Mr. Speaker, I rise to charge the Minister of Public Works and Government Services with contempt for deliberately misleading the House. The minister has left two very different versions of the facts on the record of this House.
The Minister of Public Works and Government Services said in this House on April 11, 2005, in response to a question, and I cite from Hansard :
Mr. Speaker, it was the Liberal Party that engaged two auditors, PwC and Deloitte, to do a full audit of the books of the Liberal Party. That audited information has been provided to Justice Gomery. We are working with Justice Gomery's auditors to ensure that we get to the bottom of this.
On the same day, in response to another question in the House, the minister said:
Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party acted quickly to engage two auditors, in fact, Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Both audits found that all contributions were receipted, handled and accounted for properly. These reports are in fact posted on the Liberal Party website and have been for some time. They have also been given to the Gomery commission, as of last December.
It turns out that this was not true. The Edmonton Sun of April 13, 2005 reported:
The Conservatives called the Grits on their audit line when they produced proof from firms Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Deloitte that their examinations didn't include cash flow to riding associations, and that they had to rely strictly on information provided by the Liberal Party.
PricewaterhouseCoopers said that what it was doing does not constitute an audit. In the document referenced by the hon. minister Deloitte says, “Our services were engaged to perform a forensic accounting review”. After the auditors determined that the Liberals were caught in telling a mistruth, the minister, in response to a question on Wednesday, April 13 in this place, said:
In fact, the Liberal Party has cooperated fully with Justice Gomery by engaging auditors to conduct financial reviews and providing all that information to Justice Gomery.
The minister presented another completely different version of the facts to the House as soon as it was exposed that his government had misrepresented the facts about these purported audits.
On February 1, 2002 the Speaker ruled on a similar matter in regard to the then minister of national defence. The hon. member for Portage—Lisgar had alleged that the minister of national defence deliberately misled the House as to when he knew that prisoners taken by Canadian troops in Afghanistan had been handed over to the Americans. In support of that allegation, he cited the minister's responses in question period on two successive days.
The Speaker considered the matter and found that there was a prima facie question of privilege. He stated:
The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House...But in the case before us, there appears to be in my opinion no dispute as to the facts. I believe that both the minister and other hon. members recognize that two versions of events have been presented to the House.
To put in context the severity of this misrepresentation of the facts, the Ottawa Citizen reported today:
One of Canada's leading forensic accountants dismissed the accounting reports commissioned by the Liberal party, which it held up as proof its books are clean, as “half baked” because they fail to track “dirty money” that was never recorded by party officials in the first place.
Forensic auditor Al Rosen, a chartered accountant and certified fraud examiner, said the Liberal party is “pulling the wool over taxpayers' eyes” by pointing to reports done by Samson Belair/Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers as evidence the party never received inappropriate cash donations from Quebec ad firms, which subsequently received multimillion-dollar government contracts.
“The engagements by the two auditing firms are not comprehensive enough to detect any scams or any form of dirty money transactions,” said Mr. Rosen, founder of Rosen & Associates Ltd., and a renowned critic of bad corporate accounting practices.
“Trying to use these reports to claim that everything is fine within the party is completely inappropriate. That's not what the reports say and what's missing from it is the cash transactions that don't get recorded in the books.”
Mr. Speaker, I submit that the attempt by the Minister of Public Works and Government Services to misrepresent the facts as part of his government's ongoing cover-up in this matter constitutes contempt. If you find this to be a prima facie question of privilege, Mr. Speaker, I will of course be prepared to move the appropriate motion.