Debates of March 15th, 2001

Ethics Counsellor

[The Speaker]

The right hon. Prime Minister.

[Jean Chrétien, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, like all cabinet members, I put my assets in the hands of the person responsible for the trust fund.

The ethics councillor said that I properly filled out all the forms and confirmed that the interests which I had in the golf course were sold during the first week of November 1993.

[Deborah Grey, Canadian Alliance, Edmonton North, AB]

Mr. Speaker, those shares might have been sold in 1993, but it is a gift that just keeps on giving. They came back to him again some time later.

I think the ethics counsellor has raised a very important point in response to the letter from the Leader of the Opposition. He said that those corporate records are “an important issue.” You bet that is an important issue, Mr. Speaker. Canadians need to know just exactly who is in charge there and who owned these shares.

Now it was mentioned earlier that there were four shareholders. Three of them have been identified. Who was that fourth shareholder between 1996 and 1999?

[Jean Chrétien, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, again innuendoes. They wrote to the ethics counsellor and he looked into that. The ethics counsellor explained everything a year ago at the industry committee. It was made very clear that I sold my share in November 1993.

I am not like the member of parliament who got back her pension after having been elected by claiming she was not the same type of member as we are. After the election, she took back her pension.

[Deborah Grey, Canadian Alliance, Edmonton North, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is just unbelievable that the ethics—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh.

[The Speaker]

Order, please. The hon. member for Edmonton North has the floor. We want to hear her.

[Deborah Grey, Canadian Alliance, Edmonton North, AB]

Mr. Speaker, that is nice to know.

The Prime Minister just said that the ethics counsellor looked into that and it was a closed deal. The Minister of Industry has been going on for weeks saying that the file is closed. In fact, that file is open again. The ethics counsellor just said that he is looking into it again.

The Prime Minister could get over this in a heartbeat by just tabling his bill of sale for those shares in 1993. Will he do that?

[Jean Chrétien, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, because the Alliance Party wrote the ethics counsellor another letter on this matter, he passed the letter on to the Department of Industry which has the records.

If the Leader of the Opposition had been competent, he would have written right away to the Department of Industry. This has nothing to do with the ethics counsellor who has said many times and for a long time that the shares were sold in November 1993.

Immigration

[Gilles Duceppe, Bloc, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in the Amodeo affair, the government is trying to convince us that the RCMP lost track of Mr. Amodeo once he was in Canada. We are not buying it. With the modern techniques and considerable means available to the RCMP, it is simply incomprehensible that they lost track of him.

How can the solicitor general explain that the RCMP allowed Mr. Amodeo to circulate freely in Canada for almost two years?

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Solicitor General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, what I indicated yesterday was that the RCMP have worked with the Italian police since 1999. They did not positively identify or locate the individual until December of last year. When they did that, he was arrested, put in jail and is now awaiting deportation hearings.

[Gilles Duceppe, Bloc, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the RCMP admitted that it supposedly lost track of him.

We are told that there was a warrant out for him in January 1999. But 25 months, a completely unreasonable length of time in the circumstances, went by before he was arrested.

Given the means available to the RCMP and the fact that we knew where his wife lived, because at the same time she was seeking immigrant status, how can the minister explain that Mr. Amodeo was allowed to roam freely in Canada for 25 months?

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Solicitor General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, what I can indicate, as I have before, is that the RCMP were working with the Italian authorities. There was an investigation under way but the only way that the RCMP can arrest somebody is under a Canadian warrant. They investigated, located and identified the individual in December of 2000. He was arrested, put in jail and is now awaiting deportation hearings.

[Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral, Bloc, Laval Centre, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in January 1999, the wife of Gaetano Amodeo made an application to Immigration Canada in which the name of her husband, a notorious criminal in Italy, appeared as a dependent. That same month, the RCMP was informed that an arrest warrant had been issued for Amodeo by a court in Palermo.

How does the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration explain that, at the time, her department, which has access to the RCMP's central file, failed to connect Amodeo the applicant and Amodeo the criminal, thereby delaying his arrest by several months?

[Elinor Caplan, Liberal, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Speaker, as I have stated before, my department receives over 300,000 immigration applications each year. This particular file was transferred from one office to another and Mr. Amadeo's name was removed from the application by a legal order. The criminal checks were not proceeded on him at that time because his name had been removed from the application.

[Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral, Bloc, Laval Centre, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in September 1999, the Canadian authorities received a request for the extradition of Gaetano Amodeo, who was being sought for murder in his country. A few months later, the RCMP admitted that it has lost track of the dangerous criminal.

My question is for the solicitor general. Why did the RCMP, which had been aware of the request for extradition since September 1999 and which had lost track of Amodeo at the end of 1999, wait until December 2000 to ask Immigration Canada for help in arresting this criminal?

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Solicitor General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, as I have indicated many times in the House, I do not run investigations in the RCMP, but I do get information from the commissioner of the RCMP. He has indicated that the RCMP did not locate and identify this individual until December 2000. When it did, he was arrested, put in jail and is now awaiting deportation.

The Environment

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, now that President Bush has the election behind him, he has come clean that Americans have no intention of honouring their signature on the Kyoto deal. I am sure the Prime Minister has seen the letter.

Leaders from around the world have been swift and scathing in their condemnation but not a word or a whisper from Canada.

Will the Prime Minister register Canada's protest with his new special friend in Washington, or will we remain, once again, international wimps on the sideline?

[David Anderson, Liberal, Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder where the hon. member has been over the last few months, particularly at the time of the meeting in the Hague on climate change where Canada, through the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Axworthy, expressed our position and our clear disappointment at the breakdown of those meetings, partly because of the American position but, more important, because of the position taken by the Europeans. I would reiterate that we had a meeting in Ottawa immediately following to see what we could do to proceed with the events but we were unable to get agreement. Now we do indeed have a serious problem with respect to this gap between the Europeans—

[The Speaker]

The hon. member for Halifax.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, we have a really serious problem in that this government will say nothing about the fact that, with President Bush, Kyoto is kaput.

Forget international obligations, forget election commitments and forget the environmental consequences, will the Prime Minister, right here and now, condemn Bush's Kyoto kiss-off and make it absolutely clear that Canada will only sign on to international trade agreements if there are real, enforceable environmental—

[The Speaker]

The hon. Minister of the Environment.

[David Anderson, Liberal, Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, the letter sent by the president of the United States to four United States senators made it perfectly clear that while the president would not proceed with his campaign remarks with respect to carbon dioxide, he, nevertheless, in that letter, made it perfectly clear that the United States administration of President Bush takes extremely seriously the problem of climate change and intends to take measures to deal with it.

Ethics Counsellor

[Joe Clark, Progressive Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister keeps saying that the auberge file is closed, yet the ethics counsellor has just found another part of that deal that needs investigating.

Jonas Prince says that he returned the Prime Minister's shares. What happened to those shares then? Was the Prime Minister, or the Prime Minister's trustee, or the Prime Minister's lawyer, or any other of the Prime Minister's go-betweens, advised that the ownership of those shares was back in the Prime Minister's control? If those shares were not in the Prime Minister's control, and Mr. Prince had sent them back, who controls those shares?

[Jean Chrétien, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I replied to the Leader of the Opposition very clearly a minute ago.