Mr. Speaker, to sum up what we have heard, and it is a rather ominous thing that we have heard, we have deteriorated even further than we did in the last session into looking at the past, thinking we need more big government, more government control, less accessibility for the public, less accountability.
In 1994 on a similar type of bill a government member stood up and said “We are going to open up access to information and we are going to reform it and make it better. It is under review within the next 12 months and the justice minister will be coming up with new legislation within 12 months”. That was in 1994.
Now the government members have the audacity to stand up and say “Some of these things are good and we have to open up government. However, it is under review so we will not support anything like this”.
How long can they keep saying that? Going into the 21st century it is still going to be under review. I trust the Canadian public will put them under review very carefully in the year 2001 or before.
The government talks the talk. Some of the opposition parties talk the talk. It is very interesting that some of the opposition parties talk about changes and being accountable to people and yet most of their speeches sound like they come out of the 1960s.
I do not feel we have moved very far. We have a finance minister who conducts a poll, who has his former leadership member conduct that poll, a former membership of his team in 1990, for which hundreds of thousands of dollars of Canadian taxpayer money is paid. There is nothing wrong with that. He then proceeds to keep it secret for 18 months because it was politically unwise to put it forward. There were political reasons. He decides to make it public after his own lawyer said he could never win in court. Mulroney challenged the court and lost, and he even had some reasons. He said the minister is going to challenge it and but does not have any reasons at all other than political.
I see this as a very negative point. Obviously the government is not interested in accessibility and accountability in letting the taxpayers know what they are getting for their money.
In conclusion, that is the reason we came down here. We came here because we felt the status quo must be changed. The Canadian people feel it must be changed and the debate today has further confirmed why we have to change the way this place operates.