Mr. Speaker, the good people of the riding of Winnipeg Centre are justifiably furious over the revelations of the Gomery Commission's inquiry into the sponsorship scandal. Many of them have come to me and asked my party to do all we can to bring the government down and stop its ability to continue in the way it has. I am one of those furious individuals.
Just because our motion today is reasonable and is a compromise of position, I do not want anyone to think for one minute that there is not justifiable choleric and outrage on this side of the House over the degree of corruption and theft that took place in the sponsorship scandal and who knows where else.
When I read my remarks today in support of this reasonable compromise position, I do not want the fact to be lost that the organized theft in the sponsorship program in which the Liberals took part will go down in infamy as one of the most horrendous abuses of power in Canadian history.
Coming from the riding of Winnipeg Centre in the province of Manitoba, the sponsorship scandal, this organized theft, was not limited to Quebec. I have good reason to believe that the people of Winnipeg were ripped off in the sponsorship scandal in the 1999 Winnipeg Pan-Am Games. I feel good enough to say that both in the House and outside the House if necessary. Let me tell the House how that happened.
We were given a $2.3 million sponsorship contract through the sponsorship program but only $650,000 was delivered to the executive and organizers of the 1999 Winnipeg Pan-Am Games. The rest of the money was siphoned off as production costs by a Liberal advertising firm, the fourth largest beneficiary of all the sponsorship scandals in the Gomery inquiry. I am here to say that Winnipeg was ripped off in the sponsorship scandal as well, not just the good people of Quebec. It offended all of us right across the country.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I believe in my heart that the Liberal Party of Canada is institutionally psychopathic. It literally does not know the difference between right and wrong. It is so obsessed with keeping power at all costs that it is willing to disregard any social norms or mores or laws. In fact, it cut a swath through all things decent in order to maintain its grip on power.
I predict that when Mr. Gomery presents his second report his number one recommendation will be that the Liberal Party of Canada be disbanded out of disgrace. Just as the airborne regiment was disbanded after Somalia, the same thing will happen to the Liberal Party of Canada. We will kick them out of power first, I believe.
Some people are too thick-headed to be embarrassed. There is saying that some people cannot be embarrassed. We see the arrogance perpetuated even in the midst of this maelstrom where any person who is not psychopathic would have crumbled under the weight of the sheer disgrace. They would be on their knees in contrition. The Prime Minister of Canada should prostrate himself before Canadians like Jimmy Swaggart and beg their forgiveness. “Forgive me Lord for I have sinned”, is the kind of reaction we would expect from the Liberals, but all we see is arrogance, smugness and cockiness.
What the Liberals have said is that they know the Liberal Party stole from Canadians so they will make it right by giving some of the money back. That was their first tenuous position. Their second position was their admission that the Liberal government and the Liberal Party stole from Canadians and said that the reason they needed to be re-elected was to ensure no future Liberal government would ever be able to steal from Canadians in that way again.
That is the kind of pretzel, convoluted logic we on this side of the House have been asked to accept. It is galling to any reasonable person. It offends the sensibility of any thinking Canadian to try and buy into that logic. I am one of those who has said that we should blow their heads off at the first opportunity. I am one of the hawks in our party, I suppose.
Thankfully, reason prevailed. There are more statesmanlike people in my party who held a dominant position there. They said we do not bring down a government and trigger an election out of pure anger and polarity because that is the wrong motivation. I was told we have to consider the ramifications and the implications of what we are about to do because there are worthy, worthwhile things in the pipeline.
Most of those measures were in fact generated because of pressure from the opposition parties in this minority Parliament. There were things of merit that were half-way done. The Liberal government said that it did not want to have an election now because of all these worthwhile things.
We have accommodated every consideration that the Liberals raised, every reason not to blow their heads off. We have taken that into account, and considered and proposed a reasonable compromise solution which the Liberals dismiss.
First, the government said it was unconstitutional and it could not be done. We dealt with that argument in a matter of 15 minutes or so. Then the government said it was unparliamentary and there was no precedent to call upon the Governor General at some future time. We disregarded that. There is no such argument. We have the authorities that indicate what we are proposing is completely within the purview of Parliament and completely constitutionally correct.
Now the Liberals are objecting for the sake of objecting, so that they can hang on to power for another two or three months to bribe Canadians with their own tax dollars. The government is trying to blackmail Canadians when the threat of bringing down the government becomes a reality.
This is what is really offensive and perhaps what offends me most about the whole last couple of weeks. The government went to first nations and said, “You know how you've been waiting for social justice for the last 150 years or so? You know how the Indian Act has been 130 years of social tragedy? Guess what, we're going to fix all that”. However, the government said that the NDP and the opposition parties are going to bring down the government before it can get a chance. It was finally going to address the despair and the misery that first nations deal with. It was just about to get around to that and now the big, bad NDP, the Conservatives and the Bloc are going to stop the government from solving all the social ills of first nations.
The government dispatched the PMO right across the country to contact every aboriginal leader, every first nation, Métis and Inuit leader to phone us and say, “The Liberals say if you guys bring down the government we are never going to get any social spending to solve this human tragedy that we are experiencing”.
Imagine exploiting the most underprivileged people in our society. How low does a government get to exploit human misery? My colleague says it is similar to stealing the nickels from a blind man's cup. It is disgraceful.
I want to make it clear right here and now that we did everything necessary to ensure that the first ministers meeting does in fact take place. This is what our proposal says. Those same aboriginal leaders should be calling the Liberal government and the Prime Minister, and saying, “Accept the opposition parties' reasonable proposal because that's the way we will ensure that the first ministers meeting does in fact take place”. The government is being completely disingenuous with how it spins this.
Frankly, these are the tactics that make my blood boil. I have tried to be reasonable in the eight years that I have been a member of Parliament. I have tried not to get angry about these issues. It has been an exercise in frustration to get this government to accommodate any of the reasonable positions that we bring forward.
Let us put it on the record today that it is the Liberal government that is threatening the success of the first ministers meeting, not the opposition parties. We have found a way to accommodate that and give the Canadian people a way to vent their spleen on the Liberal Party.
My final point is that there is no way on God's earth that this Liberal government should have the exclusive right to dictate the terms and conditions of its own day of reckoning. That is for the Canadian people to decide, not for a corrupt Liberal government.