Debates of Feb. 8th, 2000

Supply

[John Bryden, Liberal, Wentworth—Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I just have to caution members opposite that when they make comparisons between the last election of 1993 under the Mulroney government they have to watch out if they start to look at multiculturalism funding. There are those of us who have documents and have done research in this area. They are liable to find, just as an example, the Parents for French organization used to get a $130,000 annual contribution from the Mulroney government but just prior to the election it went to $424,000. There was a lot going on in that year about funding special interest groups of all kinds prior to an election.

The point I want to make to the member is that there is an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. I asked a question of members of the NDP and they dodged the reply. I ask this question of the member opposite. Is he willing to see the same standards of transparency, accountability and performance review that we wish to see in HRDC apply to all other organizations that we see getting funding from government, including those organizations involved in unions, involved in poverty, non-governmental organizations, charities and non-profits? Does he not think one shoe should fit all in terms of accountability and transparency?

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to respond to that question. We know in the past the government has said one thing while in opposition but when it made that stroll a couple of sword lengths across the floor it did something completely different. Of course we want the same standard applied across the board. We are very anxious to see transparency and truth in government. We are sitting here on the edge of our seats in anticipation that it will happen, but will it happen?

The hon. member opposite loves to raise the spectre of Mulroney, but I will tell the House that when this is all over I think the name he knows well will replace it. The promises of a new approach, the promises of a new administration, are all in jeopardy now.

[Deepak Obhrai, Reform, Calgary East, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from the Conservative Party made a very good and interesting speech. I am amazed at the questions and comments of Liberal members, especially the member who asked a question two minutes ago.

This same member supported the $20 million payment to the NHL. I heard the Liberal member on CBC Radio supporting the program. Yet his own caucus was opposing it and that is why the program was cancelled. I am amazed that I do not hear any objections coming from that side. As a matter of fact that side is trying to say that this was a good program, not understanding that it was totally mismanaged and, as my colleague has said, the biggest scandal to hit the government. Perhaps he would like to comment on what we are hearing from Liberal members.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, my learned friend knows that hypocrisy is not a word we can use in this place. There is something rotten in the Liberal dome. The malevolent king of slush playing Robin Hood in reverse has somehow been caught in the squeeze. There is a big difference between giving money to the NHL, giving money to the banks, giving money to fat cat Liberals. When it comes to a job creation program we are supposed to be helping Canadians.

I am surprised that my friends in the NDP have not raised the issue that changes to the EI system took place in the early part of this administration which now keep money away from needy Canadians if they are a few hours short of qualifying. Yet the government seems prepared or more than willing to put money into companies that are already making money. It seems prepared to give money to businesses. Yet it will keep money away from needy Canadians who are a few hours short of qualifying for EI. This is a very shady approach on which Canadians will judge the government harshly in the next general election.

[Jean-Guy Chrétien, Bloc, Frontenac—Mégantic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, problems with Human Resources Development Canada are nothing new. On the eve of the June, 1997, election, a man by the name of Pierre Corbeil received from the minister who has now left, the former member for Hull—Aylmer, a list of people who would get significant amounts of money.

Pierre came first and he asked for a ransom, in cash, please. We do not know whether all the funds he received went directly to the Liberal Party of Canada or if some got lost in his car along the way but, nevertheless, it was seven months before the RCMP were able to bring charges against him and before he recognize his wrongdoing. But nothing was done within the department.

This is almost like Douglas Young, the guy from New Brunswick. He got his punishment. I would like my colleague to finish this story.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has brought the name of Pierre Corbeil into this debate. We know there were actually criminal convictions registered in that instance. We know that it arose out of HRDC where a Liberal fundraiser armed with lists of pending HRDC transitional jobs money went knocking on the doors of companies that were perhaps eligible to receive it and said “A little something for the effort and we might be able to speed up the process”.

There were criminal convictions registered. The trail is now cold but I think more and more watchdogs have become aware of it. It comes down to a question of priorities. Do we spend money in this reckless fashion or buy MRIs? Do we allow for some form of accountability or some form of student debt relief? The government has to make priority decisions. The government has mismanaged taxpayer moneys and is now being held to account.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to stand in defence of the people of Canada, particularly the people of my wonderful riding of Elk Island, and to address this very timely issue.

Yesterday I moved a concurrence motion in the report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. The report which was tabled in the House last November would have addressed this question. Of course the government has been sitting on it. We began the debate and the very first Liberal member who rose moved to stop the debate. Of course the Liberals have the majority and stopped the debate on it.

One gets the impression that the Liberal pork-barrelling the program we are talking about represents is a favourite program of the government. The Liberals just do not want to see it attacked or criticized or repaired.

I am very pleased to note today that all members on the opposition side have spoken in favour of this very timely motion. It is time that all of us, not only members in the opposition but members on the other side, to do so. They were behind their leader in the last two elections. They said they would follow the leader of the Liberal Party who would take them into power with integrity and who promised a new trust in government. That is wonderful. I believe that people voted for the Liberals because of that promise.

I venture to say in all sincerity that members on the government side will apparently today, so we are told, stand on command and vote against the motion in defiance of their own sense of integrity because they know that this problem has to be fixed.

I will use a bit of my time this morning to give a little math lesson because it has been overlooked so far. The Prime Minister has tried to diminish the size of the problem by saying that only 37 projects are suspect and that the rest are all fine. He is also saying that the 37 being questioned will be clarified and all will be well.

There are two ways of dealing with a problem like this. One way is by denial, get out the damage control troops to see whether the damage to the Liberal Party and the government of the day can be minimized. The other way is to honestly face up to it.

I have told this story in the House before. I will briefly repeat it and anyone who wants the full story will have to go back. I remember one time in my life when I did something that really was bad. I mentioned this story in the House a couple of years ago. I was a youngster and I suppose I was following the lead of some of the older people in the group. We were out for a bike ride and we ended up at a neighbour's place in the farm country of Saskatchewan. The house was vacant. As I said the last time I related the story, much to my sorrow and personal regret now, when we left not a single window was left in the building because we had broken every one of them by throwing rocks at them. It was dastardly.

I do not know what the other parents did, but my father took me to the owner. I will not mention his name again; the last time Hansard misspelled it because I forgot to give the correct spelling. I had to look that man in the eye and say, “I broke the window”. He also required that I pay it back.

I was a youngster on a Saskatchewan farm in the late forties. We did not have a great deal of money. Money was hard to earn. I picked up beer bottles for about two years and sold them in order to repay the debt. I am grateful to my dad for the lesson he taught me.

To me, that is a way of solving a problem. When one has erred, the best way of fixing it is to face up to it, admit it and then make restitution.

Here is a situation where the Prime Minister is trying to minimize the problem and explain it away instead of saying to the people of Canada, “Yes, the auditor general in his report brought this problem to our attention and we will do something about it”.

In fact, nothing was done. The previous member from the Tory party brought out this point too. One of our people made the access to information request. I do not know whether Canadians know this but when a request is made under the Access to Information Act one of the first things that happens is that the department getting the request fires off a warning memo to the minister that says, “Hey, they are looking into something here. Let us be prepared”.

In a sense that becomes part of the damage control team trying to get the defences ready even before the attack is launched. It just so happened that within a couple of days of that access request being filed the minister said, “Oh, oh, we have been caught. They are on our trail. I guess now we will have to be honest”.

I hesitate to say this, but an honesty that is forcibly extracted somehow rings hollow. I do not want to impute any improper motives to the Prime Minister or to the various ministers who have been involved in this scandal but I think it rings hollow.

Getting to my math lesson, as members know, I have been an instructor of mathematics at the technical institute in Edmonton. I did not specialize in statistics but I know a little about it. One of the things that happens when a sample is done, within a statistical range of error, it is appropriate to apply the results of the sample to the entire population.

For example, the Liberals like to gloat that right now if 2,000 Canadians were asked how they would vote in the next election, something like 35% or 36% would say they would vote Liberal. How did they get that? Out of the 2,000 people maybe there were 800 or so who said they would vote Liberal. They took the 800 out of 2,000 and extrapolated it to the entire population and said that is how the entire population would vote. That is how statistics work. As a matter of fact statistical methods are used all the time in many different industrial processes and certainly in socioeconomic studies and investigations.

In this case there were some 30,000 projects. The internal audit came as a result of the auditor general putting his finger on a problem. That is when the internal audit was called and appropriately so. The auditor general pointed out there was a problem way back last April, almost a year ago. The department said that it needed to look into it and fix it, which was an appropriate response.

The internal audit looked at a random sample of 459 projects. These projects were not chosen because they were suspect; they were picked statistically at random. That is my understanding of how these projects were chosen. Of the 459 we have these percentages. These are the numbers plus or minus a certain range due to statistical variation which is very normal in statistical studies. My guess is that it could be plus or minus 5% or thereabouts.

Taking a sample size of 459 and extrapolating it to 30,000, this is what we have. Of the projects that were reviewed, 15% did not have an application on file. That means out of all of them we could extrapolate to say that there are 4,500 projects that were approved without even having an application on file.

[An hon. member]

No.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

A member opposite is saying no but I stand by my numbers. It is the same percentage applied to the whole population as it is to the sample plus or minus a very small range. If he wants to say 4,400 or 4,600, I will go along with that, but it is 4,500 plus or minus a small number.

Of those that had no cash forecasts, there would be 21,600 projects. Eleven per cent of them had no budget proposal. That means we could conclude that some 3,300 of these projects did not even have budget proposals, and they were approved and received taxpayers' money.

Mr. Speaker, you have signalled that my time is up and I wish I could go on. I am trying to give a message to the Liberals on the other side. Today when they are asked to vote on this important motion, I appeal to them to do as will all other members on this side. Let us vote for the people, for the taxpayers and not just for our own self-preservation.

[John Bryden, Liberal, Wentworth—Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted the member for Elk Island raised the issue of the Access to Information Act because that is a subject of great sensitivity to me today. As he will realize his party blocked a private member's bill that would reform the Access to Information Act, increase transparency and increase accessibility to the very kinds of documents and information that the member for Elk Island is citing.

So I would like to ask him how he could expect me as a member on this side of the House who is most interested in getting to the root of government documents, in getting to examine the way government functions and indeed who has had legislation before this House that would enable members to better do their job in this regard, to take this motion seriously when his party has deliberately blocked the very kind of legislation that we need in this House to enable backbenchers and opposition members to assess how government operates? Legislation is transparent and yet that party, the party on the other side, has rejected that legislation. And they expect me to support their motion? Well, I am sorry.

[Lee Morrison, Reform, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. It appears that the hon. member is again challenging your authority. You shut him off on this before but he persists. Can we not get back to the debate on the subject at hand which is the scandal in HRDC?

[The Deputy Speaker]

I am sure we will with the hon. member for Elk Island who now has the floor to respond.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what the member for Wentworth—Burlington is saying. He had a very important bill. He came to members of the Reform Party and got them to sign a sheet of paper which said we want to make sure it is debated in the House. Reform Party members agreed to that. Then he changed the bill. Now it has a different substance in some areas. The signatures no longer stand. It was simply on a matter of principle that he was given a set of signatures that applied to something other than what he was presenting in the House. It is a completely different issue. He should understand that. We want to preserve the integrity of Private Members' Business which is so important.

However, he has brought up the subject of integrity and I will just conclude with a simple statement. I expect him as a result of his commitment to integrity, honesty, openness and transparency to rise in support of this motion.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, every time I hear the member for Elk Island talk about his window story, I get very nervous about the beautiful stained glass windows in the House. I hope he does not salivate over those beautiful windows.

I thank his party for bringing this very timely motion to the House today. It is very important. Throughout this country, we as politicians and members of parliament are held in low esteem regardless of this boondoggle. We need moral leadership that encourages people not only to become members of parliament but to run for elected office at all levels.

I ask the hon. member should the minister be asked to resign, which I suspect she should do to show leadership, but should not the previous minister of that department also resign? These problems are systemic. They did not just happen overnight.

It is interesting to hear the Conservative Party talk about accountability. When it was in power a lot of money went into areas and was not really accounted for. I am glad to see the Conservative Party has changed its tone and has seen the right way of doing things now.

Should not the previous minister resign as well for this boondoggle?

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member has a valid point.

First I would like to assure him that when I was nine years old, having gone through that lesson, I learned not to break windows. To my knowledge I have not broken one since then, even accidentally, so do not worry about the windows here.

I would like to talk about the idea of ministerial responsibility because the Prime Minister said that the ministers would be responsible. Indeed it is a measure of integrity that when things have really blown apart the minister resigns.

[Maurice Vellacott, Reform, Wanuskewin, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I regret that I have to stand in the House to talk today on a subject of this sort that represents what we would expect to be the very best for Canadians in terms of their use of tax dollars.

I have come to sleuth and to understand more of this big scandal which some would suggest is certainly major mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. I do definitely, individually, have major concerns with the management and the minister's and the whole government's lack of competence in this area.

I would ask this more as a question and the members in the House and people in the gallery and those watching in TV land would be the ones to respond. This government vaunts and boasts often of its competence, managerial ability, fiscal prudence and sound government. We see quite the contrary it would appear. I ask a question and I do not prejudge the outcome but everyone can draw their own conclusions. Is there something of a fraud in the Prime Minister's brag of managerial competence, fiscal prudence and sound government? As I lay out my understanding of what has occurred here I will allow the audience to draw its own conclusions today.

In a very considerable way what has happened over the last number of weeks, or at least what has been exposed, has drawn into question the jobs fund as a matter of principle and whether it is effective in creating jobs. That is sad in a certain sense. I am a believer that there can be tax dollars targeted for social programs for individuals who are disabled and so on. They need equipment and special access. That maybe is another matter. That is a social program. That is policy set in place to help those who need that leg up in society.

Government handouts are very poor at creating jobs in the general sense. If that were not the case then the maritime provinces would obviously be booming, as might other parts of our country.

Generally speaking, when we are not talking social programs—and there is need for that with respect to disabled and other people—job creation, for the most part, should be done by the private sector. It is the engine that drives job creation. Studies have shown that. It is beyond dispute. Reducing corporate tax, payroll taxes and those kinds of things provide incentive and release money for investment.

It is a real shame that this $1 billion or more boondoggle seems to be endemic and systemic in the government. It is money that could well be used in other areas. When we have had significant cuts in health and post-secondary education and we have not had the kind of support for farmers in terms of a subsidy war across the world, it is a real shameful thing in my view.

Tax dollars are justifiably used for things like health care, post-secondary education and a basic social safety net. After that we do have a consensus to break down from there. What is so preposterous about this is that tax dollars have been used for things that they should not be used for and on the other hand we have had a deficit in respect to health, education and basic social needs.

We do need social programs that help people with disabilities and so on, but we do not need them as the driving engine to create jobs. This is a fundamental flaw. They do not create jobs as effectively or in any proportion as the private sector would if it was left to do that.

When seats throughout the west were held by Reform, we did not say, as some people may have thought, that we did not want our share. We said that we had enough of these kinds of programs. We have had enough of the old way of doing things, the dark ages' way of doing things, by patronage and pork barrelling which comes out of the 1800s and 1900s. In a modern democracy, we should not be doing programs in this manner. The west was not asking “Where is our share?” It was saying “Enough of this kind of stuff, enough of these fiascos”, which are now very apparent.

The government failed to create jobs in many cases. It gave $14 million to 32 companies but no jobs were created. We can list many of them and we will over the course of the days ahead. Companies in my own province that created zero jobs were Clifford Smith Trucking, $72,000, and Saskatchewan Dutch Elm Disease Committee, $100,000. No jobs were created. I could go on with a list of companies and projects that received money but where not a single job was created.

We could list companies that have closed. A Cape Breton coffin factory received $400,000 to make fibreglass coffins that would float or last forever underground. Only three of those coffins ever sold and the factory closed.

We could list companies that have wasted money. In the 1988 audit we found, among other ridiculous kinds of examples, that a road that went nowhere was built through the riding of the then revenue minister Elmer MacKay. Two bridges were built but no roads connected to them. It goes on and on. As a matter of principle, the government has clearly not been creating jobs and in fact cannot do that.

The government has used this fund and the grants and contributions to give politically motivated handouts. Some have called it a slush fund. I will leave that for others to state. However, the minister certainly did not keep her own rules. There are 15 pages of grants given to the minister's Brant riding, a riding which should not have qualified for grants. Since April 1999, she has approved other projects. Her riding did not have an unemployment rate of over 10%. The earlier qualifying rate had been 12%. She was signing cheques for her own riding contrary to the most basic rule of the Canada jobs fund criteria, which was to create permanent jobs, new jobs, sustainable jobs and so on in areas of high unemployment, areas where there was more than 12% unemployment, later relaxed to 10%. She clearly violated that rule.

How can Canadians put their trust in a minister who mismanages the money that goes into her own riding?

I can think of other examples that have been mentioned in the House during question period. I refer to the Grand-Mère Inn in the Prime Minister's own riding, the Pierre Corbeil story, an enterprising young Liberal, an individual who thought that he could lever some money for the Liberal coffers by going to them and saying “If you give me a donation, we will make sure your TJF application gets approved”.

[Paul Forseth, Reform, New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, BC]

It is called a shakedown.

[Maurice Vellacott, Reform, Wanuskewin, SK]

It is called a shakedown, as the member said. He was charged with that and there was a conviction. These programs are rife with that stuff. It would not be surprising if many more instances of that turn up.

As I understand it, a special assistant in the justice minister's riding of Edmonton West by the name of Greg Fergus handled these special representations by ministers, which led to grant approvals in areas that did not strictly qualify. Justice Minister McLellan's riding received $1,350,000 and $888,000 from the transitional jobs fund even though the unemployment rate was lower than the TJF rate.

There is no accountability to taxpayers and the records are poor. This is not just sloppy, it is systemic. If a dot or a decimal is missing, that is sloppy. If it is patterned like this throughout, that is systemic. The problem the government has is that these are not just a few isolated cases. They run like a thread in terms of patronage and pork barrelling throughout the government. It is endemic.

Let us look at the recent TAGS program: 34% did not contain any proposal to support the project; 83% did not have any supporting documentation; 80% were not checked to see if recipients owed money to HRDC; and 76% did not show any evidence of financial monitoring. That was under the Atlantic groundfish strategy. Other examples could be cited from across various departments.

We believe some cover-up is going on. We have said before that the minister appeared to have misled the House. On November 17, 1999, she would have had the information in hand and had been fully briefed, yet subsequent to that, on December 1 and again on December 7, she talked about the wonderful and extraordinary job being done to make sure Canadians got back to work. What a wonderful play act. On December 7 she talked about how Canadians approved of this when she was withholding information that would have pointed to the contrary and would have exposed this whole thing.

One would have to ask, and I believe some have rightly done so, whether the minister is staying in that role because of bloodlines or genetics because her father did not fiscally manage things accurately. Significant dollars were in question when she was in the aboriginal affairs department.

The Prime Minister's spin on this whole thing is that there are only a few cases. Let us consider that the scathing audit of 459 projects is a representative sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 projects. According to Ms. Brigitte Nolet, a spokesperson for the ministry of human resources, the sample of just under 500 projects represents about 60,000. With that proportion, we still have about 4,800 that have been badly mismanaged.

This is a major problem. We cannot just minimalize it as the Prime Minister does. It is endemic. It is systemic. It is a pattern of the government and deserves to be dealt with in this manner on this day and rebuked for the good of the Canadian taxpayer.

[René Canuel, Bloc, Matapédia—Matane, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know where to start. I hesitate because the language I would like to use might be unparliamentary, and I cannot use all the words that come to mind. I hope the members opposite will understand that many of the words I would like to utter will remain unsaid out of respect for the Chair, who would judge these words to be unparliamentary.

I will use a very simple language. A billion is a long string of zeros with a one in front of them. It is a thousand million dollars that were squandered, handed out to friends and supporters, particularly those who contribute to the liberal election fund.

We know that there are 1.5 million children living in poverty in this country. If we took $1 billion and divided it by 1.5 million, every child in Canada could have received $6,666 in support. But that was not done.

Instead, next year, it will be reported that once again the number of children living in poverty, and parents living in poverty of course, has grown. I know that, in my riding of Matapédia—Matane, where unemployment is very high, from time to time someone makes a mistake and claims one week too many in benefits and there are penalties for doing so. They come and get them and they are almost prepared to send them to jail.

About the $1 billion that disappeared and went into the pockets of some rich people, I ask my colleague, whom I listened to intently, how he would qualify this scandal.

[Maurice Vellacott, Reform, Wanuskewin, SK]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend is quite right. Words fail, at least in this place, in terms of words that are allowable to use. Without a doubt, in terms of just the scan of it so far and in the research that we have done, it shows that a disproportionate amount of those dollars have gone into Liberal-held ridings. It would certainly bolster what has been said before in terms of being used, being levered for contributions to the Liberal Party and so on. I think that is what outrages the public in the whole matter.

The Liberals are now trying to minimize it by saying that it is just a few projects, when in fact this is a representative sampling of a far bigger piece.

Yes, we do have a problem. Frankly, the whole system needs to be changed or started from scratch again where we deal with handicapped people and provide the resources and so on there. We need to get away from the kinds of things that are subject to political interference, patronage and the kind of pork-barrelling that has been used by the Liberal government over the course of a number of years.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to give the hon. member an opportunity to respond to a couple of concerns. He talked about the private sector being the economic engine that creates jobs. There is a downturn to that as well. For example, the Royal Bank in my area made $1.76 billion this year and announced a layoff of 340 new jobs. Next year the bank plans to make $2 billion.

Yes, the private sector does create jobs, but there has to be some sort of corporate responsibility when it comes to economic opportunities in the outstretches, or what I call the extremities of Canada.

There is no question that what we need in the country is moral leadership, people who will stand on principle. My question is for the previous member who spoke, as well as for the member for Elk Island. If the minister is to resign, should not the previous minister resign as well?

[Maurice Vellacott, Reform, Wanuskewin, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I would again agree with my hon. colleague. I do think this sends a signal with respect to the activities and competence of the previous minister as well. It taints the record of when he was there. It was on his watch over a period of time when a significant part of the program began and then changed over to the Canada jobs fund. He was able to skittishly get out of there just in time. Some might say that he was lucky or fortunate, but perhaps it was planned. I am not sure. I think it also sends a signal in terms of the competence of the minister who was in that position previously.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Oak Ridges, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Vancouver—Quadra.

We have an internal audit that was released by the Minister of Human Resources Development. The minister announced a six point plan to deal with this particular situation with which I do not think anyone in the House is pleased.

We hear though from the opposition terms like scandal, pork-barrelling and slush fund. We do not hear anything from the opposition about what we should be trying to do to fix the problem. How can we constructively participate in making sure that this problem does not happen again? But no, we would rather bandy about cheap terms that have little credence. We know that it was not $1 billion missing, but we continue to hear the $1 billion figure. Unfortunately, if we say something long enough we tend to believe it, which is certainly the case across the aisle.

The fact is, we have 459 projects—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Oak Ridges, ON]

Some of my colleagues have all the answers and are not prepared to listen.