Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for St. John's East.
On behalf of the people of Renfrew--Nipissing--Pembroke, it is an honour and a privilege to stand here in my place and reply to the government's Speech from the Throne. I thank my constituents for the confidence they have placed in me and I am pleased to return their trust.
On behalf of those same trusting individuals, it is with sadness, disappointment and now disgust that I find it necessary to focus on just one aspect of the Speech from the Throne, that is, the lack of ethical behaviour on behalf of this government and, more important, the lack of ethical behaviour on the part of the Prime Minister, which is becoming the continuing legacy of the Liberal Party.
What is truly disappointing on behalf of thoughtful Canadians is how the Prime Minister has personally let each and every one of us down.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a real Ottawa Valley get-together at St. Mary's Church in the hills of Wilno. In typical Ottawa Valley fashion, the community had come together to help a well known local personality, Barney McCaffrey, whose home burned down on New Year's Eve. Barney had no electricity, no phone and no insurance. The hall was packed as Barney's friends and neighbours helped to raise funds to rebuild his home.
Between the softwood lumber dispute and the crisis surrounding BSE, life has become very lean in rural Canada. People in my riding may not have all the trappings of rich Liberal ad men to be able to afford fancy lunches at expensive restaurants where the tab for one lunch is more than some people in my riding receive as income for an entire month. This is real Canada. These are the people who have been let down by this Prime Minister. I can see it in their faces. There were high expectations for this Prime Minister, but they are all gone now.
The Ottawa Valley knows the Martin family better than most Canadians. Paul Martin Senior lived in Pembroke. Two of the Prime Minister's aunts still reside in the community, and my condolences to the Prime Minister on the recent passing of his Aunt Lucille.
If the Prime Minister ever had a shred of compassion like what we have in the hearts of other Ottawa Valley folks, that is all gone. The Prime Minister is not his father's son. No amount of Liberal spin will change the fact for the people in my riding who knew Paul Martin Senior that this Prime Minister has never had the welfare of Canadians in mind. Actions speak louder than words. We have to walk the walk and talk the talk, but all Canadians have heard is idle talk.
Canadians have now started to realize what kind of person the Prime Minister is. He broke his promise to scrap the GST and it has been downhill ever since he broke that very first promise. The Prime Minister wants to take credit for eliminating the current account deficit, but Canada still has a huge debt. We are more in debt today than when the current crew took office. When it comes to taking responsibility for spending, he claims ignorance. The Prime Minister cannot have it both ways.
The Prime Minister deserves a Genie award for his acting. Canadians are insulted by his phony rants of concern. Canadians know that any outrage has more to do with the fact that greed allowed the Prime Minister's party to get caught than with the fact that skimming was actually going on. In fact, it was Chrétien, Mr. Integrity in the eyes of this Prime Minister, who publicly stated that if a few million got skimmed, so what. That was his signal. That fat signal was what the Liberal Party was waiting for: get out the expensive cigars and the champagne and book those fancy restaurants.
It was not until the official opposition drew attention to the fact that the Prime Minister's personal companies, like Canada Steamship Lines, were receiving tens of millions of dollars in taxpayers' money that the Prime Minister passed the company off to his boys, far enough to claim that he was out of it, but close enough to ensure that taxpayers' money flowed to increase the private wealth of family members.
If that was not bad enough, as finance minister the Prime Minister made sure that his international tax shelter remained in place. This was happening even as the Prime Minister bragged that other tax shelters were being closed. This was done so that Canada Steamship Lines, the personal company of the Prime Minister, could benefit to the tune of $100 million in tax avoidance, that we know of at this point, and this does not include the benefits that the Prime Minister's family realized by flying any flag but the flag of Canada in order to avoid our labour and environmental laws on his fleet of ships.
How blind is the so-called blind trust when the Liberal lap dog, better known as the unethics commissioner, met with the Prime Minister 13 times over expensive taxpayer funded lunches. To discuss what? Only the Prime Minister knows.
Where was the media in all of this scandal? The Liberals spent $793 million in taxpayers' funds in the last five years by buying media silence in the form of advertising contracts. That is a lot of money. Obviously it did buy a great deal of silence.
The silence in the Speech from the Throne about the ethics of this government is even more deafening. Remember our old friend, former CBC reporter Jason Moscowitz? Jason was starting to ask too many embarrassing questions about Grand-Mère and the Shawinigan scandal. Where is he now? Bought off as a spin flunky for the Business Development Bank at some obscene salary. It would be informative to tally up the numbers of all the ex-journalists who are now on the taxpayers' payroll.
Canadians are outraged at the sheer enormity of the greed on behalf of the Liberal Party. We can hear the seething anger in their voices as people think about the waste the government keeps on incurring.
First we had the actual incompetence of government ministers for such things as the HRDC billion dollar scandal, the billions spent on the gun registry, and the billions being poured into agencies like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Under the guise of research, many of these institutes are just a front for anti-family Liberal propaganda. The Institute of Gender and Health is an example of how it wastes millions of dollars producing anti-family pamphlets, much of it intended for third world countries with no benefit to Canadians. That is not medical research. This is money that the government calls basic research and it is misleading; in fact, Canadian researchers are leaving the country because the dollars for research just are not here. They are being siphoned off into non-accountable foundations.
In the area of science and technology, the government claims to have spent $13 billion since 1997, but unfortunately we have no proof that this occurred. The use of foundations by the federal government to deliver public programs like research and development is this government's way of transferring public money beyond the reach of effective parliamentary scrutiny.
Fortunately for Canadians, the Auditor General has audited the government's practice of flowing money through foundations, with the audit finding, in the words of the Auditor General, and I quote: “significant gaps and weaknesses in the design of the delegated arrangements; limits on what the Auditor General can look at...; the 'parking' of billions of dollars of the public's money in foundations, years before it is [supposed] to flow;” and little recourse for taxpayers when things go wrong. So much for dealing with the democratic deficit.
Canada is like the Titanic and the iceberg we have hit is Liberal Party corruption. Canadians can only see a tip of the iceberg; it is what lies below the surface that really concerns people. It can be likened to democracy. As the Titanic was once considered unsinkable, democracy is felt to be a Canadian tradition. Each of the bulkheads in the Titanic can be likened to each Canadian institution. We had the bulkhead of the Senate fill up with water a long time ago, as they did with freedom of the press and an independent judiciary, and then there was the bulkhead called the RCMP with the APEC scandal.
The only bulkhead left standing to keep the ship afloat is the official opposition. Canadians deserve better and it is time to repair the good ship democracy before the government sinks our nation.