Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my 20 minutes with the member for Cumberland—Colchester. I look forward to hearing from him a little later.
I am concerned when I see a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the government side. It seems as though the government is deflated and has no energy. It does not seem to have any enthusiasm for doing its job.
The last speech was a good example of someone who seems to be apologizing for the government rather than coming forward with initiatives. The government is blaming us for the fact that it is paralyzed. I do not think that is fair and I do not think that is the case.
The government has been in power 100 days now but is basically a rehash of the old Chrétien government. It cannot get moving. We saw more of that today in Lethbridge.
It was interesting to watch the photo op in Lethbridge where so many cabinet ministers were trying to prop up the Liberal candidate and trying to get him elected in Lethbridge when he has no chance. The member of the Conservative Party who serves in Lethbridge is extremely well respected and has done an excellent job. After having spent the last year working on the agriculture file, the member knows it inside out. He has spent many hours trying to make BSE an issue that the government would pay attention to and did a tremendous job on that.
It was somewhat embarrassing today to watch the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the agriculture minister and the Liberal candidate trying to convince farmers that the $600 million that was finally being committed to the problem after 300 days will change the fortunes of western Canada.
I know our member on the Conservative side here, who worked hard on this file over the last year, was glad to see the money going out to producers, but earlier today he wanted to know why it took so long. One reason that it took so long has to do with our motion. I want to read the motion in sections and comment a little on each section if I have the time. It begins:
That, given the lack of new legislation introduced by the Liberal government during the Third Session of this Parliament--
I want to talk about that a bit. It is interesting to note that out of the 23 pieces of legislation that the present government introduced, 21 of those were rehashed from the Chrétien government. The vast majority of the bills introduced by the present government are nothing but reintroductions of the Chrétien legacy legislation.
Up until last week the only new legislation was the customs tariff bill and a bill apparently dealing with MP health benefits. We have another one today in which again the government has refused to take the action that is needed to deal with the issues. The government brings in half bills and then, as we heard a little earlier, it complains about the fact that we do not like them. If the government would show some leadership we would be a lot more supportive.
I want to point out that no new legislation is being brought forth by the government. It basically has stopped. Last week we called it paralysis by analysis. The government sits and is not able to bring forward the legislation that the country needs.
The second part of the motion today reads:
...this House recognize that the current government is not new--
It is important to point out that the government is a continuation of what happened before. In fact, not only is the majority of the cabinet old Chrétien ministers, but many of the promises and actions are ones that have been carried out by the present Prime Minister. In fact, many of the actions highlighted by him, where he said that he would change the culture in Ottawa, are rehashed, reheated promises from as far back as 1993. We think that if those folks were serious about dealing with issues they perhaps could have done something about them in the last 11 years.
The government included things from 1993: a greater role for MPs, an independent ethics commissioner, a parliamentary review of appointments. All of those were prominent parts of the 1993 red book but we have yet to see any of those things happen.
After 11 years I would ask why anyone would take the government's promises seriously. Actually, the Prime Minister has voted against some of the things that he claims he stands for. We know he voted against the independent ethics commissioner. He voted against expanding access to information legislation to cover crown corporations. He actually voted against that twice.
That is a disturbing thing. It is particularly disturbing for someone such as myself who is involved with agriculture and would love to see that legislation extended to the Canadian Wheat Board. Many farmers and producers would like to see what has been going on behind the scenes in the Canadian Wheat Board.
The Prime Minister voted against legislation that would have allowed Canadians to find out what goes on in their government. He just keeps reiterating that he will do what he said he will do but the records just do not bear that out. That was the second part of the motion.
The third part of the motion reads:
...that the current government is not new, but rather one that is intricately linked to the past decade of mismanagement, corruption and incompetence--
We have talked about corruption and incompetence in the House before and we are back again. It seems like it never ends. As the leader of the official opposition said today, he asked questions about these issues two years ago when he first came to the House of Commons. He came back today on his first day as the leader of our new party and he is asking many of those same questions again.
I wanted to point out the fact that the government is not only not new but it does not seem to be all that interested. In fact, it is difficult to even get the Prime Minister into the House to answer questions. He is out doing photo ops across the country. He is usually not here but when he is here he is really not here either because on February 25 he sat through question period but never got off his rear end once to answer a question. The opposition sees that as an insult, not only to us but to the Canadian people, that he would not show enough interest to stand and answer the questions that Canadians are asking us to ask the government.
There are so many broken promises and the government has only been in power for 100 days. The Prime Minister spoke about changing things in so many ways but unfortunately none of that has happened. I just want to give a couple of examples. He promised that he would increase the representation of women in the cabinet. Of course we know that he added one more woman to cabinet. I do not know if we can call that an increase in representation.
He promised greater representation for the west but he actually has one less minister from the west than he had before. Today, while we see him taking advantage of the photo opportunities in western Canada, in reality he is listening less to the west than he ever has. The members that he has in his cabinet from the west are seen in western Canada as being ineffective. We know that they come down here and they carry the Liberal members' message back to our people. They do not carry western Canadians' message down here and make it heard. That has been extremely disappointing. One of the reasons that I am involved in political life is that the member who is responsible for our province fails to represent the interests of his province to his party down here.
The Prime Minister promised to address the democratic deficit. That lasted about five days, because on the sixth day his government invoked closure to cut off debate. A little earlier we heard one member suggest that the government should do that again, that it should cut off debate, cut off the opposition so that it cannot continue to debate bills and to make issues that are important to Canadians a priority.
One of the things that disappointed me the most happened last year. We saw such a commitment, supposedly, by the government to share part of the gas tax with the municipalities. For a couple of weeks that was a huge issue. At the time the present Prime Minister was not the prime minister and he was making a big deal about it. Of course, as we saw in the throne speech, the government will not follow through with that at all. It has been a disappointment for many folks and we just wish the government would do a better job.
I want to talk a little about some of the scandals we have had to face with the present government in place. I actually will give some credit to Time Magazine because it has a good chronology of the scandals in its February 23 article. It talks about one of the initial ones which began with Shawinigate. With only one minute left I will have to race through this. I will just go through the list of headings: the job fund boondoggle in January, 2000; Gagliano under fire in March 2000; the fuel rebate disaster in December 2001; the ACOA disaster in December 2001; a missing report that just somehow disappeared in March 2002; accusations of patronage that took place in 2002. That is only halfway to where we are at right now. There was the breaking of the rules that was talked about in May 2002. We had MacAulay's resignation in October 2002, in which my colleague from Crowfoot played a tremendous role bringing that scandal to light. We have the gun registry fiasco that has gone on for years. We have the expense accounts of the privacy commissioner that were of such interest a few months ago where he had spent $380,000 on travel and hospitality in just two years. We had the Air Irving incident and now we have the sponsorship report that came back in 2004.
The list goes on and on but I see I have run out of time. However that is a quick list of why Canadians do not trust the government, why they think that we need a change and why we look forward to forming the next Government of Canada.