Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to enter in the debate today. I will be sharing my time today.
Canadians have seen the obvious. They have seen what we have called the culture of corruption. The Auditor General has called it appalling, shocking, incredible and unbelievable. That is the list of problems that seems to chronically plague the Liberal government, and has since the new Prime Minister has taken over. Today we are highlighting that. We are showing what is obvious.
I think the government has lost the confidence of Canadians. My guess is that the Liberals will rally around the Liberal flag here today and support the government, but the truth is in what they have been hearing at home.
The newspapers have quoted Liberal after Liberal saying what they are hearing at home. Many have said that even their own sisters will not vote for them and that their mothers are wondering whether they are corrupt. It has become clear that people have lost faith in the Liberal government. Everywhere I go I hear the same thing.
The motion also points out that the government lacks anything new. Corruption is not new but we have certainly been made aware of it in a new revelatory way. What we have also seen is that the government seemingly has no idea of where it wants to go. The government would like us to believe that it is a new government. On December 12 a new Prime Minister came in and therefore all things old were made new again but it is clear from the government's legislative package that nothing is new.
Today the Liberals are pretty excited because they finally tabled new legislation, the whistleblower act. They have only been promising it for 11 years. However everyone in the civil service says that unless there is a culture change over there, the whistleblowing legislation by itself will not help. To date, anyone who sticks his or her head out of the gopher hole, it is like the whack a gopher thing at a fair; the poor little civil servant creeps up, sticks his or her head out to see what is out there and some guy whaps his or her head right flat. The culture has to change. We have to create something new, but the whistleblowing legislation, which is the one and only real significant thing they have brought forward 11 years late, will hardly do it.
I would like to respond to a couple of comments that I heard from the Liberals. This was from their cheat sheet on how to oppose the new Conservative Party when one gets into this debate and they are asking who knows what the Conservatives stand for. It is not hard to figure out what we stand for. Basically, almost anything that the Liberals stand for we stand against. It is almost that bad in this place now.
Let me give a brief rundown of the things that should have been in this supposedly new government's package.
For example, 100 days ago, or on December 12 when the Liberals first came in, why did they not check on the compensation package for the people and communities affected by the softwood lumber disaster? The only thing the government has done so far is spend $55 million of the compensation due to the softwood industry on creating a new bureaucracy and hiring new bureaucrats. In British Columbia, where this is the biggest problem, no money has been sent yet to the people and the communities that really need it.
Anything the Liberals could have done over the last 100 days on that front would have been much appreciated by the people in B.C. and the people in my neck of the woods, like Boston Bar, Lillooet, Hope, Pemberton and those areas. People who have put in applications are being told that their applications have been hung up in the bureaucracy and that if they do not starve to death in the meantime, one day those applications might be approved.
The government might have actually come up with a BSE compensation package before today. The Liberals have almost enough in the compensation package now that if the farmers survived this long they could have almost fed their cows for half of the time between the time this government came in and now, or, I guess, kept their cows alive.
The government waited months to do this job and it has yet to do it properly. I remind people that the government still has not got a single cent into the hands of farmers. That is why we have lost confidence in the government. The Liberals say the right things in the throne speech and they do not deliver.
How about democratic reform? The Liberals say they will change the democratic deficit, which they created by the way, that the democratic deficit is creating a crisis of confidence in the country. My party has put forward motions such as the creation of an independent ethics commissioner. The government voted it down. We put forward a motion which said that the defeat of a government bill does not mean the defeat of a government, that it means the defeat only of that particular motion. The government voted against that in order to make sure that iron will is imposed.
When the House leader came to committee I asked him whether on the supplementary estimates he would allow the government members to vote against more money for the gun registry, which is somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion now. He said no, that actually they would have to vote in favour of it because if they have approved it, they have to fund it. In other words, they could not vote against it. There is no free vote over there. They have to do as they are told and vote as the whip and the House leader tell them to.
Every time we bring forward motions to address these issues, the government votes them down. Once in a while we would think a breath of fresh air would blow through this cavernous chamber.
The member for Wild Rose brought forward a motion to do away with child pornography and all the frivolous defences that people put forward on the child pornography file. The Liberals could see a vote getter when it is laid in front of them so they voted in favour of the motion by the member for Wild Rose. What happened in the following days is that they could not actually do that. They brought in other legislation that continues the frivolous defences that will keep child pornography on the streets, on the Internet and available to Canadians. It is a shame. They do it time and again.
My party brought forward a motion that we should transfer gas tax revenues to the municipalities. It has been our policy for 10 years. We actually used the wording from a speech that the Prime Minister gave to the Union of British Columbia Municipalities. We took the exact words of his speech, brought them into the House and said we would take him at his word. We brought forward the motion and we voted on it. It passed nearly unanimously. It passed with an overwhelming majority.
The next day my party asked in the House, now that the House had passed judgment on the motion, surely the government would move ahead. The response that came from the government was “Well, we are considering this now and we will talk about it”. Actually, the government has no intention. It was not mentioned in the throne speech. It will not be in the budget tomorrow. I make a prediction here today that the gas tax revenue will not be handed over to the municipalities as the House has decreed and as the Prime Minister has promised.
Is it any wonder that we have a motion today saying that we have lost confidence in the government. How often do we have to go to the well and put forward substantive motion after substantive motion on agriculture, on softwood lumber, on foreign policy, on more funding for our military, on a proper environmental policy, on changes to the democratic system? Over and over again we have put forward detailed policy initiatives. We have been accused of being too policy oriented. Apparently we have too many policy wonks over here. It is a scary thing over there that people actually have policy.
We have put forward the policy. The distressful thing for Canadians is that even when it passes in the House they say “Sure it has been brought forward and sure it passed, but with the government, it does not seem to make any difference”.
That is why I have lost confidence in the government. It does not seem to understand that Parliament should be paramount, that Parliament should reign supreme. What is passed in this place, what is agreed to in this place, the government should take as its marching orders. Not all good ideas come from this side of the House, and certainly not all of them come from that side.
A culture of corruption has infested the government and has stalled it in its work. It cannot come forward with decent and new legislation of any sort that seems worthwhile. Therefore, quite properly, members of the House tonight when voting on this supply day motion should vote in favour of a vote against the government, vote non-confidence in the government. Let us get that passed because that is the truth. That is what Canadians are after.