Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and respond to the throne speech on behalf of the people of Saanich--Gulf Islands, who have given me the honour of representing them here in the House of Commons.
I am going to address a number of areas in the throne speech, starting with some of the areas in which the government is lacking or is failing to address. I am also going to talk about some of its broken promises. I also want to talk about the direction that the Conservative Party will take and some of the amendments put forward by the Leader of the Opposition, which have recently been agreed to by all members in the House. I am also going to talk a bit about some of the more specific areas that I want to see addressed in this Parliament for the people of Saanich--Gulf Islands.
As we move forward in this 38th Parliament, though, we need to ensure that the promises that are made are kept. I will admit that we heard promises being made during the last campaign, but I have heard promises since before I was elected, going all the way back to 1993 when the government was first elected, including scrapping the GST. There is always a long litany of promises made in order to get elected, but they are never followed through on by the government. Hopefully we are going to see that cycle come to an end with this minority Parliament. I hope the Liberals will start keeping some of their promises as opposed to recycling them every four years.
I said I would start by talking a bit about some of the things that were missing. I have to say that, bar none, the single biggest issue in the past election campaign for the people of Saanich--Gulf Islands was accountability, along with honesty and integrity. There was not a place I went to in the last election where people were not telling me of their incredible frustration at how their tax dollars were being spent, and spent not just unwisely but used for political gain. A lot of people called it outright theft or they called it corruption. People were really angry. They were angry at all politicians in general. They were frustrated at seeing hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, of which the government is the caretaker, the trustee, the guardian, given off to supporters of the Liberal Party. If there was one issue that resonated right through the campaign, that was it.
Of course in my time here as a member of Parliament, I have seen scandal after scandal in one department or another, whether it be the sponsorship program, the HRDC scandal, or $2 billion given to the gun registry. There is a long list. There was hardly a mention of this, if at all, in the throne speech. I think the Prime Minister needs to address this. He needs to assure us that it is never going to happen again. I am not convinced he is capable of doing it and maybe that is why it is absent from the throne speech.
My old boss once said to me that silence is consent. If we do not deal with something, if we do not talk about it, we are actually consenting to it. I wonder if that is why the Prime Minister has been so silent on this issue. Of course we hear more information coming out at the inquiry into the sponsorship program showing that the Prime Minister actually had involvement in it. His office knew of it. He was looking at this. I am very troubled by that.