It was the Minister of International Trade and her former work colleague, good friend and campaign manager. It was the Pomp & Circumstance company. That's where we're full of pomp and circumstance in this government.
That's how you get a $9,000-a-night vacation, presumably, or a $6,000-a-night hotel room in London with a butler and a piano so you can sing Bohemian Rhapsody if you are the Prime Minister of Canada. Pomp & Circumstance must have done the booking in advance on that because why else would you use a company called Pomp & Circumstance than to go to Britain and deal with the pomp and circumstance.
This goes on to say in the second paragraph:
whatever the level of detail at which the minister becomes involved, the minister and deputy have a complementary responsibility to ensure that appropriate systems are in place to manage the risk of problems and to correct them when they occur.
Ministers are similarly accountable for the exercise of the authority by the deputy minister
I spoke earlier on the Al-Mashat affair. Remember when I was reading several nights ago from that excellent Library of Parliament report on ministerial accountability? There was a discussion in that paper about Al-Mashat, the former long-serving Iraqi ambassador to the United States for Iraq during the first Gulf War.
There may be people in this room and even members of Parliament who weren't even born then, but you need to know history. It was in 1991 just for clarification, and some of the members here were toddlers.
That Gulf War was when Iraq invaded the sovereign nation of Kuwait and the “coalition of the willing” came together. They came together under the leadership of the first president Bush and under then-prime minister, Brian Mulroney, to push back a despot in Saddam Hussein out of an independent country. Saddam Hussein's ambassador to Washington was a fellow named Al-Mashat and Al-Mashat decided that he wanted to emigrate to Canada; who wouldn't, really.
Even if you're an ambassador in Washington with the fancy life, the cars, the limos, and the expense accounts that an ambassador gets, Al-Mashat decided he wanted to come to Canada. The immigration minister of the day, who I happened to work for, said no, but he got in anyway. I was talking about this with the Minister of Immigration today, actually, just before a vote, we were talking about ministerial accountability in the immigration department. I informed him that the reason that all of the people in the embassies abroad now work for the immigration minister, and not Foreign Affairs, is because of this ministerial accountability issue around Al-Mashat.
At that time all of the people who processed immigration applications were actually foreign service officers. The deputy to the deputy minister then, known as the associated under-secretary, was Raymond Chrétien. Surprisingly, if you haven't heard of Raymond Chrétien, Raymond Chrétien was the nephew of the then-Liberal opposition leader, Jean Chrétien, future prime minister of Canada, who had decided through various Liberal channels that the best thing to do was to take Al-Mashat and send him off to Belgium, have him processed and put in, in spite of the fact that the immigration minister had said no. You know, what the heck. What's the point of being the 2IC, as the bureaucrat in charge of where foreign service officers go on their postings, without having the ability to actually tell one of them what to do.
The poor immigration officer who was a foreign service officer for the Department of Foreign Affairs gets a telex—back then it was telex—from the person who decides whether his next posting is Paris or Mogadishu. What is a telex? Back to this thing about some of my colleagues only being a few years old in 1991, a telex was how embassies communicated to each other back then because the Internet was in its infancy. It's like a telegram.
The guy in charge of deciding, Raymond Chrétien, the nephew of the opposition leader, on the request of the former Liberal ambassador to the United States, a buddy of Al-Mashat, a fellow named Allan Gotlieb, requests that the poor, lowly, officer in the Belgium embassy of Canada process this application. Guess what? That poor, young, foreign service officer, didn't choose to listen to the immigration minister, who had said no to this person coming in, but chose to listen to the person who decides whether he gets to go to Paris on this next posting. It's human nature, I guess, so he processed him. Little did all those people know that one month later that immigration minister would become the foreign minister.
That foreign minister would read in The Globe and Mail, much as we're reading today about Chinese interference, because apparently The Globe and Mail learns about it before the Prime Minister. The Globe and Mail then published a report that said that, in the middle of a war with Iraq, Canada had allowed their ambassador into Canada and given him landed immigrant status. It's phenomenal, really, when you think about it. The Immigration minister said no, so what is a minister in accountability supposed to do?
This is really what this is about, the issue of ministerial accountability. The ministers of the day said.... This is why it was in that insightful Library of Parliament report. I know the library because of my interventions the other night and again today. They will probably want to revise this report to include more detail on this initiative, and I'd certainly be willing to spend time with them to explain it.
The minister is still alive. Her name is Barbara McDougall. I can't go on without a statement here mentioning that the Honourable Barbara McDougall, who happened to be my boss back then, experienced this. She didn't experience it differently, it was.... Well, I guess she did. As Immigration minister, she said no, but the department and the bureaucrats in External Affairs experienced that command by the immigration minister differently and said yes.
The minister of Immigration, as I was explaining to our current Minister of Immigration today in question period.... The new foreign minister said, “You know what? I'm never gonna let this happen again,” and made all of those foreign service officers no longer diplomats with all the status that comes with diplomats. They are now and have been ever since employees of the Department of Immigration. They weren't happy about that, but they are now in Immigration. They still are.
The reason that our current Minister of Immigration has an accountable task force of people throughout the world to execute on his strategy and this government's strategy on immigration and to implement the exceptional processing of immigration in Canada that has led to 2.4 million people being in our backlog....That exceptional efficiency is because the minister has clearly marshalled his resources accordingly, but he has all of these resources around the world, and do you know what he has that they didn't have back then? He has computers, Internet and things like that to keep....
Back then, everything was done by paper. The immigration backlog back then, when we were allowing 200,000 people into the country, was 40,000 people. Can you imagine a world with only 40,000 people? I think the Minister of Immigration should be added to this motion to account in this budget for the changes, because there are changes in this omnibus bill to immigration rules and citizenship. I don't know how we're going to get through this in two hours.
That is a bit of a digression from the Treasury Board report.
I will skip down a few paragraphs in the interest of time. On page 12 it says:
Ministers are said to be answerable, as opposed to accountable, with regard to the day-to day operations of arm's-length organizations in their portfolio. This means, for example, that if questions were raised in the House—
It's hard to raise questions in the House in our search for finding Freeland. Six days and five months....
I was trying to figure out yesterday why the minister was there in the House, and it dawned on me. I looked at my calendar. Do you know what happened between last week and this week? It's a new month. It's the month of May, so it's the monthly appearance of the Finance minister. It sounds like—she's promising at least—this may be an unusual month of May, the merry month of May, as it's called in the song in Camelot.
We're going to have a second presence of the minister, at least for an hour anyway or, as one committee member on the government side put it, she has been here in the past for at least an hour. I don't know. Maybe she misspoke, because I don't think she's ever been here for more than an hour. The proper English explanation of that would be that she was here for an hour, if we're going to be factually correct, and we're just looking for two hours. It's a small amount to be worried about.
The last paragraph on page 12 says, “An important dimension of accountability is the capacity to respond when issues arise.” Fifty-one acts being amended is an issue that has arisen, so the dimension of accountability is obviously important, according to Treasury Board.
The report goes on:
Accordingly, with respect to matters arising under the watch of a previous minister
—well, that's not the case here—
the current minister, rather than the previous minister, is accountable for answering to the House....
We see that every day, obviously, with some of the issues going back to the Minister of Public Safety. Some of these things go back to the previous Minister of Public Safety, who sits silently in the House as the current minister, sadly, has to defend that record. The previous minister used to be the police chief of Toronto—