Mr. Speaker, let me say on the record that I am not living at Stornoway as the Leader of the Official Opposition. I have a place in Ottawa and I am staying there.
People are saying that the Prime Minister's office directed police to use pepper spray and dogs against UBC students so that a third world dictator would not be embarrassed when he visited Canada. Who should we be concerned about in terms of embarrassing?
When asked about the use of pepper spray, the Prime Minister joked “For me, pepper is something that I put on my plate”. This is a head of state. This was the Prime Minister of our country who made this joke at his little press conferences. This gave Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes great stuff to use, but it was hardly something that we would expect from the Prime Minister of our country.
I might add that a riot breaks loose every time the Prime Minister goes to Vancouver. People had a fit in front of the Hyatt Regency Hotel when the Prime Minister attended a fundraising dinner in 1998 where he continued with his joking. He said “Usually it is a rubber chicken dinner, but when we come to the west we have beef. Sometimes we have pepper steak”. Somehow there is nothing hilarious about this. He might think that it gets a great rousing laugh from the crowd but it is not very funny. He talked about the merits of using pepper spray over tear gas, baseball bats or water cannons. The point is, why were they doing that in the first place? Was it to make Mr. Suharto comfy in Canada? That is the question we need to be asking.
Let us not just look at the Prime Minister's behaviour on the APEC deal. What about the auditor general's staff, the guys who look over the books and make things so uncomfortable for a government when it messes around? In 1998 the auditor general, Denis Desautels, was reprimanded by finance department officials for presuming to criticize accounting practices of the government. What do the Liberals expect the auditor general to do? His job is to audit the books. If the government is not coming across really well he will criticize accounting practices.
Does the government use generally accepted accounting principles? It seems to me that it shoves a whole lot off to future years to be reckoned with then. The auditor general was reprimanded by the finance department for pointing out those criticisms. I guess we have to ask the Liberal members whether we even have to trifle and be inconvenienced by an auditor general, because, as I said, he often does get in the way when we talk about government financing.
In 1998 inspectors at Environment Canada were warned not to testify before a commons committee on the cutbacks in their department. There is no real freedom of speech when a government member can stand up and say “If you get up in that committee and say x , y or z you will be in big trouble and there will be repercussions”. These people should be begged for information because they are the people who are working on the front lines. They are the ones who can give us the real practical help.
I talked to someone the other day in the finance department. This was a person from whom I wanted to get information because the person knew what was going on over there. This person was warned not to testify before a committee.
In 1998 six Health Canada scientists said they were warned not to speak publicly about their concerns over a bovine growth hormone. This was another threat.
We see a government in power that is just so full of mismanagement and fear tactics that it should cause fear in all Canadians.
Health Canada Director Joseph Losos was chastized by the privacy commissioner for rummaging through the files of departmental critic Michèle Brill-Edwards. Michèle Brill-Edwards is a very bright woman. Joseph Losos was chastized by the privacy commissioner for rummaging through her files.
