My leader has asked for an example. I just happen to have one here.
On June 3, 1985, the minister of public works got up and referred to the fact that sons of the minister of justice at that time, Mr. Crosbie, were involved in working as legal agents for the government. He said “This whole incident gives new meaning to the theory of relativity”. I am not sure what he meant, but maybe he meant that there is a certain moral relativity, that is to say when somebody else is doing it, it is wrong, but when he is doing it, it is not wrong, it is just a mistake that has been cleared up.
What did the minister of public works say at that time? I say this with regret because I have worked with the minister of public works in his capacity as government House leader and I found him to be one of the best government House leaders I have ever dealt with. That unfortunately does not absolve him of having to answer for the things he has done in the other capacities he has for this government. What the minister of public works said when he was a member of the opposition on June 3, 1985, was that “The Prime Minister...ought to relieve the Minister of Justice of his responsibilities until this whole mess can be cleared up and corrected”.
This is all we are asking of this government: that the minister of public works, if he feels that ultimately he has done nothing wrong and that ultimately he has nothing to hide, simply do what he asked of the Conservative minister of justice on June 3, 1985, and resign until such time as this whole matter can be cleared up.
It may well be that the minister of public works would be able to return to the front benches of the government, as other ministers over the years have done in provincial cabinets and federal cabinets. It is not a permanent departure if in fact one is vindicated. I would urge the minister of public works to consider and the Prime Minister to consider taking the advice that was offered at that time.
I do not want to spend a lot of time on that because I think that in fact there is something corrupt in or corrupting of our political culture in the way that we deal with corruption here in the House, in the way that we deal with patronage and in the way that we deal with these ethical questions on the floor of the House of Commons. We had hoped for some redemption from this sandbox mentality that we get into where everyone is saying “You did this” or “You did that”. This hardly enhances people's perceptions of parliament or of democracy and it contributes to the kind of disrepute that my leader spoke of, which serves the corporate agenda very well and serves the privatizing agenda very well. If Canadians were to watch parliament for a day would they want their country or anything else to be run by people who are engaged in this kind of constant mudslinging and bickering? No.
Back in 1993 we had hoped that the Prime Minister was serious about trying to redeem that situation by appointing an ethics commissioner, not a counsellor or an extra spin doctor for the government, but an ethics commissioner just as he promised, a truly independent ethics commissioner who would report to parliament. Here we are, it is nine years later and the government is mired in various forms of accusations about patronage and corruption. The Prime Minister said he is going to do something about it and the appointment of an independent ethics commissioner is not even on that list. It is nine years later and he still insists on not keeping that promise.
The Prime Minister has a lot to answer for. He likes to say that he does not want people to act in a way that brings the institution into disrepute. Fair enough. Those of us in the NDP particularly are leery about that. We do not like to do that. We do not want to bring a democracy into disrepute. On the other hand we cannot allow glaring errors of ethical judgment to go uncriticized. We participate but at the same time we want to keep other issues before the House so that the whole political culture does not become obsessed with this and is corrupted by it.
The Prime Minister likes to hide behind not just keeping the reputation of democracy up, but he likes to hide behind national unity. Not everything that is done in the name of national unity is appropriate. Just because something is being done in the name of national unity does not make it right. National unity does not make gross patronage right. National unity does not make all the things the government is being accused of right.
National unity cannot be used as some kind of umbrella or mask for otherwise unacceptable activities. Yet that has been the habit of the Liberal Party for years, not just the Liberal Party but primarily the Liberal Party. That has been the last refuge of scoundrels, as someone said. A lot of scoundrels have hidden under the umbrella of promoting national unity, as if the end justified the means. As someone suggested, how creating the impression of a corrupt federal government in Quebec helps to promote national unity is something we might want to think about a bit more.
The Prime Minister said there is a debate about the role of government. The Liberals believe the role of government is to help the poor, et cetera and members of the official opposition do not and that is why they spend so much time attacking HRDC. That is why in some ways we did not spend as much time on HRDC, because we do not want to be part of an attack on the role of government.
The role of government is being jeopardized not just by the ideology of the official opposition but by the behaviour of the government. It is the government that gives the role of government a bad name. It is the Liberals who for decades have given the role of government a bad name through patronage and all the other kinds of activities it has been accused of here.
We need to look at getting rid of the role of money in our political system. Some innovating has been going on over the years in Quebec and recently in Manitoba. Many people have come to the conclusion that we need more extensive public funding of elections so that we do not have this kind of dependence on corporate money, which presumably has a lot to do with the relationships the Liberal government has established with advertising companies. One of the things we could look at is reducing the role of money in our democratic culture because it does have a corrupting influence.
Finally, I would like to go back to the whole issue of accusation and counteraccusation. One of the things we learned when we were kids, and I am sure your mother said it to you, Mr. Speaker, as my mother said it to me many times, was that two wrongs do not make a right.
The Liberal government gets up and says “You lived in Stornoway and you said you would not, and you took pensions and you said you would not”. There was a lot of political dishonesty on the part of the official opposition with respect to a whole lot of things, all of which were part and parcel of the democratic process falling into disrepute. That does not for a minute and should not for a minute obscure the gravity of what is going on on the other side of the House.
For the Prime Minister and others to engage in that kind of counteraccusation does exactly what the Prime Minister says he is concerned about. It calls the whole process into disrepute and should not be engaged in.