Debates of Feb. 17th, 2004

Supply

[Grant Hill, Canadian Alliance, Macleod, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a single substantive suggestion and that is to throw the rascals out in the next election.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the leader of the official opposition on his remarks.

He referenced in his speech the case involving François Beaudoin, the former president of the BDC, who was absolutely vilified by the government because he had the audacity to stand up and challenge the Prime Minister's assertion that there was a golf course and hotel in his riding so badly in need of public money. We know that it turned into a complete fiasco of taxpayers' money. He had the personal indignity of being dragged through the courts. He has been completely vindicated according to the hon. member.

I wonder if the member would go further in suggesting, for example, that Michel Vennat, who currently remains the president of the BDC should be suspended from that position? He was absolutely discredited by a Quebec Superior Court judge in his testimony that was given against Mr. Beaudoin and suggesting that he was very complicit in this vilification of the man who he replaced and yet remains on the public purse, remains drawing a salary just as we saw Alfonso Gagliano do when he was fingered by the Auditor General.

Could the public be spared further indignity by paying the salary of a man who was involved in this scandal from the get-go?

[Grant Hill, Canadian Alliance, Macleod, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am somewhat hesitant to go down the road of tarring individuals in this chamber where I do have immunity. However, I will report, and this comes from court documents, that these individuals who attacked François Beaudoin did it in such a vicious way as to put his very career at risk. This was a fine honest banker, a man who simply said that he did not believe that the loan relating to the former Prime Minister's business dealings was a fair thing for the taxpayers of Canada.

This individual, who my colleague mentioned, wrote two separate letters to RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli, one asking the federal police to investigate Beaudoin for “misappropriation of bank property during his tenure”, and the other accusing him of being the source of the forged Grand-Mère document leaked to the National Post .

The court case that has taken years has now completely exonerated this man. The individual who made these allegations was called a liar in court. I am sorry to report that here in the House but the real issue here is, where did the charges come from? Where was the coordination between that individual and the Prime Minister's Office when it came to bringing out the communications strategy? I believe that Canadians will look upon this individual, as I said before, as a hero.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, like many Canadians, when I reflect on the Auditor General's report, it is more with sadness than anger that we have this discussion in the House of Commons today.

The motion brought forward by the official opposition is meant to focus attention on what has happened with other people's money.

Is there anything more embarrassing for Canadians than seeing their Prime Minister sitting in penance before the altar of father Rex Murphy, as we saw on the weekend? What a spectacle of shame. What a hair shirt the Prime Minister was wearing. The Itchy and Scratchy show could not be more painful than that performance.

The cross-country cross-examination of our Prime Minister must go down as one of the greatest embarrassments we have ever seen in the country by a prime minister, an actor who was trying to portray himself as blameless in this entire affair. It reminds me of the old Platters' tune, and I know my colleague from St. John's will recall this, the Great Pretender .

The Prime Minister expressed feigned indignation and anger at what had happened. “Mad as hell” is our Prime Minister; mad that he got caught.

It is far too soon for the Prime Minister to speak of matters of ultimate destination. The list of Liberal offences is much longer than the confessional we saw occurring before father Murphy.

The Prime Minister forgot to mention that he sat in the cabinet room during the entire Shawinigate raid on the funds of the Business Development Bank.

He sat silently while the cabinet Orders in Council were passed shutting down the Somalia inquiry, which is reason for concern given these current public inquiries.

He sat silently while an Order in Council was passed appointing Alfonso Gagliano to represent Canada in our diplomatic corps, something that the Pope himself was not prepared to bless, yet the Prime Minister seemed to be completely oblivious to what was happening.

He sat silently while the government squandered millions on a politically motivated RCMP witch hunt of a former prime minister, which cost the country millions.

Silently he sat, while the HRDC program unaccountably ran up billions.

He sat silently while an ethics counsellor facilitated a venetian blind trust that let him play peekaboo with his own private corporate interests. He wrote that particular element of the red book, that infamous red-faced document that now still sits on the table as a reminder to Canadians what the promises of this government are worth.

Why did he do not more? The man who owns so many boats appears to be unprepared to rock any boats. Why did he do that? Clearly, self-interest, the lust for the brass ring; his precious, the Liberal leadership. That seems to be the reason that he sat silently while so much happened under his nose.

His advisers have told him he needs to get the story out. They fear he is not being given sufficient time in question period. I know I cannot reference the fact that he sat silently through much of question period last week.

Let me remind the Prime Minister that the floor is open to his ilk in this debate. He can come before the House at any time. He has unlimited time to use in the House of Commons. How on earth could he possibly have missed what was going on in his home province, in his department, in his country, for over a decade? That is impossible to accept.

Before he went to father Murphy's confessional on the Rock, the Prime Minister went into the Liberal caucus meeting last Tuesday to tell them the game plan. Since that meeting, the stream of gutter language that has spewed from the mouths of otherwise temperate Liberal members has been truly remarkable.

The game plan is for the Prime Minister to go out across the country and say that he is mad as hell. That mantra will be repeated from the charlatan in the movie Network . The Prime Minister's spin doctors forgot to tell him the full line, and that is that the people of Canada, after 10 years of Liberal government, are also mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

What is the anatomy of this Liberal corruption?

We are here today essentially to dissect that anatomy. This is no small task. The Auditor General's report examines the government's sponsorship program, but, as the Auditor General herself has said, her mandate is not to include an indepth examination of the criminal intent.

Let me be clear, as the Prime Minister himself is so prone to say, what Canadians need to understand is that something went terribly wrong and that the Liberal government is responsible and should now be held to account.

Summing up her report, Sheila Fraser said that we needed to ask two important questions. Who authorized the payments and who benefited? We know who did not benefit: hard-working Canadians who every year, in trust, send their hard-earned taxpayer money to Ottawa for distribution to programs from which they should benefit. We know well connected Liberals assured the funnelling of taxpayer dollars to Liberal-friendly ad firms, and I would say that Canadians know the reason why.

I do not subscribe to the Prime Minister's line that he acted decisively or in a timely fashion. The document was available to the government in October of 2003. It had it in its possession since that time. The Prime Minister had to be aware.

There has been much speculation for months about the content of the Auditor General's report. The government knew that it would be a damning indictment of how these sponsorship programs and grants were being operated by the Department of Public Works and by other elements of the government.

There has been a string of public works ministers, Ralphy, Curly and Moe, and they have all bungled the file. I knew that the last Auditor General's report would be stinging and would castigate the government for its activities in the way it was not accountable, in the way it was spending taxpayer money, in the way it kept Parliament in the dark and in the way it “broke every rule in the book”, according to her. Yet these transgressions outlined in this report are worse by the ministers in the various departments audited.

Sadly, the recurring theme of the government has been mismanagement, corrupt practices, faulty accounting and missing documentation. This is the way in which the government has been spending money, losing track of that money, trying to cover it up and then saying that it is not to blame.

The report itself is riddled with numerous examples. Some of the most troubling that I would point to involve the RCMP itself, money that was allotted for the RCMP's various programs for its 125th anniversary that should have been a source of pride for Canadians. One of our longstanding, principled institutions has been sullied and tainted by the Liberal government. That money was spent in an inappropriate way and put in a bank account that was deemed to be highly inappropriate by the Auditor General herself.

What is happening on the Prime Minister's now frequent talk show circuit? It is an attempt to stifle the debate, to take it away from the average Canadian. The opposition's job is to be diligent, to ask questions, to come to this place and to speak for Canadians. We saw it in the House of Commons last week. We saw it on Cross Country Checkup .

The Prime Minister said that he did not know what was happening. Imagine, the minister of finance, doubling as the vice-chair of the Treasury Board, the man who wrote the cheques, the man on the frontlines, the gatekeeper, the man who was specifically tasked with safeguarding the money of Canadians did not know how the money was being spent. This is simply not acceptable. He was complicit or complacent about how these programs were operating. He had a responsibility, an obligation and a commitment to the Canadian people, which he is now shirking.

As we saw last week, simply announcing that there will be a commission to look into this, just as there was a public inquiry into the Arar case, will in effect put these issues to one side until after an election. Make no bones about it, the object here is to call an early election, to try to bury this and to try to put it behind him as quickly as possible.

The Canadian people who phoned in to Rex Murphy's show were not impressed. They urged the Prime Minister in the strongest possible terms not to do so. I suspect that the CBC callers' board was lit up like a pinball machine and they could have gone on for another eight hours given the time constraints.

It has been over year. Other references have been made to the ballooning costs of the gun registry. The minister now responsible is a minister who had operational control over that budget for many years as well. To see her sit here in righteous indignation and throw barbs back at the opposition is again a little hard to take. Those who are concerned about this and want to get to the bottom of it should start at the top. Those who are quick to point the finger at bureaucrats, as was pointed out by my colleague, should look in the mirror when they looking for those responsible.

The Auditor General has been tasked with an important role, but so are we. We in the Conservative Party intend to be diligent and we intend to be vigorous in our examination of the government, both at the committee level and here in the House of Commons. More important, we intend to pose to the Canadian people an alternative: a government in waiting, a government that would do things better, cleaner, more effectively and with more responsibility to those who send us to this place.

[Guy St-Julien, Liberal, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very closely to the two previous speakers. I would like to make a comment and ask two questions.

I find bizarre the attitude to this motion attacking all members. I warn the hon. member that I was a member of Parliament in the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. I know how the machine works. I spent nine years and two months with the Conservatives in this place.

You say that you are a new Conservative Party, but that means nothing. When you attack all members of this House on—

[The Deputy Speaker]

Order, please. I know we are in the early stages of a very important debate, so I just want to caution members on either side of the House that all interventions have to be made through the Chair.

I repeat that remarks must be addressed to the Chair and not directly across the floor of the House. I would simply like everyone to respect the rules.

The hon. member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik

[Guy St-Julien, Liberal, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik, QC]

Mr. Speaker, you are an excellent referee. We know about your experience in the national hockey league. You are clearly demonstrating your skills today.

My comment is the following. I recall that, under the Progressive Conservatives, I was the only member in the House of Commons to do so. The Progressive Conservative Party, the NDP and all opposition members disagreed with my disclosing all my expenditures as an MP.

If all members' expenditures are published every year in a report entitled, Members' Office and Travel Expenses, it is thanks to me. This way, people have a clear picture. Look at the history of the House of Commons to find out how I went about it.

Coming back to my comment. We have, in the House of Commons, a registry of foreign travel by sponsors, promoters and Canada.

The Conservative member for St. Albert, Alberta, has been on television in recent months, expressing outrage at the spending by all chiefs of staff on this side of the House. Moreover, there is no reporting concerning this spending. Only names are listed.

After investigation, we can see that the member for St. Albert in the new Conservative Party has travelled the world. We are talking about expensive travel, with business class fares at $6,400. He even travelled to receive a sponsorship. He who got a sponsorship is now denouncing sponsorships. That is one sponsorship from promoters.

I travelled only once in 15 years and 10 months. It was in 1986. I travelled with my wife, and our trip cost the Canadian government all of $4,302.

My question is the following. Will this new Conservative Party of Canada, as it is called today, produce by the end of the day all the expenditures of their members, from the PC Party and the Alliance, who have travelled with promoters around the world, at a cost of millions of dollars?

Also, could we be presented with comprehensive reports on all sponsorships under the program in question, by electoral district and by member, and on how it was distributed?

I look forward to receiving an answer by this evening.

[Peter MacKay, Progressive Conservative, Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, NS]

Mr. Speaker, without being too derogatory or dismissive, that is probably one of the most inane questions I have ever heard. Of course our expenditures are logged here in the House of Commons, just as those of all members of Parliament are. We are not getting on a $100 million jet as members of the government are.

The member opposite should be fully aware that we are not talking about expenditures of members of Parliament or even members of the government. We are talking about massive, colossal waste by government departments, mainly public works. The sum is astronomical.

Two hundred and fifty million dollars would have paid the salary for eight years for 556 police officers. It would have bought over 8,000 police cruisers. Two hundred and fifty million dollars would have paid for between 100 and 200 installed MRI machines in the country. It would have paid the salaries of over 196 full time nurses, at a salary of $50,000 for the next 25 years, according to StatsCan.

There would have been 30,000 full time university students studying at an undergraduate level with that kind of money. It could have gone toward their tuitions. Every university student in the province of Nova Scotia could have been given a bursary toward their education, amounting to over $8,000, with that kind of money.

Two hundred and fifty million dollars would pay for more than two years of construction, rehabilitation and maintenance for the province of Nova Scotia's highway network. Nova Scotia will pay $106 million toward construction and rehabilitation just next year alone.

Those are the kinds of priorities that could have benefited from that kind of money, and what has it gone to? It has gone to Liberal-friendly firms for political gain, for partisan perpetration of power, to hold on to that grip with unbelievable ferocity.

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, President of the Treasury Board and Minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry I did not get a chance to ask the member a question. I noted his use of Itchy, Scratchy, Ralphy, Curly and Moe, but I did not hear any substantive contribution to the solution to the problem.

I did hear him suggest that the Prime Minister was hiding from the Canadian public by going on TV for two hours and taking questions. The Prime Minister has been absolutely forthright in meeting with citizens on this question because he has absolutely nothing to fear from the truth. That is exactly the point that the Prime Minister has been making over and over again, and Canadians are listening.

I do want to talk a bit about what has gone on, how we have arrived at the point we are at and what we will do about it. It is important to put this debate into context.

I just came from an hour with the public accounts committee where I heard questions from all sides. It was a very healthy discussion. Members are seized with the issue and want to do a good job on it.

We have members from all sides of the House, such as the member for Winnipeg Centre who worked very carefully on the whistleblowing legislation and the member from New Westminster, British Columbia who was my vice-chair on the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, who take this stuff very seriously.

When I met with the committee earlier today one of the central questions concerned the changes to modern comptrollership that lie underneath some of the problems we are facing here.

I want to first characterize the debate in this way. If we want to look to who is responsible for a big part of this problem, we need look no further than the House. We need look no further than the members on all sides of the House. Let me go through this.

We collectively represent all Canadians in the management of a corporation that has roughly 450,000 members who deliver services to 2,600 lines of business. It is an enormously large complex which in this year had about $183 billion in annual expenditures and about $170 billion in the days that this took place. It should be pointed out also that the $250 million is a four year figure, or about $62 million on average annually.

The Auditor General is worried about $100 million, not all of which she claims has been misspent. She said she could not figure that out. She has identified very serious improprieties and problems but the actual number may tend to be quite a bit smaller. Let me put that into context. The actual amount is roughly two one-thousands of a per cent of the total operation under management by the government at any point in time. It is a very small program.

We know about the billion dollar boondoggle in HRDC which turned out to be a question about whether there was value for $65,000. When we got through the heat and it came down to the end of the day we found that $65,000 was unaccounted for, not $1 billion.

The member talked about the gun registry and a cost of $2 billion. In reality, the gun registry has cost a little under $100 million a year from the time it was put in place. The audited figure is about $814 million to date. That includes the developmental costs. I have been quite critical of some of the developmental costs because I do think there are problems with governments bringing in large systems and it was evidenced here. I will not run around sharing with members the “I told you so” stories, but I am more than willing to talk about that at any particular point in time.

The reality is that we are getting to the point where we have a service that will cost us $60 million to $68 million a year to operate and it will deliver substantive positive protection to Canadians. That is why the national chiefs of police have said that they do not want it taken out, that they want it managed efficiently and effectively. We want that also and we are delivering on that.

The point in these debates, if we are to do justice to the role that we play here in the House, is to bring these debates down to a substantive base. We have to start paying attention.

It is a former clerk of the House who makes the point that the House is ignoring 50% of its constitutional responsibilities and that is oversight.

I have to say that I have spent time listening to the statements of members opposite and I have not heard a lot of them over the years talk about wanting more time on estimates, that they want to get in there and do estimates or that they must pay attention to this.

No. They want to cruise around in the hot atmosphere of the 30 second debate in question period. However that is not the place to have a debate about the improvement in the public service.

I absolutely reject the assertion that there is a culture of corruption in the public service. It is absolutely untrue. As it happens in any operation and any profession, people do sometimes go wrong. It is a fact. We do need systems to correct that. However to tar the entire public service is simply unacceptable.

How did we get here? I have researched, studied, worked on and spoken about this in the House for years. A transformation is taking place right now in public management and it is taking place all around the world. The new information and communication technologies, which have so transformed our economy, have created huge pressure on public management.

In a world where we have the death of time and distance, we need decisions like this but modern systems cannot act that fast. The House does not act that fast. One of the things that has contributed to the loss of status of the House of Commons has been its failure to figure out how it functions in the world, the world that our citizens function in, that is making decisions at the rate of speed of the snap of a finger. They are not taking months and weeks to respond.

What we did over the years, rather than confront that, was give up the review of estimates in 1969 when we said that they could be deemed. When we brought in time allocation in 1972 it was because we wanted to get things through the House more quickly.

We hand things over the Auditor General. I like the Auditor General. I know her well and I have spent a lot of time with her. I have spent time with the previous auditor general. I am interested in these issues and I have been for years. However there is a question here. The House contains members from all over our nation, members who have been sent here by citizens from all over our nation. The House should be deciding the value questions for Canada. Unfortunately, we give that up to others so that we can deal with Itchy and Scratchy.

We have to take back that ground. I do not believe there is a lot of ideological difference between that side of the House and this side of the House when it comes to good management. I do not believe there is a strong difference of opinion in how we deliver public services, or that we want it more or less than the others.

I have experienced what I consider to be the very best kind of activity in the House which is when members get out of the glare of the camera and sit down together.

I can tell members that some of the stuff that took place during the investigation of the privacy commissioner's office was absolutely astounding. Members from all parties got together and collaborated on how we would ask questions. They were outraged at the actions of certain professionals who should have known better, et cetera. It was a collective effort, with every single party working together to resolve an important problem in public management. We can do it.

I believe the public accounts committee can get there. I think the democratic deficit will be reduced by the public accounts committee taking this seriously and delivering a quality piece of work back to the House. I have some faith. The chair and I have disagreed at times on style. I think he does make a mistake when he comes into the House and joins in the question period debate when he is trying to manage the more sober debate in that committee, and I have told him that. However, overall I believe the chair and the members of that committee are committed to doing a quality piece of work and I have told them that I will support them every step of the way.

How did we get into this situation? Since the world is moving faster, large organizations have adapted to that by delegating more and more of the service responsibility close to the people who are receiving service. They did that for good reasons and for positive reasons.

Yesterday I said that the actual change began under the Kim Campbell government. I do not say that to absolve responsibility. I believe we would have made the same decision. I do not believe that Kim Campbell knew about it nor understood it. I think it was a management decision within the public service. However it was done because there was a belief that this had to be done to get better quality service. The motivation was a good one.

What they did not do is extend the communication systems the same way. How information is handled and managed in the government is very threatening to governments. This is a problem with which industrialized countries around the world are struggling. I have visited a number of them. I have talked with them. I have done research and I have read this stuff.

On some fronts Canada is actually doing better than most of the world and in others about the same as the rest of the world. A lot of money has been wasted on IT projects all over the world. It is quite freely written about, because there is a problem as we try to reframe the information infrastructure.

Members of the House and Canadians want greater transparency. How we do that in this world is very complex and we, frankly, have avoided it. We delegated responsibility for action and, in doing that, we took out the then comptrollership program.

The comptrollers program was a second line of access to oversee. The problem in only having one line of access is if the person above us is breaking the rules, then we have a problem. Where do we go? We saw that in the interviewing of witnesses from the privacy commissioner's office. Public servants were saying that they knew what went on was wrong, that they told their superior it was wrong but that he told them he was a deputy head, that he had the right to make that decision and that they should go away. They were stuck because they felt there was no place else to go.

Our whistleblowing regime is inadequate. That was identified very clearly in our study. In fact, the subcommittee, chaired by the member for Winnipeg Centre and one of the Liberal members, wrote a report on how we can improve whistleblowing legislation. The report was taken seriously by the previous president of the Treasury Board, the current Minister of Industry, who had some work done on that and it will be coming before the House. We will put that before the Standing Committee on Government Operations after first reading to allow members of the House to craft legislation to provide us with the best legislative base in the world for protecting our public servants when they want to deal with wrongdoing. However we must do more.

Let me talk about what we will do. The day I was sworn in, December 12, I was handed a letter from the Prime Minister, a letter that went to all ministers. It said in part that from the foundations of the government will be enhanced transparency, accountability and financial responsibility.

In my mandate I received a very specific set of instructions from the Prime Minister. In the first part of my mandate he said “You, Mr. President of the Treasury Board, are responsible for ensuring that we have transparency, accountability and financial responsibility and you will put in place a system of modern comptrollership so we have secondary access and oversight in every single government department. We will replace what was taken out in 1993 but we will do it responsibly and we will do it in a way that respects modern public management”.

He also created a cabinet committee called the expenditure review committee, which I chair, and which has as its core mandate the modernization of the public service. It will put in place a system of delivering public services that will be the best in the world. Our public servants have the right to hold their heads up high and to feel proud of the work they are doing. We will do everything we can to support that.

He also looked at Treasury Board and said that Treasury Board had become fat and lazy. This has no reference to the president. He said that instead of its oversight roles, it gave up a lot of those and was now operating programs and delivering services. That is not what Treasury Board is supposed to do. Treasury Board is supposed to be the accountability function within government. He stripped all of that out. He gave some of it to PWGSE and some to the Privy Council and said “You, Mr. President of the Treasury Board, will focus on oversight and management improvement”. He gave me oversight over all of the spending and over the regulations. I have administrative law and I have the finances. We are working hard to build up the team.

I am a little bit disappointed by some of the comments I have heard coming across the floor about some of the administration over there. The secretary of the Treasury Board was put in place in that organization a couple of years ago to clean up this mess. He has done an absolutely marvellous job of that in a difficult time when he did not have leadership that really wanted to go there.

I have quotes here from the Auditor General. If members want to talk about the credibility of the Auditor General, then they should quote the Auditor General when she talks about the very important work that has been done by the secretary of Treasury Board and by public servants throughout government to correct these problems and to address them. She is quite laudatory, frankly. It is just cheap debate that comes across the floor, the Ralphy, Curly and Moe variety.

It was the current Minister of Finance, when he was in charge of this department, who put in place a series of controls and management methods that the Auditor General specifically references as substantial and needed improvements. It is he who led this improvement. It was the former House leader, when he was in the position of minister, who brought in the auditor in the first place. It was his action that brought the auditor's attention to this file.

So I am sorry, but I just do not accept that kind of cheap, foolish debate on the floor here.

In addition, there was a statement made in the committee that somehow, on December 12, I also had access to this report and knew about it. I want to say that this is absolutely untrue. This report is an embargoed report by the Auditor General. The Auditor General's report was brought to me about three weeks ago; it will now be the fourth week that I have had this report.

I can tell members that when I read this report the anger of some individuals in this country was trivial compared to mine. I believe strongly in public management. I have worked all my life in public service in one form or another and to see people who have so little respect for their responsibilities saddens me beyond belief. That is not what we need from anyone. People like that should be sought out and punished in whatever way it takes. We need to send a clear message that that kind of behaviour is not acceptable.

I had the report for three weeks. I was not allowed, because I had it on a confidential basis, to take action until such time as it was tabled in the House. That would have been contemptuous of Parliament, frankly, to act on information that had not yet been laid before the House, but I was given access to the Auditor General. She and I had several meetings on this. I met with staff and I met with others. I looked at possible solutions. I prepared some advice for the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister at the end of the day had a decision to make. It is an old and new decision, right? Does he want to act like politicians who come into the House and say, “Let's have a political debate and you'll say this and we'll say that”? Then, at the end of the day, everybody is so confused that they say, “A pox on both your houses”.

But this Prime Minister said no. There were people who said, “My goodness, don't call a public inquiry. That's going to cause all sorts of problems. That's going to go all over the place”. The Prime Minister said, “Absolutely not. We need to get to the bottom of this, wherever it goes. The Canadian people need to understand what the bottom line is here, what has happened, and we want to understand it”.

But it is difficult, and this is one of the differences; the opposition calls for an inquiry a day. The reality is that for most of the administrative practices when there are problems I am sure the House is capable of dealing with them and I certainly know that I am. But in matters such as that of Maher Arar, where issues of secrecy and national security are involved, we want to be a little careful about that. We want to get to the bottom of it, but we have to respect that environment because it is a very complex and difficult one.

In matters where it may touch upon colleagues of ours, colleagues of mine--it may, I do not know for sure, that is for the inquiry to decide--then I do not think I should be the one investigating. I think the Prime Minister's decision was exactly the right one: hand it off to an independent, wide-open process, no holds barred, and let them go wherever they wish to go, because the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to fear from the truth. Not only that, he wants the truth out.

It was a ridiculous statement that he is hiding from the Canadian public on TV, that he is hiding from the Canadian public by going around to talk shows, listening to people and making himself available to answer these questions. The political pundits are saying, “No, you don't do that. You manage this”. Nonsense. What the Prime Minister is doing is saying, “I have nothing to fear. I'm out there”.

Let me end with this. There is work that the House has to do. I am launching a review of the Financial Administration Act, which is the backbone of public administration. I am going to come to the House and ask members to be involved in that.

I am announcing a review of crown governance. We have problems in those crown corporations that I will be reporting on shortly, but we are going to review crown governance. I will ask members of the House to get engaged with us, to put their ideas on the table and show us how to improve this. I will show them. I say to them, Mr. Speaker, “I will show you mine and you show me yours”.

There is a bigger question--and we are going to put whistleblowing legislation--and it is the question that the auditor poses in chapter 2. It is a question that she and I have debated a lot and it is a question, frankly, that she says is the important question we have to answer. We just do not have an easy answer, because it is not an easy question.

We can put in place all the laws we want. For example, we have laws against stealing cars and people still steal cars. We can put all the laws in place, but what we have to do is deal with this question of ethics and integrity. We have to deal with the relationship between politicians and public servants.

This is a piece of research for which I am going to bring in the best minds in this country. I am going to invite members, our unions, and our employees, and I am going to invite Canadians, and we are going to put down some guidelines, a simple set of rules that talks about what it is to live a life of honour, because that is what our public service can deliver and that is what Canadians need.

[Chuck Strahl, Canadian Alliance, Fraser Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the last 30 seconds of that 20 minute speech was interesting because the minister did start to put forward a couple of ideas. It would have been nice to actually hear the details rather than just hearing him say it is a review, because that is all we have heard from these Liberals since they got in hot water.

It is interesting that today the minister blamed the House; the problem is this House. Yesterday it was Kim Campbell, that dang Kim Campbell, boy, she basically has been running things over there for the last 10 years and we just did not notice that the problem was actually of her creation.

I can give us a couple of other ideas that the minister could consider. For example, I do not know why he did not speak up when Gagliano was appointed to the cabinet originally and the RCMP recommended that he not be approved for cabinet. Do we remember that?

[An hon. member]

I remember.

[Chuck Strahl, Canadian Alliance, Fraser Valley, BC]

What happened on the front benches then? They all came together and said,“Guess what, this guy does not meet the smell test”.

This is the truth, folks. The RCMP said he should not be in cabinet, they put him in cabinet anyway, the Liberals backed off 100%, and guess what? He is in disgrace today and the Liberals are in disgrace too. What a shame.

It started over there. The smell started there. He could have stopped this probably at that moment, because we create a culture with those kinds of appointments. Then they appointed the former minister, the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, to clean up the mess. It was not long before he was up to his eyeballs in alligators and then he was gone. They then appointed the finance minister of today to come in and clean up the mess. Now they have appointed another minister and they have spokesmen over there to try to deflect this. It is just a sickness that goes through the system.

The minister should not be surprised that we cannot debate with him how to overcome this culture of corruption that is part of the Liberal system. I just do not know how we can debate it other than to say it is just plain wrong and it should be gone.

These days in Quebec, the most popular television show is Les Bougon . A “bougon” is someone who cheats the system whenever they can.

In yesterday's Le Journal de Montréal , the headlines read, “Les vrais Bougon”. A couple was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay back $26,000. This is for a small-time “bougon”. How much time will the Prime Minister's “bougons” get for millions of dollars?

I wonder if the new Liberal Party slogan is, “We are 'les Bougon'”. Quebeckers understand this slogan, because the Liberals are corrupt and they have created a culture of corruption. A change of government is needed. That is the only way to resolve the problem.

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Mr. Speaker, let me first correct something the member said. I expressly said in my remarks that my comments about what occurred under Kim Campbell would have occurred under us, that it was a policy management trend at the time. I do not hold her accountable. As I said, I suspect that she did not even know what was going on, not because she was not paying attention but because normally politicians do not pay attention to some of these management issues. It was done on the management side. I do not think there is a lot to dispute about that.

I just wonder what value we serve to Canadians when we stand up here over and over again and smear people without putting any facts on the table. If the member has something that he thinks is substantive, that proves his charge of corruption--that is the word he used--then I think he has an obligation to put it on the table. He has the inquiry. He can do it here. He speaks here within privilege, but if he has substantive--

[An hon. member]

Pierre Corbeil.

[Chuck Strahl, Canadian Alliance, Fraser Valley, BC]

Pierre Corbeil, how about him?

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

He was not talking about Mr. Corbeil. He was talking about the ambassador to Denmark. He made a very specific allegation. I would ask him to put evidence on the table.

That is the problem with this debate. I have yet to hear from that party a single substantive contribution on this issue, not one.

I can tell those members that there are members in this party who care, such as the member from New Westminster. I hope he speaks today, because I know he is an individual who has studied this and cares deeply about public management. I know he has a contribution to make, as do others.

The right hon. member for Calgary Centre, at a time in his life after he left the leadership of that party and could have gone off and written his memoirs, came and sat as a member of the standing committee on government operations because he cares passionately about our public service and the public services we deliver. He participated every step of the way with that committee because he can make a substantive contribution, as can the member from New Westminster.

The member for Winnipeg Centre spent a long time on this issue of whistleblowing and protecting public servants. Actually, there was a Bloc member on the committee who has since seen the light, but that does not take away from the Bloc's position. I want to say this quite clearly: in Quebec, they have some of the best privacy legislation in the country. They have some of the best election finance legislation. I am a little annoyed at some of the stuff that comes from across the floor here. The election finance legislation that we put in place was modelled on the best regime in the country and that is the one that is in place in Quebec. If people want to talk about problems and want to assign that to a particular region, is Grant Devine from Quebec? Is Glen Clark from Quebec? I am tired of that.

I think that members would do this country a service if they ratcheted down the rhetoric and personal smears and focused on solutions. I know we can solve this problem, and if the members think that they are a government in waiting, a government in waiting has to have ideas because the Canadian people reject this other debate.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think the President of the Treasury Board is trying to cloud the issue. The issue at the heart of the motion of the Conservative Party, and the current debate throughout Quebec and Canada, is truly the culture of waste and scandal within this Liberal government. It used, perhaps for national unity purposes, taxpayers' money. Nonetheless, the government is not fooling anyone. The primary goal was to promote the Liberal Party of Canada, particularly in Quebec.

I would like the President of the Treasury Board to comment on this culture of waste. It is manifest in many ways, such as in the fact that, from 1997 to 2002, when the Prime Minister was the Minister of Finance, federal government operating expenditures increased by 40%, which is twice the increase in operating expenditures of the governments of Quebec and Ontario.

There was also the Human Resources Development Canada scandal; a billion dollars vanished who knows where. There was the Business Development Bank scandal with the loans to the Auberge Grand-Mère and also the firearms registry fiasco. Nearly $2 billion was wasted in administering this registry. There was also the sponsorship scandal. Is this not too many coincidences to try to appear blameless in the eyes of Canadians and Quebeckers?

I would like him to comment on this series of scandals and tell us that the government and the Liberal Party have not had anything to do with all these facts. These are facts.

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question. I have addressed some of this and I will come back to it.

On the motion that is before the House, it says:

--the liberal government has and continues to nurture a culture of corruption through the abuse of its influence and the use of public funds for personal benefit--

I think it is a rather substantial charge to say that the government is using public funds for personal benefit. If the member has evidence of that, he should put it on the table. It is fine to engage in the hot debate and let us go to it.

The HRDC billion dollar boondoggle was debated in the House. We still hear about it every day. The billion dollar boondoggle is $65,000 in spending that was unaccounted for. It was not $1 billion but $65,000.

The member says, picking up on a report from some mathematical wizard, that the gun registry has cost us $2 billion. The gun registry to date has cost us $814 million, a little less than $100 million a year and that includes the development cost. The reality is it will end up costing us somewhere around $65 million to $68 million to operate.

The Canadian food institute would cost us, using that same calculation, $500 million a year for 10 years, some $5 billion to provide absolute protection of our food to keep it safe. Do I hear the member complaining about that?

The fact is in a country of this size, to deliver services to people to protect their safety costs money. The services should be delivered as efficiently and as effectively as they can be. I guarantee that we will do everything we can, with the involvement of other members, to see that that happens. Those members have to live up to their responsibilities also. One of them is not to simply come forward with allegations and smears but to come forward with ideas. I am listening. I am going to read every word that is spoken in the House. I want to hear some ideas.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

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.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask hon. member for Saint-Jean the same question I asked the President of the Treasury Board.

The President of the Treasury Board argues that we are trying to blame the federal public service for all the problems. To talk of problems in this case is an understatement. The word scandals describes the Liberal reign in the past decade.

In the hon. member's opinion, is the fact that operating expenditures increased by 40% in 5 years while the Prime Minister was finance minister, when spending in Ontario and Quebec increased only half as much part of the culture of waste?

The HRDC scandal—the billion dollars that vanished into thin air--the scandal of the Business Development Bank of Canada loan to the Auberge Grand-Mère; the scandal of the firearms registry—nearly $2 billion, which everyone knows about except the President of the Treasury Board--and the latest, the sponsorship scandal, are they coincidences or are they evidence of the culture of waste and of the scandal marking this government?

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Joliette, who is an excellent economist. He probably knows the answer to many of his questions. He is giving me the opportunity to say that indeed, the culture of waste is widespread within the Liberal Party. Unfortunately, this occurs at a time when there is fiscal imbalance in the provinces. The provinces have to provide all the services, and the government transfers very little money. And meanwhile does not keep its own house in order.

The gun control issue is truly despicable. The program was supposed to cost $2 million. I do not want to contradict the President of the Treasury Board, but at last count, the program has cost $2 billion--1,000 times more.

In Quebec, we have nothing to learn from the Liberal Party when it comes to managing public funds. We manage them and we do not have the means to waste anything because we are not getting enough funding. After stealing from the unemployed and cutting transfer payments, they think they can waste everything.

My colleague from Joliette has done excellent work with a former PQ minister in examining the waste and lack of spending control within the current Liberal government. In the provinces, this seems to be much more controlled and much better managed.

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

Mr. Speaker, last night on the national news the Prime Minister said, “the Liberal Party is not corrupt”. That is the exact statement he made. It reminded me of that famous United States president who said, “I am not a crook”.

I think that the public service, as mentioned by the President of the Treasury Board, is not corrupt. We know that. The public servants of this country are great. But someplace there is corruption in this whole mess of the sponsorship program. If it is not the public servants, which the President of the Treasury Board has assured me it is not, and I know that myself as I was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 30 years, then where is the corruption?

The corruption then can only rise up to the political level. At the political level there is very little difference between me and the Conservative Party and little difference between the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party.

Seeing that this type of contract shenanigans is happening in all provinces across the country, including Quebec, who does the member think is actually responsible in the end for this mess?

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question because it is a question of accountability. I agree with my colleague. Naturally the Prime Minister knew what was going on. It is corruption from top to bottom.

Let us look at how the Prime Minister has reacted since the beginning of this scandal. He started by saying that a handful of officials were to blame. After that, he expanded by saying that it was the former regime and he was not involved. Next he tried to say that political masters were likely involved. Indeed, this could not have gone unnoticed by the political masters.

The Bloc Quebecois is saying that the current Prime Minister was one of the political masters. He knew what was going on. Yes, the regime is corrupt from top to bottom and I think the voters know it. They are waiting for an election to settle their score with the Liberal Party.

[Odina Desrochers, Bloc, Lotbinière—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, our presence here today is the result of a political event that occurred in October 1995, the referendum. Fifteen days before the referendum, the polls clearly showed that the Yes camp was winning.

So, there was panic here in the House of Commons, particularly among the federal Liberals. Quebeckers had to be shown that Canada was a beautiful country and an ad campaign was needed to do that. That is why the sponsorship program was created, and that is also where everything started, like the famous love-in held two days prior to the referendum.

So, when I am told in the House that the current Prime Minister, all of the current ministers and all of the federal Liberal members did not know what was happening, I must say I have serious doubts because everyone knew that Jean Chrétien's Liberal government had to flex its muscles to save the country. That is what we were told by the person who set up this program when he testified in July 2002 about the sponsorship and Groupaction scandals.

Do you know what Mr. Guité said? “We were at war. Something had to be done. The separatists were going to win”. What more proof do we have to give here in the House? The sponsorship scandal is inextricably linked to the future of Quebeckers. Now, today, they are trying to tell us that the present PM did not know what was going on.

I remember my days on the public accounts committee when we tried to have some witnesses appear who could cast some light on this. You should have seen the stonewalling that went on, as the federal Liberals systematically prevented the Standing Committee on Public Accounts from doing its job.

Today we hear from the new President of the Treasury Board. It was he who opposed those amendments, before the present Prime Minister came along, when we were debating the importance of the Public Service Act and when the Bloc and the NDP were trying to introduce amendments to protect public servants who might act as whistle blowers about ministerial political interference. The Liberals themselves blocked those amendments to Bill C-25.

This morning, it is quite fantastic what the President of Treasury Board can say when he talks to us about democracy and transparency. I need not remind hon. members that, the night before the Auditor General's first appearance to explain the content of her report, an emissary of the PMO called together the Liberal members of the Public Accounts Committee. I would call that interference and controlling behaviour.

Today they are trying to make us believe that transparency and democracy exist among the Liberals, but I am not buying it. You know what the press is saying today? Today's headlines describe the PM's actions of yesterday as “damage control mode”, in other words that he was in a panic. Do hon. members want to know what the PM reminds me of with his protestations of not being aware, that he will clean house, that he is outraged, and so on? He reminds me of someone who claims to have left his past behind, but then keeps on talking about it. After two hours of hearing about it, one is tempted to say “Hey there, you have not left your past behind you at all”.

That is what the Prime Minister is doing now. He keeps on saying he knew nothing, keeps on saying his government will change its behaviour, change its mentality, that his government will become the most democratic government anyone has ever seen in this House of Commons.

That is a monumental joke. The people of Quebec are starting to react to what the Prime Minister intends to do, because it knows that the sponsorship scandal is intimately related to our national future.

If current polls are clearly showing that the Bloc Quebecois has made significant gains in Quebec, regardless of what happens in coming months, this means that the people of Quebec understand what took place in October 1995. It means that Quebeckers are a good, proud, and different people.

There are phone-in radio show hosts, in Toronto and Vancouver, and even a minister who are currently suggesting that this whole issue is indicative of Quebec's way of doing things. We have certainly never seen anything of the sort.

The current Prime Minister, who proclaims himself a Quebecker, should take more aggressive action to stand up for Quebec when under such attacks. There is more to come. Anytime the Quebec people sets out to achieve sovereignty, these kinds of racist remarks pop up all over the place in English Canada. Forgotten are all the nice things said in Montreal, one day or two before the referendum.

Light will definitely be shed on this issue. The Standing Committee on Public Accounts has set the process in motion. On Thursday, we will have a meeting where the Auditor General and officials from the three departments concerned will try to explain the complex nature of this program. There are so many complexities that it is hard to make out the authors. All this was apparently done without any political interference.

Now we can see one president after another speak up. André Ouellet said he did not know what was going on at Canada Post. Jean Pelletier—and this is worse—is Jean Chrétien's former chief of staff and now heads VIA Rail. He would have us believe that he knew nothing.

I look forward to hearing what Alfonso Gagliano has to say. He made us a promise and I hope he will keep it. He said he did not want to comment on a political situation while posted in Denmark, but would clarify the whole situation upon his return to Canada. I am sure that, listening to Alfonso Gagliano, there are ministers from Quebec, federal Liberal ministers, who are going to blush.

We are talking about a Prime Minister who says he was not in the loop. It is funny that the same day the report was tabled he held a press conference to announce his measures. He preferred to speak to the media rather than to Parliament. The next day he said that it was a small group. When he felt that people were beginning to have increasing difficulty believing him, he went back to the media at 1:30 p.m., to tell the journalists that it was no longer just a small group, but that it was quite a lot bigger than he thought and that there was some political direction involved.

Not only are the polls unanimous, but all of our colleagues were discussing it when they returned to the House. On the weekend, no one was talking about anything else. We heard how revolted the people felt, especially since this Prime Minister had made cuts in transfer payments for health care and education and in employment insurance, so that the government and good friends could make millions and millions of dollars. That is unacceptable. It does not matter whether the election happens on May 4, May 10, in the fall, or in 2005, the people of Quebec are going to say, “Liberals, begone”.

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

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from the Bloc was on the agriculture committee with me. I would like to talk for a few seconds about the dollars and cents being thrown around about this business.

The Treasury Board minister was talking about a 1/2000th spending of the total federal government involving this corruption, even though that adds up to $100 million which I believe is what the Auditor General said. Right now there are potato farmers in P.E.I. and farmers and ranchers out west particularly in the cattle business who are suffering to the point of having to use the food banks to feed their families. That is the gospel truth. The average Canadian is sitting out there listening to us discuss hundreds of millions of dollars, especially the Treasury Board minister, as if it was just a mere pittance of no concern. These people are starving to death and financially are going to ruin.

I would ask the member to relate the dollars and cents that are being thrown around here, or perhaps it should be the lack of sense. How do they relate to the average person, in particular the beef farmers who are suffering so badly today?