Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot.
Our motion today is very simple. It is to make sure that the parliamentary inquiry into the sponsorship program continues even though Parliament will be dissolved in a few days time for an election call. We think this is very important because two key questions remain unanswered.
The first question that remains unanswered is who gave the orders that allowed this program to be so badly mismanaged. The second question that remains unanswered is where the money really ended up.
I would like to refresh the public's memory about what the Auditor General said about the sponsorship program which involved a quarter of a billion dollars. She said:
What is particularly disturbing about these sponsorship payments is that each involved a number of transactions with a number of companies, sometimes using false invoices and contracts or no written contracts at all. These arrangements appear designed to provide commissions to communications agencies, while hiding the source of funds and the true nature of the transactions. The parliamentary appropriation process was not respected. Senior public servants in CCSB and some officials of the Crown corporations were knowing and willing participants in these arrangements.
We observed that from 1997 to 31 August 2001, there was a widespread failure to comply with the government's contracting policies and regulations, a pervasive lack of documentation in the files, and little evidence in many cases that the government had received value for its sponsorship—in some cases, no evidence.
The Auditor General concluded:
Considerable amounts of public funds were spent, with little evidence that obtaining value for money was a concern. The pattern we saw of non-compliance with the rules was not the result of isolated errors. It was consistent and pervasive. This was how the government ran the program.
If the government ran the program that way, we know that someone in government gave the orders to break the rules. In fact, the Prime Minister himself said over and over, after the report became public in February, that there had to be political direction. Yet there has been no identification of the politician, the elected person or people in government who said to the bureaucrats and civil servants that they should break the rules because that was how they wanted a quarter of a billion dollars to be dealt with.
No one has taken responsibility. We heard evidence from Professor Franks to the effect that the Privy Council Office had interpreted the doctrine of parliamentary and ministerial responsibility in such a way that no one could really be held accountable. That is the most disturbing thing, but I will get back to that.
We need to have a clear understanding of who gave the orders because if no one is responsible then we can never be sure that this will not happen again. Canadians have to be sure that when they give money into the hands of government, into the hands of the people administering their country, that it will be dealt with according to the rules, the law and the highest standards of accountability and, if it is not, that someone's head will roll and someone will pay the price. Right now no one is paying the price because no one has been identified as giving the orders.
What has been troubling a lot of Canadians is where the money has ended up. Media reports have been very disturbing about where the money might have ended up. CTV reported back in February that the allegation “is that senior political figures used the ad agencies to launder money.
“So, for example, the wife of a senior politician goes shopping in downtown Montreal buying very expensive clothes and a person from the ad agency goes along with a VISA card and goes, “click, click,” and it gets charged back to the advertising agency and then charged back to the Government of Canada”.
Canadians are justifiably concerned about this. Another media report in the Ottawa Citizen quotes an ad executive as saying:
Well, we'll do the dry cleaning for you.
We do it all the time. You know, dry cleaning--we pick up the expense and charge it to you (the government).
If this is going on, then it must be stopped. The people who are doing this, conniving at this, giving the orders and looting the public treasury in this shocking and unacceptable manner, must be brought to account.
This is Canada and we pride ourselves in having the highest first world standards of uprightness, fairness and right dealing in a democratic way with public money. Yet we have seen in the Auditor General's report that the rules were thrown out the window and where the money really ended up might well be in a cynical and even criminal defrauding of the public.
We need to be clear about this. The public is not just a big mass out there. The public is people like my constituents in Calgary—Nose Hill, people with children, people struggling to get by, to pay the mortgage and to pay the cost of putting gas in their vehicles so they can get back and forth to work, people who are struggling to pay their taxes, people who are just barely getting by. When they find out that the government is taking their money that they struggled to earn and using it to buy luxuries and in a money laundering way, this bothers them, to say the least, and it should bother them.
This is a gross betrayal of trust and we should not rest for one moment until the people who have engaged in this, in any way, shape or form, are brought to justice and brought to a place where they will pay the price.
A lot has been made about the fact that there will be a public inquiry. I sat on the public accounts committee looking into this and I can say very frankly that it is a very imperfect instrument for getting to the truth. All members of the committee have eight minutes to get some facts and some evidence out on the table. That includes the witnesses taking up air time and, in some cases, taking up air time just to burn up our time. It is almost impossible to get a concentrated line of questioning that really gets to the facts in those brief few minutes. Sometimes it is only four minutes.
Yes, the parliamentary committee is an imperfect instrument and those rules do need to be changed, but to shut it down when it could keep going, does not serve Canadians' interests. The judicial inquiry will not even get going until next fall. Even if the inquiry pushes full bore ahead, it is not going to report until the end of 2005, if they are lucky. Canadians will not know until 2005 what is happening.
Let us look at the mandate of the judicial inquiry. One of its mandates is that the commissioner, Judge Gomery, “be directed to perform his duties without expressing any conclusion or recommendation regarding the civil or criminal liability of any person or organization and to ensure that the conduct of the inquiry does not jeopardize any ongoing criminal investigation or criminal proceedings”.
The judicial inquiry will not be able to say if someone defrauded the public or money laundered through the ad agencies. That it is not in its mandate. It cannot talk about civil or criminal liability. I really believe the government does not want the truth to come out.
When a motion was moved to bring forward the Gagliano papers because he was the key minister involved at the time, the Liberals in the committee voted it down. When a motion was moved to allow the committee to see the Privy Council briefings to the Prime Minister about the sponsorship program, the Liberals voted to keep that evidence hidden. The reason is that Liberal dealing with the sponsorship money, with quarter of a billion dollars, cannot stand the light of day and that is why they want to shut it down.
There is a bigger issue here and that is the reputation of our country. Parliamentarians from our Parliament, from the House of Commons, go to other countries in the world and say, “Let us help you do things right”. My colleague from St. Albert started the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption. They go around the world helping other parliamentarians clean up the mess in other countries, and what happens? To our red-faced embarrassment and shame, we find out that our own government is misusing and mismanaging hundreds of millions of dollars and is hiding the evidence and not letting it come forward, is shutting down the inquiry and putting off the day of reckoning until after an election. It is wrong. It is wrong to do that.
That is why we brought forward a motion that we keep the evidence coming, that we keep working to get to the bottom of this issue, so that we can win back the trust of Canadians, so that we can win back the trust of the international community. In that way we can show by our deeds that we will not leave a stone unturned until we get to the bottom of this issue, until we find out who gave those orders, until we find out who really got the money. We must get the bottom of this terrible allegation of money laundering.
I urge the House to support the motion.