Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in support of the motion put forward by the member for Kootenay West-Revelstoke.
What we have here will undoubtedly go on for a while and will probably be viewed like a television mini-series by the time we get through. It has all the elements. It has intrigue, influence peddling, patronage and unholy relationships between very strange bedfellows and their respective party friends, the Liberals and the Tories. This could win an Oscar by the time we are through.
When this story is finished I do not think there is an author in the world who could write anything as intriguing that would carry all the elements that people look for as entertainment.
Unfortunately this is not something the Canadian people look on as entertaining, and it should not be something the Liberals and the former government smile smugly about, thinking all the bases are covered and that this will not come out into the open. It will. Something as unholy as the relationship in the Pearson Airport deal cannot be covered up forever. It will come up.
I am familiar with this issue, having sat for a number of months on the transport committee. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the debate and probably expand on the truths coming from this side of the House so that the Canadian people following the debate in the media and on television will get a real grasp on what actually has happened and what will happen around the Pearson airport deal.
We are talking about something the Liberals talked about prior to the election. The Liberals actually put this in their red book. They called for openness and transparency in the operation of government. How good they said it would be to get a Liberal government that would operate in an open and transparent manner, something that has been missing in all other governments that were not Liberal.
Quite frankly, we think that is a good idea. That is why the member for Kootenay West-Revelstoke has put forward a motion that calls on the government to deal with the Pearson airport deal, this whole mess, by establishing an impartial public judicial inquiry to look at all the events surrounding this apparently clandestine deal.
My hon. friend is asking for nothing different from what the Liberals promised in their campaign, openness and transparency and truth. This type of inquiry is needed when we consider how the matter has been handled up to now by the government, the Senate and the committees. A lot of time and money was wasted on the issue. To this date we are no closer to the truth than we were before this whole thing started.
The Liberals blame the Tories, which is not surprising. The Tories blame the Liberals, which is not surprising. I am surprised that both of them do not blame the Reformers and we were not even here yet. Make no mistake, Reformers are here now and the government has to deal with Reformers when it comes to openness, transparency and truth. There will be no more getting away with the stuff that the Liberals and their Tory friends have been doing for decades.
As I indicated, if the truth were known it would clearly show, not to the surprise of too many people, that the Liberals and Tories have been, still are and will continue to be in bed with each other until maybe we are no longer a country. Hopefully that will never happen, although the way the Liberals are treating the Bloc and the relationship developing between them, we never know what can happen.
This entire affair has been under the control of the government since the start. If there was ever a time to take an impartial look, an open look, a transparent look, a look where the criteria is truth, the time is now.
As members know, the previous Tory government signed a deal with a private sector consortium to take over Pearson International Airport. What upset the Liberals was the fact that this contract was signed during the 1993 election campaign. Their spin doctors and their strategists probably got them together and said: "You might lose some votes around the Toronto area if this thing gets signed by the Tories, so what can we do to turn this thing around? We will call it a lousy deal and we will threaten to cancel it". They have the money to get good spin doctors. They did put a different spin on it. They made the contract an election issue. They promised to scrap it should they be elected.
This is surprising. It seems to me they made a similar promise about the GST before the election. Am I mistaken that they were going to scrap the GST?
Nevertheless the airport deal was scrapped. In order to justify the termination of this project the government thought after it was done that perhaps some people were wondering about it. They thought they had better bring someone in to back them up, someone who would speak the truth, who would be impartial, who would be open, who would show transparency and truth, someone people could trust. They picked Robert Nixon, Liberal Robert Nixon.
Is it true that this Mr. Nixon was a Liberal member? He could not have been a Liberal member. There are allegations that he was a Liberal bagman. Could that be true? There are allegations that he had some very strong ties to the Liberal Party. Let us not forget where he is now. He could not be the CEO of some crown corporation that is controlled by the Liberal government? Could the recent round of ministerial appointments be in any way affected by the fact that Mr. Nixon was a long time friend of this Liberal government? Perish the thought.
The Liberals have said and of course everyone must believe them-