Mr. Speaker, tomorrow night, a short time from now, there will be a bit of a watershed moment in the House. Members from both sides will take a decision. They will vote according to their own conscience as to whether or not accountability will indeed reign in the House.
The House will decide whether or not members from various parties, but most importantly individual members, will do what they felt they came here to do.
This will be a watershed moment because when I look back and remember some of the statements that were brought forward by members who represented the Canadian Alliance party, the Reform Party, and then the merger that formed the Conservative Party of Canada, they came forward with very strong ideals that they voiced with passion. They said they would clean up Ottawa. They said they would bring in a Parliamentary Budget Officer with teeth to prevent the kind of shenanigans that they said were going on around here. They said they would empower officers of Parliament to ensure that those agents of Parliament could perform their functions and do their jobs.
It has not quite worked out that way. A lot of good people, very well-intentioned and strong-minded and very vocal and articulate in their opinions, said they were coming here to do their constituents' business, and one of key points of their constituents' business was to clean up Ottawa. No more of these cover-ups, no more sweeping things under the rug. They were the Conservative Party, and they were going to set the record straight.
History has not been quite that kind in terms of their performance. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was someone who just got in the way. Conservatives were trying to do the people's business, and that pesky Parliamentary Budget Officer was getting in the way.
The nuclear regulatory commissioner was going on about people's safety from radiation. Well, she had to shut up; they were going to get rid of her pretty fast, and they did.
The list goes on and on. The Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, the person appointed by the Prime Minister of Canada—the current occupant, whose job it was to ensure the integrity of the public service—was found to be guilty of serious abuse and wrongdoing. The Auditor General of Canada did an investigation and put forward in detail some of his findings.
What did the government and the majority of the Conservative members on that side of the House do? They ensured that the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner was not available to appear before the public accounts committee and that no ministers were prepared to appear before the committee.
That is one of the most important committees of the House. It is an oversight body that reviews the actions of the government. It was a cover-up.
How far we have come. How far the Conservatives have come, because they have now become the problem, the very thing they came here to criticize and be a solution to.
It goes pretty deep, because there has not been any instance that I can recall in my 18 years in this place in which a prime minister himself has been personally implicated in a matter of this seriousness.
Let us review the facts.
The Prime Minister has always said that the buck stops at the Prime Minister's Office. On May 16 the Prime Minister's Office said:
Mr. Wright will not be resigning. Mr. Wright has the full support of the Prime Minister.
A couple of short days later, another statement was issued:
It is with great regret that I have accepted the resignation of Nigel Wright as my Chief of Staff. I accept that Nigel believed that he was acting in the public interest, but I understand the decision he has taken to resign. I want to thank Nigel for his tremendous contribution to our Government over the last two and a half years.
We know that on June 5, the Prime Minister made another statement in the House:
....it was Mr. Wright who made the decision to take his personal funds and give those to Mr. Duffy so that Mr. Duffy could reimburse the taxpayers. Those were his decisions. They were not communicated to me or to members of my office.
Then, more recently, on October 28, the Prime Minister said:
Look, I think the responsibility whenever things go wrong is for us to take appropriate action. As you know, I had a chief of staff who made an inappropriate payment Mr. Duffy. He was dismissed.
There is a certain disconnect here that people are aware of. There is an incredible disconnect between the truth of what the Prime Minister said initially versus what he says now versus what he said about how many people in his office knew about what went on versus what he says now about how many people in his office knew.
For such an orchestrated event to occur, behind closed doors, among such senior members of his staff, and for such senior members of the party to be complicit in it, and for him not to know, I think the Prime Minister himself recognizes, would bring his own managerial competence into question.
That is the stuff of debate and politics and is eventually for the voters to decide. What is not for any of us to decide is a version of the truth. It is for openness and accountability to occur to allow that light to pour in on the truth.
This party that governs now once actually made a commitment to one of its predecessor parties that cabinet ministers would be required to attend every session of every parliamentary committee, every hearing, on which they had an interest and a responsibility to report.
It was not a question of whether a parliamentary committee could grab a minister for an hour to answer questions on a particular topic. The point of view of that party, put in a platform document, was that cabinet ministers would be required to attend every session of every committee meeting.
Now we have an opportunity to show accountability to Parliament through the committee process. How far we have come.
The text of the motion is as follows:
That the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics be instructed to examine the conduct of the Prime Minister’s Office regarding the repayment of Senator Mike Duffy’s expenses; that the Prime Minister be ordered to appear under oath as a witness before the Committee for a period of 3 hours, before December 10, 2013; and that the proceedings be televised.
It is pretty straightforward. It is part of the process of accountability. It shows that we have an understanding of and an appreciation for the committee structure. Often it is the standing committees of the House that allow us to access or glean information that may not necessarily be available in the cut and thrust of question period. However, the questions and answers that flow in question period will be part of any such study by a standing committee. It will provide the basis for some of those questions that as yet are unanswered.
The crux of this motion is very simple. The Conservative Party of Canada has been communicating not to Canadians. It is more interested in communicating with what it calls its base. Allow me to communicate to the Conservative Party base for a minute.
I do not believe for one second that a Conservative Party donor, someone who truly believed that he or she was supporting a party that was going to do things differently, was supporting a party that would recklessly fire a quasi-judicial regulator of nuclear waste and energy as payback for speaking out. I do not think the Conservative Party base was interested in making sure that the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner was given carte blanche to run roughshod over her office and never be held accountable on the floor of the House or at the public accounts committee or anywhere else.
I do not believe the Conservative Party base members ever thought that when they were giving their $20, $200 or $1,100 cheques to the party that those funds would be used for legal fees for someone whom the Prime Minister had suspicions about, according to his own words. I do not believe they thought the Prime Minister of Canada would allow Mr. Nigel Wright, whom he later implied was distrustful and incompetent, into his inner sanctum.