Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to address the Group No. 4 amendments to Bill C-52, particularly the motions put forward by the hon. member for Québec-Est.
I know what the hon. member is thinking in proposing these amendments. They would allow government contracts to be placed before committees and before members of Parliament. The committees would look at them and either approve or disapprove of them. Quite naturally, this is an unworkable and unrealistic concept. It simply does not work.
We must take into consideration when considering MotionNo. 8 the fact that the government enters into literally thousands of contracts over the course of a year with thousands of individuals and hundreds and hundreds of companies. To suggest that these contracts could be effectively analyzed by the government operations committee is unrealistic. Considering the sheer number of contracts in no time the committee would be simply choked with paperwork. Ultimately this would achieve nothing.
While I do not support the amendment I share the opinions of the member for Québec-Est, particularly those on non-competitive contracts. I share his concern in all contracts laid out by the government. It is a well known fact that Liberal governments past and present and Tory governments past and hopefully not in the future have built their party fortunes on the practice of patronage.
We can look at the who's who of business in the country and find Liberal and Tory friends, big time. We have seen time after time where Canadian companies that are well known supporters of the Liberals or the Tories end up with a multitude of contracts.
One that comes to mind since I spoke about it a couple of weeks ago is in the area of Canada Post, a crown corporation, and SNC-Lavalin. I know it is a little removed from what we are talking about. However SNC-Lavalin is a huge consortium, a huge company, a well known friend of the Liberal Party. In the last three years hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts have been let out by Canada Post. They have been uncompetitive and given with no public tender to SNC-Lavalin.
It does not take a rocket scientist to go through the political contributions over the last 10 or 15 years. Almost on an annual basis SNC-Lavalin and friend companies come up right at the top of the list as contributors to the Liberal Party. We wonder why.
I share the concerns, but to put thousands of contracts before the government operations committee, before members of Parliament, is simply unworkable and unreasonable. Let us talk about whether, if they did go before committee, the matter of committee examination raises larger issues with respect to how committees operate anyway.
The Liberals promised that committees would play a greater role in Parliament and that members would have input into the legislative process by way of their roles on the committees. What a joke.
Let us start with some of the more notable initiatives of the government when it comes to committees. One of the vice-chairs of committees is automatically given by tradition to a member of an opposition party in the House. There are two recognized opposition parties in the House. One is a federalist party that believes in Canada, that loves the country. Its power base in the last election just happened to have been in the western provinces, from Manitoba west. It was a good result for our first time out. We will wait until the next election. We will let the people of Ontario, Quebec, the maritimes and the rest of Canada determine our future.
We are a federalist party. We put forward a member's name from our party to sit as a vice-chair. The separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois, put forward a member. It is a party determined to break up the country. The Liberals had two options. One was a separatist who wants to destroy Canada and the other was a federalist who wants to keep Canada together and make some changes so that it will stay together. Who did the Liberals vote for en masse? They voted for the separatist member. In every vice-chair position the separatist member was supported by the Liberal Party.
The chairman of the public accounts committee is always an opposition member. The Reform Party, a federalist party, put forward the name of the member for St. Albert and the Bloc Quebecois put forward the name of a member of its party for the chairmanship of the committee. One would think the government would want someone in that position who has the interests of the future of Canada at heart. I would think that. Most Canadians would think that, but not the Liberals.
The Liberal whips were there to make sure all their committee members did exactly what they were told. They promptly voted in a member of the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist party whose goal is to break up the country, to be chairman of the public accounts committee. What a joke.
We can talk about the effectiveness of committees. Given the fact that government members dominate the committees in number, and they are the government so let us give them that credit, the effectiveness of the committee is nullified. If there was patronage going on, and I am sure there is, it would quite likely continue because the committee members would simply rubber stamp everything their party whips and powers that be told them.
We should look at how effective opposition members have been in committees and the way Liberals have bulldozed bills through committees. We need only look to Bill C-45, Bill C-64, Bill C-89 and Bill C-91 to find that the Liberals had no intention of listening to what the Reform Party or the Bloc party had to say.
When Bill C-64, the employment equity bill, was before the committee the Liberals allowed four witnesses from the Reform list to appear before the committee and debate on each clause was limited to five minutes. We are talking about a major piece of legislation the Liberals wanted to push through the House. What did they do? They sent the whip down to the committee examining
the bill to give Liberal members their instructions and the bill was rammed through.
Motion No. 8 has some merit in so far as the intent of the hon. member for Québec-Est. I agree with his intent but unfortunately it is simply not workable.
Motion No. 9 would cause a list of all government contracts in each constituency to be distributed to the appropriate MP every month. This would incur a tremendous amount of cost. The Reform Party is a fiscally conscious party. It wants to see government operations decreased rather than increased. Although we agree with the intent of the motions we have to oppose them and that we will.