Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the opposition motion today. As I see it, there are two major issues that flow from the motion and from this whole issue.
First is the government's attempt to redirect criticism for the handling of the affair by blaming the auditor general. That is the first big issue. The second is how confusing Canada's taxation system is, and the failure of the government to provide crystal clear tax policy that prevents disputes of the type we are talking about today. Those are the two big issues.
I want to say a couple of words about this specific incident. What we have here is a curious set of events that led up to the tax ruling in 1991 and a curious set of events that get us to this point in the debate in 1996.
A tax ruling was made that was not made public which had a curious lack of documentation surrounding it. We know that this ruling allowed $2 billion to leave the country in a circumstance where, ordinarily, it may have been taxed. The final point I make with respect to all this is that the auditor general looked at all this and found that there was no wrongdoing.
While there are many unanswered questions, the government has done a very poor job of making tax policy clear. It is very wrong and irresponsible when its members turn around and criticize the auditor general.
The Bloc Quebecois has gone way beyond the pale in suggesting that there is some kind of great scandal here, that Canadians are going to rise up. That is just a little hyperbole on its part.
However, the opposition motion gives us the chance to talk a little more about these two issues, the government using the auditor general to escape accepting responsibility for the lack of clear tax policy and really how confusing our taxation system is.
What I regard perhaps as the most serious of the two issues is the efforts of the government to blame the auditor general and to try to redirect criticism to him so that it does not have to take the heat for not being clear about tax policy.
This has become a theme, really, for the government. I point to the recent responses to questioning by the Prime Minister with respect to the Somalia inquiry. He is blaming the inquiry, in this case, for some of the problems he is having. He is blaming it for taking too long and for being too tough on witnesses.
I see a theme developing where the government is trying to blame other people. In the case we are talking about, its members are blaming the auditor general, an officer of the House and not accepting responsibility themselves. This will catch up with the government so that its members cannot continue to blame other people, particularly independent agencies, when things go wrong.
There is no shortage of incidents where things have gone wrong for the government and I want to talk about a few of those for a moment if I might.
I hate to continue to raise this, but I feel duty bound to do so because it is one of the things people have been talking about the most over the last little while. It is something that Canadians are very concerned about.
I go back to the whole issue of the broken promise on the GST. We had a situation where the government was blaming the media when it came to its broken GST promise: "Oh no, we didn't promise to scrap the GST. Look at our red book". Of course, they were on national television doing exactly that. Again, they were trying to shift the blame. They did it on the GST on reading.
The Prime Minister wrote the don't tax reading coalition and said he would remove the GST on reading materials. We have had policy conventions since then, in 1992 and in 1994, where the government said that it would remove the GST on reading. Now the government is trying to say: "You must have misunderstood. That is not really what we meant at all". This is despite the fact that it is in Hansard and in all kinds of public documents. Again, the government seems to have a problem accepting any responsibility, just like in this debate over the auditor general and his criticism of taxation policy.
We have a situation where the government promised to provide 150,000 day care spaces but it will not accept responsibility for making that promise. I do not support the government when it comes to providing these day care spaces. We believe that it should take a different tact. However, that is not the issue. The government made a promise in the red book and it is now trying to weasel out of it.
During the recent debate over cuts to the CBC, there is a pledge in the red book which states that the government will provide stable funding for the CBC. The heritage minister has been one of the most vociferous defenders of funding the CBC over the years. On numerous occasions the minister has said that we must protect the CBC. I do not agree with protecting funding for CBC Television, not at all, but that is not the issue. The government is trying to weasel out of its promise. It is trying to get out of accepting responsibility for the promises that it made in the past. Again, that is what it was trying to do with the auditor general.
The auditor general should not be investigating those policy areas, the government is saying, he should not even be looking at all those kinds of things because it makes it look bad. That is too bad. It is the government and it has to start accepting some responsibility.
Another issue where the government is trying to get out of a previous promise and shift responsibility away is on the Canadian Wheat Board. I remember very well during the election campaign when we had the Prime Minister and the current minister of agriculture saying they wanted a plebiscite on the wheat board issue. However, there has been no plebiscite.
We also know that since then they have brought down a panel that was going to review the whole issue of the wheat board, what it should be involved in and should there be options for farmers other than the wheat board. The minister hand picked these people and said he was going to listen to their recommendations. Again he is trying to get out of that responsibility. He and the Prime Minister is now preparing Canadians for the fact that they will not meet their promise. We again have the government trying to slide out of a responsibility, a promise it has made.
It does not end there. I want to talk about the big kahuna of promises, the big promise that the government made during the last election campaign. It was jobs, jobs, jobs. I just want to talk about that in detail for a moment.
The Liberals won the election in part because of a promise to create jobs, jobs, jobs. The issue we are talking about they have again tried to redirect criticism from the public, from opposition parties and from other interested people over the issue of family trusts. They have tried to pin it on the auditor general. However, I fail to see how the auditor general or the Somalia inquiry or any of those other groups are responsible for the complete and utter failure of the government to fulfil its promise to provide jobs for Canadians.
We still have, as we did in 1993, 1.5 million unemployed Canadians in this country. That is a scandal. That is what the Bloc Quebecois should be calling a scandal because that truly is. It is not just the unemployed Canadians, it is the underemployed Canadians: 25 per cent of Canadians underemployed. Half of all Canadians are worried about keeping the jobs they currently have. There is scarcely a person in this country who does not know somebody who is unemployed or very afraid of not being able to get a job when they get of school. There is 15 per cent youth unemployment in this country. There are people with Ph.Ds working at minimum wage in jobs that certainly are well below their qualifications. We need the government to start accepting some responsibility for all these broken promises.
Members across the way will say that on average unemployment is going down. That is like saying, as the member for Calgary Southwest says from time to time, that the guy with his feet in a bucket of ice water and his hair on fire on average feels pretty good.
When we talk about unemployment we cannot look at averages. Unemployment in Newfoundland is up around 20 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 70 per cent in some communities. That is an absolute human tragedy of monumental proportions. Improvements in the job picture in Alberta do not help the people in Newfoundland one bit. And so we must insist that the government start to accept some responsibility for all the promises it has made.
People in Atlantic Canada, people in Quebec are desperate to find jobs. The government cannot continue, as it has done in the finance committee report, to push the blame on to somebody else. The government of the land is in charge of the levers of power. It makes the decisions. It rode to power on the promise that it would provide jobs, jobs, jobs.
Canadians have a right to know what the government is doing to fulfil that promise, and if it does not fulfil that promise they expect the government to take responsibility, not to shift the blame to somebody else. It is time the government started accepting responsibility.
When a six-year old child does not accept responsibility it is bad. But when adult men and women, capable people, people who are supposedly the cream of the crop, people who make up the caucus and the cabinet of the country, refuse to accept responsibility for promises that are on paper, which they campaigned on, it is scandalous. It is ridiculous.
This government will pay a price. I personally am going to ensure it does. When people make promises like the government has made and refuse to accept responsibility when they do not fulfil them, then they only contribute to the tremendous cynicism we see across the country today when it comes to people's respect for politicians. Is it any wonder people are so disrespectful of politicians today? Hardly.
The government made another promise which it has tried to slide out of, to weasel out of. The red book it states:
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.
Three years have gone by since this government took power. Do we have an ethics counsellor who reports directly to Parliament? Hardly. We have someone the Prime Minister knows who reports directly to him. The Prime Minister allegedly speaks to the ethics counsellor when a scandal arises. Then the Prime Minister comes back and tells us what was allegedly said. But this person is not an independent officer of the House of Commons, not at all.
We have had situations like when the former heritage minister met clients of his department for a fundraising dinner. We asked that these situations be referred to an independent ethics commissioner. What happened? Nothing, despite the fact that the Prime Minister and the government promised in writing to do that. Another promise in writing, another promise broken. And again the government shifted responsibility and said: "Perhaps we were misunderstood. We really do not mean the words that are on this paper".
I do not buy that and Canadians do not buy it either. It is an absolutely ridiculous package of-