Mr. Speaker, you were absolutely correct. I was going to start quoting from On the Take and Friends in High Places , but I was so disgusted by reading them that I did not want to bring the debate down any lower than it is at the moment. Therefore I will not quote from those books.
This is not a prop. It is just facts that I had in my hand. I want to identify what I believe is a very dangerous trend which has developed in Canadian national politics and government during the last 15 years.
When the Mulroney government was elected it started to phase out some senior professional bureaucrats. These people had dedicated their entire lives to developing good public policy for Canada and Canadians. One of the reasons we had such good public policy over the years was because of the professional dedication of these men and women. They were professional and they worked long hours. They were motivated by one thing only and that was to do a good job for the people of Canada and for the government of the day.
I am afraid to say that most of those people are gone. They have been let go, laid off or were so demoralized they quit. They just could not take the lack of leadership and the sell-out to the private sector that has occurred over the last 15 years.
There are still some very good people around, but by and large the best have left and most of them have left because they were forced out of the system.
That created a huge vacuum at the senior levels of the bureaucracy in terms of public policy creation. Who has filled that vacuum? The paid lobbyists, the people the government hires on contract from the banks to develop amendments to the Bank Act or lobbyists from pharmaceutical corporations to change laws regarding the pharmaceutical sector and so on.