Mr. Speaker, first of all, I will be sharing my time with my hon. colleague for Lotbinière—L'Érable.
In my opinion, we have just had a clear demonstration by the President of the Treasury Board of what is wrong in this House and in the Canadian Parliament.
The President of Treasury Board tells us, with such arrogance, “I am the one with the figures, the only one with the figures. All the opposition members are barking up the wrong tree, and do not have the right figures.” The news media are all being told the same thing when they criticize the scandals: “You don't have your figures right. I am the only one with the right ones.”
The problem with the Liberal Party, now and in recent years is arrogance. And it is losing it
Yesterday I heard the Prime Minister, who pretty well did the rounds of the TV media in Canada. He was trying to explain that what was going on was terrible, that he was terribly upset, disgusted, found it unacceptable, absolutely inadmissible. But he has been reacting this way only lately.
When he was Minister of Finance, he did not react this way. On the contrary, he played at “see no evil, hear no evil”, even “smell no evil”. Yet he was well aware of what was going on.
So we do not buy them telling us now that the Prime Minister knew nothing of it when he was finance minister. He was after all in charge of finance, that is, number 1 in Quebec and number 2 in Treasury Board. It is not true that he knew nothing.
After he was on TVA yesterday, a listener poll was carried out and 98% of respondents said “We do not believe the PM”. Only 2% did believe him.
This is pretty logical when we look at the tissue of lies around this whole affair. There is nothing complicated about it. They are all ministers. They are all Liberals. They are all people who have worked with them, people in ad agencies, or vice versa. Even in the Crown corporations, the ones involved were all people with past Liberal connections.
Today they are trying to convince us that no one knew what was going on. It is too much. The Liberal Party of Canada is being undone by its arrogance.
What with Groupaction, Polygone, Coffin, Everest, do you think they were not fed up hearing this and seeing the Canadian flag flapping everywhere, on every street corner in Saint-Jean and everywhere else in Quebec? Every time some event took place, there it was. People were not taken in.
They understood that at a time when it was hard to find funding for public services and education in Quebec, Ottawa was investing money in flags to drive home the message that federalism and the representatives of federalism par excellence, the Liberal Party, were our only defenders.
The money did not go where the people of Quebec wanted it to and they reacted badly. That is why there is such a furor today. “Finally,” they say, “what we sensed at the time, what we thought was not right at the time—it has come out now”.
The Bloc is proud to say that we are the ones who uncovered this scandal. It was not the Liberal MPs from Quebec. They knew what was going on in Quebec, but they did not talk about it. It was the Bloc, once again, who did its work by asking an impressive 441 questions in 4 years.
Now the Prime Minister, who was there for all these questions, would like us to believe that he went back to his office after question period and did not ask any questions and did not say, “There is something odd here. There seem to be a lot of questions about this subject”.
Let no one try to tell us that the Prime Minister went back to his office and all was business as usual. That cannot be. Moreover, he did have some trouble with the letter from the Liberal policy chair, who told him in 2002, “I am sending you a letter because there is a problem. You must look into it”. Now we are told that the letter was lost. Nevertheless, the letter appeared on the front page of the National Post , and it was picked up by all the media.
Consequently, there is a major problem. For the crown corporations, it is a terrible scandal. Of course, we know who André Ouellet is. He is a former minister of Foreign Affairs, number 3 person in the government at the time. He is someone important. He was up to his neck in it. Canada Post, of course, was up to its neck. There were many other companies that were up to their necks, too, including VIA Rail. In my opinion, the most amazing is the RCMP. Now the RCMP has had to ask the Sûreté du Québec, “Please do our investigations, because things do not look good”.
It has become almost a political police. We never doubted it at the time. I would rather not remind you of the 1970 crisis, but what we have here is even bigger. These are people whose job it is to investigate individuals suspected of wrongdoing and we discover they too are involved in the business.
There is something really wrong with this government, and people are noticing now. It should not come as a surprise to the Liberal Party, then, if this stirs up such a furor. People have had it. In this place, we hear fine Liberal rhetoric about their being democrats and transparent, but the truth is the opposite. On every issue, the opposition is kept in the dark. A few officials in ministerial circles are making all the decisions. That is what happened in this scandal.
Do not tell me that no one knew anything. We suspect that everyone did. That is the Liberals' defence. They are still as arrogant as ever. Evidence of that is what the President of the Treasury Board just said, accusing the opposition of saying any odd thing and throwing figures around. Well, I am sorry but I think that our figures are accurate. I think that the people are currently siding with those who provided the right figures, instead of those who are continuing to hide behind their arrogance, claiming that nobody else has the right figures, that they have all the information, that they are going to make everything right and that the opposition and the public need only follow them and trust them.
I think the remarks the Prime Minister made to the media were pathetic; he was really eager to exonerate himself. When I saw the polls, I realized I was not alone. In fact, 98% of those polled do not believe the Prime Minister. The PM himself had problems with a number of companies. He wanted to have his own companies listed as well to provide marketing services to the government.
What can we say too about the information made public yesterday on Earnscliffe Strategy? There was $6 million in contracts, most of it granted by the former finance minister and current Prime Minister for verbal reports. This reminds me a bit of Groupaction. What are we to think about the famous report that cost ten ministers $27,000 each for the exact same report? This seems awfully similar to when the Groupaction scandal was uncovered; that company had provided three photocopies of the same document for $500,000 per copy.
The corruption goes quite deep. A public inquiry will not save this government. It will likely delay things. That is why we would like to have a preliminary report. I can, however, say one thing: whether there is an election this spring or fall, or in the spring or fall of 2005, the Liberal Party has made a monumental error and people have now had enough.
I am also sick of hearing members opposite and people across Canada say that Quebec politicians are a corrupt group. We are the victims here. We broke the scandal, and today, people want to tell Quebeckers that this is how we play politics. As proof, the minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario said some nasty things two days ago in his private journal. Perhaps he thought that we would never find out, but we happen to have some contacts. We received a brown envelope and we found out about it.
I am a little sick of being blamed for this. We are the victims here. About 25% of this money belongs to Quebeckers, and it was used to fund an unscrupulous deal to shower Quebec with Canadian flags. People are a bit sick of this.
The Prime Minister retroactively saved $100 million in taxes thanks to a bill. He said that he obtained $137,000 in federal government contracts, when he really got $161 million.
People are sick of it. In Quebec, it is even more obvious. A public inquiry is not going to fix things for the Liberal Party, but the voters are going to. No matter when an election is called, we will be waiting for the Liberals in Quebec . Their actions are unacceptable, and they will pay the political price.