Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in support of today's Conservative opposition motion. Let me read it once more into the record:
That, in the interest of transparency, the government should ensure that the work that has been done by the Standing Committee on Public Accounts into the sponsorship scandal be continued after the Prime Minister calls a general election and until the Standing Committee on Public Accounts is reconstituted in a new parliament by establishing a commission under the Inquiries Act.
The purpose of this motion is to allow the Prime Minister the opportunity to fulfill his solemn commitment given to Canadians in February of this year after the tabling of the Auditor General's report with respect to chapters 3, 4 and 5 dealing with the sponsorship program and government-wide advertising and public opinion research.
Following the release of this scandalous report, the Prime Minister exclaimed that he was as mad as hell. He said that the people responsible for this were going to pay. He said that anybody who was found to have known that people were cutting cheques or falsifying invoices did not belong in public life. He went on to say on Feb. 13 of this year:
I do know that clearly there...had to be political direction.
He then said:
Let me assure you that those who are responsible, regardless of who they are, where they work or whatever they may have worked in the past, will face the full consequences of their actions.
He later said:
It is impossible to believe there was no political direction.
The same Prime Minister went on to commit to Canadians that he would leave no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of the ad scam Liberal corruption. He promised that Canadians would have answers before an election was to be called.
Yet, we have been compelled to introduce this motion today precisely because Canadians do not have answers to the meaningful questions, and precisely because the Prime Minister has broken his word. He has violated his trust and, inadvertently perhaps, misled Canadians about his intent to get to the bottom of this before calling an election.
Why do I say that? We have heard the government members today carry on about the exhaustive, supposedly historic, measures taken to examine this historically enormous scandal.
Let us look at those efforts. First of all, references to the RCMP for criminal investigation and the laying of potential charges have barely even begun so far as we know. Indeed, this past week two charges were laid in respect of a report of the Auditor General that was tabled two years ago. It took the RCMP two years to investigate criminal wrongdoing related to three contracts totalling $2 million.
The RCMP is faced with hundreds of contracts involving as much as $100 million in fees and commissions paid to Liberal advertising firms principally operating in Montreal. The Auditor General testified there was little or no documentation to verify these contracts. She said in her report to Parliament that documentation was very poor and there was little evidence of analysis to support the expenditure of more than $250 million. Over $100 million was paid to communication agencies as production fees and commissions.
I am speaking on this because I have been an active member of the public accounts committee since February. I have sat through some 11 weeks of hearings and testimony, listening to witnesses. I am here to testify that after my best efforts, and I believe those of any member of the committee who is willing to be honest, I must say that we are not substantially closer to the truth of this affair today than we were when the public accounts committee began. That is partly because we have only begun the process of hearing evidence.
At the beginning of the process, members of the committee collaboratively agreed on a list of prospective witnesses who could bring important information to the committee. I have that witness list here.
The witness list originally included some 130 prospective witnesses. To date the committee has heard from little more than 40 of those witnesses. Ninety prospective witnesses have not yet been heard from. I will detail some of those witnesses in a moment.
The committee has requested several important documents that have not yet been received. Witnesses have come to the committee and I believe have deliberately misled the committee in contempt of Parliament and in de facto, if not in de jure, committed perjury, including former ministers of the Crown and former senior public officials.
We hired an expert forensic accounting firm, KPMG, to assist the committee in this important inquiry. KPMG has identified question after question and issue after issue that have not yet been resolved. These are all reasons why we must continue the work of the committee and do it diligently.
Let me give an example of some of the witnesses from whom we have not yet heard. For instance, we have not heard from former chairmen, several of them, of Canada Post, one of the crown corporations implicated in the scandal.
We have not heard from former senior officials at VIA Rail who could confirm or deny the testimony of Marc LeFrançois, the former president.
We have not heard from senior officials from the Royal Canadian Mint with respect to their knowledge of this affair, or people from the Business Development Bank which, of course, was centrally involved in these scandals, including Michel Vennat, the former chairman, or for that matter Jean Carle, former executive assistant to then Prime Minister Chrétien.
We have not heard from Jon Grant, former chairman of Canada Lands, a victim of the witch hunt of the government and an important whistleblower. We have not heard from senior officials from the Port of Montreal, who could testify about the bizarre $1.5 million grant for a giant screen for the port that seems to have disappeared.
We have not heard from senior people from the RCMP who could add to the inquiry. We have not heard from anyone responsible at Groupaction Marketing, perhaps the central ad scam agency involved in this matter. We certainly have not heard from Jean Brault, president of Groupaction, now under criminal charge for several counts of fraud.
Nor have we heard from Jean Lafleur of Lafleur Communications, who is a central figure, another multi-million dollar donor to the Liberal Party of Canada, a Liberal fundraiser, a Liberal crony, Liberal organizer and beneficiary of the millions that went missing in the ad scam.
We have not heard from anyone from Gosselin Communications stratégiques. We have not heard from anyone at Communications Coffin or Compass Communications. I could go on and on about the people from the ad agencies that have not yet testified before the committee.
We have not heard from former clerks of the Privy Council, like Jocelyne Bourgon or Mel Cappe, who could tell us what the Privy Council knew and when it knew, and what directions they gave. Whether for instance, did an official from the Federal-Provincial Relations Office of the PCO call Chuck Guité in 1995 and instruct him to bend the rules, if necessary, in the government's advertising program? We would like to hear them testify to that question.
We have not heard from the former minister of public works, now the member from a riding near Ottawa who was prepared to testify the other day, but was unable to because of Liberal procedural tactics. We have not heard from the current Minister of Finance, who was also a former minister of public works, and himself intervened to get sole sourced contracts for his friends at Earnscliffe Strategy Group.
We have not heard from former presidents of the treasury board, including two current members of this place. We have not heard from the Minister of the Environment, whose constituency staff told a constituent that there was a secret slush fund available that turned out to be the sponsorship program. We have not heard from the President of the Privy Council, whose name has come up on almost a daily basis in relation to the ad scam inquiry.
We have not heard from industry experts like the Advertising Standards Council or the Association of Quebec Advertising Agencies.
We have not heard from Robert Scully of L'Information essentielle, the man involved in the Rocket Richard series that was exposed by the Auditor General.We have not heard from dozens of political staffers like Mario Laguë, Bruce Hartley, Karl Littler, Terrie O'Leary, Warren Kinsella, Jean Carle, Albano Gidaro, Elly Alboim Earnscliffe, and Jacques Hudon.
We have not heard from political organizers for the Liberal Party in Quebec who could testify about the fundraising connections between the ad scam agencies and the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec.
We have not heard from Vincenzo Gagliano, son of Alfonso Gagliano, who received suspicious government contracts routed through firms like Groupaction and Groupe Everest. We have not heard from political assistants to Mr. Gagliano like Pierre Brodeur. We have not heard from Pierre Tremblay, former chief of staff to minister Gagliano who then became executive director of the sponsorship program after the departure of Chuck Guité.
Most notably, we have not heard from the right hon. Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada, who was the man ultimately in charge, and who gave the orders, I believe, to Jean Pelletier to get this thing done. Ultimately, he set up the peculiar relationship between Chuck Guité and his ministers like David Dingwall and Alfonso Gagliano. Jean Chrétien fired the member of the House who was for a brief while public works minister and refused to play the game.
The committee is not yet one-third of the way through hearing from prospective witnesses and has not heard from the critical witnesses, the people who ultimately could have and would have given the political direction about which the current Prime Minister has spoken. I am talking about witnesses like Jean Chrétien, Jean Carle, and people like Pierre Tremblay from the sponsorship program itself.
KPMG, our forensic auditors, have provided us with many pages of unanswered questions, of contradictory testimony, and of what yet needs to be done by the committee. It did this in a briefing before us only days ago. There are documents that we have requested that we have not yet received. There are documents that we in the opposition have requested that government members have refused to allow us access to, such as notes taken by the clerks of the Privy Council in meetings with the former Prime Minister that pertain to the sponsorship scandal.
These would allow us to know what this Prime Minister and his predecessor knew about the ad scam, and what direction they gave and when they gave it. Liberals will not allow us to see those documents because presumably they have something to hide.
The Liberals voted against an opposition motion to give access to the Gagliano papers, his diaries and agendas, which would have allowed us to verify whether or not Mr. Gagliano misled the committee, and committed perjury when he claimed to have had virtually no working relationship with Chuck Guité and exercised no political direction or oversight in the program.
What we have here is the anatomy of a cover-up of the largest scandal involving public funds and the abuse of public trust in decades according to sober minded political historians like Michael Bliss. This is a scandal that has brought government itself, not just this government, but government itself into disrepute in this country and abroad.
What we have here is a unit of government that was set up in the words of Huguette Tremblay “without any rules” and in the words of the Auditor General was designed “to break all the rules” in order to benefit, and I believe criminally, certain people who had certain privileged access to the governing party.
That is what we are dealing with here. We are not dealing with some run of the mill misadministration that the government will look into. This is about a fundamental issue of trust. This is about theft. The former Prime Minister, Mr. Chrétien, himself said that “millions may have been stolen”.
This is not just the assertion of the opposition. The former Prime Minister, the man most likely to have provided the political direction, said “millions may have been stolen”, but it was justified because, in his perverse view of the world, $100 million thrown out the window to Liberal friendly ad agencies somehow saved the country.
I believe Canada is stronger. The strength of the federation is greater than millions of dollars of pork handed out to partisan friends of a corrupt administration.
Canadians were outraged in February, as they are today, and the Prime Minister knew it, which is why he said he was mad as hell and he promised to get to the bottom of this before an election. How will we get to the bottom of it? As I said earlier, the RCMP will have barely begun its criminal investigation into the revelations of the Auditor General's February report.
The Prime Minister has said that he has appointed an independent judicial inquiry led by Justice Gomery. Justice Gomery will not even begin hearing witnesses or receiving evidence until September of this year and will not report back until December of 2005. Therefore, no meaningful criminal investigation will be revealed before an election is expected next week. The judicial inquiry will not even begin its hearings. The only show in town, the only window Canadians have on the truth in this matter has been at the public accounts inquiry. It has sat for the past 11 weeks, dealt with perjurious witnesses, witnesses who skated around and avoided answering questions, witnesses who deliberately, I believe, misled us. Yet it is the only show in town.
The Prime Minister said that his judicial inquiry would operate on an expedited basis. Yet it will take that inquiry nearly two years to do its job. After 11 weeks, he has effectively given the order for the guillotine to fall down on the only inquiry that exists at the public accounts committee. How has he done that? For weeks, anybody who has watched those hearings has seen the procedural nonsense of the Liberal members, led by the very face of Liberal arrogance, the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine who in motion after motion and one spurious point of order after another has sought to hamper the work of the committee.
Then this week we were concerned that the government was about to effectively shut down the committee. We asked the government about this. Hansard of Monday, May 10 reveals that the Deputy Prime Minister said the government “wants to get to the bottom of this matter. I call upon the public accounts committee to continue its work”. She said, “On behalf of the government, I would encourage the public accounts committee to continue its work”. She further said, “I would encourage the public accounts committee to get on with its work”. She further said “It has been the government that has been encouraging the committee to get on with its work”.
No fewer than half a dozen times on Monday of this week she said that the committee should get on with its work. Then on Wednesday of this week, her members came into that committee, the Liberal members, and voted to move the committee meetings in camera, in secret, and to hear from no more witnesses this week. Then the government line, including that of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services who had joined us, was that this was just an interim report to inform Canadians, but the committee will continue its work.
This morning my motion was put to have the committee meet from Monday through Friday of next week to continue to hear witnesses and to continue to shed light on this outrageous abuse of public trust. Every Liberal member of the committee voted against my motion effectively and voted not to continue meeting.
Why did the Deputy Prime Minister say, the government encourages the committee to get on with its work?” Why did she say, “On behalf of the government I would encourage the public accounts committee to continue its work”, in the present tense. Why did she say that if she did not mean it? Why no more hearings next week? Why meeting in camera this week? Why no judicial inquiry until September? There is only one reason. It is blatantly obvious this is a corrupt Liberal government that does not want the truth to come out before an election.
That is why we have moved this motion that would allow the public accounts committee effectively to continue with its work after the dissolution of Parliament anticipated next week. The motion would have the effect of creating an inquiry. I would suggest that all the current members of public accounts could continue under the aegis of that inquiry. Chaired by our current chairman, we could continue with our witness list and we could continue to do the work that we have set out to do, and the Prime Minister could keep his word that he would get to the bottom of this before going to the polls. I hope my colleagues opposite will support the motion for that reason.