No, the member across was not here then. I am sure things would have been a whole lot different.
I love it when a candidate says “I will be a member of government and, boy, I will tell you, I will straighten out that government”. The fellow who won the byelection a couple of years ago in Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam said “I am no yes-man”. Wrong.
Another favourite little tactic is that they repeat everything. Everything is all right. Everything is normal. It is just business as usual and everything is going to be just fine.
The Prime Minister said on June 1, 1999: “I am very happy with the system because it is doing what has to be done for the good of the taxpayers of Canada”. A few of them, I guess; the ones who were getting the grants, but certainly not all of the taxpayers of Canada. I do not think so.
What about leaving more of our money in our hands in the first place? It would seem sensible to me that if we send money to Ottawa, the government should not take such a huge cut from it when it is swirling around and then send a little back to the regions or whatever the government thinks with its personal largesse to make everyone feel good about it while at the same time claiming that it is giving tax cuts. I love that excuse too. “We are giving tax cuts”.
I would ask any of the Liberal members, any of the huge number of them who are here, when was the last time someone came into their riding office and said “Oh, this tax cut just feels so good”?
I see the member from Edmonton Southeast is here. His riding is not very far from mine. We are just across the city from each other. I would love to know if someone has come into his office and said “Look at my tax statement. That tax cut just feels so good”. I would love to tell him how I am going to spend that money.
It is not happening, is it? It is not happening. The finance minister says that they are coming forward with tax cuts, but nobody is seeing it at the ground level. This whole idea that we are in charge and we are looking after you, everything is okay, is nonsense.
Here is a good one: “Someone else ordered the contract”. On March 12, 1999 the solicitor general was talking about why Yvon Duhaime's father-in-law got an untendered contract for the guardhouse on the road to the Prime Minister's cottage. Members will remember that a little while ago a new guardhouse was being built. The contract was untendered. He said: “The RCMP is responsible for the security of the Prime Minister. It requested that this firm be hired because it was in the area for security reasons”.
The firm just happened to be in the area. I do not know, they might have been camping over at Meech Lake. I am not too sure, but they were in the area, so give them the contract. It saves a bus ticket. Just hire them because they are close by.
Yet when I think about the solicitor general, it is pretty hard to believe. Yesterday in the House we were asking questions about murderers, prisons and some other things. As everyone in the House and anyone who watches the proceedings knows, the solicitor general always says that the RCMP and the Correctional Service are at arm's length. I am not sure how long that is, but it ought to be about out to here. He says that he has nothing to do with them, that he cannot be the one to tell them what to do.
Yesterday there was a question about the dreadful situation of the two people who were put together in jail after murdering someone. He said that he phoned right away. He did not phone from downtown Ottawa but from downtown Washington D.C. He called the Correctional Service and told them to split those people up. That was not very arm's length. There was a telephone on the end of that arm. He picked it up and used it. When we see these discrepancies it is hard to believe that the solicitor general continues to say that the RCMP is responsible and he does not get to talk to them. Yesterday he was on the phone in jig time.
Then there is this one: “The Prime Minister was involved, but not all the time”. He is kind of a part time prime minister or he is only involved part of the time.
On March 22, 1999, just a year ago, the Deputy Prime Minister said that he had a representative of his office attend meetings with officials. As far as he was aware, the decisions were made at other meetings when the Prime Minister and his staff were not involved. Can we believe that? Oh, no, he was not really involved. He was not at the meeting. No, he was not there, so it was someone else just acting on his behalf. That one is pretty hard to believe.
Let us say that we were HRD officials sitting around with the crew we work with all the time, with whom we are comfortable working, doing what it is we are supposed to be doing, and Poopsie, or whoever, comes in. She says that she is from the Prime Minister's office and is just coming to take part in the meeting. Do we sit down and ask what are we going to do? That is nonsense.
If we are sitting there as a bunch of bureaucrats, doing our job, and someone walks in—