Mr. Speaker, I can quote the Minister of Justice from just a couple of minutes ago, when she said that our system is one of parliamentary democracy. I believe she also said that public office is a public trust.
What we see today in the debate on the motion and in the response and the defence being put on by the government is that the government really does not believe that we have a working parliamentary democracy. I do not think they appreciate that public office is a public trust.
The reason I say that is that it does come down to the heart of accountability. Human nature being what it is, unless we are accountable to someone else or to some external force, human nature tends to suggest that we cover up for ourselves. We do things that are not totally proper, but then we hope to get away with them.
Here is how I define accountability. I have done a lot of work on the topic. I was chairman of the public accounts committee in the House in the last parliament and a member of the committee in the parliament previous to that, and I deal a lot with accountability. I work a lot with the auditor general who, in his way, tries to hold the government accountable by releasing his independent reports, his criticisms and the problems that he finds. Sometimes they are overlooked by the government. Accountability means that one is responsible to forces that one does not control and that will affect one's behaviour. If the forces are not totally and absolutely out of one's control, if one can manage them, manipulate them and dominate them, then there is no accountability, regardless of what the justice minister says.
Parliament was created and then evolved over several hundreds of years in the U.K. It started off with a monarch who had absolute autocratic authority. He did what he wanted. He hung people, imprisoned people, taxed people and went to war. He did whatever he wanted with absolute, total, autocratic authority, and the people said no. Over several hundred years, the people wrestled from the monarchy the right to hold the government and the monarch accountable.
In the House, as 301 parliamentarians, perhaps excluding the government benches, it is our role to hold the government accountable. Unfortunately, we in this House either tend to think that we are part of government or, on the opposite side of the House, we hope that we become government. Therefore we lose our focus on what we in the House should be doing, which is to hold the government accountable.
As long as the Prime Minister says that he is doing his bit, that he has an ethics counsellor who reports to him, it is an outright sham when it comes to accountability. For the justice minister to speak in the House about how accountable the government is and to say that they will vote against the motion indicates the disdain by which they hold the House and the members who sit in the House.
We only have to look in the recent past at the HRDC billion dollar boondoggle. There were numerous HRDC audits in the last number of years, internal audits that did not cause change. However, when the final audit got into the public domain and the minister could no longer control the response to it, we finally had some real accountability because the minister had to respond to forces outside her control.
We had the Minister of Health, just yesterday, answering questions about the native treatment centre scandal in Manitoba. Why is that a scandal? Because there is no accountability. The financial statements are not available. The chief said that once the money flowed to the reserve it was no longer public money and he did not have to answer to anybody. Now we find after years that thousands and millions of dollars have gone astray.
We find that people are off on Caribbean cruises and they call it training. How can that be? The minute it becomes public and the minute that the chief no longer controls the responses and the demands for information, we find there is real accountability.
We had the Shawinigan affair in the Prime Minister's riding. Let us compare the ethics counsellor reporting to the Prime Minister and the chairman of the business development bank who lost his job because he was suggesting that he did not do what the Prime Minister wanted. I would expect that the ethics counsellor would have lost his job too if he did not do what the Prime Minister wanted. That is a great affront.
I draw attention to a parallel a couple of weeks ago in the U.K. parliament. The minister for Northern Ireland, Mr. Peter Mandelson, was economical with the truth. He gave some information to a junior minister who reported to parliament that turned out to be a bit shy of the whole story. Within two days he was no longer a minister. If that type of thing happens in our parliament, unfortunately it is glossed over and it is business as usual.
In the last few days the Minister of Foreign Affairs admitted to the House that he had not been in full command of all the facts in his department and his department had not been in full command of all the facts regarding the Russian diplomat who was expelled from Canada. He has by and large mislead the House because he was not up to his job.