Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to participate in the supply day motion debate, as well as to congratulate you formally on your appointment as Deputy Speaker of the chamber. I wish you good luck and I am quite confident that with your personality and abilities you will do a wonderful job in the House.
Canadians are disgusted with the ethically bankrupt Liberal government and its miserable record of corruption, frauds and scandals. For years we have been witness to one boondoggle after another. Hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, have been misspent in one manner or another, often on questionable grants to Liberal held ridings.
This grates on the nerves of all taxpayers, especially when those accountable dismiss the losses. “So what if a few million dollars were stolen”, said the former prime minister, Mr. Jean Chrétien. A few million may look small when contrasted with a $180 billion federal budget and the huge amount that has been pocketed by the Liberal Party out of that money.
When we start talking about a quarter of a billion dollars in the sponsorship scandal, much of which appears to have ended up in the hands of Liberal cronies and eventually in the pocket of the Liberal Party, it becomes a nightmare for all Canadians.
It appears from the Auditor General's report that the government has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through the public works department and five crown corporations to a number of Quebec advertising agencies, all with ties to the federal Liberal Party of Canada.
In some cases all the advertising agencies were doing was transferring money from one government department to a government agency and charging a hefty commission. For example, for one transaction, the transferring of a cheque for $900 million to one of the crown corporations, an advertising agency charged $112,000 as a commission for picking up and delivering the cheque.
As the Auditor General pointed out, there was no need for a middleman in those transactions. It certainly was not a service worth thousands or millions of dollars.
It has been suggested in the media that the money was paid for services performed for the Liberal Party during the 1997 and 2000 elections. There seems little other explanation for why the Liberals would be rewarding these firms with millions of dollars.
The Prime Minister claims that he did not know what was going on. This program began in 1997 when the Prime Minister was finance minister, the custodian of the public purse and vice-chair of the Treasury Board committee. How could a finance minister, vice-chair of the Treasury Board committee and senior Quebec minister not know what was going on? Does the Prime Minister want Canadians to believe that he is incompetent? That will be reassuring to Canadian voters come election time.
According to the Prime Minister's latest spin on the scandal, it is no longer the work of a few rogue bureaucrats but rather a political operation. While at first claiming complete ignorance to what was going on, as further information has come to light he now admits to having been aware of rumours surrounding the sponsorship program, but thinking it merely a matter of some administrative failures until the Auditor General's report confirmed how corrupt it really was.
This is the same Prime Minister who for the past 13 years has been busy back-stabbing and manipulating to take over the Liberal Party's leadership.
His hold over the party was so complete that by 2002 that he was able to force Mr. Jean Chrétien into retirement. When he submitted his nomination papers for the contest to become Liberal leader, he had the support of 259 out of 301 riding presidents. Can members imagine that?
However the Prime Minister now wants us to believe that despite all his ground work securing the support of the party, he had no idea what was going on inside the party. Frankly I find that to be unbelievable. I do not care how strained the relationship was between the Prime Minister and his successor, the current leader of the Liberal Party could not have been oblivious to the political corruption that was taking place right under his nose.
He was aware of the scandals surrounding Shawinigan, the HRDC boondoggles, the transitional jobs fund, the $2 billion gun registry and the long history of mismanagement in the regional development agencies. It should have been more surprising to him if the sponsorship program had not been corrupt.
The Prime Minister, in just the last year, has proven that he has a bad memory. He seems to forget important details until reminded by the official opposition or by the media. Let us take, for instance, the Prime Minister's multi-million dollar family business, Canada Steamship Lines.
All the while he was finance minister, CSL was supposedly held in a blind trust. According to the Prime Minister, he was held completely in the dark, but, alas, that was not completely true. The blind trust actually had at least a dozen holes in it.
The Prime Minister has finally admitted that he did have briefings on at least a dozen occasions by company executives on important issues affecting CSL. However the ethics counsellor was always present so that everything was okay, so much so that the ethics councillor charged the government purse for lunch expenses for his meetings with the Prime Minister and his staff.
His family business received contracts worth $161 million from the government instead of the original figure indicated of $137,000.
Last fall it was revealed that five Liberal cabinet ministers had received free flights or vacations from Canada's corporate elite. The former finance minister, however, remained quiet at that time. It was only later, after his objective of being elected Liberal leader was accomplished, did he come clean and admit that he too had benefited from the generosity of corporate Canada.
When asked about the rule that ministers have to publicly declare gifts valued at more than $200, the soon to be Prime Minister replied that everyone else was breaking the rules too. He was hiding behind everyone else. On that day the Prime Minister proved that while he may be a political leader, he certainly was not a moral leader.
While other parties receive significant donations from everyday Canadians, the Liberals have always relied upon the generous support of the corporate elite, usually the same corporations that receive lucrative government contracts.
Let me give one example. Over the course of four years, Geratec Inc., which later became Tecsult Inc., received $136 million worth of contracts from CIDA. However, in return, it gave $137,000 to the Liberal government.
I would like to say to the Prime Minister that whether it is $12 million of funds raised for his campaign from the same business elite who might at one time be looking forward to getting some benefit from the Prime Minister, or whether it is the tax havens where the Prime Minister's family's company has registered the ships, it raises difficult questions.
Since coming to power in 1993, the Liberals have been actively eroding the confidence Canadians have in their government. Noted Canadian historian, the author of Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney , Michael Bliss, refers to the latest sponsorship scandal as the mother of all Canadian political scandals.
Michael Bliss goes on to write that it is without precedent in our country's history and that the previous scandals pale by comparison.