Mr. Speaker, Bill C-43 gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves: Who exactly is running this government? Is it the people through its elected representatives or is it private interests, corporate interests? The people of Canada are concerned. For a long time they called for a law governing lobbying activities on Parliament Hill, even before the arrival of Conservatives and Liberals, because they know that lobbyists exercise undue pressure. They know that patronage exists within the government, as well as waste and corruption. They know it, although they do not have
any concrete proof, but there are signs, gestures, and recent events that show without any doubt that lobbyists manage to extract favours from the government by undue pressure. For example, there is the Pearson airport case which involved millions of dollars, and even today the people of Canada do not know what the players, the lobbyists and the various interests actually did.
The case of the Minister of Canadian Heritage was mentioned. Although he is the minister responsible, he interfered with the CRTC and this, of course, raised the question of the role played by the ethics counsellor within the government, a person who was not even consulted by the Prime Minister in this case.
In the case of BST, a hormone developed by Monsanto, we read in the papers that this company had people, lobbyists, who met with officials of Health and Welfare Canada and offered some 2 million dollars to convince them to approve BST for use in Canada. These are but three recent cases among the very many which prove the abusive role of lobbyists in Canada.
I will come back to this with an even more distressing case.