, seconded by the hon. member for Toronto--Danforth, moved:
That this House has lost confidence in the government.
Mr. Speaker, it has now become evident to all observers that the government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons and must be removed.
After 17 months in office, the record of the government--or I should say in many instances its lack of record--has become unacceptable to a large majority of the members of the House, representing an overwhelming majority of Canadian voters.
I want to reflect on the reasons why things have come to this.
In the last election, the Liberal government was narrowly re-elected, with only a minority. In effect, the Canadian people put this government on probation. Why?
Why the limited confidence? Because already in June 2004 the government was seriously tainted by the sponsorship scandal. Ever since Sheila Fraser's devastating report indicating that some $100 million in taxpayers' money was unaccounted for, the public has been deeply mistrustful of the Liberal record of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Events since then have only confirmed the depth and breadth of the sponsorship corruption. Perhaps more important, they have shown that the Liberal Party has no desire to change, no intention to change and no ability to change.
The opposition parties did not begin this Parliament with the hope that it would fail. We have all tried different ways of making it work.
Last fall, all three opposition parties developed consensus amendments to the government's Speech from the Throne rather than just the traditional opposition motion rejecting everything. How did the government respond? It responded by threatening an immediate election.
In February, this party decided that we would support the government's budget based on a number of priorities we shared, including some very modest steps toward tax relief, the Atlantic accords on resource revenue sharing, and the transfer of gas tax revenues to municipalities for infrastructure.
But by April, we believed that the evidence revealed before the Gomery commission left the Liberal Party without the moral authority to govern this country. The testimony before the commission began to confirm a sponsorship program that was a front for massive kickbacks involving organized crime, used by the Liberal Party to fill its own election coffers.
At that point, the New Democratic Party had a serious disagreement with the other two opposition parties. Its preference was to wait to see whether Justice Gomery would confirm the testimony of Jean Brault and others in his report and whether it could find common ground with the government on other issues in the meantime.
The government survived in the spring, thanks in part to its deal with the NDP. However, it ensured its survival by resorting to unprecedented anti-democratic tactics, such as cancelling the opposition days and ignoring non-confidence votes.
Also without precedent was what the government did next, which was an unprecedented and hopefully never to be repeated effort to buy off and to attract members from this party and from other parties, even to the point of being prepared to exchange cabinet seats to do it.
In the eyes of the official opposition, this government has lacked the moral authority to govern ever since.
At the same time, we knew that it would be impossible to bring the government down until the NDP also came to the same conclusion. We knew that without a three-party common front, the Liberals would try once again to beg, borrow or steal votes in order to survive.
The moment of truth finally came with the release of Justice Gomery's report on November 1. This report removed the benefit of any doubt about the depth of corruption within the Liberal Party of Canada.
In his report, Justice Gomery noted:
clear evidence of political involvement in the administration of the Sponsorship Program;—
a complex web of financial transactions—involving kickbacks and illegal contributions to a political party—;
the existence of a “culture of entitlement” among political officials and bureaucrats—
These statements can no longer be dismissed as media speculation or as partisan attacks. These are the findings of fact by a judge in a judicial inquiry. As Judge Gomery concluded, “The LPCQ...cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of its officers and representatives”. The Liberal Party itself is part and parcel of this scandal and corruption.
There is no way that a political party that has been named for its involvement in a massive corruption scandal can be entrusted by the House to remain in office. So far, criminal charges have been pursued against relatively small fry in the sponsorship scandal and no one has gone to jail. As long as the guilty party remains in governing the country, as long as it remains in office, nobody will ever be held truly responsible, nobody will ever be firmly punished and no real reforms will ever be made.
Notwithstanding Jean Chrétien's role, the current Prime Minister himself was part of that fateful cabinet meeting of February 1996 that made it a government priority, a taxpayer priority, to strengthen the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec, which Judge Gomery pointed out was highly inappropriate as, “Cabinet is expected to deal with the interests of the country as a whole, leaving partisan considerations aside”.
As Judge Gomery said, the arrogant attitude of the cabinet to define the interests of the Liberal Party as synonymous with the federation itself “is difficult to reconcile with basic democratic values”. The Prime Minister should have known that. He cannot get away with saying, “Don't blame me. I was only the piano player. I had no idea what was going on upstairs”. As Jean Chrétien said, “He knew what I knew”.
Clearly, this Prime Minister has done nothing about the sponsorship scandal, because the current Prime Minister and his Liberal allies share the same culture of entitlement as Chrétien's Liberal Party.
Since the Prime Minister came to power, we have seen one Minister of Immigration have to resign over favouritism in giving out visas, while the next one billed taxpayers $138 for pizza, all defended by the Prime Minister. We have seen Art Eggleton, a man that Jean Chrétien fired from the cabinet for giving an untendered contract to a former girlfriend, get rewarded with a seat in the Senate.
We have seen the PM's good friends, Francis Fox and Dennis Dawson, also compensated for “good and loyal services” by a Senate seat.
We have seen the unseemly spectacle of a government negotiating severance pay with David Dingwall, the man who hired Chuck Guité to run government advertising, an unregistered lobbyist who received contingency payments that were against government contracting rules, a patronage appointee who quit his job.
We have seen the Prime Minister flying around the country on Challenger jets doing a few hours of government work, then spending the rest of the time campaigning and fundraising, often at exclusive cocktail parties where big Liberal donors pay $5,000 a ticket to discuss public business. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The Liberal culture of entitlement goes on. The public must be given a chance to put an end to it.
Unfortunately, and tragically, because this government was so consumed by disinformation and petty politics, so obsessed by its own scandal sheet and its own survival, some things essential for this country fell by the wayside.
Where the government has acted, it has become increasingly erratic and irresponsible. Take for example the government's budgetary policy. In the first budget in February, the government announced modest surpluses and small tax relief measures. But in May, after the deal with the NDP, the Minister of Finance produced the second budget, claiming that the cupboard was bare and that there would be little or no surplus. He then removed the tax relief.
Two weeks ago, in the third budget in less than nine months, all of a sudden there was an enormous $97 billion worth of surpluses over the next five years, enough for a $30 billion package of corporate and personal tax relief. Since that budget two weeks ago, policies have appeared and disappeared at the rate of $1 billion a day, many of them not in any of the budgets.
At this point nobody can believe a word the government says about economic or fiscal policy or anything else, especially the on again off again policies on income trust, which I will not even get into.