Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up where the member for South Shore left off.
In my mind the importance of the debate is to remind Canadians of a promise that the Prime Minister of Canada made and had no intention of keeping. When we get lost in the minutia of the equalization formula and the detail, I think we lose focus on what this whole thing is about.
The Prime Minister went to Newfoundland in the heat of an election campaign, with the bottom dropping out of his campaign, both going south in a panic mode, making a promise that he had no intention of keeping. What famous humorist came up with this expression: “We have lies, we have damned lies and then we have statistics”? The fact is that the Liberal Party of Canada wants to refocus the issue. It simply wants to get into the minutia and the details of an agreement.
However, as the member for Central Nova, our deputy leader, mentioned this morning in his remarks, what is it about 100% that the Liberals do not understand. The issue is that the Prime Minister made a promise that the province would keep 100% of the offshore revenues and that the revenues would not be clawed back in the equalization formula. It is that simple. As soon as we deviate from that we are playing into the hands of the Liberal Party of Canada because it has made so many outrageous promises over the years. In fact the leader of the NDP pointed out some of those.
Mr. Speaker, you and I have lived through some of those. I just want to remind the listening public of some of the promises made in the past that the Liberals did not honour. This is just one more, the promise made in the heat of an election in Newfoundland in terms of the offshore revenues.
Everyone will remember the GST. The Liberals said they would eliminate the GST. How many members over there got elected in 1993 because of that outrageous promise? They had no intention of keeping that promise. They did not keep that promise and yet they were elected on it.
That was the same party that said it would tear up the free trade agreement, if hon. members remember that one. That goes back to the 1988 election, the first election in which I was elected. The Liberals were demonizing the Americans at that time and said that they would rip up the free trade agreement if elected. Of course in 1993, along with the GST promise, was the promise that they would renegotiate the NAFTA agreement. They did not change a comma in the NAFTA agreement.
We talk about the success of Alberta, the oil patch in Alberta and how much wealth that has generated. We want the same level of fairness applied to Newfoundland. That is an argument that the member for Central Nova brought forward this morning, so I will not go through that.
I do want to touch on the national energy program. Prime Minister Trudeau at the time saw an opportunity to go out and rob Alberta of its revenues. The national energy program was all about bringing all that wealth into Ottawa so the Liberals could redistribute it at will. It took a Conservative government to unravel that program. The fact is that I think it will take a Conservative government to unravel the promise that the Prime Minister made.
The Prime Minister is used to getting up in the House and making outrageous promises or of pretending he knew nothing about nothing. It sounds like Tony Soprano to me, “I know nothing about nothing”. That is exactly what the Prime Minister does in this place, day in and day out. It is like the ignorance he enjoyed in the House in regard to Canada Steamship Lines and how much revenue was generated by contracts from the Government of Canada, which he said was just a few hundred thousand dollars. It turned out to be several hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue generated by his company under contract to the Government of Canada when he was finance minister.
The Prime Minister cannot be believed, and the election last June pretty well proves that. What the motion is all about today is forcing the Prime Minister of Canada to honour the commitment he made this past June in the middle of an election.
We are saying that the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia should be allowed to keep 100% of their provincial offshore oil and gas revenues. It is that simple. We simply want the Prime Minister of Canada to honour a promise made in an election simply for the purpose of gaining public support and winning enough seats to come back here as Prime Minister of Canada.
I guess the strategy worked as a clever political strategy but I believe that time has caught up with the Prime Minister and with the Liberal Party of Canada. As I have mentioned, the Liberals have a history of doing this.
Let us do the right thing. Let us support the motion that is before the House today, let us keep the heat on the Government of Canada and let us give Atlantic Canada its fair share of the prosperity that the rest of Canada enjoys.