Madam Speaker, I would love to keep talking about taxes, but I am also honoured to be able to expose the foibles of the government when it comes to matters of ethics. I think it should go without saying that this particular motion must be supported by all members of the House.
The motion we are dealing with was presented by the member for Calgary Centre. It is a motion for what is called the production of papers, hence the label of the motion is P-15.
The production of papers, for those who may not understand it, is for the basic purpose of providing information to the member of Parliament requesting it in the motion, and thereby to the public, on something that has happened behind closed doors.
I am sure the member for Calgary Centre has more experience in the House than I probably ever will have. He knows all the rules and he knows about all the things that happen here, so I am a little reluctant to give him this caution, but I will: “Be careful what you ask for, because if you get it, it may not be that useful”.
I speak from experience. The one time that I did get the possibility of having a motion debated was on a production of papers motion that I put myself, at the time when we were talking about the Royal Canadian Mint and its decision to open a coin plating plant in Manitoba. It just so happened that the Mint rejected all my pleas for information so we finally brought that motion into the House and it was carried here.
Lo and behold, the people then came into my office with literal pallet loads of paper. When I checked through them, which I did at some length, I saw that a lot of it was just repeats of memos that were sent. In other words, I was given a copy of a memo that had been sent to someone who had copies of previous memos, so I got the same memo probably 50 or 80 times. It was a huge volume of paper. It took us an awful lot of time to go through it. The amount of information divulged actually was not that great in the end, but it took so much time to wade through it.
Therefore, if the right hon. member for Calgary Centre is actually going to get this motion passed, and I presume he will, because I think the government should be embarrassed to vote against something like this, then he should also be ready to have his staff and maybe he himself go to work for some period of time to read all the paper that will come in the paper blizzard.
This particular issue has to do with the resignation of the then solicitor general. I do not remember the name of his riding, but he was the solicitor general way back then and he was forced to resign. The thing that was so interesting about it was that on his resignation he did not admit he was at fault. He merely said that on meeting with the ethics counsellor, the ethics counsellor had some reservations about some of the things that had happened so he then had to resign because that was the recommendation of the Prime Minister. Let us remember that our ethics counsellor reports to the Prime Minister.
We could go into a real sidebar here and talk about an independent ethics counsellor or independent ethics commissioner, something which the government is proposing to provide to the Canadian people, but which unfortunately, in matters dealing with ministers, is still going to be exactly the same as before. The whole modus operandi is fairly well identical, with a few minor changes.
So that is not going to be the answer to the problem, but however, in this particular instance there is an interesting dilemma because the former solicitor general never did admit that he was guilty. He never did admit that he had done the things with which he was charged, but we the Canadian people, we the parliamentarians, were never privy to what it was that he had done wrong. What did the counsellor find? What were the grounds?
I think the fact that the solicitor general basically denied guilt would have him now eager to bring all this to light. I know I would be. If the ethics counsellor had decided on an issue with respect to me and I was totally convinced that I was not guilty as charged, I think I would want to have all the information made public so the public could judge for themselves. That is one of the reasons why we have public courts, public hearings and the independent hearings at various levels in the judiciary. These things are public so that people can see what the facts are and draw their own conclusions.
If I were that minister, or that ex-minister, I would welcome this debate. I would welcome the exposure of truth. I would welcome the divulging of all the information from the ethics counsellor on this particular file, because if he is in fact innocent this will show the people of Canada that he is in fact innocent. If he is not innocent but guilty, then we as parliamentarians and Canadians still have the right to know the truth of the matter.
I believe that this motion brought forward by our colleague from Calgary Centre is therefore a very important motion. It is one which I would urge all members to support. Of course I have a difficult task right now because I am persuading members to vote for it who may not right now be hearing me. It is possible that all those members on the other side who have it in their power to decide whether this motion shall pass or fail may not be persuaded by my words since they may not have heard them.
I urge them right now to sit up and listen and take note, because it is very, very important that this motion be carried. I am trying to persuade them now to vote in that way. I also presume that after this little challenge the word will get out, all of them will eagerly look at Hansard , read this speech and the others that have been made, and hopefully they will hear the arguments and make a wise decision.
It is not a good policy to do government business behind closed doors. I know that some of it has to be for matters of national security, and sometimes there are matters of privacy, but when one is a cabinet minister doing government business, I think the general rule, the general principle, should be as much as possible that all of the business is done in a transparent fashion and is open, accessible, and available to parliamentarians, to Canadians and to journalists so that the facts of the matter can be fairly reported.
Of course that is also a great responsibility for us as parliamentarians: to keep pushing and pushing for openness and transparency in all areas. Because if we can get it in areas like this, then hopefully we will eventually change the culture of secrecy and the culture of confidentiality this government has undertaken in order to protect itself.
I know it is not the object of this motion, but I sure would like to see the negotiations that went on with the former minister of public works and government services. I would like to see the communications, copies of notes, phone calls, e-mails, and the letters and faxes between the Prime Minister and that member which led to that member's resignation, not only from cabinet but indeed even from Parliament. And to see him actually extradited to a different country to me is a tacit admission of guilt, and I believe that Canadian taxpayers, Canadian voters, have every right in the world to be aware of the facts in cases like that.
That is the only way. If all of us knew that what we do, what we write and the decisions we make would one day be made public, even if not that same week but maybe at the end of our term of office, it might just tip the balance on making a proper ethical decision rather than an unethical one, just because of the fact that the accountability factor is a very important one.
Therefore, I would urge all members of the House to vote in favour of Motion No. P-15. Let us have those papers produced. Let us expose the truth. No one should ever be afraid of the truth. Let us do this. Let us support it. I hear the hon. members over saying, “Quit talking already; we are already convinced”, so I will do that.