Peter Van Loan

[Points of Order, December 5th, 2016]

Which is accepted to be a tie.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I did not say that Saudi Arabia has been dramatically reformed. I said that there have been indications of gestures of moving in that direction. I think it is to be encouraged. We should all encourage that. We should also encourage any stabilizing element Saudi Arabia can be in the Middle East. God knows, we need allies and help to encourage peace and stability in that part of the world.

The issue here is not that. The issue is, of course, Fidel Castro. That is what the motion is about. In my view, what we saw from the communist regime in Cuba has not been any kind of significant liberalization. It has taken some baby steps out of economic necessity only recently as it lost economic support first from the Soviet Union and later from Venezuela, which has been its patron historically. Even those baby steps have been essentially stopped.

It is positive that we are encouraging those baby steps. Our government was part of encouraging those baby steps, as people know, including the effort to open relations between Cuba and the United States. That was a positive step. However, at the same time, it has to be done with an ongoing, continued moral clarity where we do not shut up and stop talking about human rights simply because we are trying to encourage progress in another area. We have to understand that progress is about encouraging human rights.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there is a considerable difference in tone between the two statements. The tone of Mr. Harper on the matter of King Abdullah was very restrained. There was no gushing about great friendship. There was no suggestion that the people of Saudi Arabia celebrate him as their el Comandante. There was none of that. There was a very restrained focus on the things Saudi Arabia has done positively in co-operation with Canada in trying to preserve peace in the Middle East. That is a critically important thing.

We know that former Prime Minister Harper, as a great defender of the State of Israel, recognized the importance and role of Saudi Arabia as a stabilizing force, albeit far from perfect. He put particular emphasis in his statement on the reforming aspects, the willingness to change, in Saudi Arabia as a form of encouragement of that change. That is very different from a gushing, positive statement.

I thank the hon. member for the words he said about Fidel Castro. I only wish his leader had the same kind of courage to say the same kinds of words.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mégantic—L’Érable.

It was just a few days ago that I was looking down at my BlackBerry, saw a message and read it. It said, “It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President”. I was stunned and wondered how he had done that. I quickly forwarded it to my wife with the same comment.

It was a very odd point of departure for the Prime Minister that his description and praise for Cuba's late president was that he was Cuba's longest-serving president. The answer to the question of how he did that is clear. He was a communist dictator and he did it using the pages out of the textbooks of his great teachers: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the succession of Kims in North Korea.

What was that textbook? That textbook was very simple: the complete extinguishment of democracy, the suppression of freedom of expression and freedom of speech, the shutting down of any different political parties, the use of imprisonment, executions, and the complete suppression of human rights. That is how he became Cuba's longest-serving president.

It was a very odd point of departure. The rest of the statement from Canada's Prime Minister went on in a similarly shameful fashion. I think it was not just embarrassing to Canadians but actually made Canada into a global laughing stock. The world has figured out what communism and communist dictators are all about. World leaders everywhere have figured that out, save but one. It is so self-evident that it is not a matter of outrage, it is a matter of laughing at Canada and Canada's leadership that clearly is simply not ready to assume serious responsibilities in a serious, difficult, and challenging globe.

I like to think of Canada as being a country that has established moral leadership. Certainly in the time the Conservatives were in government it did. It has been done through world wars. It has done it through refusing to recognize the annexation, for example, of the Baltic states, which I will get to later. It stood with Ukraine as it sought to achieve its freedom. It took sanctions against Russia as it threatened the successors of Ukraine, led by a KGB leadership, and annexed parts of Ukraine. We showed clear moral leadership and an understanding of what was right and wrong on human rights. Canada has lost that moral leadership and the world is laughing at us as a result.

Fidel Castro was able to maintain his position largely with the support of the Soviet Union, the USSR. His textbook for taking power in that Cuban revolution identically followed that of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. It started with a broad-based coalition that was a revolution against a government that was generally not supported by the people. However, once getting control, it began to target and eliminate any competing political leadership, executing them, extinguishing them, consolidating that power, and abandoning any of the promises made before the revolution of democracy, freedom, and even what one might call social democracy, as we would think of it in the west. That is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. That is exactly what happened under Castro's leadership in Cuba.

In the Soviet case, it went on to expand after that, through World War II and beyond, that Soviet empire, exporting its particular brand of repression of human rights and suppression of freedom. Cuba was part of that frontier. It almost reached its apogee by bringing the world on the verge of world war III with the Cuban missile crisis, another one of Castro's great contributions. Talk to anybody who was young at the time. The fear was palpable.

It was Castro who brought this world closest to global nuclear annihilation with his reckless actions in the Cuban missile crisis, when John F. Kennedy, the American president, had the fortitude and clear moral thinking to understand that it had to be stood up to. The Kennedy type of thinking is apparently lacking in our current Prime Minister.

I know something about this, because my family lived some of the experience. My background is Estonian, and those who know Estonia know that it gained its independence during World War I. With the coming of World War II and the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, they carved up eastern Europe, and Hitler agreed with Stalin that the Soviets would get the Baltic states. The tanks rolled in. The occupiers rolled in. Initially, the occupation was not gentle, and freedom was entirely suppressed within the Baltic states, but there was a pretence that it was a popular revolution and that it was democratic.

My family was in a special circumstance. My grandfather was an agronomist, an agricultural economist, for one of the counties in a largely agricultural society. Those people were seen as community leaders. When the Soviets put together a phoney drummed-up election, all the Estonian parties got together and selected the most august and clear moral leaders to be their candidates in the election. My grandfather foolishly took on the task of being one of the candidates. On election night, a few hours before the polls closed, a contingent of 30 or 40 Red Army soldiers came up the farm path to the door and told my grandfather that they were there to accept his concession of defeat. My grandfather was a fairly strong-willed, principled man and foolishly said, “You will not decide. The people will decide”. My grandmother was a bit more pragmatic. The soldiers said that they would wait for him at the end of the driveway and would be back after he thought about it a bit. In the intervening period, my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather, with the help of some of the hired hands on the farm, fled into the woods. It was one of many times my grandfather would be in flight.

Shortly thereafter, the Germans occupied the country. Then the Soviets came back, and much of my family was extinguished either in Siberian concentration camps or by execution by the Soviets, or otherwise.

I grew up learning these stories and understanding that freedom and democracy and human rights are fragile and easily lost. They are lost at the hands of people like communist dictators like Stalin and like Castro and the revolution that was supported by the Soviets.

Raised on that, I became interested and involved in politics. As a young child, I was a champion, believe it or not, of a guy named Pierre Trudeau. I was not a normal child. I was interested in politics. Pierre Trudeau said he stood for freedom, democracy, and human rights. Shortly thereafter, I saw him parading around on Parliament Hill and elsewhere with figures like Kosygin and Brezhnev, the people who were imprisoning what was left of my family in the Soviet Union, essentially imprisoning them in their homes and depriving them of all freedoms, and their colleague Castro, with whom that friendship was so strong.

By the age of nine, the wisdom of age was upon me, and I ceased to be a Liberal. I understood that the commitment to freedom, that principal commitment, could not coexist with that kind of affection and love of communist dictators in that day and age. I knew there was one party that was truly committed to freedom, and that is why I became a Conservative.

My family was horrified. Why? It took a few years after I became involved in politics, but my grandmother finally explained to me why. She said that after the communists took power, the very first thing they did was get the party membership lists, and those were the people they went after.

In the case of my grandmother and grandfather, she was a lawyer in the 1920s and he was an agronomist. They were natural community leaders. They only fled for their freedom when they were given the heads-up that they were on the list to be sent on the trains to Siberia the next day. That is when they fled.

This is what communist dictatorship is about. I could give the House many more graphic stories that I grew up on.

The driving force for me to get into politics was the belief that freedom and democracy are fragile and easily lost and that we must fight to preserve them. We must also fight to preserve the memory of those who have suffered from the loss of it. We have to fight to preserve the memory the way we do so well with the Holocaust and the Nazi horrors, for example, so that the world does not repeat them.

We are not well served by people who lack the moral leadership to call communist dictators what they are. We need not celebrate their death to describe what they are and to recognize that there are some people who are not worthy of the kind of praise we heard.

[Income Tax Act, December 1st, 2016]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-323, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (rehabilitation of historic property).

Mr. Speaker, this bill creates a tax credit for the rehabilitation of historic buildings in Canada. It is designed to help those who invest in our cultural heritage.

It is a meaningful measure to strengthen heritage infrastructure. By maintaining historic buildings and undertaking costly heritage renovations, citizens undertake a considerable private burden from which we all benefit through the preservation of our past and the places that have made our country. This bill seeks, in a small way, to provide some support for them for the considerable investment they make on behalf of all of us.

With the 150th anniversary of Confederation nearing, this bill is an opportunity for all members of the House to show their support for preserving Canada's built heritage. These changes will help save our most important historical structures for our children and grandchildren to enjoy for generations to come.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[CBC/Radio-Canada, November 30th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, standing up for our constituents is what we were sent here to do.

Just months ago, the Liberals gave the CBC $675 million on top of the $1 billion-a-year it already gets. The CBC now says it is not enough. It wants another third of a billion dollars-a-year, and more from hard-pressed Canadian taxpayers.

When it comes to the CBC, it seems it is just never enough. The Liberals say they are open to this request from their friends.

Will someone over there finally take the side of taxpayers, and halt the convoy of Brink's trucks to the CBC?

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, November 29th, 2016]

Apparently, Mr. Speaker, all that money is not working. Canadians look for high-quality Canadian content from the CBC, but fewer are watching. In 2001, the CBC drew almost 10% of the prime time audience. Today, that number is close to 6% as viewers tune out.

No wonder ad revenue is in free fall. The CBC has a solution. Taxpayers can be conscripted to replace ad revenue. After all, when Liberal spending is out of control, what is one-third of a billion dollars between friends?

Do the Liberals really plan on rewarding falling viewership by giving the CBC even more taxpayer money?

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, November 29th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, in 2001, one-quarter of the CBC's funding was from advertising. However, this has fallen in recent years as advertisers are abandoning CBC programs. Today it seems only around 15% of revenues come from advertisers. Taxpayers are now being asked to make this failure into a virtue.

What is the solution? Another one-third of a billion dollars per year from the poor beleaguered taxpayer and a guaranteed annual increase in the CBC subsidy forever.

Does the government agree with the CBC president that its business model is “profoundly and irrevocably broken?”

[104th Grey Cup, November 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, last night saw another page written in the storied history of Canada's unique game, with a barnburner 104th Grey Cup. The Ottawa Redblacks and Calgary Stampeders gave us memories for the ages in a thrilling to-the-last-play contest of the type that Canadian fans have come to expect.

Canadian football is part of our heritage and helps define us. There is no other annual event like the Grey Cup, which brings together fans from every corner of the country to celebrate Canada. Our distinct three-down game again demonstrated that it cannot be matched for drama, heroics, and sheer entertainment.

Our congratulations go to outstanding Canadian Brad Sinopoli and the rest of the Ottawa franchise for their underdog victory. Commissioner Jeffrey Orridge, Matt Maychak, and the league can be proud of a championship that demonstrated the enduring appeal of our game, and the host Argonauts franchise led by Michael Copeland and Sara Moore delivered a first-rate game day experience.

Next year, the CFL will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation by holding the Grey Cup game in our nation's capital. It will be a fitting finale to a year of celebrating Canada. It will show once more the enduring and special place Canadian football holds in the heart and culture of our country.

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, November 24th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member made my case better than I could make it myself.

Central Park, as an urban park, is not a natural park. It is not a park of ecological integrity. It is a park that has been reshaped and built by man. The features in it are man-made. The paths in it are man-made. The attractions the people who visit it everyday use are man-made. They are all things that are not part of the natural condition of that land before it was developed by human beings to be a park.

None of it, which he says is an absolute gem, would be permitted if ecological integrity was the overriding principle. It is an important principle. We think it is important to have it there. It is one of the most important factors. However, should it override every other consideration of human use and agricultural use, such as roads, pipelines, and human safety? No.