Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

Mr. Speaker, it is not okay to put poison in our food just because it is properly labelled. Banning trans fat will save lives, full stop, period, yet 11 years after Parliament directed government to ban trans fat, we are still clogging our children's arteries with this toxic goop.

The United States has taken direct action and banned trans fat in all its forms. Will Canadians have to wait until the NDP forms the next government before we can protect consumers from this public health hazard?

Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 11th report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, in relation to its study on the programs and the activities of the Canadian General Standards Board.

Mr. Pat Martin

Mr. Speaker, the commitment has been, and it has been made very publicly as recently as this weekend, that the leader of the official opposition would consult with Canadians and would consult the premiers for the purposes of finding collective interests in abolishing the Senate and meeting the requisite numbers where the Senate could in fact be abolished, as per the lower chambers. All the provinces that used to have second chambers have gone bicameral, those will testify and admit that their lower chambers were not diminished by abolishing the upper chamber; in fact, they were strengthened.

However, the mandate of senators comes into question, too, and it needs to be addressed as it is part of the problem that we are facing today and part of the abuse that we are going to hear declared by the Auditor General when he releases his report tomorrow. It has to do with the fact that the mandate of senators, as they see it, is so open-ended that the mandate of a senator is anything the senator deems to be his or her mandate. They are spending money freely, without any oversight, without any scrutiny, without any control even by the rule of reporting.

If the ruling party has senators in its caucus, surely the ruling party could exercise some control over those senators so they do not abuse the system and abuse their expense accounts. Where is the accountability on the part of the ruling party and the Conservatives?

Mr. Pat Martin

Mr. Speaker, Canadians may be even more concerned that the total budget for the Senate is more like $90 million. The House of Commons gets to vote on the $57 million in vote 1, which is the appropriation for the Senate, but some of its funding is in fact statutory.

The fact is that Canadians are wondering why they are paying anything for it. Not only has there been a pattern of abuse, but it serves as an undemocratic barrier to the will of the people as expressed by those elected representatives in the House of Commons, time and time again. There are 133 examples that the researchers at the Library of Parliament found for me where bills were vetoed by the Senate which were passed in the House of Commons.

Nobody elected those guys to make legislation. Senators should have no right to interfere with the will of the House of Commons, and they certainly should have no right to generate bills.

More and more bills that we are dealing with in the House of Commons, as members know, are not called Bill C-51, for example, but rather Bill S-6, Bill S-13, or Bill S-33. The bills are originating in the Senate. Here we are dutifully debating bills that are generated in the other chamber. It is completely upside down. It is completely absurd. If Canadians think about it, this is an affront to democracy and everything that is good and decent about our notion of democracy.

When Sir. John A. Macdonald first crafted the Senate, to cut him some slack, he was two years away from the American Civil War. He was looking south of the border thinking that he could not give too much authority without some checks and balances or God knows what could happen. North America was traumatized. However, that happened not in the last century, but the century before that.

We do not need to be bound by the limitations of John A. Macdonald's thinking when he made that terrible quote about how “We must protect the rights of minorities, and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor”.

Mr. Pat Martin

Mr. Speaker, what I was referring to was how much I enjoyed the exercise leading up to the Charlottetown accord. What an honour it was, as a carpenter by trade, to be chosen as an ordinary Canadian, going through what was an incredible learning experience, learning about the fabric of our country.

As my colleague knows, the Charlottetown accord was not limited to the future of the Senate or the reform of the Senate, although substantive recommendations were made. If my memory serves me, the accord proposed that each province would be assigned six senators and each territory one, and additional seats would be added for the representation of aboriginal peoples of Canada, an idea that we borrowed from the country of New Zealand, where the Maori have representation, and that elections would take place under the federal jurisdiction at the same time as elections in the House of Commons.

Those were interesting developments arrived at by consensus-building in six meetings across the country, talking to ordinary Canadians.

The initiative failed, but at least the government of the day did not put it on the too-hard-to-do pile. It embraced it as an issue and as a subject that Canadians wanted to talk about.