Debates of Feb. 17th, 2004

Supply

[Randy White, Canadian Alliance, Langley—Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the hypocrisy of some of these statements really gets me.

The member opposite said “we have identified”, but the fact is, the members opposite did not identify anything. This was identified for them. They got caught. There is a big difference between saying, “We have identified the problem and now we are going to try to find the solution”, and “We got caught with our hands in someone else's pocket”. There is a big difference between those two.

I would like to ask the member opposite whether he understands the difference between identifying a problem and a solution and getting caught with a problem and everybody else looking for the solution. We cannot leave the solution to this problem with the government because the government, the Liberal Party, and many other people associated with this are the problem in the first place.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Speaking about hypocrisy, Mr. Speaker, that holier than thou party, and I do not want to get into specifics because I started--

[An hon. member]

Go for it.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Yes, let me go for it. We remember the law firm that represented their former leader, their previous leader who sits in the House today. Can we recall what happened with them paying money and with the kickbacks going back to when he was a member of the Alberta provincial government? I answer in that way. I chose not to go in that direction, but he moved me in that direction.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Bélair)]

Let us try to be respectful of one another.

The hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake.

[Howard Hilstrom, Canadian Alliance, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a general comment and observation. I spent 30 years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Sixteen of those years were spent on organized crime, white collar crime and organized crime involving narcotics. I looked at the organizations that were set up, where the top guys had layer after layer underneath them and were never touched or where it was very difficult to touch them. The beneficiaries of that were the top guys.

I see this same layering with the sponsorship program, which was not about saving Canada. It was about the Liberal Party being elected in the next election, buying votes and enhancing its own funding.

What I see from the Auditor General's report is that in fact these sponsorship advertising agencies were very Liberal friendly. With the experience I have had in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I see the same organized effort by the Liberal Party of Canada to bilk the taxpayers.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will close with this. I ask the member to read today's Quorum , in which a Globe and Mail article states:

According to the Auditor-General's report, the executive director of CCSB [the communications branch] decided which sporting and cultural events received sponsorship funding, issued the contracts to the advertising firms that handled the deals on Ottawa's behalf, and signed off on the invoices.

Those members keep saying Liberals, Liberals, Liberals. We rolled out the program, and in that layer, which I agree with him exists, there is some gutter, and there is some cancer that needs to be cleaned out. I ask them to work with us because they know very well, as we worked together at the public accounts committee on the privacy commission, we worked together for the betterment of the taxpayer.

[Roy H. Bailey, Canadian Alliance, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, like my colleague, I had a position of trust: he as a member of the RCMP and I as the CEO to a board. I want to say that if what the hon. member has said is true, I cannot believe why in the world this government even needs a cabinet minister if that minister is not going to control how the money in the various departments is being spent. The people of Canada do not believe that the Prime Minister knew nothing of this event. They will never believe that.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this is exactly what he was saying.

They keep referring to the RCMP, an institution that I greatly respect and have supported all my life, and I will continue to support it, but look at what happened there. Is he telling me that the upper echelons of the RCMP knew what happened with that money? I do not think so, but it happened. That is what happened. That is what we have to get to the bottom of.

[Randy White, Canadian Alliance, Langley—Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague from Provencher.

I am having difficulty with some of the things that I am hearing from the other side and I will give a couple of examples. The government is now asking all of us to work together. For the first time in a decade since I have been here the Liberals are now asking us to all work together because they are in a pickle. They stole some money, gave it to their buddies and then financed an election, and now they are asking us all to work together and fix it. It is really incredible that we are being asked to work together on that thing.

Another comment made over there was that they did wrong but over here on this side we did wrong, too. If I refer to the speech that was made just before I rose, it was a kind of “we did it, you did it, so we did it”. I just do not relate to the two issues that were put to us.

I am commonly asked in western Canada about the outcome of the 2000 election. The Liberals had a whole bunch of money then. They got money from other funds that were redirected through advertising agencies and other agencies back into the Liberal Party which helped the Liberal Party form a government because of the money. We should be looking at whether or not that very election was a valid one. That is how serious this is.

I want to make a couple of comments on a philosophy that I often hear across the country about the government. I really believe that the government subscribes to the philosophy that a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. That kind of fits in with this little philosophy that I think the government has. That is a lot of what this is about. Taxpayers' money is redirected through sources and given back to the Liberals and everybody is happy. That is not the way a proper democracy should work.

Before I get into what this really means to people in my area, I want to mention that I do a lot of work in the prisons and other areas like that in politics. Yesterday an all points police bulletin was issued for Russell Corbin in my riding. He up and walked out of Ferndale prison, unannounced of course. He felt he should go somewhere. Now there is a Canada-wide warrant looking for Russell.

Russell was in prison for the possession of property obtained by crime and theft. He got two years for that and now the government, in its wisdom perhaps, has an all points Canada-wide warrant out looking for Russell and here the Liberals are trying to justify themselves for what, the possession of property obtained by crime and theft. How ironic is it that. There are people in prisons today for having done the very thing that the government has done, not accused of having done but proven by the Auditor General that it has done. It is kind of ironic.

I want to go through some of the numbers and what this means to average Canadians. It is interesting that according to Statistics Canada there were 54,000 full time university students in 1998-99 studying at undergraduate and graduate levels in British Columbia. My children were among that group.

With an average tuition in 2002-03 of $4,100, every university student in the province could have been given a bursary to fund his or her education if the government had not abused the $240 million, every single student in British Columbia. Think about that. It is not a very proud comment quite frankly, from a politician in opposition or wherever we are in the House of Commons to think that money was stolen out of the hands of taxpayers which could have gone to our students.

In addition to that, the $250 million could have paid for eight years of salary for 556 new police officers in the country, but what did those guys do? The Liberals threw it at their buddies and had some of it delivered back to their party.

Here we are today looking for more police. I spend a lot of time on drug issues. We are woefully short of police officers fighting the drug issues in Canada. Yet those guys over there think it is a darn sight more important to fund themselves than to fund police officers.

That $250 million could have bought 8,333 police cruisers and paid the salary of an additional 250 full time nurses in Canada. Imagine, that is less important in the minds of the government than those things. We could have bought between 100 and 250 MRIs and had them installed in this nation for the same amount of money the government sucked out of the pockets of taxpayers and funnelled, in part, back to its own party.

The 1996 census showed that the average annual income in Canada was $25,196. Some 9,922 Canadians could have been paid for a year.

I have another little anecdote about attitude around here. Just before question period yesterday I read a statement about an individual who had come to this country nine years ago. He is currently a non-citizen. He has been on welfare for all nine years. He was recently picked up for drug dealing. Although he had no money when he came to this country and has been on welfare for nine years, he owns three houses and all three of them are in my riding.

When I asked the revenue minister how this atrocity could happen, what I got from the revenue minister was laughter, telling me that it was a joke. I just do not get the attitude in this place. The revenue minister thought that it was a joke. While hardworking Canadian citizens are spending their lives paying for mortgages, a guy is given welfare for nine years and is allowed to keep three houses that were obviously obtained illegally.

We have no proceeds of crime legislation to deal with situations like that. There is only laughter from the revenue minister. It is a joke in his mind. That is wrong. Half of what is going on in this country with the government is a bit of a joke.

A lot of communities in many rural areas could have used that money. In fact, there are many communities in my province alone that could have done with the money. Here are some examples of towns in Canada that have paid a total in income tax of about $250 million: Heart's Delight, Deer Lake and Stephenville in Newfoundland and Labrador; Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia; Sackville, New Brunswick; Montebello, Quebec; Barry's Bay, Cochrane and Sioux Lookout in Ontario; Flin Flon, Manitoba; Churchill, Saskatchewan; Fort Macleod, Alberta; and on it goes.

Incredibly, all of the taxes paid for one year by each of those communities is the same amount of money that was dished away by the government. Each of those communities paid the same amount of money that the government has absconded from the taxpayers and put partially in its own pocket.

I want to close by reiterating the way I have always thought about the government and the Liberal Party. I opened my remarks by saying a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. Is that not the philosophy we are dealing with here? It is truly unfortunate. It is truly a sad day for this country. No amount of let us help each other out of this is going to work. That party has stolen money from people in Canada and we intend to have that party pay for it.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General expressed the point of view that there was not a culture of corruption either in the government or in the civil service. This morning the House of Commons counsel indicated that the higher public interest is not served by bringing down the institutions of government and Parliament. There is the judicial inquiry. There is the public accounts committee which is chaired by a member of the opposition. There are the checks and balances that are inherent in Parliament. Given all of that, why is the member not satisfied? On behalf of serving the higher public interest why can he not let those institutions and those mechanisms work so that the House of Commons can get on with the other important work of the House?

[Randy White, Canadian Alliance, Langley—Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, one wonders what the other important business of the House is, if it is not about the integrity or lack thereof of the government.

There is nothing wrong with this kind of issue going to a committee of the House of Commons or an inquiry, but there is also nothing wrong with opposition members spending a great deal of time talking to the government about the problems it is having and trying to put into perspective in the House of Commons what the government, its cronies and the Liberal Party have done wrong.

This is not as simple as putting this issue off to the side, studying it for a while and meanwhile having an election and making sure the election goes well. The fact is there was money stolen from the citizens of the country. The fact is that merely putting it off to the side for a public inquiry is not good enough.

Members of the government must understand that they too will be held to account. That is our job in this country. It is not a matter of the government or its cronies looking for fall guys. A big part of the problem is systemic. It is systemic in the Liberal Party. It is systemic in the politicians who exist in the House.

I will repeat once again that a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. I believe that is where the Liberal philosophy has been for years.

[Howard Hilstrom, Canadian Alliance, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we in the opposition party, the media and Canadians generally are not using the words “culture of corruption” lightly. Those are very serious words.

We look back at the history of the Liberal Party and we see the influence peddling that came out of the previous elections. There is the Corbeil case. We see the current investigation with Mr. Basi, one of the main organizers of the Prime Minister's campaign for leadership of the Liberal Party. We see the Virginia Fontaine centre with strong Liberal connections in Provencher, Manitoba. We add these up and sadly that is not all of them. There are many more examples. When we get more than a handful of examples of corruption, what are we to call it but a culture of corruption?

That is what is so sad about the situation today. I would like the member to comment on whether the words “culture of corruption” as they are being applied to the Liberal Party are being misused or whether it is correct.

[Randy White, Canadian Alliance, Langley—Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, no. My colleague is right. It is a culture of corruption. It has been there from the early days when I came into the House of Commons in 1993. I can recall going to Cape Breton and looking at the ding wall in David Dingwall's riding. I followed issues time and time again in this country where it was just bad spending.

Now it has gone deeper than just bad spending. It has gone to taking taxpayers' money, diverting it through sources and getting it back to the party in general to fight elections.

I think there is nothing more corrupt than what has happened here. The government deserves to be thrown out of office, quite frankly.

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to add my comments to this debate. Speaking of the culture of corruption, I received a copy of a letter in my office last year written by a chief of a first nations community in my riding. The letter was directed at a Liberal cabinet minister threatening the Liberal cabinet minister with exposure of all kinds of corruption if he did not agree with what the chief wanted for his community. He said he would work with the then Alliance in order to expose this corruption.

I wrote to the chief and said that I had received his correspondence and was certainly interested in what this corruption was all about, but I was not willing to make a deal. I heard nothing in response; however, at the Liberal nomination meeting, who was there supporting the Liberal candidate? The writer of the letter of course.

Obviously, he made a deal and that is the kind of deals that go on inside the Liberal Party, and the kind of deal that I will have nothing to do with.

[An hon. member]

Will you state that outside the House?

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

The members asks, will I state it outside the House? It has been distributed. His colleague, the minister, has it, so I will certainly be more than pleased to give him a copy of that letter.

Recently, on the CBC news, The National , a pollster, Mr. Allan Gregg, dismissed the idea that the Auditor General's revelations were significant. He stated that the Auditor General was exaggerating and that the sum of money was relatively small in the scheme of government operations.

I found it astounding that an educated man who understands presumably the way Canadians think would state that on air. Of course, that position was immediately denounced by his fellow panellists and by most Canadians. Because much of this money was actually stolen, this is a much more serious state of affairs than even the $2 billion gun registry boondoggle. The CBC revealed that it is now $2 billion as a result of its crunching the documents and the numbers.

However, this quarter of a billion dollars that was stolen or otherwise misappropriated is much more significant. This is not just bad policy; this is criminal conduct.

Last week's revelations by the Auditor General revealed how the Liberal government allowed these dollars to be stolen. They were not improperly allocated, not lost, not wasted through incompetence, but stolen. They were stolen from the public purse and handed off to Liberal friends, advertising companies and crown corporations. The Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues said nothing when he as finance minister signed the cheques that found their way into the back pockets of the friends of the Liberal Party.

One of the--

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Bélair)]

Order, please. The hon. member for Mississauga South on a point of order.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I fully appreciate the significance and importance of this debate, but I believe that in this place to attribute a criminal activity to someone or to allege that some criminal activity has taken place is totally improper under parliamentary rules.

I would ask that the Chair rule that to attribute that there have been either kickbacks or that a member has deliberately allowed someone to steal is unparliamentary.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Bélair)]

I understand where the hon. member is coming from; however, the hon. member for Provencher did not attack or accuse another member of Parliament directly. He talked in general terms of the supposed corruption that is going on.

I do not think the member's point of order is valid, but on the other hand I would caution the hon. member for Provencher to be careful. The hon. member for Provencher.

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

Mr. Speaker, if it makes the member opposite feel better, I can use a term that the Auditor General used, and that was fraud. That is what the Auditor General said, and in law, as a former prosecutor, I can tell the member that the mental intent between stealing and fraud is no different. So, let us use the word that the Auditor General did because that is what we are discussing.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would like to have a ruling from the Chair with regard to the aspect that fraud is also a criminal offence. If the member is implying that somehow this is going to be used as a synonym for what he should not be using with regard to a specific member, I would ask that the Chair rule that the member cannot refer to any other member of Parliament as having committed a fraud.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Bélair)]

I could use the same ruling I had made a while ago in saying that the hon. member for Provencher did not accuse or attack any member directly, but that he was attacking the issue in a very general sense.

As far as the word fraud is concerned, everybody knows that it is a criminal offence, but like the hon. member for Provencher said, the Auditor General used it herself, not in here obviously, but when she had her press conference. It is on the line actually. It is not right, but if she used it, then members can use it. I ask members to be careful.

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

That is good advice, Mr. Speaker. The point has been made and obviously the sensitivity on the other side demonstrates that my arrow has hit its mark.

Now that the Auditor General has confirmed what the official opposition has been stating for years, the Prime Minister announced yet another meaningless public inquiry. He has created a flurry of media attention, made public apologies, and has uttered threats against the nameless evildoers to get the Liberals past the next election.

The story changes every day. I assume what is happening is that the story is told then the polling is done. If it does not wash with the people, another story is told. I refer to the first story as the case of the conspiracy of the 12 monkeys. There are 12 people hidden away in the labyrinth of government somewhere gratuitously shelling out money to ad companies with close connections to the Liberals. They then kite these cheques, as the Prime Minister said, and the money goes on to friends and some of it just stays.

What I found objectionable is that the government, or whoever these nameless individuals are, used agencies like the RCMP to accomplish its purposes. These individuals traded on the good name of the RCMP so they could send an ad agency a cheque for $3 million. The ad agency kept $1.3 million and $1.7 million went to the RCMP. What happened to the $1.3 million? The ad agency and obviously these nameless individuals hiding in the bowels of government were trading on the good name of the RCMP to perpetrate this scheme on the people of Canada using taxpayers' money.

Canadians are entitled to know, why did the Prime Minister say nothing when he was in a position to stop this unprecedented financial abuse? We have heard from Liberal members that, since 1999 in their caucus, these rumours have been circulating. The former Minister of Canadian Heritage said that the now Prime Minister, then finance minister, the vice-president of the Treasury Board, must have known. It was obvious he should have known if he did not know.

Government does not operate by setting up a program for a quarter billion dollars and not have that go through the Treasury Board process and through the senior minister in the province where the money is to be spent. It was convenient. I am saying that as a result of my own public service experience as a member of the attorney general's department, as an elected official and a cabinet minister in Manitoba. What these Liberals are trying to get Canadians to believe about this mysterious organization and funnelling money to their friends is simply ludicrous.

Everyone knows what the process is. If the process was not followed, there is only one individual who is to blame, and that is the person who had his hands on the levers of power when he was finance minister, when he was vice-president of the Treasury Board, and that is the Prime Minister.

Now the Prime Minister is trying to distance himself from the previous 11 years of Liberal government. “I had no idea what was going on”, he said. Yet he never hesitated over the last 10 years to tell us how he was an integral part of the government. He knew where every dime was going. Suddenly, he is out of his office. However, he was an MP. He was here every day in the House I assume. Yet he did not hear any of the rumours that we heard.

When we spoke up about this, the Liberal members shut down the committee hearings. When we wanted to ask Alfonso Gagliano a question, the Liberal members shut down the hearing. Why did we not speak? It was because the member over on the other side shut us down.

It is shameful that those Liberals were involved in this cover-up when everyone over there knew what was going on. When the people of Canada were entitled to know what was going on, they shut down the inquiry. They refused to allow us to ask questions. Now they say to us that we are all in this together and that we should resolve it together. It is like somebody being caught breaking into a house and going down to do time asking if anyone wants to share time with him. I say, “No, thank you. You are doing your own time”.

[Jay Hill, Canadian Alliance, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague. I noted some of the heckling coming from the Liberal benches during his remarks, in particular the comments from the member for Cambridge hollering over at my colleague, “Well, why didn't you speak up? When did you say anything?”

As my colleague said, we spoke up time and time again. It is only too bad that the member for Cambridge had not been listening a little, along with the rest of his Liberal colleagues.

I wonder if my colleague from Provencher might, drawing on his experience as the past attorney general of the great Province of Manitoba, bring some legal sense to this issue and pursue the issue of why the Prime Minister, who was the former finance minister, would try to distance himself from this instead of taking responsibility.

We used to hear talk in the House about ministerial accountability but with this Liberal government there never seems to be any ministerial accountability.