Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle. I still think of the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle as the member for Yorkton—Melville. I have not quite adjusted to the fact that he is not known by the riding that he was known by for 25 years.
I have a couple of things to say about the motion. We are talking about two things in the motion. We are talking about broken promises and we are talking about the substance of promises made, and whether or not those promises should now be implemented.
First, with respect to the question of broken promises, clearly this is a broken promise. It was very clearly promised in red book one that there would be an ethics counsellor created and that the counsellor would be responsible to the House of Commons. That has not happened and the government has given us no indication today as to why that has not happened. It has been very self-congratulating in terms of its record. It looks good only because it compares itself to the previous Conservative administration which was rife with controversy and scandal.
Sometimes I think that the only difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives, when it comes to that sort of thing, is that the Conservatives never really got out of their amateur status when it came to patronage, scandal and other things. The Liberals are the real professionals when it comes to that sort of thing. They are better at not being caught. They are better at hiding what they do. They are better at covering things up. The Tories were just a bunch of rank amateurs.
In fact, when the Tories were in government, I remember some Liberals in opposition saying to me off the record that the Tories were a bunch of rank amateurs, that they were really the people who knew how to do that. The Liberals have been back since 1993 and they are still doing it, in part because they have not kept the promises they made with respect to those kinds of issues. One of those promises was the creation of an ethics counsellor, an ethics counsellor that would be responsible to the House not to the Prime Minister.
The government House leader made the argument that the Prime Minister was ultimately responsible and therefore we could not have the ethics counsellor reporting to the House. The Prime Minister is ultimately responsible for the official languages policy, for the privacy law and for the freedom of information law, but that does not prevent us from having privacy commissioners, official language commissioners and freedom of information commissioners. It also should not prevent us from having an ethics commissioner, if that is what that person would come to be called whenever that position would be created, who would be responsible to the House of Commons. On the face of it, the Liberals have broken this promise and offered no explanation as to why they have.
What has given rise to the debate? It is of course all the controversy surrounding the things that have happened in the Prime Minister's riding.
I have listened to the Prime Minister carefully over the last 18 months to two years. It is not a question of whether the Prime Minister did anything wrong in the criminal sense. I am certainly not making that charge and some people who have made that charge have withdrawn it. What the Prime Minister does not seem to get is that he is not just an ordinary member of parliament. I just do not think there is any substance to that argument.
Yes, the Prime Minister can do the same things as an ordinary member of parliament can do, but to suggest that it is ordinary behaviour for the Prime Minister to have people over to 24 Sussex to talk to them about loans to hotels in his riding, not to mention hotels that the Prime Minister has had something to do with in the past, and that it is the sort of thing that I get to do every day as a member of parliament, is just ridiculous and the Canadian people know it.
Given the election results, the Canadian people seem resigned to accept this. They seem resigned to accept a certain level of that kind of behaviour. Unfortunately, they just seem to think that goes with the Liberals. They seem prepared to tolerate that behaviour with the hope that the Liberals have other virtues.
However, we as members of parliament do not have to tolerate it. We do not have to tolerate it as opposition parties. As members of this place We have a responsibility not to tolerate and that is why we are up on our feet today.
I say to the Prime Minister and to the government, not just for their own sake but for the sake of the political process in general, that they should behave differently. They should see that there is a distinction to be made between the kinds of opportunities that the Prime Minister has, the clout that the Prime Minister has, the question of how that clout should be used and whether there are times when the Prime Minister should resist the temptation to use that clout, even if it is for the benefit of his own constituency, because it puts the whole political process in jeopardy.
There is no question, from some of the figures I have seen, that the Prime Minister's riding has done very well indeed by virtue of having the Prime Minister as its member of parliament. When it gets so out of whack, when there is so much more money going into the Prime Minister's riding over what goes into other ridings, and when we see that there are secret opportunities for transitional funds going into Liberal ridings that people in other ridings do not even know about, all these kinds of things do not exactly bring a healthy smell to the political process.
I would urge my Liberal colleagues to see if they can find a way to act more appropriately when it comes to this sort of thing.
We often talk about governments breaking their promises. I want to say with respect to the party that moved the motion today that it is one of the rare political animals in our political system. It has managed to accumulate a whole number of broken promises while it is still in opposition. It is not something that everybody can do. One has to have a special talent to do it. Members of that party made promises as to how they would behave in opposition. They did not say how they would behave in government because they have not had a chance to govern, and God help us if they ever do, although if they ever do become government I hope they do break some of their promises. I hope they never bring them into being.
The Canadian Alliance promised that their leader would not move into Stornoway. They promised their leader would not take a freebie with respect to a car. Many of them promised they would not become members of the pension plan.
Having said all that, I think they have done some growing up while they have been here. They have appreciated some of the policies that were in place, that they made a political career out of criticizing, and have changed their mind. However, when they changed their mind, they broke another promise. They were the ones who said that when members of parliament change their mind or make a decision contrary to what their constituents thought they were voting for, then they should put themselves at the mercy of their voters once again.
With respect to the members of the Canadian Alliance who indicated that they would opt into the pension plan before the last election and the people voted them in, fair enough. What about the people who indicated after November 27, 2000 that they would opt into the pension plan? Do those members not have an obligation, given the things that they have said in the past, to submit themselves to the mercy of their constituents in a form of self-imposed recall? Do we see any of that? There is another broken promise.
It strikes us as a bit odd, without prejudice to the well deserved criticism that the Liberals deserve when it comes to breaking promises, that the official opposition should be on its high horse when it comes to broken promises because they are the one political party in the country that has managed to accumulate a record of broken promises without ever having been in government.