Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the motion today. I am not exactly sure where the members of the Liberal Party want to go with it, although I do have their talking points. It is a scurrilous bag of scum if ever there was one. It is just an awful list. It is a litany of accusations and unfounded garbage of the worst kind.
I want to tell the House what I think this is not about today. It is not just about patronage, although we could go on about that. We could go on about the Senate appointments, the appointment of Mr. Gagliano to Denmark or the 5,000 other appointments the Prime Minister gives every year. However I do not think that is really the problem.
I think people understand what is going on and they do not like it. They kind of hearken back to Mr. Mulroney's promise that he would appoint Liberals to these patronage appointments only after every last living, breathing Progressive Conservative member was appointed. That attitude was no good and it is still no good today. However I do not think that is what the motion is really about.
It is also not about influence peddling, although we could go on about that. We could go on about the fact that Pierre Corbeil, a Liberal fundraiser, was convicted of influence peddling. The Liberals have now disassociated themselves from him but he was a Liberal fundraiser who was convicted. In fact, following his conviction we found out that not only was he selling access to ministers but a whole structure was in place in the Quebec federal Liberal wing of dual approvals. Approval was required from not only the minister but from the Quebec Liberal wing for a project to go ahead and the grant to be accepted.
It is totally unacceptable. It is beyond the pale for someone to say that a political party should get to approve who gets the grants, which are taxpayer dollars. However I do not think that is what this is about today.
I also do not think the debate is about broken promises. We talked quite a bit about the need to have an independent ethics commissioner. I do think it is still necessary. I think the Prime Minister finally understands that there is a problem. Today was the first time I ever remember the Prime Minister respond to an opposition motion. He spoke today to address the fact that his government is embraced and embroiled in many scandals and he needs to find a way out of them. He may feel the need to appoint an ethics commissioner somewhere down the road. Who knows? It was a promise from the red book and I think it is long overdue. I think it is like many other broken promises. People kind of shrug their shoulders and say “What do you expect? How do you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving”. It is sad but that is where we are at right now.
I also do not think the debate is about a refusal by the government to listen to the other independent watchdogs of parliament. We could go down the list. It has refused to listen to the auditor general. When the auditor general said that the finance minister did not use accepted accounting practices, what was the government's response? It said that it was too bad but that was the way it was.
The auditor general said that it was almost beyond belief how many rules were broken under the Financial Administration Act, the treasury board guidelines and the minister's own guidelines on allocations of contracts. The debate is not about ignoring that, although in and of itself that would be a good debate. However I do not think that is what we are talking about today.
How about the auditor of the EI fund who said that the government was consistently overcharging EI premiums and taxing workers and employers for creating jobs in the country? The government refused to listen to that independent auditor.
The government refused to listen to the privacy commissioner who warned the government that the bills it had just brought forward attacked the privacy of Canadians and warned the government of the fact that we were becoming almost a police state. I am not overstating that. That is what the privacy commissioner said.
The access to information commissioner, who is another independent officer of parliament, said that the government had almost a code of secrecy regarding what it did. He warned Canadians and parliamentarians that the access to information that we deserve was being compromised by the government. That would have been a good debate in and of itself but again I do not think that is what we are talking about today.
When things get really bad and warrant inquiries, such as the Krever commission on the tainted blood scandal, the Somalia inquiry, the APEC inquiry and the Nixon inquiry into the Pearson airport deal, time and again those inquiries are shut down, the funding is withdrawn, the mandate is changed and the appointments to those commissions are cooked.
Time and again there are problems with those inquiries. There is no independence. They are not allowed to come to a conclusion and, even if they could, nothing happens to follow. We could talk about that at length and, in and of itself, would be enough to be debated today, but I do not think that is the core of the issue.
We could even be talking today, and there has already been some discussion, about the long overdue reforms of parliament and the frustrations in this place from not only the opposition side but the government side about the lack of respect for private member's business. People have asked why the member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca touched the mace the other day. It was in utter frustration over his private member's bill being eviscerated and emasculated by the government.
This is the same frustration felt by the government backbenchers who sit wringing their hands over the fact that their private member's business is often not votable, that they cannot get something into the hopper and when it does it does not go anywhere. Even if it does get to the floor of the House, passes and goes to a committee, the committee spends 90% of its time emasculating it and nuking the clauses out of the bill.
Even when a private member's bill gets as far as the Senate, the Liberals use their power in the Senate to make sure it does not progress to actual law. They make sure it never comes up on the order paper, never gets debated and never becomes law.
We were stuck patting ourselves on the back when we created the new Canadien horse, which was not a bad thing in and of itself, but what a minor role for legislators to say that our crowning glory was that we were able to stand in support of creating an official Canadien horse. What a moment. Neither the Liberals nor the opposition members came here to be glorified in trivial legislation like that.
Therefore, the debate could be about the exasperations in the House, the lack of free votes and the lack of influence. We are seeing it manifest itself on the Liberal side to the point where people are starting to push back both in the newspapers and even a bit in the House. They are starting to get so exasperated that they are standing up and speaking out. We could go on about that and it would be a good debate, but again I do not think that is what we are talking about today.
What we are talking about today is a malaise that has hit the government after nine long years in power. It is a malaise that cannot be explained away by an $800 cheque, when it was issued, when the priest saw it, when it was cashed and all of that. That is not the issue.
This is not an issue of whether Mr. Gagliano should have been appointed an ambassador or whether he went out of town before the RCMP moved in to check the books.
The issue is about the new Minister of Public Works and Government Services, a man I have a lot of respect for because I worked with him for quite a while when he was House leader, not seeing the train coming down the tracks where he was standing. That is the problem the Liberal government is facing today.
Why on earth did the minister of public works allow himself to be put in the position of a conflict of interest like that? I cannot believe it.
I know the man and I know him to be a good sort but he is the minister of public works and he is in charge of handing out millions of dollars in contracts, some of which have had huge controversy over the last few weeks and months. For him to stay at someone's place who is intricately involved, in a business sense, in acquiring more contracts, in essence, from him, the public works minister, I cannot believe he would let that happen. He said himself that he would not do it again. I do not doubt that because, in retrospect, I think he has seen how bad it looks and how wrong it is to sit in the cottage of someone who wants to influence the minister. It is just wrong to do that.
This train was coming, the light was on but he did not even notice. That is the problem. What we are talking about today is that time and again the members on that side of the House stand on the tracks with the train coming and say that there is nothing wrong with this. When they get caught, like the auditor general caught them, like the independent auditor caught them, like privacy commissioner caught them or the independent retired generals from the armed forces caught them, time and again they say that they had better change.
When the Minister of Finance found out that a lobbyist in Alberta gave him a cheque for $25,000 to help with his future leadership campaign, he said “Oh, my goodness, I got caught. That is so wrong. I will give the cheque back”. The train ran right over him. He did not see it and did not even hear it.
The Liberals are so desensitized that they have not realized that time and again these examples are proving to Canadians that the government has lost its moral compass. I think that malaise is the subject of today's debate. It is not about any one of those things. It is the fact that they have been desensitized to an important issue to the point where they do not even know when they have done wrong.