Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my friend from Winnipeg--Transcona, a fellow House leader, for his usual ferocious and fastidious comments. I always love hearing him quote Progressive Conservative prime ministers' remarks.
Let us be very frank about why we are having this debate. It is an official opposition supply day. However, what we see happening here is the attempt by the government to table some sort of rebuttal or response to what has been swirling around it. The timing is interesting. The timing is that the Liberals were caught doing something. They were caught outright with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar and handing cookies out to their friends. This is the reason this is happening now.
The Prime Minister in his remarks stated no less than five times that they have raised the bar. He used that expression repeatedly. I want to draw attention to a quote that is very relevant to this commentary by the Prime Minister. It comes from a very distinguished and decorated individual in the public service, a man by the name of Gordon Robertson. On top of being a privy council officer, Gordon Robertson was clerk of the privy council for prime ministers Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau and spent a very historic career within the public service.
We all recall the Shawinigate scandal when the Prime Minister made inappropriate approaches, called the president of the Business Development Bank to lobby for a government loan for a friend, a businessman and former business partner in a golf course that he used to own in his riding. There was an RCMP review of the circumstances. There were substantiated allegations that someone from the Prime Minister's Office, Jean Carle, was dispatched to the Business Development Bank to sanitize files and mop up to ensure that Mr. Clean was able to take away all of the evidence that could be found.
This is what Gordon Robertson had to say in response to that particular scandal, which is one of many:
What happened in Shawinigan never would have met the standard set in Pearson's code of ethics. I should know--I drafted it. This Prime Minister has lowered the bar.
That is a fairly damning condemnation from a person in the know, a person who spent his career working in the Parliament of Canada, working in service of Canadians.
This particular issue of corruption has seized the House of Commons. Members opposite and members of the official opposition might like to suggest that the opposition is not focusing on the real issues. We are not talking about health care or the softwood lumber issue and the trade disputes that are jeopardizing Canada's workforce and productivity. We are talking about that but it has become clouded. It has become a distraction when we see the level of corruption, the level of conflict of interest, the level and extent the government is willing to go to perpetrate power, to hold on to and concentrate its power by rewarding individuals who are loyal to it and who in turn make contributions to the Liberals.
This is a very simple issue. It is an issue of competence, but it is an issue of corruption. It is an issue of confidence. It is an issue of Canadians having faith in what their government is doing and believing what the government is going to do. Promises were made prior to elections about what the Liberals were going to do to clean up government, to be more transparent, those famous red book promises that should lead all Liberals to be red in the face when one looks at them in retrospect.
This issue of corruption will not go away with a simple swipe of the hand and the Prime Minister simply stating that the government is going to look into it, that it has a five point or six point plan. We have seen that routine before. It is getting tired. We saw it with the HRDC scandal. We saw it just last week with the public works minister suggesting that all is fine, that the fiefdom will be whole again, that he can clean it up with a five point plan. Now the Prime Minister is trying the same tired routine. It is simply not going to work. This is a problem for which the government has to take account and for which it has to take responsibility.
There was very little apology and responsibility in the remarks made by the Prime Minister in the House today. Let us be clear on one thing. It is the Prime Minister who must set the standard. He is the one who all members of his government should look to to set that standard. What a low standard that is.
There is an old expression that the fish stinks from the head. Clearly, the Prime Minister is the head of the government and what a smell. This standard has never been lower.
The Prime Minister likes to make the claim that no one in his cabinet has ever resigned or has had to leave in the midst of scandal and allegation. That is not true. His transport minister resigned over allegations of inappropriate letter writing campaigns. His deputy prime minister at the time resigned over the broken promise of the GST. Do members not remember that? The government was going to abolish it, get rid of it, and rescind it. That did not happen. She ran again of course and was re-elected at a great cost to taxpayers. She at least showed a flicker, a glimmer of accountability. However, she is back in full force. There are other ministers. There was a solicitor general in the government that resigned over loose lips on an airline.
It is not true to say that there was never a resignation. Clearly, there should have been more. The Prime Minister, by setting such a low standard for himself, cannot expect his members to take account or be responsible. We cannot claim that the standards are there if there are no standards. If there are no standards, there are no resignations. That is the formula.