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.