Mr. Speaker, thank you for your intervention. I assure you I am leading to the heart of the matter.
Once the government's hearings on lobbying got started, the complexity of the lobbying activities became very apparent. Then despite all the strong words promising to clean up the system, the Lobbyists Registration Act failed to live up to expectations. Once installed on the other side of the House, the Liberals decided that not all lobbying was a bad thing. The final legislation avoided issues such as restricting frequency of contacts or limiting fund raising activities.
As I mentioned earlier, Young is prohibited for two years from meeting with officials in the departments of defence and human resources development because he presided over them during his last year in government. He is however free to lobby officials in other departments, including transport where he spent most of his tenure here in the last Parliament.
The rules also prevent Mr. Young from discussing the business of his clients with any minister who handles the same portfolio that he or she held as Young's cabinet colleague. Therefore, the industry and finance ministers are off limits but there is nothing to stop Mr. Young from approaching the ministers of transport or trade on behalf of a client.
Young is also restricted to giving advice on matters already in the public domain. Theoretically he cannot make use of specific knowledge of programs or policies he might possess by virtue of previous positions.
Of course, none of these restrictions apply to Mr. Zed because he served as a mere parliamentary secretary in the last government and he is available for front man.
One of Summa Strategies' first clients was very familiar to Mr. Young, CNR which he privatized in 1995. The president and CEO of CN, Paul Tellier, was the former Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the most powerful people in Ottawa. I cannot help but wonder what he could possibly learn or gain from hiring Mr. Young. Other Summa Strategies clients include the RCMP, the Prince Rupert Grain Company, and SNC-Lavalin.
Interestingly, a company called Defence Remediation Inc. which is a land mine clearing company is listed as a client of Summa Strategies. I guess it will have to wait until June 1999 before Doug Young with all his department of defence expertise can represent it personally. Right now he can only deal with transport matters.
Let us talk about Charlotte County Ports Inc., a front company which wants to acquire control of one of the few profitable local ports in Canada, Bayside port, on behalf of a very muscular New Jersey based supplier of construction aggregate. The only thing Canadian about Charlotte County Ports aside from its registration is another ex-politician, a former New Brunswick Liberal cabinet minister.
To digress momentarily, it is impossible to talk about Doug Young's post-parliamentary activities without touching on the very smelly Maritime Road Development Corporation's New Brunswick highway deal. In this instance, he was not representing a client but a consortium which he himself was the head of, at least until he realized that a former federal minister cannot work for a company or project that had been directly affected by his decisions as minister until two years after leaving office.
Because MRDC will be collecting tolls on a stretch of highway built under the 1995 federal-provincial highway agreement which Young oversaw as transport minister, he changed hats. Instead of being president, he is now chairman of the board since January 22. Obviously switching positions is not the answer.
Nevertheless, the federal ethics commissioner does not believe that Mr. Young's highway activities violate the code of ethics because Ottawa is not in charge of the project. Just as it does not own the land surrounding Bayside port, because Ottawa is not in charge of the project and did not select the contractors who would build it. I feel a lot better.
The term lobbying comes from the lobby outside the House of Commons in the British parliament buildings. It was there that interested parties and petitioners would try to capture the attention of members of Parliament before they went in to cast their votes.
It is a sign of the diminishing role of Canadian members of Parliament that we do not find any lobbyists in this lobby. Everyone in Canada knows perfectly well that the real government decisions take place far from the House of Commons so lobbyists concentrate on people in the PMO, key cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats.
If nothing else, the large number of lobbying firms in this town, even though they do not ever appear in the lobby, is a testament to how far our system has moved away from control by the ordinary citizens. The influence on public servants is particularly disturbing as they are out of the public eye and not subject to elections.
Firms like Summa make their money by trading on knowledge and contacts of their principals about the inner workings of government. They tend to be providing advice to clients and opening doors or making representations on their behalf.
The question we must ask ourselves which should make the government squirm is could Doug Young and Paul Zed be successful lobbyists if the Liberals had not won the election? What exactly do they have to sell?