Mr. Speaker, today we are debating a motion by the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, asking that:
—this House recognize that the current government is not new, but rather one that is intricately linked to the past decade of mismanagement, corruption and incompetence, and has accordingly lost the confidence of this House.
I think we can just say that the opposition parties are in favour of this motion.
I think also that the party from Quebec in particular has a big problem with this government, because of what went on with Groupaction and the others.
It is interesting though to watch both the opposition day motion and the government response. There is a dynamic going on that I find quite interesting from an historical perspective. I am not sure this has happened very often in the past, maybe never in this chamber. The dynamic that I see is that on one hand we have a government party that is pretending it has not been here for the last decade or been involved in any of the scandal around the sponsorship, that it was somebody else who did that. We see the Prime Minister going around the country, not even mentioning the name of his party, again pretending that the Liberal Party did not exist when he was part of the government, that he was not part of that. He is distancing himself as much as possible.
I must say that with my constituents, and from what we are seeing around the country by way of opinion polls, it is not selling very well. The Canadian public has not bought it and in the Province of Quebec, it is not being accepted at all.
While that dynamic is going on, if I can move over to this side of the House and the official opposition, the official opposition is pretending that somehow its history never occurred, that which got it to where it is now.
We see that element of the Conservative Party, which came out of the Progressive Conservative Party, pretending as if the former Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, did not exist, and that all of the scandals that that government perpetrated on this country over a nine year period did not really happen. Or if it did--and here those members are taking a page out of the Liberal government's playbook--that it was not them, that they were not there and were not part of it, even though the former Prime Minister was very much involved in this last campaign for the leadership. Unfortunately for him, it was for a candidate who was not ultimately successful.
They do not want to acknowledge either the scandals that seem to be erupting out of the provincial Conservative Party in Ontario involving the former premier there and some of the money that he and his close associates were paid, which very much mimics what we saw in the sponsorship scheme and scandal. It concerns services being paid for and not delivered, or delivered at a scale that was inconsequential in proportion to the amount of money paid, whether it was to the former premier or to a number of his close associates who helped run the government when he was premier. There is a very similar pattern there, but again the mover of this motion and the party of which he is part is pretending that those situations did not exist at all.
We see this party pretending that it was somehow born like a virgin birth, that it came from nowhere with no background and no ancestry, but in fact it does. We need only to think of some of those scandals--as I was reading some of the material in preparation for this debate--like Justice Parker finding, in the case of Sinclair Stevens, 14 separate conflicts of interest over a relatively short political career. We saw things like the scandal around the movement of the airplane maintenance contract. It was well deserved to be placed in Winnipeg but was moved to Montreal.