Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House and be back again after a summer break. I want to welcome the new pages to the House while I have the chance and also to say hello and best wishes to my colleagues all around the House.
In particular, of course, I want to address Motion No. 393 and I must say that, in general, my colleagues and I are overwhelmingly opposed to the motion. There are any number of reasons why we are opposed to it.
Just to remind people who are in the House and who are watching this, effectively the motion would give members of Parliament a fund that they could use at their discretion to hand out to various community organizations. The reason why we are concerned about that should be pretty obvious.
We are concerned that the money will be used for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the public good. If there is any question as to whether or not that can happen, I invite members to take a look at the record of the government when it comes to how it has used funds through Human Resources Development, Industry Canada, and through other grants and contribution granting agencies and departments. It has blatantly broken the rules in many cases and used the money to end up benefiting it politically.
There have even been cases where charges were laid and actual convictions against members of the Liberal Party when it came down to using government funds that ended up coming back to the Liberal Party. Pierre Corbeil is the name that people may remember who had a sordid history and actually ended up being convicted because of his involvement in those types of shenanigans. The Canadian Alliance is vehemently opposed to this idea.
I want to lay out some scenarios to show why we are opposed to this motion. As a general principle the government hands out grants and contributions. Members should recall that the federal government in Canada today has about $18 billion that it hands out in grants and contributions every year to various groups and to different bodies of all kinds, and a lot of that money, to be fair, is pretty tightly controlled. But with a lot of that money there is tremendous discretion at the ministerial level. There are some rules in place, absolutely, but sometimes I would argue that those rules are broken. We do not want to encourage that by opening up the discretion even more by giving a slush fund to members of Parliament. Let me give some examples of how those rules are broken.
We know for instance that right now the RCMP is investigating Human Resources Development Canada and that at least six people have been fired, maybe more. I wish to point out that it was not human resources personnel that found these problems in their department where money went missing. It was the RCMP who brought this to their attention.
The last thing we want to do is to take what has occurred in Human Resources Development Canada, and which everyone agrees is a bad thing, and now make it the official policy of the government to extend those same sorts of privileges to members of Parliament. It is ridiculous to do that where people would start using taxpayers' money for their own ends.
Members of the Bloc can understand where the potential lies to use that money to benefit them politically and there are many ways in which that could happen. For example, we could be facing some kind of political challenge from a certain group in a riding and all of a sudden we could see how it would be very tempting for a member of Parliament to ensure that money from his or her slush fund went toward a particular group to get it off their tail. We could see how that could happen or contrarily a member of Parliament could use money to go toward a particular group. That particular group could then kick back the money to that member of Parliament's election fund. That could happen very easily.