Mr. Speaker, it my pleasure to rise and address this important issue. I want to thank my friend who just spoke for doing a good job of outlining the many ethical problems the government has run into and also exposing the weakness of its solutions.
Earlier today my leader gave an excellent speech about the red herring approach to dealing with the ethical issues that trouble this government. What we mean by that is that the government is proposing a code of conduct for parliamentarians when the real problems are flowing from the cabinet of this government. That is where all the problems flow from. The government is proposing this red herring hoping that the public will not look at the details of the proposal and will not understand that really it does not do anything to address the sorts of problems that have plagued the government for the last several months.
I want to emphasize how frustrated we are with how disingenuous the government is on the issue. Surely its conscience should be tweaked by the fact that the public is upset with this. On the other hand, the government is not prepared to do anything at all to really address it.
There are so many issues we could talk about, but I just want to run through the sorry record of the government. Probably the best way to do that is to refer back to 1993 when the government came to power and made a red book promise about an independent ethics counsellor. In the red book the Liberals made a promise for an independent ethics counsellor who would answer to parliament and be appointed by parliament. Nine years later that has not come to fruition. Here they are in the middle of an ethical storm and they still cannot understand that they need to take that step if they are going to win the confidence of the Canadian people at all. That is really the starting point for this whole thing. The government has to fulfill that first promise and start to win the confidence of the public again. It has to win over the public to the point of view that the government is serious about tackling the public's ethical concerns.
Let us talk for a few moments about some of the ethical issues that have come up in the last several months. It is well known that this latest round of scandal was sparked by an internal audit in public works that was followed up. It prompted an investigation by the auditor general. It had to do with a company called Groupaction. Groupaction in this case received a total of $1.5 million for reports. We found out later that in fact there were supposed to be three reports. One report is completely missing. The other report is basically a copy of the first report. The public paid $1.5 million for these shoddy, and in some cases missing, reports, if there ever were reports in the first place.
The government has moved very slowly to deal with this issue and it has moved inadequately. In fact, it has stalled and covered up at every opportunity. How did the government do that? It did that by proposing some half measures which will ensure that the real essence of the problem is never revealed. It did that in a couple of ways.
First, the auditor general is going ahead now with an investigation of the problem throughout the government. That is a good thing, but the problem is that it will take probably a year and a half or two years to do it. By and large the auditor general will focus on accounting practices, which is important, but it does not get at the essence of the problem.
On the other side we have the RCMP investigating. Right now I believe the minister has the RCMP looking into about six different contracts issued through public works. That is important because we get at the criminality, but again there is that area between poor accounting practices and criminality which many people would regard as unethical or corrupt.
However, the government does not see it that way. As my leader pointed out today, the Prime Minister has a very different standard when it comes to describing what is unethical compared to where Canadians are at. The Prime Minister seems to think something is unethical only if it is illegal. The Canadian public sees it much differently. As my leader said today, Canadians see any abuse of power as unethical, and we regard what the Prime Minister has been doing over the last nine years, but really only has been caught a couple of times on, as being a real abuse of power and therefore unethical.
We want a way of addressing all those things that fall between what are breaches of good bookkeeping, of the treasury board guidelines and of the Financial Administration Act and what is clearly criminal and illegal. In order to do that, we need a full, independent, public, judicial inquiry and we need it now. If we do not have that, ultimately we will not have confidence in the government. We will not feel that we know for sure that the government is being careful with the spending of our money. More important, we want to know that the government is not using our money to pay off friends, to engage in cronyism, to try to buy votes or to do things that it thinks are politically important at the expense of the integrity of government. We want a full public inquiry, as a result, to get to the bottom of this and reveal what we believe really has become a systemic problem in government today.
I want to back up what I am saying by providing some more evidence of the nature of the problem. I talked about Groupaction and the three reports, but it goes well beyond that. Public works seems to be a nest of people who are providing contracts to political friends for their personal benefit or at least for their political benefit. I want to offer many examples. I have talked a bit about Groupaction, but there are many other names that the public is not familiar with. Groupe Everest is one of them. There is Coffin. There are a number of them.
What we do find out is that without exception these companies that are receiving millions of dollars in advertising money are also big donors to the Liberal Party of Canada. Also, there is what the auditor general described in the Groupaction deal: appalling bookkeeping. As she said, in that particular case the people in charge broke every guideline possible and they broke absolutely every rule in the book. We see that again and again in some of these other contracts.
My leader spoke today about the problem at the justice department, with public works ordering a report on how to sell the gun registry when in fact the justice department did not even order it. It seems like that report was never produced either although the government paid out $330,000 to purchase a phantom report.
It is not just that one. There was the sponsorship program and the outdoor shows in Quebec. We have a case where hundreds of thousands of dollars was paid out for sponsorship at a show in Quebec that was never actually held. Did the government go after the $330,000 in that case? No, it did not. Only now, when it has been revealed because of access to information requests and good work by the media, do we find that the government is finally getting to the point where it is going to address some of these issues. In a way, that speaks volumes about why we need a full, independent, public, judicial inquiry. We need it because it seems that the only time this government will really act is when it is caught with its hand in the cookie jar.
We have had many examples of this over the last several days. We have had the public works minister get up and say that in the year 2000 public works found some things in an internal audit and posted that on the Internet. He seems to think that solves all the problems. What he did not do, of course, is take action. He did not go through the entire department to see if there were other examples of contracts paid out to Liberal friends for reports that did not exist. He did not do any of that, which of course is what one should do. One has a fiduciary responsibility to do that as a minister of the crown, as somebody who controls not millions but billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. One has that obligation.
What did the Liberals do? They did nothing until they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar and then they did only as much as they felt they had to do to move the issue from the front burner to the back burner. They did not fix the problem. They tried to manage the problem. That is a problem in and of itself and again we think that is evidence that we need a full, independent, public, judicial inquiry.
There are many other examples of problems in the government. I do not want the House or the public watching to think that this is limited in some way to public works. We have had problems before in the Prime Minister's own riding with Shawinigate. Just recently in the House we raised the issue of the audit that the Department of Human Resources Development had been sitting on for two years. We finally got the department to release it. The information commissioner finally got the department to release it after two years of fighting it in the courts.
What we found in that independent audit was that the Prime Minister had intervened personally to help companies in his riding, companies that were not meeting the criteria for receiving grants through the transitional jobs fund. The Prime Minister intervened on their behalf. These companies were the same ones that were showing up in his campaign literature. We also found out that according to the internal audit some of these companies may have been set up solely for the purpose of defrauding the Department of Human Resources Development. Those are not my words. Those are the words of the independent auditor. That is why the human resources minister sat on the report for two years.
In the last several days we have had the Deputy Prime Minister get up and say that there is no evidence for some of the accusations that this side is making toward the Prime Minister, but the evidence came from human resources development, from that audit. That is just one piece of evidence and there are many, many more. Already today we have heard a little bit about the problems that surround the Prime Minister's conflict of interest with respect to the golf course in which he had an interest and that whole mess. I will not bore the House with all the details because others have already spoken on it today, but suffice it to say that the issue is not closed. There are still troubling questions about the Prime Minister's involvement in that whole affair, which may have possibly put him in a direct conflict of interest.
I think justice demands that we have a full, independent, public, judicial inquiry to get to the bottom of all of this. It is not enough to have the RCMP investigate the criminality. It is not enough to have the auditor general determine whether or not accounting rules were followed. What we need to find out is whether the practices of the government fall into that area between those two things. We need to find out whether or not a judge somewhere thinks that there are practices of the government that are essentially unethical. If there are, those practices need to be changed.
Again, justice demands that. We are talking about not hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars, but billions of dollars that are being spent. We need to have confidence that this money is being spent ethically and certainly within the bounds of the law. That is an argument that we are making to have a full public inquiry into this whole mess.
I will wrap up now by saying that in the last number of months I think we have seen a sea change in the House of Commons. I think we have pulled the mask off the government to some degree and what we have seen on the underside is pretty ugly.
For a long time the Prime Minister portrayed himself as the little guy from Shawinigan. I think we are finding out that the little guy from Shawinigan can be extraordinarily ruthless not just in his own caucus but also in the sense that he is quite prepared to break every rule in the book to ensure that his friends and political supporters are looked after at the expense of the taxpayers. That is unacceptable and it has to end. It is not appropriate in a country like Canada to have that style of government.
I am glad that the public finally is getting to see what we as the opposition see on a daily basis. They are starting to understand it. I very much look forward to that day in the fall when we can get back to this place so we can continue to hold the government to account for its troubling actions.
Mr. Speaker, I move:
That the amendment be amended by inserting between the words “Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons be” and the word “appointed” the word “immediately”.