Mr. Speaker, I thank the member whose sincerity and enthusiasm I admire and have for a long time. I know many of the points she has articulated today are points that we share in the Alliance. We have made those points in debate on this bill and will continue to do so.
The member alluded to this as being a legacy piece of legislation. That is a fair observation. There is an attempt here to throw a bandage to a person who has been punched and bloodied pretty much over the last 10 years by the Prime Minister. It is about that trivial an attempt. It is a cosmetic attempt to try to patch up the credibility of a government that has had great difficulty in behaving credibly.
The member opposite, in defending the government on this issue, asked a question about specific examples. I could go on at much more length than I have time for today. However, for example, when a government pursues trumped up charges against the preceding prime minister, when it cancels contracts solely on the basis of a partisan initiative, when it cancels whether it be helicopters or Pearson Airport contracts, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars.
What this does is it calls into question not only its management ability, and certainly that would be in question, but it also calls into question its own ethics. It is under the Prime Minister that these things have happened.
Management competence versus ethics we could get into when they brush up against one another, which is the predominant problem, the management inability of the government or its ethical lapses. However the fact remains that this is a government that has been plagued by both of those problems.
Bill C-34 will not address satisfactorily the independent promise it made to affix an independent officer, an independent ethics commissioner, under the 1993 red book authored by the new prime minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard. If we expect a fresh face and a fresh approach, I do not think we will get one from that member because after all that is a book of unfulfilled promises.
Would the member like to elaborate a little more on some of the unfulfilled promises of that book in terms of the promises it made to improve the lives of Canadians, those less fortunate, those have not Canadians? I would like her to elaborate a little on that aspect of the unfulfilled promises of that book and how that might relate to a better role for an ethics commissioner who would be truly independent in this Parliament.