Debates of June 20th, 2002

Code of Conduct

[Michel Guimond, Bloc, Beauport—Montmorency—Côte-De- Beaupré—Île-D'Orléans, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Given that perseverance is one of my traits, I ask once again the unanimous consent of the House to move an amendment to government Motion No. 30, which is currently before the House.

I move:

That the main motion be amended, in the eighth paragraph, by adding between the words “taken, so long as both Houses” and “are represented” the following:

“, including at least one member of the opposition from each House,”.

I ask for unanimous consent to amend Motion No. 30 accordingly.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Does the House give its consent to the hon. member to move his motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Deputy Speaker]

The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

(Motion agreed to)

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, like other members who have spoken previously, it is with some reluctance that I stand to speak about the issue of ethics here in the House, given the sad spectacle that we have seen in the last number of weeks and months, I would suggest, and some might argue we could go right back to the beginning in 1993. We are talking about the government's record of ethics and the need to refer the matter to an independent committee to look at the issue overall.

The problem with the motion is that it is a bit of a diversion. It distracts away from the real issue of the ethics of the decision makers in this place, the cabinet and the executive branch, and those who have ultimate signing authority over millions and millions of taxpayers' dollars and the way in which they have been conducting their duties.

I want to address the amendment proposed by the Leader of the Opposition. I congratulate him on the remarks he put forward this morning. I was certainly pleased to hear him point out the fallacy of the Prime Minister's boast that he has not fired any ministers for misconduct.

Of course what we have seen is the complete duplicitous actions of the Prime Minister in sending off and in fact rewarding some members of the cabinet, giving them postings overseas, simply giving them lateral shuffles or waiting until there is an opportune time to sort of slip them under the rug. Indeed, because of the Prime Minister's low ethical bar, as has been pointed out many times by individuals like Gordon Robertson, the retired Clerk of the Privy Council, the Prime Minister has failed in maintaining a duty of high standards for himself and for those around the cabinet table.

It is easy to have no resignations or no dismissals because high standards are what result in resignations and dismissals. To brag that there were no firings is to admit that the bar has been lowered to an all time low. Do not just take that from a partisan opposition member. Let us examine the words of Gordon Robertson who now at age 83 is in a unique position to provide commentary.

Gordon Robertson spent his entire professional life as a public servant beginning in 1941 serving parliament. He worked for Mackenzie King. He was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's superior in the Privy Council Office between 1950 and 1952. He served as the Clerk of the Privy Council to John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson and Mr. Trudeau. He was the first secretary to the cabinet for federal-provincial relations. Mr. Robertson is a person who in essence achieved the very highest office in the civil service. He is a very educated intellectual in commenting on the government's performance.

What did Gordon Robertson have to say about the government's performance and in particular the Shawinigan scandal? I am quick to point out that scandal is the all time low in government and perhaps will go down as the biggest scandal in Canadian history when all the facts are finally outed. It is the type of scandal that makes the Watergate scandal look more like a shoplifting charge at a five and dime store. This is what Gordon Robertson said about the government's performance:

What happened in Shawinigan would never have met the standard set in Pearson's code of ethics. I should know. I drafted it. This Prime Minister has lowered the bar.

Certainly that is a scathing, damning condemnation from a person like Gordon Robertson.

The Prime Minister cannot provide leadership to the House on ethical questions. He has failed abysmally in that duty. In 1995, two years after the Prime Minister took office, the auditor general presented a report on ethics in government. This is what it contained in chapter one:

Four scenarios dealt with the appropriateness of receiving benefits, preferentially conferring benefits or improperly using knowledge of a department. On the whole, public servants in the four departments believe it would be inappropriate to receive benefits from suppliers to or recipients of their programs, preferentially confer benefits or improperly use their knowledge of the department.

For example: 89% of public servants, 96% of senior managers, believe it would be inappropriate to accept the use of a ski chalet from a recipient of their contribution or grant program--

Does that sound familiar?

Seventy-five per cent of public servants, 94% of senior managers, believe it would be inappropriate to accept, at cost, goods or services for personal use from a supplier to their program;

Seventy per cent of public servants, 89% of senior managers, believe it would be inappropriate for an employee to hire a brother-in-law on a $20,000 untendered contract;

Seventy-two per cent of public servants believe it would be inappropriate for a senior manager in a department to use knowledge gained while working to secure a position with a firm wanting to do business with that department.

These points were brought out two years after the government took office, yet it was completely mired in this type of activity. This is what the Prime Minister was told further in that 1995 report on leadership:

Even the best codes of conduct or conflict of interest guidelines could not protect Canadians from a government that was not fundamentally honest.

Boy, there is foreshadowing.

To concentrate on public servants without emphasizing the role of leadership by ministers, deputy ministers and other senior levels would simply contribute to the existing cynicism among public servants. The literature on ethics and fraud emphasizes the importance of leadership and of the examples set by leaders in determining the ethical tone of an organization. Our discussions with former senior public servants also suggest the importance of support at the top to counter unethical acts.

That says it all. The old expression is that the fish stinks from the head. The Prime Minister was engaging in unethical activities by lobbying the head of the Business Development Bank to help an individual and a property in which he held an interest at the time. The extraordinary efforts that were made to cover the tracks and hide those facts is what remains to be shown to Canadians in the true light of day.

Michael Starr and Mitchell Sharp noted in their 1984 report entitled “Ethical Conduct in the Public Sector”:

A large measure of the responsibility rests with the Prime Minister in relation to matters of ethical conduct in the public (because) the Prime Minister sets the tone for the entire government.

The actual and perceived day to day behaviour of leaders such as the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers and senior public servants must be consistent with the government's ethical guidelines. Again it is leading by example. For those who do not know the name, Mitchell Sharp is the Prime Minister's mentor and dollar a year advisor.

That information, logic and advice has been with the Prime Minister for a long time. The Liberals and the Prime Minister in particular made ethics a campaign issue. That was part of the red book promise. That was what was held out to Canadians as a shining beacon of change, that the Liberals were going to clean up government, that they were going to change it. What have they done? They have done the complete polar opposite of the promises that were highlighted in the red book such as the desire to change the free trade agreement and to get rid of the GST. They were completely broken, completely abrogated.

Clearly the Prime Minister prefers words and broken promises over actions. Effective and independent ethical regimes for himself and his cabinet have gone completely by the wayside. The motion before the House is just a smokescreen to conceal the dark refusal of the Prime Minister to honour the promises he made in the red book to appoint an independent ethics counsellor to police cabinet conflicts of interest.

In recent days the ethics counsellor himself has revealed that he is certainly not a watchdog but is a guard dog for the Prime Minister and his cabinet. He has proven to be ineffectual and anaemic in terms of his ability to have any sort of moral authority over the subject of ethics.

He admitted openly before a parliamentary council that he himself had been disciplined for unethical breaches over, wait for it, the awarding of contracts. He had lost signing privileges while working in the Department of Industry for breaching ethical standards that should have applied to him as a senior bureaucrat. Even faced with that fact, the Prime Minister chose to elevate him to the position of ethics counsellor who we know only reports to the Prime Minister. It is a complete and utter farce that drives cynicism into apathy in the minds of most Canadians.

The futile effort to cover the trail of many of these scandals and the pathetic efforts to arrange for an exit strategy for Mr. Wilson in months ahead, one must really wonder where he is headed. It is probably to an embassy in Norway or Sweden, somewhere close to Denmark. All of these efforts make it appear that he has seen the light.

After more than eight years in office the Prime Minister has finally grasped that at some point ethical standards had to be set, that ethical standards should apply to him. It did not matter that the report that was originally put forward was not about standards for ministers or the independent commissioner with powers to investigate the cabinet or the Prime Minister's own misconduct.

Groupe Polygone, Everest, Lafleur, all these infamous names in time will be synonymous with the ineffectual broken promises and contradictions of the government in what it said and what it actually did in awarding of contracts. It does bear mentioning because it is constantly thrown back at the Progressive Conservatives about the scandalous government that preceded it.

A lack of judgment on the part of a defence minister entering a strip club hardly cost Canadians hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone millions. It cost that person a lot of embarrassment and he lost his job over it. The fisheries minister, when 15 cans of tainted tuna were found in a private plant in New Brunswick, also lost his job, not at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers. A cabinet minister making an inappropriate remark in an airport lost his job, again not at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is the litany of resignations that the Prime Minister likes to cite in the House. Yet let us compare his government's record. It is just incredible. I hear the chirping of hon. chipmunks opposite. They seem to be somewhat agitated.

What we have seen is no less than six criminal investigations embarked upon in a short period of time. We should give it time, there will be more. It is an unprecedented ethical breach that we have seen. We have never seen so much scandal and criminal investigation in our country's history in one condensed period of time.

Referring the matter to a committee is an attempt to take the pressure off the Cabinet. I highlight the fact this is for all members of parliament and it should apply. It is nine years too late but it should definitely happen. It is a listing of tools to fight corruption. Transparency International lists Canada's Access to Information Act as a vital tool. This is the same act that the Prime Minister has gutted in either a pathetic reaction to September 11 or in a Machiavellian power grab. It is an attempt now to claw back this useful tool for parliament, to somehow blunt that instrument, because it is starting to disclose information and evidence. It is allowing the opposition to disclose and uncover much of the critical evidence that is needed to expose the government.

This is the same type of legislation that the Prime Minister, at great length and great expense to the people of Canada, has challenged in the courts when inquiries got too close to him. The Information Commissioner finds himself embroiled in a court case because he will have to jump through hoops to get information from the Prime Minister's Office rather than simply disclose the information, judiciously review it and decide whether it is relevant or not. The Prime Minister is not interested in ethics or access to information or the tools that would fight corruption and instill public confidence in government.

What the Prime Minister is doing and what he is signalling is that he is only interested in staying in office so that he can continue his calls to those he knows. He can continue to do business with the Business Development Bank of Canada when it benefits him and his friends. He can hammer down the media when it starts to write stories and disclose information about his activities. He can throw caution to the wind when it comes to these contracts and how they are being played out.

We have heard the evidence. This is not something that is scurrilous or being made up. We have seen consistent reports from people like the auditor general that hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid for absolutely nothing. This magical figure of $330,000 was paid out for a sport and fishing and hunting show that did not happen. Some reports were not written, others were written once, photocopied and billed two and three times.

This is not something the opposition has made up. These are facts. Groupaction has been the subject of one of the recent investigations and the auditor general herself brought to parliament's attention three questionable contracts worth $1.6 million. The government's money is not at risk. This is public money. This is money that would be far better spent on x-ray machines, electrocardiograph machines, overtime for nurses, farm aid, or heaven forbid that we order helicopters for our military. All of this thrown into this cesspool of corruption that has been seizing parliament has taken away from the real priorities of Canadians.

We can talk about individual cabinet ministers. There is an aide to the industry minister who travelled five times to Manitoba on so-called government business right around the time that the industry minister was kicking his campaign for leadership into high gear. The Winnipeg Free Press filed an access to information request about this particular aide and it was found that then and only then did the industry minister reimburse the House for one of those trips.

We know about the heritage minister who has been under fire recently. It was revealed that the chairman of the Toronto Walk of Fame, whose organization received $1 million from her same department, is also signed on as her chief fundraiser. Talk about a conflict of interest.

We have the former finance minister and Mr. Palmer and the embarrassing revelation that one of his top fundraisers in Calgary was simultaneously advising the finance department on resource tax policy and soliciting donations for the minister in the undeclared leadership campaign.

We know what happened to the former CIDA minister with respect to her voting patterns and what has happened at DND. My colleague from New Brunswick has raised this issue numerous times in questions about the Lancaster Aviation project, where thousands of dollars in parts belonging to DND are being stored in a warehouse belonging to a convicted felon in the United States.

There are the HRDC grants and contributions between 1999 and 2000. The Prime Minister refused at that time to fire an incompetent minister and the auditor general was not praiseworthy of his comments at that time. It was “more than just sloppy paperwork”, reminiscent of the auditor general's revelation about breaking every rule in the book. The auditor general's report on the HRDC scandal at that time stated:

This is very serious, because taxpayers have a right to expect that the government will follow due process when it spends public money.

That was the previous auditor general. I suspect that those sentiments are also held by Ms. Fraser.

Then there is the pièce de résistance, Shawinigate. Throughout this longstanding, yet to be resolved scandal, the Prime Minister claimed that he never did anything wrong, that he was only acting as any normal member of parliament would. I have to beg to differ though. I do not believe any normal member of parliament would call the president of the Business Development Bank of Canada to his or her home at 24 Sussex to influence and have a decision reversed about a loan to an individual in his or her riding. The individual in question had a pretty spotty history and had purchased adjoining property in which the Prime Minister still held an interest. And of course there are the extraordinary lengths that the Prime Minister, his minions in the PMO and others like Jean Carle went to, to ensure that the public never truly got the facts on what took place there.

There have been questions raised by the right hon. member for Calgary Centre about the transaction itself, which the Prime Minister has maintained all along was legitimate. Yet the company to which he supposedly sold his shares does not exist. It is not a registered company. This backdated napkin that was signed is the height of incredulity. There is no chance that the contract was legitimate and written at the time.

These are a few of the litany of examples. All of this is sticking to the government. It may not want to admit it but the public is looking now with a jaded eye at the performance of the Prime Minister and the government. What has happened in the midst of all of the panic and the scrambling around? We see the government coming unravelled, but not with the efforts of fixing, or giving the appearance of fixing these ethical breaches, this scandal and mismanagement of taxpayers' money.

What are the Liberals fixated on? They are fixated on the internal leadership battle that is under way. We have seen in recent days and weeks the Prime Minister and the former finance minister engaging in a personal battle of egos and wills, putting all of their efforts into shoring up support.

That speaks volumes to the priorities, the disconnect, the drift, and the arrogance that has become so prevalent on the government side of the House. Surely the Liberals must be hanging their heads in shame as this session comes to an end. They must be going back to their constituencies to face their constituents with a great deal of guilt and trepidation, as they should. This is a record now that they have to defend. They have spent the last nine years chastising the previous government, shifting the blame away while taking the credit for the positive financial policies that were put in place by the previous government.

The government has simply followed the previous government's plan with respect to the financial management of the country. It has broken new ground in hitting new lows in terms of ethical breach and breach of trust with Canadians.

[Monte Solberg, Canadian Alliance, Medicine Hat, AB]

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”.

[The Deputy Speaker]

The Chair will take that under advisement momentarily. We will proceed to questions and comments of the hon. member for Medicine Hat.

[Grant McNally, Canadian Alliance, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague touched upon some very important points in his speech.

Although it has not been mentioned in debate today, I think back to something which I mentioned in this place and I will mention it again. It goes back to 1997 when I was a newly elected member.

I remember a news story of an incident regarding a Liberal fundraiser named Pierre Corbeil. Somehow he got hold of a list of companies in Quebec that were receiving government grants or were about to get approval for government grants. He basically went to those companies and shook them down for donations to the Liberal Party of Canada. They had to come up with a donation of $10,000 to the Liberal Party of Canada. If they did not give this donation to the Liberal Party, they would not receive the grant. This is what was alleged, charges were brought forward and he was convicted of influence peddling.

I remember at the time thinking that this was a very strange occurrence but it seems that it possibly was the tip of the iceberg. This has gone ahead through the courts, the individual has been charged and that is good. However as time has gone by we have seen time and time again these kinds of dubious contracts given out to people who have donated to the Liberal Party. They have received government grants and then they have given money back to the Liberal Party of Canada.

I ask my colleague, how is it that Canadians could possibly trust a group of people that have engaged in this kind of activity for nine years now to be the ones to clean up that scandalous behaviour? Does he not agree that the people of Canada, the taxpayers whose money is being squandered in this way, would want to have a new government to come into place to take care of these issues? In other words, how can the people who have been the instigators of these schemes be the ones to now say “Trust us, we will clean it up”?

[Monte Solberg, Canadian Alliance, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am reminded of something Einstein said. To paraphrase it, he said that the problems we have today will never be solved by the same level of thinking that created the problems in the first place. That is clearly true.

The problem as it stands today is that the Liberal government was in power when all these problems first erupted, when Pierre Corbeil was convicted of influence peddling. The same people, the same Prime Minister are saying that they will now be the reformists, the people who will clean up the ethics problems in government. They are the people who created the problems.

It stretches the limits of credulity to suggest that they are the ideal people to clean this mess up. That is why we are asking for someone from the outside to come in, someone who is not in a conflict of interest. Who knows what skeletons are hidden in the closets of Liberal cabinet ministers. Can we really expect that they would put themselves in political peril by bringing in changes that would reveal some of those skeletons? Hardly. That does not make any sense at all. That is why we need someone from the outside to come in.

The problem with what the government has proposed today is that the auditor general may produce a damning report of what she finds as she scrutinizes spending in all the different departments but it may not necessarily be behaviour that is criminal. The RCMP is called in when evidence is found that demonstrates there may be grounds for a criminal investigation.

What about all those other areas? What about all those other incidents that are never reported on, that we never find in a massive bureaucracy that spends $170 billion a year? Clearly we need to have someone from the outside come in, pull it apart, analyze what is going on, raise serious questions and propose some serious answers. If we do not do that, Canadians will never have confidence that the government is spending their tax dollars both ethically and legally. Canadians deserve at least that much.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Before we proceed with questions and comments, upon review the hon. member's subamendment is in order.

[Grant McNally, Canadian Alliance, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on my previous comments and make a further point.

The finance minister came to committee yesterday and talked about the economic update of the country and how the economy was doing. I did not get a chance to ask him questions then but the point I would have made to him at that meeting would have been that during the time the government was dealing with deficits and cutting health care, education and social service spending, it kept in place the grants and contributions scheme. The government did not cut any of those dollars while it cut dollars to essential services in the country.

What has been revealed now is that the government has continued to keep the schemes in place to pay off dollars to its friends. It is unbelievable that it could continue and would be ongoing had this information not started to come to light. We wonder how much information is out there that needs to be explored.

[Monte Solberg, Canadian Alliance, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Speaker, during that period of time starting in 1995, the government did cut expenditures dramatically for health care. If we compared expenditures for health care to expenses for grants and contributions on a graph, we would find that the health care line went down. Through that period of deep government cuts, grants and contributions remained static, almost a straight line across the graph, about $15 billion to $20 billion a year depending on how some of that spending is characterized.

That $15 billion to $20 billion by everyone's definition is spending that is unnecessary. I allow that some of that spending is important spending, but some of it clearly is frivolous spending. Even frivolous spending does not necessarily have to be politically motivated, but much of it obviously is politically motivated. That is the best case scenario because some of it may be motivated by personal interest or by conflict, which is what we were talking about before with respect to the Prime Minister. We still need answers on his involvement with respect to the golf course.

My friend raised a very good point. In 1995 the government undertook to make sharp cuts. It cut billions of dollars out of health care. Hospitals were closed. We could not afford MRI machines. People could not afford drugs. People were lined up in the hallways of hospitals. This happened because the government chose to cut health care instead of cutting into grants and contributions, which is the political grease that the Liberals use to make their party go. That frankly is unacceptable.

[Ken Epp, Canadian Alliance, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, this is a curious debate we are having today because I believe it is a diversionary tactic along with so much else the government is doing these days. I cannot help but believe that. Had we not had the disclosure of all of the conflict and the sleaze that we have had in the last couple of months I am sure the government would not have brought this up at this time.

If we look back in recent history we will find that leading up to the 1993 election the government promoted the concept of increased ethics in government. Undoubtedly that was well-founded at the time. There were some allegations of misconduct in the previous government which the Liberals were trying to replace. The Liberals made that an election issue and it resonated with Canadians. There were a lot of people who voted for our party, the Reform Party at that time, who said that was one of the reasons they voted for someone else.

Out west a lot of people said that they would not vote for the Conservatives because there was a lot of evidence that they were not on the up and up when it came to ethical behaviour. However, they said they were not voting for the Liberals either because they still remembered some of the things that they had done. Therefore, they gave this new party an opportunity to begin spreading its influence, hopefully one that was positive and directed toward improving not only the ethical behaviour of government but also fiscal behaviour and behaviour in many other areas.

I remember many years ago when I was teaching in a high school there was a problem in our school. Audio-visual equipment kept disappearing. All of a sudden one of the projectors was gone, then one of the screens and then a tape recorder disappeared. I remember how incensed we were when the solution to solve that problem was to increase the amount of time that teachers would spend monitoring the halls at noon. In other words, instead of having three people on hall duty at noon it was increased to five or six.

We said that it was absurd because whoever was taking that equipment had access to the room where it was stored and none of the teachers had keys to that room. We had to go to one person who had a key. It was either that person or someone else who had a key who was liberating the equipment. We objected because there was a problem that was identified but the solution was opposite to what would have solved the problem.

The reason I give that example is because we have the same thing here. Unfortunately, we have here a culture of corruption. That is a phrase that has been used. It is not used inadvisably. I do not believe we are heading in the right direction if we were to say that in the midst of this culture of corruption the problems would be solved by coming up with another document. Will we behave differently from what we believe in our hearts because of the presence or absence of a document?

I have the advantage of sitting in the back row on the opposition side but directly opposite, for all intents and purposes, the Prime Minister. When we ask questions I get an opportunity to observe not only his body language but I also get to hear his words. In the last couple of months when accused of steering public money into purposes for which it was not originally intended, he seemed to suggest that it was normal. I found that to be incredible.

He said it explicitly. He said that he was just doing his job as a member of parliament. This happens with other members. The solicitor general was asked about trying to get a contract for a school in P.E.I. That was just a good MP working for his constituents. It so happens from my understanding that the college was not even in his constituency. He was acting as a political minister for the province. His job was to get money from the federal coffers into his province as a political minister.

Yet when we asked questions of the political minister, the Speaker, with all due respect, ruled them out of order. He said it was not a proper ministry. It was not labelled and not listed in Hansard as one of the ministries. The questions were ruled out of order because a ministry did not exist. Yet the government ministers and the Prime Minister were telling us that this was normal, people just did this.

It is the thinking that has to change. These people must come to the realization that whether it is written in a code or not, it is wrong. That is the simple bottom line of it. People do not take things that do not belong to them, nor do they take things and give them to their friends if they do not belong to them.

I am incensed at the lack of ethical behaviour by the government. It is totally wrong what it is doing. It is wrong to give contracts to businesses where there is no intention of doing any work, but there is no qualm at cutting the cheque.

I have wondered about this. Where has the breach come from? I strongly doubt, and I have no evidence for it, that this was instigated by the public servants themselves. I do not know what would be in it for them. Unless they were getting immediate kickbacks from the scheme then there was nothing in it for them. In the long term it would have to be a pretty substantial one to persuade them to do this. Their job would be at risk, at least we would think so, if they were caught.

Where then does this come from? I have a suspicion, but again we cannot find out, that the source of the problem was a directive from higher up, from the political minister for the province. I will tell members the reason why I believe this.

When Nicole Simpson in California was murdered there was this bizarre situation where the helicopters hovered over the white Bronco. It was reported that O.J. Simpson was in it, apparently holding a gun to his own head. There were other stories that were circulating at the time. There was probably nothing that cast more doubt on his innocence than that particular occurrence. What bizarre behaviour if he did not know anything and was not involved.

I have used an analogy and I bring it back to the case at hand. In January there was a sudden and unexpected cabinet shuffle. The result of that shuffle included the former public works and government services minister being released from his post. He resigned from cabinet and resigned as a member of parliament and off he went to Denmark. That was totally bizarre. If there was nothing behind it in terms of these contracts that were going on in Quebec, that was bizarre behaviour. Why would one just out of the blue one day say that his job was done here, and he was gone. I cannot understand that.

The Prime Minister used to get up and say that this was a minister who was doing a fine job and he supported him. He said that for everybody, no matter what the controversy. Those words are meaningless. If the same words are used all the time, regardless of the situation, then it does not take long and the words become meaningless.

The Prime Minister's testimony that this was an excellent minister and he supported him all the way proved not to be true when in January he sent him hurtling over to Denmark. Why would he do that? We have no way of finding out. The Prime Minister will not answer the question directly and I guess he does not have to. The rules of the House state that we are free to ask any question and the government is free to give any answer. Most of the time when we ask a question that is directed toward getting at these facts we receive the most absurd response. Sometimes, in fact almost always, the answer has no relation to the question at all.

As a humorous diversion, I recall when I was a youngster we used to relish in riddles. I do not know if I can remember this one correctly because we are talking decades ago and I was probably in grade 4 or 5. This was the riddle: “If your mother were a $5 bill and your father were a cat, how many flapjacks would it take to shingle the roof of a doghouse?” The answer is 23 because a Ford does not have feathers. That does not make any sense.

Yet I have thought of that riddle many times in question period. We ask questions of the minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister. The responses that we get have about the same relationship in comparison to the riddle that I just told. We ask questions on specific aspects of the investigation, where the money went, who was accounting for it or who had the right to sign for it. Invariably--

[Peter Adams, Liberal, Peterborough, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I missed the point about the riddle, the part at the beginning. Could the member explain it again?

[The Deputy Speaker]

I will make a suggestion. Next time the hon. member reads Hansard he will probably want to cut it out, frame it and memorize it.

[Ken Epp, Canadian Alliance, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it was so long ago if I tried to repeat it now it would be another version of a different riddle. However it would be just as nonsensical as the answers we get from the ministry on the other side.

This is not acceptable. If we want to increase the trust of Canadians in their government and in parliament we ought to have a decent board meeting here because that is what this is. It is a meeting of the board of directors of the corporation called Canada.

Let us imagine we are on the board of a bank, business or corporation and one of the directors of the organization is in front of the board to answer questions. Let us suppose a board member asks a question and the director of one of the departments says “What kind of a member would ask a question like that? How about him? Last night I saw him doing this or doing that”. I do not think the director would last very long.

That is what we have here. On the front benches in parliament we have the executive branch of government which should be responsible. The fact that we can ask questions over and over, day after day and get such nonsensical and unconnected responses is an absolute absurdity. That is why the government has such a small reputation among the people of Canada. We need to start running this place like a real business. When someone on this side has a question to ask on behalf of the shareholders, taxpayers and voters out there it should be answered. It should be given an honourable, fair and reasoned response.

That is what is missing here. We get mockery instead of genuine answers. Why do government members give such answers? On occasion their answers have been very solemn and correct. After the tragedy in Afghanistan when some of our armed forces personnel were killed we had a couple of days of questioning in the House. The tragedy was of concern to many of my constituents because there is an armed forces base in my riding. The previous minister of defence rose solemnly and gave the best answers he could. I asked what we were doing for the families of the victims. It was a genuine question and the minister responded in a genuine and fair way.

However when we ask questions about untoward contracts why do we get such garbage from the government? The answer is quite clear: It is a cover up. There is no doubt in my mind. If there were no cover up the government's behaviour would be very bizarre. It would not make sense for government members to respond that way if they were not guilty as charged. People who are guilty will use every tactic possible to throw critics off guard and deflect questions. They will do whatever they can to get the media off the story.

The best way to get the media off the story would be to have a full, independent and public judicial inquiry. That would get the facts out. If it were truly independent there would be no partisanship. It is more important for the government to have an inquiry and let people know the truth than to use a whole bunch of tactics to try to solve its ethical dilemmas.

One tactic the Liberals are using is to introduce this legislation which has been gathering dust for six years since the committee reported. I was on that committee. I remember some of the debates we had. We worked very hard. We came up with a recommendation and suggested the government accept it. Lo and behold, there it has been sitting for six years.

Why did the government bring it out now? It wants to give the impression it is doing something. It reminds me of a speaker who used to say “Before I say anything, let me talk for a while”. That is what these guys are doing. Before they do anything they want to talk about the code of ethics. It has been studied to death. One need only look at the history of codes of ethics in the House which goes all the way back to 1973 and presumably before that.

It is not for lack of a code of ethics that we do not have ethical behaviour. It is for lack of ethics. That is the problem. It is not the code. It is the fact that the individuals engaged in this do not distinguish right from wrong. If they do, they blatantly and deliberately betray their own consciences because they must know it is wrong. If they do not know it is wrong we are in deep trouble and voters should take the opportunity to turf and get rid of them.

As parliamentarians we should have the highest behaviour. I have been impressed over and over again by the expectations everyone has of members of parliament. It is doubly true for members in the executive branch of government. They have a lot of power over there. They make all the rules. They have the power to determine which laws will be and which will not. They have the power to enforce or not enforce them as they choose. With all that power they must be totally upright. That is where the dilemma lies. These people are morally bankrupt. They have an ethical vacuum. It is absolutely incredible that they cannot use their own moral compasses to decide what is right or wrong.

Perhaps their behaviour is at the behest of civil servants, in which case they should be found out and prosecuted. However I do not believe that is the case. I am much more inclined to believe it is the influence of political ministers who have the power to tell bureaucrats whether or not they have jobs. They are the ones who put the pressure on. A lot of evidence is pointing in that direction. That is where the correction must be made. There is no point in having a code if we do not have an independent ethics commissioner to enforce it.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Deputy Speaker]

The question is on the subamendment. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the subamendment?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Some hon. members]

No.

[The Deputy Speaker]

All those in favour of the subamendment will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Deputy Speaker]

All those opposed will please say nay.