Mr. Speaker, I listened very closely to the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands. I noticed in particular that, according to him, all the decisions made by the Liberal government so far were in keeping with the promises in the red book.
I wish to remind the hon. member that, during the election campaign, the current Prime Minister, who was then Leader of the Opposition, was against free trade and in favour of GST reform and said that he would not touch social programs and transfers to the provinces. But we know what happened to all these resolutions. The Liberal government did just the opposite.
I remember another matter that was widely discussed during the election campaign, especially in Ontario, namely the Pearson airport deal. It is one of the areas in which the former Tory government had to pay for its poor performance under the circumstances, since the Liberal Party had promised to review the matter. Yet, once in power, the Prime Minister appointed Mr. Nixon, a former Ontario finance minister, to look into this deal. During the investigation, Mr. Nixon himself said that there might have been certain irregularities due to lobbyists.
A little later, the ethics counsellor, who reports not to the House of Commons but to the Prime Minister, admitted at committee meetings that Bill C-43 would not have changed anything regarding the misconduct of lobbyists in the Pearson airport deal. He said himself that it would not have changed anything. Yet, the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands brags about the merits of the bill.
I have two questions for him: First, how does he explain that it took the government 18 months to table this bill with the Pearson airport deal in the background, when the information obtained under the Access to Information Act reveals that Bill C-43 has been modified and is not in keeping with Liberal promises, precisely because of lobbyists' influence? I would like him to answer this question.