I thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank MP Vis.
I'm still on 1991. It was nice cabinet shuffle, and I have to say it was a great thing. I tell you, I can remember the day when we got shuffled to foreign affairs. It is a great and incredibly prestigious post to have. It was a fascinating time to be there, with the Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the coup in Haiti, the situation in South Africa and the negotiation of NAFTA.
I could go on with the issues we were dealing with there, but I'll get back to the Al-Mashat affair and ministerial accountability.
Raymond Chrétien sends this note off to Belgium and directs the foreign affairs employee who is doing the immigration there to process this for his buddy. Of course he did, because you know what Raymond Chrétien can do if he doesn't do it? He can send him, not to Paris on his next posting, and not to London on his next posting, and certainly not to Washington on his next posting; he could send him to what are called “hardship posts” if he didn't go along.
In foreign affairs, hardship posts could be places like Sri Lanka. Foreign service officers want to go to Paris, London and Washington, where the game is played; they don't want to be lost and buried in the department in hardship posts. It's tough on them and it's tough on their families. Of course the poor immigration officer approved what his boss, Raymond Chrétien, said, which was to approve this application.
Of course none of this was known, so when my boss gets to foreign affairs, up comes this note saying that he had approved it. We still had the memo, because back then we kept paper. We still had the copy of the memo from my minister, as immigration minister, saying that in no way is this person supposed to be allowed into Canada as a landed immigrant, yet he somehow got here through this circuitous route. We didn't know how he got here, so the question on ministerial accountability became, what do we do with this?
Here you have a new secretary of state who has been on the job just a few weeks and is dealing with a coup in Moscow where the military threw Mikhail Gorbachev out of his job. Then we discover that the department actually had done something totally against the immigration minister's orders.
I can tell you the first thing we did. They didn't like this too much in foreign affairs. My boss signed an order to make all of the foreign affairs officers who worked on immigration employees of the Department of Immigration, so that the Minister of Immigration could now control and make sure that the Minister of Immigration's decisions were abided by and not overrun by another department. That made things clear and that is still today.
We had a big decision to make because there was a huge scandal on this issue. It was very public in the press. My minister certainly was not going to take responsibility for the Iraqi ambassador coming into Canada during a war as a landed immigrant when she, as immigration minister, had said no. What were we to do?
We laid it clear at the parliamentary committee. We actually attended the parliamentary committee. There was no finding Freeland issue here. There was no “only five days in Parliament in five months, one day a month”. There was no half-a-trillion-dollar proposal budget for us over a fiscal framework, which means $100 billion a day that we pay this finance minister and all those other truancy days.