You are perfectly right, Mr. Speaker, I agree entirely.
I would just like to conclude my comments by saying that it will be necessary not only to establish a code for contracting out, to consult members of the House, to make sure civil servants are responsible for their decisions, but also to assure the public that the government will make decisions based on political ethics. I am referring of course to the act on the financing of political parties.
Earlier, my colleague from the Reform Party complained about the fact that SNC-Lavalin gets many government contracts without any justification. Maybe he is right. He did not give any details on that. I wish he would have also given examples from elsewhere and not only from Quebec, but politics have reasons that reason very often ignores.
On that point, let me stress one thing: the fact that, at the federal level, the political party financing legislation authorises companies, corporations, to finance political parties greatly jeopardizes the awarding of contracts. As I mentioned a moment ago-some may have thought I was joking, but I am very serious-I believe a greater number of federal government contracts are considered within the Liberal Party financing system than in parliamentary committees.
It is totally inappropriate that things should happen that way. But why is it so? Simply because that is where companies, those who provide money to the Liberal Party, that is to say the government-and it was the same under the Conservatives-that is where
they are able to get information which otherwise might not be available to them.
I might have to conclude on that, but let us take the example of the Pearson deal. For weeks, even months, the Bloc Quebecois battled the government which settled the Pearson airport deal in a totally unacceptable way.
We all remember that during the last election campaign, the Prime Minister promised to undo the decision of the Conservative government and make sure that Pearson remained a public company, belonging to the government, and was not sold to private interests. We were in total agreement with that. However, lots of examples, each one more convincing than the other, showed that the interests which prevailed in the Pearson deal were those of lobbyists and bagmen of the various political parties which exercised power during the last few years, that is to say the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. So much so that the government felt obliged, in order to regain an image of integrity, to introduce a bill on lobbyists, and have it passed by the House. It was actually a very timid piece of legislation.
If the government is serious when it says it wants government contracts to be granted in an equitable and fair manner, it must accept suggestions made by members regarding public disclosure of contracts to be granted.
But we must also make sure that the solution to this kind of problem is not found through the funding of political parties. This is why we have to introduce a bill to reform political party funding and make sure that not only the spirit but also the letter of the act which now applies in Quebec, which has set a precedent for all western democracies, is also applied at the federal level.