moved:
That given the Prime Minister's 1993 election commitment "that there will not be a promise I do not keep", and his government's subsequent record in breaking promises on job creation, safer streets, governing with integrity and scrapping the GST-the last of which culminated in the resignation of the former Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps-this House condemns the government for betraying the trust of Canadians and contributing to the overall "cynicism about public institutions, governments, politicians and the political process".
Madam Speaker, I did not hear the entire motion go into the record. The motion we are debating today reads:
That given the Prime Minister's 1993 election commitment "that there will not be a promise I do not keep", and his government's subsequent record in breaking promises on job creation, safer streets, governing with integrity and scrapping the GST-the last of which culminated in the resignation of the former Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps-this House condemns the government for betraying the trust of Canadians and contributing to the overall "cynicism about public institutions, governments, politicians and the political process".
That is the motion. By the way, that last quote came from page 91 of the Liberal red book.
The promise the Prime Minister made during the election campaign was very bold. I think the Prime Minister knew exactly what he was doing. At that time Canadians were very cynical about politics, federal politics in particular given the record of the Mulroney government. When the Prime Minister made the promise that he would not break any promises, he played on the hopes people had for a new government. People were desperate for some integrity in government. They wanted to believe that a new Prime Minister would instil some integrity and that they would be able to believe what the Prime Minister was saying.
How disappointed Canadians must be today. How disappointed they must be after the red book made all kinds of pronouncements about the promises the government would fulfil. Although there are many, the most obvious example is the breaking of the promise with respect to integrity. I point in particular to the recent resignation of Sheila Copps, the former Deputy Prime Minister who is now pursuing re-election in Hamilton East.
I want to talk a bit about the sequence of events which led up to the breaking of that promise. I must underline how important it is as politicians that during an election or at any time when we make statements about what we propose to do, people regard those words very seriously. We need to take these matters seriously. We cannot just hope that people are going to say: "Oh, it is just another
politician making a promise. We do not really take it very seriously anyway so if they break it, it is no big deal". We have to do something to restore the confidence people had at one point in politicians. I will talk about the events which led up to the breaking of the GST promise.
In the three or four years between the time the GST was introduced and the time the present government came to power we heard over and over again from members across the way when they were in opposition that they would scrap the GST. They would kill the GST. The GST would be eliminated. We did not hear it just from the former Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps, although she went on national television and said it. We also heard it from the Prime Minister himself who said: "I hate it. I will kill it". We heard it from the finance minister. We heard it from the current human resources development minister. We heard it from many backbenchers across the way. The promise was made by many people.
Subsequent to that, about a month before the election, the red book came out. It was distributed to about 70,000 people. It certainly did not get the distribution the Deputy Prime Minister's remarks received on national television. That document said that the GST would be harmonized, or would be replaced rather, with something that was equivalent in terms of the revenue it would generate.
Now we have a new broken promise to deal with. Subsequent to that the finance minister introduced a harmonization agreement in Atlantic Canada, along with other sundry rule changes, which will actually increase the amount of revenue that goes to the government. In fact it could increase by as much as a billion dollars a year. Again, that promise is being broken. Again, the government is not living up to its word.
I want to take the point a little further. Two months ago the finance minister said the government was not raising taxes and would not raise taxes. He was talking about personal and corporate taxes but I point out that although he is living up to the letter of his word, he is not living up to the spirit of his word.
Since the government came to power it has raised taxes and increased revenues in various different ways to the tune of $10.5 billion. That is unbelievable. Two months ago the finance minister said they were not raising taxes.
What did the minister do after that? He effectively raised taxes in Atlantic Canada. Before the House broke last week the Government of Nova Scotia revealed that the new harmonized GST in Atlantic Canada was to cost Nova Scotia consumers $84 million. That is another broken promise and a breach of integrity.
The finance minister lived up to the letter of his word but he did not live up to the spirit of his word. The government deceived Canadians in the budget by saying it was not raising taxes. That is absolutely untrue. Nova Scotians will pay more and anybody who deals in used goods will pay more. It is to be a billion dollars a year in extra revenue to the government.
How the government can say it is somehow fulfilling a promise is beyond me. However, we have the Prime Minister who is still to this day saying they have met their GST promise and that it was only the former deputy prime minister who overstepped the bounds and went too far. I cannot believe he truthfully believes that in his heart. The Prime Minister knows that somehow Canadians do not buy this. Even if the finance minister lives up to the letter of his word he is not living up to the spirit.
Deception takes many forms. Sometimes deception is not lying to people. Sometimes deception is withholding the truth, which is what the government has done over and over again.
I wish I could say it ends with the GST promise, but it does not. There are many other instances. I refer to page 95 of the red book:
In particular, a Liberal government will appoint an independent ethics counsellor to advise both public officials and lobbyists in the day to day application of the code of conduct for public officials. The ethics counsellor will be appointed after consultation with the leaders of all parties in the House of Commons and will report directly to Parliament.
Has that promise been fulfilled? The answer of course is no. What do we have today? We have a situation in which the defence minister is embroiled in a controversy. He is alleged, although it goes beyond alleged because he has acknowledged it, to have given $100,000 to a former campaign worker, broken up into small contracts so he could get around the rule that contracts over $30,000 have to be tendered. We have called for the ethics counsellor to be brought in.
What has happened? The ethics counsellor has not been brought in because the government did not fulfil its promise. It broke its promise to make the ethics counsellor accountable to Parliament. The ethics counsellor is a lapdog for the Prime Minister. He answers only to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister refuses to bring him in to do a proper investigation into this matter. This is another example of a broken promise. I want to talk about another broken promise.
One of the promises in the red book is: "We will examine such programs with the objective of reducing waste and inefficiency and promoting economic growth. Expenditure reductions will be
achieved by cancelling unnecessary programs, streamlining processes and eliminating duplication".
If the government is so efficient at reducing waste, I wonder if members across the way can tell me why last year the Department of Human Resources Development gave $105,000 to the Canadian Bankers Association. That is the organization that promotes the bank industry. If my memory is correct, the banks made about $5 billion in profits last year. I heard yesterday or this morning that the Royal Bank posted a quarterly profit of $324 million.
Why is it that when the banks are making $5 billion and the government says that it will reduce waste, we are giving banks $105,000 of taxpayer money? That somehow defies logic. How does the former deputy prime minister explain that when she is campaigning in Hamilton East?
Hamilton East is a working class neighbourhood. People there are probably wondering about the profits made by the banks. When Sheila Copps comes knocking on their doors, when they hear her government has given $105,000 to the bank industry and they have heard the banks made $5 billion, I wonder how she answers their questions. I wonder how she would answer a question when going door to door about all the money the government gave to the Canadian Bar Association, $277,000. The government promised in the red book it would get rid of all that waste.
The government gave $277,000 to the Canadian Bar Association. Does that not seem odd? The association received $20,000 from its buddies in the justice department and approximately $250,000 from CIDA, of all places. I expect that lawyers, some of the most well paid professionals in the country, would be able to afford to fund their own lobby organization. I would not have thought the Liberal government would have to give them $277,000. Another broken promise.
The government cannot get the message that people do not want it to spend money on organizations like the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Bankers Association when we keep going further into debt, when we are cutting social programs and when people are really suffering. Yet the government continues to spend on wasteful projects like those. Another broken promise.
I would think lawyers already benefit enough from the government. We have 36,000 challenges before the tax courts today, which should keep lawyers plenty busy. They do not need any more help from the federal government.
I point to another waste issue. Recently the auditor general reported that a $2 billion family trust had been transferred to the United States from Canada without any Canadian tax being paid. That is odd. The government said it is committed to ensuring there is no waste. That is a waste. There are tens of millions of dollars in taxes that should have been paid on that to the Canadian treasury, but all that money escaped.
The government will argue that was before it was in power, which is very true, but why did it not lift a finger to close the loophole? Why is it waiting for all the horses to get through the barn door before it closes it? Why is it allowing people with big money, people with all kinds of ability to navigate through loopholes and complex regulations to transfer millions and billions of dollars out of the country? By doing that it is ensuring that ordinary people like the steel workers in Hamilton and farmers in my riding, fishermen on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have to pay taxes to make up for it. Why are the Liberals doing that? It is another promise from the red book blatantly broken.
I wonder how Sheila Copps would answer that? Unfortunately we do not know because Sheila Copps will not come to any all candidate forums. Sheila Copps will not take calls from her constituents when she is on talk shows. I guess we have to talk about it in here. Hopefully when she goes door to door people will ask her some of those questions.
A major promise the government made during the election campaign was jobs, jobs, jobs. I wonder if people remember during the election campaign when the now Prime Minister pounded Kim Campbell for saying she did not think there was any prospect that the job picture would improve before the year 2000. I think a lot people will remember that. It was a fairly prominent headline in the news.
Recently the Prime Minister said in Calgary and in the House "I guess we will have to live with high levels of unemployment". At the time of the election he said Kim Campbell was wrong. He suggested that somehow things were to be much better under the Liberal government.
What is the situation today? Today there are 1.4 million unemployed Canadians. There are approximately 13 million people in the workforce. One third are underemployed. One quarter are nervous about losing their jobs. As a result of all of that the economy suffers because there is so much uncertainty about the future.
The point is the government in many different ways implied that somehow things would be radically better than they were under the Conservatives. As I pointed out before, deceit has many different faces and sometimes it is not a blatant lie, it is a withholding of the truth. The government again has broken its promise of jobs, jobs, jobs.
When we look at the numbers there are actually 4,000 more unemployed young people today than there were in 1993 when this government took power. I cannot help but wonder how the Liberals are saying they are keeping their promises on the job issue, as some members did a moment ago. They have absolutely not done that.
The debt has climbed, interest rates have climbed, taxes have climbed and course unemployment climbs. The people over there have added $120 billion to the debt; $10.5 billion in new taxes and revenue measures since this government came to power. That not only ultimately kills jobs, it prevents jobs from being created because there is much less money in the economy and so people are not able to start businesses.
I have argued on may different fronts that the government has repeatedly broken promises and it does it without even batting an eye. It took overwhelming public opinion to force the deputy prime minister to resign. The Prime Minister denies there are any problems. I put to the House that the government has done a terrible job of fulfilling its promises and should be punished in the byelection in Hamilton East.