunch when we talked about the banking institutions in this country.
It was interesting. The minister of trade, just before the House recessed, told me that there were no problems with banks in this country, there was lots of cash and lots of credit out there for small and medium size businesses. I was telling him that I have not been able to find this condition.
At my colleague's town hall meeting we asked the entrepreneurs, and many of them actually represented business associations, if they could please raise their hand if they were really satisfied or felt comfortable with the treatment they were getting from their bankers. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, not one of them raised their hand. It was an interesting experience.
I want to answer his question on contracting out. First of all, I would not abolish any one of these institutions. I would not abolish them especially during this economic climate because there is a role for everyone of them right now: Peace and Security, Ocean Development, Law Reform Commission. I have already talked about the Science Council, the Economic Council and the Canada Employment Centre.
These institutions have resources, libraries, research material, studies and models that they have built up over the years. To terminate these things and then expect to go out a month from now, two months from now or six months from now and replace them, is impossible to do it at the same price. It just cannot be done. You could not do it for the same amount of money, it would cost a heck of a lot more.
There is something else that is more important actually and that is independent thinking. We get very little independent thinking in this country today because there is such a concentration of power in terms of business. As you know, the lobbyists of Ottawa have almost taken
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over this city. They have the very superior skill, as do most lobbyists, of massaging and manipulating the thought processes of most MPs. I must tell you I include myself in that experience of being affected by lobbyists. I confess it.
The independence, the integrity, the trust of these agencies was always there. For Canadians to lose that is going to be something that will come back to haunt each and every member of this House in the long term.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I have received written notice from the hon. member for Churchill that he is unable to move his motion during Private Members' Hour on Friday, May 1, 1992. As 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 have directed the Table officers to drop that item of business to the bottom of the order of precedence.
Pursuant to Standing Order 94(2)(b), Private Members' Hour will thus be suspended and the House will continue with the business before it prior to the Private Members' Hour.
[Translation\
It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for York West-Pharmaceutical Industry; the hon. member for Don Valley East-The Budget; the hon. member for Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing -Goods and Services Tax; the hon. member for Prince George-Bulkley Valley-Softwood Lumber Industry; and the hon. member for Surrey North-Labelling.


Mac Harb: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Broadview-Greenwood for his eloquent presentation.
I had a town hall meeting to talk about the different agencies that the government is planning to close down. I want to assure the House that the people who attended the town hall meeting were unanimous in their opinion that it was inappropriate for the government to close many of those organizations in light of the fact that these organizations are providing very important services to Canadians, in particular the Law Reform Commission and the Court Challenges Program.

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My constituents brought to my attention that it is extremely difficult for a middle income or working individuals to go to the court and ask for justice. Justice in our society has become very expensive. As a result, to go to court nowadays you will have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars for even an average case.
Therefore, the shutting down of these agencies will affect many people who might be seeking justice by using the commissions or some of these organizations for advice or for support. I want to ask my colleague from Broadview-Greenwood if in his riding he has the same feeling that nowadays to get justice through the court system, if you do not have funds available there is no hope for you to do so.


Dennis Joseph Mills: I thank my colleague from Ottawa Centre for the question.
The government has cancelled the Court Challenges Program and now the Law Reform Commission. It is just another example of where we are shutting down the system for those who are most disadvantaged. That is the thing this government forgets. Governance is not for the advantaged. I said that earlier this week.
We applaud all the people in this country who are doing well. We have the greatest country in the world and I will not debate that with anyone, it is a fact. However, our responsibility in this place is to look out for those who are disadvantaged. That is the role of governance. Governance is for the disadvantaged. It is not that we exclude those who are advantaged, but we must skew our thinking and our services to those who are disadvantaged.
In the area of justice, by cutting out the Law Reform Commission, shutting down the Court Challenges Program, I believe we are flying right in the face of the fundamental mandate of why we were all sent here.


Jesse Philip Flis: Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure to take part, not only in the questions and comments part of Bill C-63, but also in its full debate.
agencies, corporations and commissions for a projected savings of $22 million per year".
Bill C-63 issues death warrants on the following commissions and agencies. It has issued death warrants on the Economic Council of Canada, the Science Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, the International Centre for Ocean Development, the Law Reform Commission and, of course, the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council and the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security.
We heard earlier in the debate that some of these agencies can be contracted out to private enterprise. The Liberal Party is not against privatization, but there has to be a bit of sense about what you privatize and what you do not privatize. What you do not privatize is input from Canadians. You do not give that to a lobby group that is going to raise the most money for a certain party.
I would like to share my recent experience in Washington just three weeks ago, when members from both sides of this House attended an international conference on Cyprus. We heard from many congressmen and senators. The congressmen and senators who spoke to us were lobbied very hard by Greek Cypriots living in the United States of America. They made excellent presentations. You could see that the fundraising was done for these congressmen by this lobby group in Washington and, therefore, they were giving a certain point of view on how to solve the Cyprus situation.
One lobbyist raised $6 million for President Bush's campaign. All he had to do was write a letter to President Bush and President Bush responds that he will personally look into the Cyprus problem.
Now, that is the direction this government is taking this country if we are not careful. Those are not the kinds of points of view that I want to see brought to any government in Canada or to any member. The kinds of councils and commissions that are on the chopping block give not only a point of view of Canadians, they give a field of view. That is the difference.
As we know, the Minister of Finance in presenting his budget on February 25, announced his intention to "eliminate, consolidate, defer or privatize 46 Crown
The lobbyists give to the government a point of view. Many of these 46 agencies, but especially these 6, give the government a field of view. That is healthy.

April 30, 1992

The government is trying to silence these organizations because they have been presenting a field of view that has not been the kind of message that the government wanted to receive. Therefore, it is going to silence them by abolishing them. That is a very scary direction in which this government is taking this country. I hope Canadians are listening.
Earlier today I heard the term rationalize said many times by members opposite, rationalize to terminate the jobs of at least 300 Canadians working for the Economic and Science Councils, the Law Reform Commission, the Canadian Institute for Peace and Security and many more valuable institutions. Rationalize, I find it difficult to see any rationale behind these cuts.
I looked up the definition of rationalize in the Oxford Dictionary. The dictionary states: "Rationalize: to make industry more scientifically efficient". That is what these agencies and organizations have been doing.
The Economic Council of Canada, the agency which provides objective, non-partisan advice to government on how to make Canada's workers more competitive and more efficient in the global economy, is being slashed in the name of saving money. The government is spending millions talking to Canadians about how Canadians should be more competitive and more productive and yet it is getting rid of the very council giving advice on how Canadians can be more productive and more competitive. This is not rational. It is not scientific.
The Science Council of Canada, the agency which recommended the creation of the Canadian Space Agency, which encouraged Canadian scientists such as Dr. Roberta Bondar to participate in valuable research, which urged Canadians to start recycling is being slashed in the name of saving money. This simply does not make economic sense.
None of the arguments we have heard from the government side of the House today are either rational or scientific. I suspect that the government is either penny wise or pound foolish. More likely this government, as I mentioned in the House yesterday, is just bankrupt of ideas.
For example, the Canadian fishing industry is in crisis and the government is closing down the International Centre for Ocean Development, the ICOD. How does the government expect the rest of the international community to help save our Atlantic cod stocks when we renege on our promise to be a world leader in ocean development, to foresee problems in advance and create
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a sustainable food supply? Ask any Atlantic fishermen what he thinks about the government today and he or she will tell you what they think about rationalization.
What about the Law Reform Commission, which is also on the chopping block? The elimination of the Law Reform Commission will mean that Canada will be one of only three Commonwealth countries without an independent law reform body. The other two are Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
In some areas of my riding of Parkdale-High Park there are people afraid to walk the streets. I am not speaking here about Los Angeles or New York, I am talking about Parkdale-High Park in Canada. Canadians expect to be protected from crime, to be protected from the drug dealers, the pimps and the muggers. Canadians expect a legal system which protects them.
Why then is the Law Reform Commission being shut down? My constituents want to know.
Bill C-63 is legislation that does not make sense. I urge my colleagues from all three parties to think twice before supporting it. I hope that we will get members from all three parties opposing Bill C-63.
Look at the volatility in the world around us. Look at the new democracies which have sprung up around the world. We all welcomed the new democracies in Eastern Europe but the government seeks to eliminate the Canadian International Institute for Peace and Security. This is an agency which provides advice to our own government on such things as how Canada can be of assistance to these infant democracies in their development toward free market economies, which is what we would like to see.
As associate critic for external affairs I would like to spend a little more time on this agency, the Canadian International Institute for Peace and Security, and discuss why it should not be included in this bill. I hope that members from the government side will consider supporting this position.
The government's own briefing notes say that the mandate for CUPS is: "To increase knowledge and understanding of the issues relating to international peace and security from a Canadian perspective, with particular emphasis on arms control, disarmament, defence and conflict resolutions". Look at the conflict resolutions in the world: Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cyprus, East Timor, Sri Lanka and on and on. At a time in our era when we need advice on how to help bring about conflict resolution, whether through the United Nations

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or the CSCE or through whatever means, we sign the death warrant for CUPS.
The members from the Official Opposition raised this matter under estimates in our standing parliamentary committee. We called as a witness before us Mr. David Brady, who is the chairman of the board of directors of CUPS. We called as a witness Mr. Bernard Wood, who is chief executive officer of CUPS. After hearing testimony from these two gentlemen all members of the standing committee came to the conclusion that the government is not saving any money by cutting CUPS because a lot of the work that is being done and a lot of the archives that have been collected must be transferred over to the Department of External Affairs. There are no savings. The government is not being fair with the people. It is saying one thing, but it has a hidden agenda that means something totally different.
At that meeting, a letter was circulated to us from the hon. member for Scarborough East. I congratulate him because he was brave enough to stand up to his own Prime Minister and to the Minister of Finance by putting his thoughts in writing. I know he will not mind me sharing this because he has made this letter public. He wrote to the Minister of Finance:
I have reflected with some interest on the budget of February 25 and on the details of the Main Estimates for 1992-93, especially as they relate to defence and international relations, and I would like to comment on the decision to terminate the Canadian International Institute for Peace and Security (CIIPS).
He talks about grants. I will not have time to go through all that. But he says:
Aside from grants, CIIPS operates many other activities. These include a series of well-researched publications such as the annual Guide to Canadian Policies on Arms Control and Disarmament, Defence and Conflict Resolution as well as the Quarterly Peace and Security magazine-all of them authoritative and free from the bias that has reflected badly on the granting program. The research facilities and the library on peace and security matters would also be badly missed by scholars and those other persons who take a serious interest in matters of security and defence.
May I suggest, therefore, that the Minister of Finance might wish to consider either of these courses of action:
1.	Terminate CIIPS as announced, but arrange that the outstanding, approved grants be honoured in respective programs that are already in progress, or-
2.	That the future of CIIPS be reviewed with a view to its continuation -
This is from the the Conservative member for Scarborough East. It has been tabled. It has been read into the record in our standing committee. That was the feeling of all the members in the standing committee from all three parties.
Our critic, the member for Winnipeg South Centre, tabled a motion to the effect that CIIPS be allowed to continue. The chairman of the standing committee, in closing and thanking the witnesses, said:
I think I can say to our witnesses I hope they have had the sense that they were among friends today. Mr. Brewin is right and Mr. Axworthy is right. There are real policy issues that concern us as members of this committee, and we want to make sure those issues are dealt with.
There is also the human issue, and that concerns anybody who has ever been a manager. Your people have to be treated fairly whatever the outcome of this is. It seems to me that it is incumbent upon us as well.
Those are the words of the Chairman of the Standing Committee on External Affairs and International Trade.
In committee, we debated long and hard about CIIPS. There was consensus in the committee and a recommendation went to the government that CIIPS be allowed to continue.
Does this government listen to parliamentary standing committees? Does it listen to Canadians at large? If the government can honestly say: "Yes, we do listen to the people of Canada. Yes, we do listen to our parliamentary standing committees, especially when there is all-party agreement," then it will remove CIIPS from Bill C-63.
It has no other choice. If it does not, then I am afraid that we will be looking at a lot of-I do not want to use the word hypocrites because that is not parliamentary-people who said one thing in the standing committee and will be doing another thing in this House when they vote.
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I will be looking across the floor when we are voting on this bill and I hope that at least all the members from the Standing Committee on External Affairs and International Trade will be voting against this bill.


Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace):: Mr. Speaker, first I would like to congratulate the hon. member on his speech.
The government has tried to justify cutting the Economic Council of Canada, the Science Council of Canada and the Law Reform Commission on the grounds that we have a deficit and consequently must cut government expenditures to save money and reduce that deficit. That is the justification it is giving for these cuts.
Does my hon. friend believe that cutting these important research agencies-particularly the ones I mentioned: the Economic Council, the Science Council, the Law Reform Commission and the Canadian International Institute for Peace and Security-will really save this country money in the long run?
In the long run will cutting these agencies really help the economy? I ask this of my hon. friend because research means knowledge and information.
Knowledge and information are essential if we are to advance as an economy, if we are to compete with the Japanese, the Germans, the greater Europe, the United States, Australia and so on. If we are really going to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, in the information age, the communications age, research is essential.
I would like the hon. member to comment on whether he really believes this argument put forward by the government that we are really going to deal with the problem of the deficit in the country, whether we are really going to save the country money in the long run by cutting these important research and information agencies.
I call them research and information agencies because that is their purpose. They provide us as Canadians, parliamentarians, members of cabinet and members of Parliament with important, key information in order to improve the lot of this country economically, socially, and politically.


Jesse Philip Flis: Mr. Speaker, the greatest asset a country can have is brain power. If we look at every one of these commissions and councils we have the top brain power of Canada, but they are also tapping into brain power around the world.
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Our external affairs committee was just in Russia and Ukraine two weeks ago. We met with a similar agency in Russia, the counterpart of CUPS. It was shocked that Canada is cutting CUPS because that was its liaison. It was sharing research. Ideas were exchanged on what kind of a role Canada should play now with the independent republic of Russia, Ukraine, et cetera. Not only were we benefiting from the top brains of Canada but the top brains of the world.
These people are well paid. What is going to happen to them? They will be unemployed. They will go on the UI roles. Where is the government saving money? Instead of these people paying taxes, they are going to be collecting unemployment insurance. What a sad state of affairs for a country like Canada with the brain power and expertise of top researchers, top scientists, and top politicians such as we have in these commissions just going to waste.
We also learned in our standing committee there will not be much savings because what these councils and commissions are doing will have to be transferred either to one government department or another. The work has to go on. There has been a lot of research collected over the years. This has to be saved and disseminated when someone is requesting it.
The hon. member asks an excellent question. I think that was the government's hidden agenda. The true reason for cutting these 46 commissions, agencies, et cetera, was because they could not take the heat as our leader said in his debate earlier today. They could not take the criticism. When a government cannot stand, cannot take criticism, we are doomed to failure.
Look what happened to East Germany. It could not take criticism. Look what happened to the entire Soviet Union. It kept people in the dark. It would not allow people to have input into government. Where is the Soviet Union today after 70 years Communism? Socialism to that level is eliminated. It is gone.
Is that what we want Canada to achieve? My God, surely a government with such a majority as the Conservatives have should not be afraid of a bit of objective criticism. I know some of the criticism that was levelled at some of these groups. Some felt some of these groups put out reports that were too far left. Some objected because some of these reports recommended the elimination of nuclear arms. The government felt the best way and the easiest way was to put a muzzle on these intelligent Canadians.

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Mac Harb: Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleague for his eloquent presentation. Through his involvement in foreign affairs, he has had a chance to visit many different parts of the world where there are instabilities. He would probably know more than a lot of other people about the valuable contribution of the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, in particular when it comes to research ability and when it comes to providing a report on situations in many different parts of the world.
I want to ask my colleague how would he see the effect of the closure of this institute on Canada's image and ability to remain as a leading force internationally when it comes to foreign affairs and when it comes to policies affecting the peace and security both abroad and regionally.


Jesse Philip Flis: Mr. Speaker, the member is very perceptive. I am proud to announce that I am a Canadian when I am travelling abroad or when I am meeting ambassadors from the diplomatic corps in Ottawa. They point out the great work that Bernard Wood and his staff have been doing over the years.
Canada is not a superpower. Yet Canada has played a very important role internationally through international organizations such as the United Nations, such as the CSCE, such as NATO, et cetera. A lot of our impact there and strong influence has been thanks to organizations such as CUPS and others that gave to us as politicians, who gave to the minister and who gave to the bureaucrats good, sound advice.
We were able to play a very important international role even though we are not a superpower. We are going to lose that. We are going to lose that.


Mr. Howard McCurdy (Windsor-St. Clair):: Mr. Speaker, Bill C-63 is a piece of legislation to give effect to a portion of the elimination or deferral or privatization of some 46 government agencies.
The bill before us is concerned with the Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council, the Law Reform Commission of Canada, the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, the Economic Council of Canada, the International Centre for
Ocean Development, and the Science Council of Canada.
If we look at all 46 agencies involved in the budget announcement, I think most of us could see some logic in the elimination of some and the privatization of others. But when I look at the list that is contained in this legislation, I am struck by what my Liberal colleague said earlier when he reflected upon the fact that the elimination of these agencies was deemed by the government to reflect a rationalization.
Without looking in the dictionary or recalling the dictionary definition that was read to us, I think one of the things we would expect of rationalization is that it at least be rational. The total cuts that were announced for all those 46 agencies will amount to something like $22 million a year.
I just want to call to your attention, Mr. Speaker, the expenditures that are being made by this government in another area. I picked this area because it seems, in proportion to the expenditures made and what is being sacrificed to save $22 million, so ridiculous, so useless and so irrational. I am speaking of the prosperity initiative the community talks. In Windsor we had one of those community talks. It could hardly be called a community talk. It could have been called almost anything except that. It involved perhaps 30 or 35 people.
For those community talks occurring across the country with an average attendance of somewhere between 40 and 50 people, the government is going to spend $3.2 million. For public relations and advertisement it is spending $5 million. That, with everything else, will give a total of $19 million spent for the prosperity initiative, something that I think most of us now agree is an entirely useless activity-and I chose this example because of the irony involved-particularly in view of the fact that prosperity initiative has a great deal to do with the role, the past work, and what could have been the work of the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada.
It is not rational in terms of savings, but it might be rational from another point of view. I have said before it is my view one of the things that has been bad about this government, certainly in the view of most Canadians, is that it has used its two majorities to implement an ideologically based program which resists any consulta-
April 30, 1992

tion, any advice or any input of an effective character from the people at large.
We have ended up with almost eight years of the most arrogant, ideological and absolutist government this country has ever seen. It is a government that does not use advice and it particularly does not want, it appears, to have good and well researched advice. That is what underlies the demise of certainly the Economic Council and the Science Council. Much the same could be said about the Law Reform Commission and the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security.
The Law Reform Commission of Canada is something that I thought was of absolute value to the advance of law in this country. I am shocked, as I am sure most Canadians are shocked, that the government has apparently decided that it is not necessary to have a mechanism by which the Criminal Code can be reviewed on the basis of the kind of research and informed opinion that the Law Reform Commission has brought to us. Yet we hear almost daily from the people about their concern about Criminal Code misapplication.
We also hear a great deal from many elements in our country, the minorities and native people, about the failure of law to them. I suppose it might be suspected that underlying the demise of the Law Reform Commission of Canada is part of a pattern of not wanting to get the bad news because the government would have to do something that is not completely in line with a preformed ideologically based idea of what should happen.
The Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security is an interesting one. It is an institution that is valued by Canadians and respected internationally. By and large it has reflected the Canadian ideal of a role in securing peace and disarmament in the world and for finding alternative mechanisms for the settlement of international disputes.
It is curious that the termination of the Institute for International Peace and Security should come at a time when within this House there has been a fair amount of controversy about what seems to be a defence policy still resident in the cold war. We are busily, it seems, building our own military industrial complex as a basis for
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economic policy in the face of the development of an appropriate civilian economic or industrial policy.
I suppose it can be said, therefore, that these decisions the Minister of National Defence has announced over the past week, and others yet to come, would be confronted with the kind of criticism this government would not want to see led by such a prestigious institution. We could argue, as it can be appropriately argued for almost all of these killed institutions, that the government killed it as it has killed the others because it cannot stand criticism. It cannot stand informed opinion calling into question policies or legislation by this government that might be appropriately questioned on well researched and well justified grounds.
I think that the sorriest actions have been the killing of the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council of Canada. The Economic Council is another prestigious institution that has had much to say which has been critical of government, but I think just yesterday it demonstrated its usefulness in its report on education in this country. The picture the Economic Council painted is one of horrific problems that, if not addressed, could lead to an increase in the next decade in the number of functionally illiterate adults in this country of one million. It portrays a picture, not of a Canada that is number one but a Canada that among industrial nations is sliding down toward the middle or worse in a number of areas.
I know that most of us have become used to the notion that Canada is characterized as spending more than any other industrial nation on education, but on a per capita basis we sink to only the average.
Figures show that of our youth between 16 and 24 years of age, above 40 per cent are functionally illiterate and innumerate. That is to say they cannot read and they cannot count. At least they cannot count well enough to tally up a grocery list and they cannot read well enough to understand what is in the newspapers.
It shows that in comparison to other countries which depend a great deal on vocational training and apprenticeship and industrial training, that we lag behind them by orders of magnitude, particularly Germany and other European nations.

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It says that this country needs leadership if we are going to be economically successful in producing within our country a focus on education, obviously implemented within provincial jurisdiction which is in accord with our desire to produce a nation that can use technology, science and research and development to yield the kind of jobs and economic prosperity that this country needs.
Unfortunately, and this is the rub, the Economic Council has been critical of the government from time to time. Therefore, it was killed. I am sure that others have already addressed with a significant degree of anger the killing of the Economic Council.
The one that is closest to my heart is the Science Council. It ought to be of concern to all Canadians that a Prime Minister who said in 1983 that unless we enhanced our technology and our research and development we would end up in the minor leagues of international competitiveness.
The fact of the matter is that we have ended up in the bush leagues. We have yet to develop an independent polity, apart from the free trade agreement which is really the only economic policy this government has so far produced. What the government has done in terms of science shows little progress at all.
The Science Council has been the only independent source of advice on science policy this country has had. It has been a productive institution, an institution that has identified many of the problems which are now common knowledge. It has addressed the need for changes in education, in the diffusion of technology and a whole host of things ranging from the environment to the place of women in science.
I just want to read a few of the titles of the reports and discussion papers that the Science Council has released because it shows the scope and in some ways responds to the argument of the government that there are other institutions that somehow can fulfil the role of the Science Council.
Among the significant reports are the following: Not a Long Shot; the Canadian Industrial Science and Technology Policy; Winning in a World Economy; University and Industry Interaction on Economic Renewal in Canada; Technology in the Canadian Forest Product Industries; the Seeds of Renewal; Biotechnology and Canada's
Resource Industries; the Uneasy '80s; the Transition and Information Society; Science for Every Student; Educating Canadians for Tomorrow's World; Science, Education and Canadian Schools; Science, Technology and Constitutional Change; Firing up the Technology Engine; Strategies for Community Economic Development.
Those are just examples. Of course, if you want to cite some of the pioneer works, the Science Council was the first to suggest the separation of waste. This lead to the blue box programs that are being used in a lot of municipalities. As I said earlier, it also identified the inadequacy of representation of women in science and engineering.
The Minister of Industry, Science and Technology, the Minister of Science, would say: "Well, we have the National Advisory Board for Science and Technology". But the National Advisory Board advises the Prime Minister. Its reports are not public. They are released at the convenience of the Prime Minister. We also have to understand that its reports are rather narrow in scope. Its focus increasingly with the elimination of representatives from government departments and the wide-scale elimination of academics from the councils is largely devoted to the issue of science and technology and industrial development. That is an appropriate emphasis for that kind of body.
We know there are other concerns related to science in this country both in terms of the positive contribution that science can make from the point of view of industrial policy, in terms of protecting and enhancing the environment, about the values in our country which have discouraged the study of science, about the impact of inappropriate policies based on science that can lead to harm, about the necessity of a partnership and the introduction of technology.
There is a whole host of topics that the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology could not provide us with.
In other countries there is the Royal Society or the science academies that have provided characteristically to some degree the kind of policy advice and research that the Science Council has provided to Canadians. Unfortunately in this country, those institutions are not sufficiently developed to provide that here. Our institution was the Science Council.
April 30, 1992

I listened as my Liberal colleague pointed out that the committee on external affairs had an opportunity to hold hearings on the demise of ships. I want it known here that unfortunately, an attempt to look at the question of the Science Council and the Economic Council by the committee on industry, science and technology was prevented by a concerted packing of our committee on behalf of the government including a parliamentary secretary who said that because this legislation was before the House we could not deal with it, an argument not made in the committee on external affairs.
I have heard government members talking about royal commissions, the research branch of the library, some of the science departments, NRC, NSERC, and so on as fulfilling the role of the Science Council. These suggestions can all be dismissed.
The fact of the matter is that the committee on industry, science and technology said that the Science Council should be strengthened. It should be provided with more and secure funding. Remember, this government's first action with respect to the Science Council was to cut its budget from about $20 million to $5 million. It asked for yearly reports. In fact the Science Council is about to produce a report on technology and industry and 15 sectoral studies.
It can be assumed that those-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret the hon. member's time has expired.
Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment?
On a point of order, the hon. member for Carleton- Gloucester.


Mr. Bellemare:: Is there not a five-minute period of questions and comments now due?


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I asked for questions or comments. Nobody was getting up.
Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.
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The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: All those in favour of the amendment will please say yea.


Some hon. members:: Yea.


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


Some hon. members:: Nay.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: In my opinion the nays have it.
I declare the amendment lost.
Amendment negatived.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The next question is on the main motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.


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


Some hon. members:: Yea.


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


Some hon. members:: Nay.


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


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Call in the members.
And the division bells having rung:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Order, please. Pursuant to Standing Order 45(5)(a), I have been requested by the chief government Whip's assistant and chief opposition Whip to defer the division until a later time.
Accordingly, pursuant to Standing Order 45(6), the division on the question now before the House stands deferred until Monday, May 4, 1992 at the ordinary hour of daily adjournment at which time the bells to call in the members will be sounded for not more than 15 minutes.
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.

April 30, 1992
Private Members' Business



PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS


Mr. Maurizio Bevilacqua (York North) moved:: That in the opinion of this House, the government should examine
the possibility of adapting to Canadian conditions and experience
some training and apprenticeship programs which have been
successful in Germany and Sweden.
He said: Mr. Speaker, as political leaders of this nation, we have the great responsibility of creating an environment and vehicles of opportunity for our people.
Our nation desperately requires new ways for dealing with the contemporary challenges we face. This country needs a new contract, a contract that addresses the effects of the changing global dynamics, the need for an equal partnership that includes the key players in the economy.
We need a new contract in order to modernize our economy, get it moving again, create high skill, high wage jobs and redefine the relationship and the roles of government and the individual within our society.
Today I rise to address this House on a subject of great importance to Canadians and to the future of this nation, namely, apprenticeship training. It is an important component of the new contract. Clearly, apprenticeship training is a vehicle of opportunity for millions of young Canadians who have not been given a fair chance by our system. It is a subject which is slowly gaming prominence in the national consciousness.
Finally, business people, politicians, media and others are starting to recognize the critical role that training plays in a nation's economy. Slowly, people across Canada are also awakening to the sad state of our educational and apprenticeship training system. They are coming to the realization that something must be done. Indeed, something must be done. Our nation is heading for a crisis unless governments, business, labour, the educational sector and individual Canadians start to co-operate on this issue.
All the players must come together and in an equal partnership must work together to build a comprehensive national apprenticeship training plan that Canadians so desperately need. This is not a simple task. Traditionally the relationships between the different players have
been examples of confrontation instead of co-operation. That is the past. It is now time for all the parties to put aside their individual histories and look toward a common future.
It is time for the federal and provincial governments, business, labour and the educational sector to sign a new contract. It is time for new ideas.
What we need is a revolution in our thinking. Government can be a positive force in the area of apprenticeship training. As a facilitator and guide, it can ensure that genuine progress is made. Government has a responsibility to take the first step toward reforming our present apprenticeship training system. Failure to act will lead to an inevitable erosion of our high standard of living and global competitiveness.
This is not an exaggeration. As a nation we cannot afford a high school drop-out rate of 30 per cent or 100,000 students a year. We cannot afford a 38 per cent adult illiteracy' rate. We cannot afford to have 1.5 million people on unemployment insurance, including 400,000 young people, while 300,000 jobs go unfilled. The present system simply does not work and it must be changed. One of the first changes to be made is how our society views apprenticeship training.
In Canada, apprenticeship training is not generally considered to be a worth-while career path. Hundreds of thousands of young people are directed away from rewarding, challenging careers because of our society's poor attitude toward the skilled trades. That is wrong and it must stop.
Another problem with our present system is that the availability of training is often limited to a small segment of the population.
Finally, because of jurisdictional barriers, the completion of a training program in Canada does not guarantee national recognition. Such problems can only be solved through a complete overhaul of the existing apprenticeship training system. We must discard that which has failed and adopt new practices, new approaches.
As we look for ways to reform our system, we should consider the German model which has been phenomenally successful. Germany performs better than Canada on most levels. Germany's drop-out rate is less than 10 per cent compared to Canada's 30 per cent. Germany has a stronger commitment to research and development and a much more inclusive approach to labour relations.
April 30, 1992

But it is in the area of apprenticeship training that Canada looks the weakest compared to Germany. The two countries vary greatly. The number of apprentices in Canada is 122,000 for .81 per cent of the work force.
In Germany, the number is 1.8 million or 4 per cent of the work force. In Canada, the average age of an apprentice is 26 and in Germany it is 17. The average length of an apprenticeship in Canada is four to five years and in Germany, it is two to three.
There are also important differences in the costs. In Canada, the apprenticeship costs $170,000 over five years and wages are $120,000 over five years. In Germany, the cost of the apprenticeship is only $51,000 over 3.5 years and the wages are only $25,000 over the same time.
How can the German system produce so many more skilled workers in less time and with less money? There are a number of reasons. An examination of the German system will illustrate some of them. Under the German system, streaming begins much earlier, between the ages of 10 and 12.
When compulsory education ends at 16, young Germans have four options: unskilled labour, full-time technical training, higher academic studies and the dual system of apprenticeship training and schooling. As is the case in Canada, 30 per cent of students choose to pursue higher academic studies. However, 60 per cent choose apprenticeship training.
By the age of 16, these students have entered a dual system through which they can combine vocational training in a company with theoretical and practical education in a classroom. German companies play an indispensable role in the German apprenticeship system. That is because they understand that apprenticeship training is more than temporary job creation. It is also an investment in the future.
These companies are willing to pay the price because they recognize the double benefit of apprenticeship training, a permanent supply of skilled labour as well as a stable society. The commitment of German employers to education and training is an example that Canadian stakeholders must follow. If we are to build the learning
Private Members' Business
culture that the government speaks of, our industries must become centres of life-long learning.
This is especially important when one considers that approximately three quarters of those Canadians who will be in the work force by the year 2000 are already in the labour market.
As technology changes, as the nature of their work varies, these people will need the skills to adapt to rapid transformations in the work place. The German model is also relevant in this instance.
The dual system geared to young people is only one element of a wide-ranging apprentice training system. Germans continue to improve their skills or to acquire new ones throughout their careers. The result of this continuous training has an important influence on their personal advancement.
Consider the following: More than one in four executive managers of the largest companies started as apprentices. Almost half of them returned to school to obtain a post-secondary diploma. One third of these companies trained their executive managers. Two thirds of Germany's engineers started their careers as apprentices in the dual system.
In 1988, 35 per cent of the population between the ages of 19 and 65 was enrolled in continuing education courses, more than half being directly related to their jobs. This attachment to the apprenticeship training on the part of German individuals and firms is an important element of a progressive, industrial strategy.
A highly skilled work force can adapt easily to changes in technological application and organizational structure, two factors in measuring an economy's competitiveness. Competitiveness must be an important concern of Canada's if it is to succeed in the global marketplace. The development of a national apprenticeship training program is, therefore, in the interests of our different levels of government as well as that of our industries.
Again, important lessons can be learned by studying the German model for Germany, like Canada, is a federal state. In Germany, education is primarily the responsibility of the lander or individual states. Guidelines for apprenticeship training are set by the standing conference of the ministers of education, which includes a representative of the federal government.

April 30, 1992
Private Members' Business
In contrast to Canada, the school systems of the different lander are highly standardized. In order to adhere to federal guarantees of freedom of movement and occupational choice, the curriculum evaluation systems and structure of the different states' educational systems are very similar. It is clear that Canadians are handicapped by a lack of co-ordination similar to that found in Germany. Provinces have traditionally paid more attention to their narrow interests at the expense of national considerations. Fortunately, however, provincial governments are beginning to realize that this restricted outlook can have serious negative results.
The Council of Ministers of Education has taken the first tentative steps toward increasing the level of co-ordination between their departments and the call for national testing is supported by almost every provincial government.
On the education front, the different levels of government are slowly starting to make progress. In other areas, however, we still lag behind Germany. For example, in the area of labour market policy it is customary for Canada to emphasize income maintenance or unemployment insurance at the expense of active programs like training and employment creation. According to the OECD, the federal government spends only 25 per cent of its labour market program's budget on active programs; the other 75 per cent going to income maintenance.
The Conservative hands off approach to apprenticeship training is the total opposite of that which we see in Germany. The success of the German system is proof of the important role that government plays as an active partner in the process, helping to co-ordinate labour market and educational policies.
The government's role of co-ordinator and regulator is just as important as business' role of provider. A strong partnership based on the participation of different levels of government, business, labour, educator and individual Canadians is the necessary foundation of a successful apprenticeship training system.
Besides the existence of a strong partnership, another reason for the success of Germany's apprenticeship training system is its reliance on an institutional model
for easing the transition from school to work. The most important feature of this model is the high degree of co-operation and interaction between those involved in education and training. Schools, companies, labour and governments all act in concert. With this level of interaction it is easy for a student to see the correlation between education and career opportunities. From an early age young Germans are exposed to the realities of the labour market and are, therefore, able to make more informed career decisions.
In contrast, young Canadians are given only superficial guidance in their career decisions. Faced with an abundance of sometimes conflicting information and without much help in analysing the data, many students make choices which they soon regret.
The general indifference of Canadian employers toward the education system is also a cause for alarm. Only by involving themselves in the educational process, by introducing in-house training programs, can Canadian firms avoid debilitating labour shortages in the future.
Finally, governments must also accept their responsibility in this area. First they must develop a spirit of co-operation between the major players, but they must also act with determination, introducing regulations and guidelines that will ensure that training programs are introduced.
Some will say that we need made-in-Canada solutions for made-in-Canada problems. I agree, but I also know that we can always learn from the success of others. While there are important cultural differences between Canada and Germany, there is still much in the German model that can serve as inspiration to us as we reform our apprenticeship training system. That reform is a prerequisite to the future prosperity of Canada.
Once we have put in place a serious, national apprenticeship program, we can start to build the kind of economy that Germany has traditionally enjoyed. We can build on traditional strengths like our abundant natural resources and our young population, but we must also give ourselves a world class apprenticeship training system. We cannot allow the world to pass us by.
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It is this government's duty to see that work begins immediately on a Canadian apprenticeship training program. Our future depends on it.


Mr. Lee Clark (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of the Environment):: Mr. Speaker, I am happy to have this opportunity, along with my colleagues, to respond to the hon. member's motion concerning, and I quote:
- examine the possibility of adapting to Canadian conditions and experience some training and apprenticeship programs which have been successful in Germany and Sweden.
I would like to begin by assuring the House that the issue of developing effective training and apprentice-like programs in Canada is a very high priority for this government. Currently the whole area of school-to-work transition is being closely examined by the federal government and the private sector. Through the Canadian Labour Force Development Board and the prosperity consultations, there are major initiatives under way to develop new strategies to facilitate this transition from school to work.
The government has been addressing this issue because we inherited a skills training legacy that was clearly inadequate to meet the career aspirations of an increasing number of Canadians as well as the competitive needs of Canada as a whole. In fact, entry level training options in Canada all too often lack relevance, responsiveness and consistency in our regions.
The result is that too many Canadian young people, and I am not only referring to school dropouts, seem to, in a sense, fall between the cracks of the labour market. A recent Canadian Chamber of Commerce report expressed concern, and I quote: "that there is a serious shortage of skilled trades people to meet certain skill needs in the work force. Not enough young Canadians are choosing skilled trades and technology careers".
Clearly addressing this problem is, in large part, the responsibility of our formal education systems, our employers and all other labour-market partners. The historical absence of co-ordinated school to work transition programs for our non-college bound young people has also contributed to this unacceptable solution.
The government supports and continues to pursue an objective of making the school to work transition more
Private Members' Business
effective, not just through band-aid remedies but through long-term solutions. Clearly this is not a cyclical problem, but is a structural problem. As such it requires long-term and lasting solutions that will help Canada fully utilize our human resources in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
As my colleagues will explain in more detail, the government has explored a variety of means to reinforce and better co-ordinate training in Canada. For instance, co-operative education has been revitalized through the Labour Force Development Strategy's support. Co-operative education has long been acknowledged as an effective mechanism to introduce young people to the job market. Our strength and commitment to co-operative education focuses on high school students with particular attention given to potential drop-outs.
Linking all areas of our effective and innovative youth program is a continuum of emphasis on the importance of training and skills development, not just during the so-called school years, but throughout an individual's life.
The highly successful Challenge Program was created nine years ago on the premise of providing young people with relevant job experience.
I mentioned earlier the training initiatives being developed through the Canadian Labour Force Development Board and through prosperity consultations. The CLFDB, if I may use that terminology, made up of stakeholders from all relevant sectors; business, labour, education, social action groups and governments, has identified school to work transition as a priority over the next two or three years. As a result, they are conducting research on this issue and will likely examine further the types of systems in other countries, such as the German dual apprenticeship system.
It is expected that the subcommittee will report its initial findings by September of this year. As well, the issue of school to work transition has been discussed at length within the prosperity consultations. Results to date from all levels of consultation, community portfolio and national, confirm that there is a significant interest in this issue.

April 30, 1992
Private Members' Business
Proposed solutions include an expansion of co-op education and the development of more apprenticeshiplike programs, modelled possibly on the German apprenticeship system. These and other related areas are expected to figure in the prosperity action plan due to be released this fall.
It should be stressed, however, that while there is much to learn from Germany and other models including Sweden, there are considerations particular to Canada that must be taken into account.
I note that the hon. member's motion quite rightly takes this into account when it speaks of "adapting to Canadian conditions and experience" programs from abroad. Let there be no mistake, there are significant differences to be considered, a fundamental one being the level of private sector involvement.
For instance, in Germany the private sector for all intents and purposes owns the system and takes full responsibility for its development and application. The German dual system of apprenticeship is already strongly established in the German private sector to ensure that employers develop the prerequisite entry level skills in their labour market. Clearly such important initiatives depend on a strong commitment from the private sector, both philosophically and financially, a commitment that in Canada until recently has been most notable by its absence.
It is no secret that compared to some of our major competitors, the level of Canadian private sector involvement for in-house and other training programs is not even in the ballpark. Clearly we need a greater commitment from the private sector, not only because it is fiscally unacceptable for governments to simply throw money at this issue, but also because in the final analysis business and industry know what they require to succeed.
Surveys indicate that many Canadian employers are dissatisfied with the skills and job preparedness of high school trained employees. Yet at the same time, not enough firms in Canada invest in training.
Responding to this critical situation, the government has made unprecedented efforts to build practical, effective and relevant partnerships with employers and other labour market stakeholders.
As my colleagues will spell out in some detail, we are now seeing the positive results from these efforts, both
in terms of specific partnerships and a growing general awareness in the private sector of the need to apply their experience and resources to the development of a training culture in Canada.
It is clear that the significant element of that training culture must be technical education and entry level programs that will involve all partners. In this context, the government has a crucial role to play as a catalyst and as a facilitator, supporting and promoting the development of innovative, co-ordinated training initiatives that will ensure national prosperity.
In closing, let me emphasize again the importance the government attaches to this issue. We understand how closely tied our success as a nation is to the quality of education and training we provide to an emerging work force. Related to this we understand as well that the critical issue raised by the hon. member's motion must be addressed, not just by government but by all Canadians if effective solutions are to emerge.
This is a strategy this government has pursued and will continue to pursue in the days which lie ahead.


Hon.   Chas. L. Caccia@Davenport: Mr. Speaker, in the limited time available I will only be able to make a few remarks.
Let me first congratulate the parliamentary secretary for his skilful reading of his notes. What he forgot to mention in his intervention is that the committee report entitled "Human Resource Development" is one year old and is still waiting for its implementation. Therefore, the beautiful expression of interest and commitment just made by the parliamentary secretary falls on deaf ears, because we do not see any action on the part of this government.
In addition, I would like to draw attention to the excellent report by the Economic Council of Canada which came out yesterday, entitled "A Lot to Learn- Education and Training in Canada". Some very interesting points are made in that report.
I would like to make sure that all members are aware of the fact that this report is the swan song of the Economic Council of Canada. It is the last report to be produced by this excellent council.
Why? Because in the budget speech of February 25, the Minister of Finance announced the killing of this
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council as well as the Science Council of Canada, the Law Reform Commission, the Canadian Environment Advisory Council, and other important institutions such as the Canadian Institute of International Peace and Security. He said it was a budget measure to reduce expenditures and to increase efficiency to Canadians.
That is not the reason why it is being cancelled along with the Economic Council. It is because the Minister of Finance has decided he can get better advice from within his department than by maintaining and encouraging the life and activities of important councils including the Economic Council of Canada which has to say: "In Canada vocational preparation is not treated as a credible alternative to the academic stream in secondary schools".
On page 41 it says: "The Canadian apprenticeship system is limited in coverage and is not responsive to labour market needs".
I can only commend and congratulate the member for York North for his terrific motion today because it allows us to focus on an issue which the party in power has neglected since 1984. The reason I say that is that while the previous federal government was involved in funding apprenticeship programs it was cancelled by this government a few years ago. Therefore eliminating once and for all any federal presence and any federal support behind apprenticeship programs. That was the end of it.
Unfortunately it was not just that which the government did. It cancelled the agency I mentioned earlier, the Economic Council of Canada, an institution that just now has begun to draw the attention of the government and the public to the shortcomings in our educational system.
Canada is almost the only economically advanced country that has no national education standards of any kind. How can we become globally competitive without national standards in education, without national input and support behind the apprenticeship system my hon. and distinguished colleague from York North has so skilfully produced in the House of Commons? How can we do that?
How can we practise the lofty themes developed by the parliamentary secretary, for whom I have the highest esteem, particularly when he enters the field of education, when we lack the instruments, when we lack the political will, when we cancel the budgetary measures which are necessary to implement apprenticeship mea-
Private Members' Business
sures, when we lose the political will which is necessary to establish national standards, when we actually witness a constant retreat in governance on the part of this government.
My time is up. We are sharing the time, the member for York West and myself, so I will relinquish my time to him. I am convinced he can carry on extremely well and I thank you for your attention.


Sergio Marchi: Mr. Speaker, it is very difficult to fill the large and impressive shoes of the member of Parliament for Davenport. Let me start by commending my colleague, friend, and neighbour for putting this motion because it is most timely.
Unfortunately the message is not a new one. We say over and over in this Chamber and across the country in various discussions that we pay people on unemployment insurance $12,000 per person. We pay welfare recipients, once they have exhausted unemployment insurance, $12,000 a year per person so they may survive. For the majority of those individuals it is a very sad situation with employment and the economy unfortunately shrinking as opposed to being vibrant and stimulating. Often those people are vegetating, not through their own wishes and aspirations, but almost as a forced circumstance imposed on them by a system.
We have, as has been mentioned by both my predecessors, a restructuring taking place. We have a world that is changing. We have a world that certainly does not owe us a free lunch and that is not going to wait for us in terms of trying to catch up.
Most observers agree with that analysis. Most individuals on unemployment insurance would agree with that. Most welfare recipients would agree with that. Most academic and educational institutions would agree that the time has come to change or reform our thinking in terms of training and apprenticeship programs.
The $64,000 question is: "Where and why is there no action? Why is there a lack of reform? Why is there a lack of political will to make the transition?"
If as has been mentioned the Germans have a good model or the Japanese have a good model, they are by no means leaders in every category of the apparatus. Clearly there have been enough success stories in both the European model and the Asia-Pacific model to point to the worthiness of having an apprenticeship program that offers a future, if not for older Canadians, clearly for younger Canadians.

April 30, 1992
Private Members' Business
Many people suggest that we should be linking unemployment insurance with training procedures. Both the unemployed and those who are successful and lucky enough to have jobs agree with that. Some feel that more and more of their income is going toward sustaining individuals, allowing them to survive without upgrading their individual attributes, and if individuals do not upgrade themselves the country's work force does not upgrade itself. There will be no net wins emanating from that system.
My father is a tool and die maker. He owns his own tool and die shop. I am very proud of him because he came here like thousands and millions of others with very little schooling and very little in his pockets. Thanks for the opportunities of this country he was able to provide for himself and his family. My father tells me that we are still going to Europe, particularly to Great Britain, to import tool and die makers. Why? It is because our schools in this country are not producing tool and die makers to meet the market demand. We do not have apprenticeship programs to allow businesses like my father's to assume tool and die makers who can make a go of it. That is a shame.
An attitudinal change needs to happen. Why? It is because many people have told their sons and daughters not to do what they had to do. Sometimes there is a stigma. Youngsters have to go to university and not do what their forefathers have done. There should be no stigma attached to being able to work with one's hands. There should be no stigma attached to being an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, a mechanic, a tool and die maker. Those positions will never be replaced by the computer. Those positions will always continue to have their value.
While they suggest that somehow a graduate of university is more special than someone who may have graduated with a licence in plumbing, never mind the stigma, we do not offer the opportunity for the apprenticeship programs that should be available for individuals who wish to pursue a career by working with their hands as opposed to working with only their brains pushing paper at a desk.
Speech after speech, study after study indicates that we are not moving in that direction. Therefore that is why this motion is valuable. That is why this motion is
timely. If the government is going to speak about global competitiveness, world economies, freer trade, increased competition, prosperity agendas, and giving the tools to our youth, what does that mean to the average 21-year-old who wants a niche and a place in his or her own world? It means very little unless we begin to enter the world of pragmatics and practicality when it comes to having a career. That is why I hope the House supports my hon. friend's motion.


Mr. Charles-Eugene Marin (Gaspe):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to respond to the hon. member's proposal. It is an interesting one that deserves our attention. To say that young Canadians are the future of this country may be a cliche, but the fact remains that this is quite true. In any case, I am sure that all members will agree that the best possible programs should be available to our young people to help them make the transition from school to the job environment.
Our government has already stressed the need for building a skilled and productive labour force, in a publication entitled Agenda for Economic Renewal, a program announced after the 1984 election. Since then, we have initiated a number of activities in co-operation with our partners in the private sector, to provide workers with the kind of training they will need to ensure Canada's prosperity beyond the year 2000.
Hon. members will recall that the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre examined our programs to assist transition from school to the labour market and made recommendations for improving them. The hon. member would probably be interested to know the conclusions being considered at this time by the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. One of the commission's subcommittees is considering ways to reach the approximately 60 per cent of young students who take no further training after leaving high school. Some of these students leave with a diploma, while others are part of the 30 per cent that drop out of high school.
Our government is a firm believer in partnership, and our partners in more than half of our leading industries have expressed their dissatisfaction with the level of skills students have acquired when they leave high school.
April 30, 1992

Furthermore, on the subject of job preparedness, managers of more than 60 per cent of small businesses are dissatisfied with the way high schools prepare their students for the labour market. Generally speaking, the public is rather dissatisfied with the performance of the Canadian education systems. Over 50 per cent of Canadians believe that our youngsters do not acquire even the basic skills, while only 30 per cent believe that they are well prepared to join the labour force.
These are but a few examples of the kind of challenge facing us. I must tell my hon. friend that the days when government was expected to solve our problems are gone. Nowadays, we have to team up with the private sector, i.e. businesses, workers and community leaders who understand the special needs of the work environment. Such co-operation already exists. The Canadian Labour Force Development Commission is made up of 22 leaders representing the business community, labour, educational and training institutions as well as social action groups.
As I said, the commission takes a close look at initiatives to facilitate school to work transition. While progress has been made toward creating strong partnerships with private sector stakeholders, I must admit that a greater involvement on the part of the private sector should be encouraged, because only 31 per cent of Canadian businesses are offering their employees regular training.
Another study shows that 15 per cent or less of the work force has received limited job-related training. Youth unemployment is higher than for the overall population.
This is one more reason why it is urgent that we come up with an appropriate basic skill acquisition scheme and a system to determine whether a potential worker has the skill level required for the job.
The motion put forward by my hon. colleague deals with the possibility of adapting to our needs some training and apprenticeship programs in use in other countries. I can assure him that we are indeed drawing from the experience of our competitors in an effort to adapt and compete on the global market.
Private Members' Business
Thanks to the information that we have gathered, we know of several international models that ensure a smooth transition from the high school to various careers and professions. For instance, in Germany, the apprenticeship program used by the private sector was expanded to enable employers to give workers a chance to acquire the skills they need to be eligible for top jobs.
I was saying a moment ago that a greater involvement from the private sector is necessary. I was thinking of the excellent initiative of a Canadian corporation from Mississauga, Siemens Electric Limited. This company has set up an apprenticeship program patterned on the German model. This program emphasizes the need for an integrated system which would encourage high school students to consider a career in various trades, lower the drop-out rate in apprenticeship programs, improve the content of education programs, and ensure fair access to the system for candidates.
This concept, which was developed by one of our partners from the private sector, would help correct the flaws of the present system and would enable us to develop the specialized trades that our country needs to remain competitive.
The issue of transition from the school to the labour market, which was the topic of studies done by the Canadian Labour Force Development Board and by partners from the private sector such as Siemens Electric, were also discussed during our consultations on prosperity. These consultations required more than 200 meetings in communities across the country. The results of those meetings were sent to a steering committee whose members represent a large sample of Canadians from all walks of life. The steering committee is expected to publish this fall an action plan which will serve as a guide for governments, businesses, workers, university people, scientists and Canadians in general.
I can assure my hon. colleagues that our prosperity initiative is entirely conducted by the private sector. It is the responsibility of the federal, provincial and territorial governments to create a favourable climate for the successful transition from the school to the labour market. However, this environment must lead to the continuous acquisition of knowledge.

April 30, 1992
Private Members' Business
The federal government will do its share. However, the success of this initiative depends on the full co-operation as well as the efforts of our partners. We are starting to see this co-operation. If we unite our efforts, we will be able to develop a strategy for the transition from school to the labour market which will ensure a promising future to young Canadians. This will in turn ensure Canada's competitiveness during this decade and into the 21st century.
I congratulate my colleague for his proposal, which definitely deserves the support of the members of this House.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I too feel privileged to support my colleague from York North. It was not too long ago that he put forward another private members' bill in this House respecting the Oakridges moraine, the largest body of underground water in Ontario. He proposed to turn most of that body of land into a national park. I supported him in that notion. I hope we can continue to promote the protection of that land in our province.
The issue of apprenticeship is important, especially today, because we are no longer able to afford the luxury of counting on our natural resources to meet the cash flow requirements of this country. For years and years we as a country have been spoiled in the sense that we could export our raw materials which would bring in the necessary cash to operate our treasury and the social programs that gave us the standard of living we all enjoy.
Today we are dependent more than ever on our ability to manufacture, on our ability to make things with our hands. The entrepreneurship of this country cannot expand its basic business unless it has a properly trained work force around it.
I had the opportunity from 1984 to 1986 to work for Magna International. This is an organization founded by an Austrian entrepreneur who came to Canada with I do not think any more than $1,000 in his jeans. I see my colleague from Newmarket in the House who knows this organization well because many of his constituents work in Magna factories throughout his area. That was an experience where I really learned the importance of apprenticeship.
This was a man who, because he had this skill of making things with his hands, was able to create a business that in over 15 or close to 20 years created 15,000 manufacturing jobs in this country. He was able to do it because every year he had very strict control over the amount of money that went into apprenticeship. He would say time and time again that the strength of that organization was the apprenticeship programs and the apprenticeship system that the corporation had.
The problem that he would bring to my attention and others' attention-some of us are in government now and he has asked us to bring this message-is that if we would support small and medium sized manufacturers in this country in the area of apprenticeship, our job opportunities for this country could expand overnight.
When there are quality apprenticeship programs, then a work force is created that has the talent to make a better product at a better price. That of course is what this competitiveness issue is all about.
We cannot expect this to happen on its own. People in industry need support. With the economic conditions as they are today, with banks cutting back on small and medium sized entrepreneurs in terms of their credit lines, it is very tough for them on their own to create these apprenticeship programs or to create an apprenticeship condition within their corporations. They are counting on us as politicians and as people who are affecting public policy to make sure that this issue is looked after.
That is why the motion of my colleague from North York is so timely and so appropriate. Last year, in this country we spent close to $35 billion on welfare payments and unemployment insurance payments. Had we redirected or if we had linked some of that money to the idea of a national apprenticeship program, it would have been a much better investment for this nation. This is where we seem to be lacking in creativity.
I know my colleague, the member or Winnipeg South Centre, when we had a similar recession back in 1981 and he was the minister of employment came up with the NEED program. It was essentially a national apprenticeship program where the government would top up or assist the employer in the funding of the person's wages if that person had been taken off welfare or the unemployment insurance rolls. That was one of the most successful programs that we have ever had in this country in terms of putting people back to work and
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giving them skills that will be with them for the rest of their lives.
That is where I think this government has really failed in the last two years through this very deep recession, where it has basically retreated from the exercise of creativity. The government has retreated from trying to figure out ways that it could top up that unemployment insurance fund or re-design the welfare system in a way that while there is a down period in the economy, we could be investing that money in a proper apprenticeship program.
That is an area where, as national politicians, if we do not focus on it, if we do not give it the necessary thrust, then the entire manufacturing capability in this country is going to become weakened and it is going to put us in an inferior position.
Earlier today I was going through a householder put out by my colleague, the member for Davenport, entitled, "Ready to Meet the Challenge." He devotes his entire householder to apprenticeship, all the various occupations and all the potential job opportunities that are out there. If we were to support these programs, our unemployment rolls would diminish very quickly.
I salute my colleague from York North for once again taking the initiative on a very important issue like this. I hope we can have the support of all members in this House.


Mr. John E. Cole (York-Simcoe):: Mr. Speaker, I wanted to stand up and commend the hon. member for York North for this motion. It is something I know he believes very strongly in. We have talked in the past about the need for apprenticeship programs. I was very interested to hear some of the comments today and the support that there is generally throughout this House for this very important project.
One of the things that we as members and we as a society have to look at when we look at apprenticeship programs is the apparent feeling in this country right now and in the last few years that in order to be successful in today's modem world that one must have a university degree and the skills and education that go along with that.
When you look at the business people today who are successful, who are doing well in today's climate, doing
Adjournment Debate
well internationally and proving themselves, they are people who have learned their skills the hard way. They have learned their trade, their ability to run a business, for the most part through the school of hard knocks, which is the expression that is often used. That is something we have to get through to our young people today. We have to encourage them to go out into the world and to learn and understand the needs of today's society.
I was talking to some people who were suggesting that bricklayers in this country are averaging 59 to 60 years of age. It will not be very long before those very bricklayers are not going to be able to perform their particular skills and crafts and we are going to need people to replace them. These are the people today who in the future are going to have the opportunity to be very, very successful economically, socially and really be able to contribute a lot to this world we live in.
There are a lot of things that we could talk about when it comes to apprenticeship, whether it is competitiveness in the future or just our whole educational system, something that the provinces have been dealing with for a number of years. We have gotten away from the trade school atmosphere that we had in our high schools a generation ago.
I realize we are out of time, but I would like to just finally commend the member for York North for bringing this motion forward. I am sure that in the future we will all be supporting this very type of action.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired. Pursuant to Standing Order 96(1) the order is dropped from the Order Paper.



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

[Stage Direction]
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.
[Stage Direction]
April 30, 1992
Adjournment Debate PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
['The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).']
Sergio Marchi: Mr. Speaker, I would like to take the few minutes available to me to review a question that I posed to the government back on February 10.
That question had to do with an earlier decision in January when this government essentially gave away the store on the whole question of the generic drug industry at the GATT meetings. The government proposed to extend the current licensing to some 20 years, which effectively places in serious jeopardy and danger the whole question of generic drug firms versus the large pharmaceutical firms.
I do not have anything against the pharmaceutical brand name companies for the work that they have done, for the research and for the drugs they come up with for Canadians and people around the world, nothing at all. There needs to be some sort of protection, maybe copyright, for the work and the research invested in the drugs that they have produced.
At the same time, the generic drug industry which employs some 3,000 people across the country and allows a moderation of prices in prescription drugs has been a made-in-Canada solution that has worked well. It has offered balance and it has offered fairness. It has offered fairness to the large multinational corporations that put their drugs on the market, have had a monopoly for a number of years on that particular drug, have made back what they have invested and on top of that have made a very decent profit.
After that, we have the generic drug firms allowed by legislation in this country to essentially manufacture and produce those same drugs at a lower cost.
It seems to me that balance has worked fairly for the pharmaceutical companies, the generic companies and most important, for the consumers. This is at a time when we are hurting economically, at a time when Toronto is losing jobs, when the two largest generic companies in the country are located in Toronto, Apotex in my own riding and Novopharm in the larger metropolitan area in the east end, namely Scarborough.
When we are talking about hurting economically and then the whole debate about the crisis facing our health
care system and the soaring prices for both patients and institutions, why would we place a strait-jacket on the generic drug firms at this particular time?
Therefore, my question was aimed at trying to have the government recognize the sensitive balance and the important role that generic drug firms, both from an economic and a medical point of view, have played. I hope that the parliamentary secretary responding today on behalf of the government will bring us some much needed good news.


Walter Leland Rutherford (Lee) Clark: Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to speak to the House, albeit briefly, on a very important issue.
I would like to begin by stressing the fact that there has been a very considerable amount of consultation with the industry, including the generic companies, over the course of these many, many months. In fact, I am informed that there have been some 15 meetings in total which took place between the spring of 1991 and the announcement in January 1992 to which the hon. member has referred.
Furthermore, I am also advised that the proposed changes which, indeed, would be consistent with changes occurring elsewhere in the industrial world will not limit the opportunity of generic companies to continue to function in Canada and to continue to have a profitable experience.
All existing generic products will continue to be available and the number of new generic products can also be introduced under compulsory licences which were issued before December 20, 1991.
It is important to stress that those pharmaceutical companies make heavy financial investments in the area of research must have the opportunity to earn a return on that investment if they are to locate in our countiy.
We are at a stage in our history when nations around the world are making locational decisions. If we are to be out of step with other potential climates for investment we will suffer. The net result will be that there may be less investment in Canada, and perhaps less investment in important research.
April 30, 1992

All of us are consumers of that successful research. We are a net beneficiary of that process.



Hon. Alan Redway (Don Valley East):: Mr. Speaker, every day that I spend in my constituency office I hear from engineers, architects and builders. They tell me just how bad things are economically in metropolitan Toronto.
Quite frankly, most of them do not know where their next job is coming from. One very large engineering firm with a million dollar payroll tells me that it has no more work orders on the books whatsoever.
How can they possibly have any work to do when there is no one out there building anything in metropolitan Toronto? Why would anybody build anything at all when right across from my own constituency office in an industrial commercial zone 30 per cent of the industrial commercial buildings are vacant? They are not doing anything.
There are signs on the windows saying: "Job Action Centre". There are all sorts of things like that. Somehow we have to create some more jobs. It seems to me that one of the best ways to do that is through construction itself.
In its recent budget the government and the Minister of Finance announced the 5 per cent down payment for housing and the use of Registered Retirement Savings Plan moneys for housing construction and for housing purchases. Those are excellent initiatives, and I want to congratulate the Minister of Finance on them, but we need more.
One of the other ways that we can get more is to push ahead with the CMHC housing development projects. There are a number of those in the works and they have been in the works for some time. They are at various stages of development but they are all there ready to go and we should be taking advantage of that.
One, in metropolitan Toronto, is the Downsview property. Another is the CMHC Toronto branch land site. Another near metropolitan Toronto is the Vaughan property. Out in British Columbia there is the Kitsilano project and in the Vancouver area the George Derby site. In Montreal there is the Benny Farm site.
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We are not lacking for a number of potential projects. All we have to do is get on with them and go ahead with them.
As far as the Downsview site in Toronto is concerned, I am not referring to the Canadian Forces military depot. I am talking about the 135 acres of property that CMHC already controls, that has nothing to do with the military depot. CMHC has a plan to build 5,000 affordable houses on that property.
If we did that, we could produce jobs for carpenters, plumbers, electricians, architects, engineers, builders, building products suppliers, furniture and appliance dealers and manufacturers. Each new home actually creates two person-years of work, so we need these jobs. We do not need that land being sold off to some private developer. We need the government to go ahead and start building on those lands now.
I hope that tonight the parliamentary secretary will confirm that is exactly what we are going to do, that we are going to build on those lands now and we are going to create some jobs.


Walter Leland Rutherford (Lee) Clark: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member referred to one of the recent government initiatives which I think is of extreme importance.
He referred to the fact that the required down payment had been reduced from 10 per cent to 5 per cent.
I would just like to inform the members of the House the results of that program have been very significant. In fact, according to my information, as of April 3 over 12,500 Canadian households have made use of this initiative to purchase their first home with a down payment of 5 per cent. That is probably greater than had been anticipated. The success of that initiative is evident.
As you also know, I think there has been some significant progress with the Downsview project to which the hon. member referred. Certainly, it got off to a slow start and the hon. member is well aware of that. However, following negotiations relating to the sale to Boeing of a division of de Havilland it is anticipated that formal applications for planning approvals can now be tabled with the city of North York.

April 30, 1992
Adjournment Debate
The CMHC, the Department of National Defence, and the Treasury Board are looking at other areas within the base itself which could allow the housing development to be undertaken in an earlier timeframe.
There is also activity going on at the George Derby project in Burnaby. At the Kitsilano redevelopment project in Vancouver the first new building is being occupied and tenders have been closed with the second building. Therefore, there is evidence of activity here. I trust that the hon. member will be pleased to hear that.


GOODS AND SERVICES TAX
Mr. Chris Axworthy (Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing):: Mr. Speaker, on February 6 I asked the finance minister about the government's commitment to keep its promise that the goods and services tax would not be charged on the necessities of life. It is clear that water is one of those necessities, yet the finance minister has seen fit to impose the GST on the delivery of that very basic commodity to 26 communities across Saskatchewan.
The GST is everyone's nightmare, despised by 75 per cent of Canadians who quite rightly see it as the biggest tax grab in Canadian history.
When the GST legislation was introduced this government promised that the basic necessities of life would be exempt from the tax and that the tax would be fairly and equitably applied.
Endless problems have been created by the GST affecting consumers, business, even with regard to the bureaucracy created to administer it.
In November 1991 the Minister of Finance decided to apply the GST to water. Surely, a basic necessity but to some Canadians not to all Canadians. This is not exactly an equitable or fair arrangement.
To add insult to injury the government imposed the tax retroactively, taking an extra $319,000 in GST from Saskatchewan in 1991, including $7,500 from Warman, $7,300 from Martensville, $4,000 from Domremy, and $3,000 from Osier each year. In Saskatchewan right now we have a situation in which the GST is applied to water for some Canadians, but not to all. This is hardly fair, hardly equitable, as the government promised.
On March 10 in a bulletin the Department of Finance admitted that the application of the GST on water is unfair and inequitable.
I raise the issue on behalf of over 2,000 families in Martensville, Warman, Domremy and Osier, communities in Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing. I ask why these people should be forced to pay the GST on water when others do not. Over 700 families wrote to me to complain that this was a most unfair situation. On two occasions I rose in the House and asked the Minister of Finance questions. I asked him if he would at least look into the implications of the tax and perhaps consider scrapping it.
In response, the Minister of National Revenue said the short answer to this question is no.
In response to another question on April 7 he said that the answer to this issue is for the provincial government in Saskatchewan to harmonize the GST with the federal government's GST. In other words, more tax. Surely, that is a ridiculous answer to the question.
The province of Saskatchewan has made an offer to ensure the elimination of GST on water would be revenue neutral for the federal government, but the department of revenue insists that the Saskatchewan Water Corporation, a Crown corporation, must assume municipal status. The Saskatchewan Water Corporation is most emphatically not a municipality. The federal government must look at the situation realistically and change the rules to fit the facts of life not change the facts to suit its regressive policies, which the government admits are unfair.
The government must rescind the GST on water. It has reneged on its promises of a fair and equitable tax. It has reneged on its promise to exempt basic necessities from the GST. Two thousand families in Saskatchewan are forced to pay an unfair, inequitable tax, one that the government admits is unfair and inequitable. They are forced to pay it retroactively because the government is, for reasons of its own, unable to accept the province's offer which would resolve the problem. It is time for the government to take action, time for the Minister of Finance to assume some leadership here. Two thousand families should not be paying the GST on water. It is time for the government to stop breaking its own promise and scrap the GST on water.
April 30, 1992


Mr. Barry Moore (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of National Revenue):: Mr. Speaker, I would just like to point out that the GST replaced an outdated and inefficient federal sales tax that freed up business from an archaic and inefficient tax and replaced it with a simpler and more equitable one.
Turning to my colleague's remarks, I want to emphasize that municipalities receive a partial rebate of any taxes paid by them on their inputs. This ensures that they do not pay more tax than they did under the previous FST system.


An hon. member:: That's not true.


Barry D. Moore: Oh, yes it is true.
Moreover, municipalities do not charge GST on the vast majority of standard residential services, including the provision of water. Simply put, consumers do not pay GST on supplies of water provided by municipalities.
In fact, under the GST a mechanism has been provided to allow provincial government agencies such as the Saskatchewan Water Corporation to ask to be treated like a municipality when it performs municipal functions.
In other words, households in Saskatchewan do not need to pay GST on water. The means are in place for the Saskatchewan Water Corporation to ensure that supplies of water are exempt from the GST. This mechanism was provided to ensure competitive equity between municipalities and other organizations that supply water.
I would suggest to my hon. friend in closing that the solution to this matter lies with the provincial government rather than with the federal government.


SOFTWOOD LUMBER INDUSTRY
Brian L. Gardiner: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House tonight to pursue a question I raised originally on March 9 with the government. That was a question put to the government following the recent decision by the commerce department of the United States regarding the softwood lumber industry and its countervail duty announcement against Canadian softwood lumber exports to the United States.
I rose on that date to express concerns about this decision from the congress department and to put a question and concern to the government to ensure that it was delivering the strongest possible message to Washington and the Bush administration that Canada will not
Adjournment Debate
put up with this continued harassment of our softwood lumber exports to the United States.
We now have learned that on May 20 we will get the next decision from the commerce department on softwood lumber exports in that dispute. We have further learned that the Prime Minister will be in Washington, D.C., on that day. I am most interested to hear the response from the parliamentary secretary in terms of what representations he can assure this House and Canadians that our government is making to ensure that the message is heard by the Bush administration that Canada will not stand for the U.S. dictating our forest policy.
Those people who live in the some 300 forest communities across Canada who depend on those exports, particularly my riding in northern B.C., call upon the government to ensure that it does not sell out as it did in 1986 with the softwood memorandum of understanding and that it deliver a strong message to the U.S. government that our forests are Canada's forests and they are not for the United States to dictate to us how they are to be managed.


Walter Leland Rutherford (Lee) Clark: Mr. Speaker, I want to make it very clear that the Government of Canada very strongly objects to the American decision to which my hon. friend has referred, i.e. the imposition of a 14.48 per cent tariff on all lumber shipments from Canada, excluding those from the Atlantic provinces.
I would also like to make it very clear that we are particularly offended by the inclusion of log export controls in this investigation. The inclusion of log export controls is totally unjustified since the United States maintains its own export controls which have recently been strengthened and extended.
Mr. Speaker, as you know very well, we have reminded U.S. authorities on many occasions that their decisions are just as open to challenge as ours are.
Furthermore, our embassy in Washington has made representation to the administration on several issues related to the requirement to post bonds or cash deposits.
We are confident that the federal government will be able not only to fight this case to the end but will be able to do so successfully. In fact, one of the reasons we are confident of that is because there is good co-operation in the federal government and the provincial governments with industry and their respective counsel in defending Canada's interests.

April 30, 1992
Adjournment Debate
I would also like to make it very clear that these cases are currently being brought before the GATT. If necessary, we will utilize the binding binational dispute settlement mechanism under chapter 19 of the free trade agreement.
Our case is strong and indeed we will succeed in the end.


LABELLING
Mr. Jim Karpoff (Surrey North):: Mr. Speaker, on April 1, I raised with the hon. Minister of National Health and Welfare the issue of foetal alcohol syndrome and the use of warning labels on alcoholic beverages as a means of coping with this problem.
The minister responded that the problem was simply a B.C. problem and there was no proof that warning labels would in any way deal with the preventive aspects of this problem. This is simply not the case.
Our health issues committee has heard from parents, care givers, professionals from all parts of Canada, from the Atlantic region, the Yukon, the prairies, central Canada and British Columbia, about the seriousness of this problem.
At least 1,500 foetal alcohol syndrome children are bom each year in Canada. The cost of maintaining services for these children is in excess of $1.5 million for each child. Foetal alcohol syndrome is the leading cause of mental retardation in Canada. In addition, foetal alcohol effect is one of the major contributors to learning disabilities, to developmental delays and behavioural problems that our school systems, mental health facilities and correctional facilities are forced to cope with.
The alcohol industry spends $250 million a year on advertising for alcohol. Between them, Labatt's and Molson's spend $115 million. By the time a child reaches the age where it can legally drink, it will have been exposed to 100,000 ads, television or electronic commercials for alcohol.
All the professionals who appeared before us have advocated the use of labels as one part of a preventive problem. The most telling tale about why the industry is opposed to the use of labelling has come from marketing
experts. I want to read the statements of Dr. Gurprit Kindra, associate professor of marketing at the University of Ottawa. He explains very clearly from a marketing perspective, not from a health perspective, as to why the alcohol industry is opposed. I quote:
Information on the package plays the role of a salesperson. Information that appears on the label can also be viewed as an advertisement. So, warning labels in a way imply forced de-marketing from the brewers' and distillers' point of view.
Labelling is part of an extremely delicate balance of the product mix. The reluctance on the part of the brewers and the distillers, in my opinion, to go along with warning labels is therefore entirely understandable from a marketing viewpoint. They're really being asked to modify their product, and that is a very sensitive issue.
The delicate balance of the product mix is based on dreams, aspirations and desired lifestyles. A warning label of any kind will ruin the fun theme that is generally associated with beer and alcohol.
In other words, the concern is that warning labels will ruin their fun theme. He goes on to say:
I believe that the hazard signs are an important part of any risk-reduction strategy-Readability, perceptual prominence, and colour contrast should be the three guiding principles of technical appropriateness. The statement on the sign should be clear, graphic, succinct, to the point, singular, and specific.
In other words, he is saying warning labels do in fact reduce the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy if they are properly applied.


Barry D. Moore: Mr. Speaker, the foetal alcohol syndrome represents the extreme end of the spectrum of adverse birth that comes related to alcohol use and abuse during pregnancy.
Recognition of these problems is relatively recent in part because they are often difficult to diagnose at the time of birth.
It is believed that FAS is more likely to occur in cases of abusive drinking, often combined with poor nutrition and smoking, but no safe level alcohol consumption can be defined for a pregnant women and her foetus.
Health and Welfare Canada has supported a number of initiatives over the past 10 years in this area of concern. They include a national research symposium in 1983, an FAS education package and resource kit in 1989, and most recently the community project Crabtree in Vancouver and many other projects.
April 30, 1992

With respect to the proposal to put warning labels on alcoholic beverages, the minister has already indicated he wants to consult the provinces and the territories. In addition, he has asked his officials to mount a co-ordinated departmental effort to look at the difficult issue of FAS more closely. Also the department looks forward to the report and recommendations of the parliamentary committee currently studying this matter.
Foetal alcohol syndrome is a tragic and complex problem. There are no simple solutions. We look for-
Adjoumment Debate
ward to participating with others in addressing this important health and social issue.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 6.26 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Friday, May 1,1992