Mr. Speaker, I think that exchange cost me a minute. I hope it is not taken off my time.
I want to repeat the motion that the Bloc Québécois introduced in this House:
That the House call on the government to immediately establish a trust account into which the Liberal Party of Canada can deposit all funds received from companies and individuals tied to the sponsorship scandal and identified in testimony before the Gomery Commission.
It is difficult to be a member of Parliament at this point in the history of Canada.
I vacillate between outrage and anger and, quite frankly, a sense of depression as a member of this House, as a member representing this government, all of us, not just members of the Liberal Party but all of us. This scandal has tainted all of us. We know that because when we are on the street or in airports and are identified as members of Parliament, we hear two things: “When are you going to throw 'em out?” and “You're all the same”. How often have we heard that?
Thus, I really am quite strong in my support for this motion, because it gives this Liberal government an opportunity, if it follows through on the contents of this motion, to perhaps address, even to a small degree, the black mark that is going to be left by this government, the legacy that is going to be left.
Obviously the NDP is going to support this motion. NDP members are almost at the stage of begging the government to finally recognize its responsibility. It is interesting to note that, last week, the NDP member for Elmwood—Transcona, and this week, the member for Ottawa Centre, both very experienced members, one a former leader of our party, both admonished the Prime Minister and gave him the opportunity to take that responsibility, to stop pointing fingers everyplace else and bring it home to roost where it should be.
I come from a French Canadian background. I fully sense the outrage, and yes, the humiliation, that the province of Quebec has experienced. Again, we have given the Prime Minister and the government the opportunity on many occasions in the House to step up to the plate and take responsibility. They owe a public apology to each and every citizen of the province of Quebec. Government members repeatedly stand in the House like little children saying, “It's not me. It's him. It's Mr. Gagliano. It's Corriveau. It's Boulay. It's everybody but us”. This motion gives them that opportunity.
We already have heard arguments from several of the Liberals members who are saying that they have to wait for Gomery to finish his work or they have to be sure they do not interfere with the presumption of innocence. We are so far beyond those arguments. This is not about the question of presumption of innocence. This is about public morality and public ethics.
This is about this government recognizing, as every Canadian citizen does, that the Liberals have tainted money in their Liberal Party coffers. It gives the Liberals the opportunity to say they recognize this, as does the Canadian public as a whole, and they are prepared to address that problem.
It gives them the opportunity to say, “We will set up this trust fund. We will impress upon the Liberal Party of Canada that for any funds we have from those individuals and those corporations that have ripped off the Canadian taxpayer, the Canadian citizen, we will put that money in trust and we will return that money”. That is one of the points of the trust fund. This gives the government the opportunity to say that this money will be returned to Canadian government coffers when it is appropriate to do so, and the Liberals will not go into this next election and benefit from that money, that they will take it out of their coffers and give it to the Government of Canada. It is a pretty simple concept, one that I believe every Canadian understands but which this government does not get.
I want to speak for a few minutes about the damage from the conduct of this government in reacting to the accusations and the evidence that have come out around the sponsorship scandal and what it has done to our international reputation. In that regard, there is a scale that an NGO puts out. It is quite respected and quite accurate in most cases. The scale in 1995 had Canada fifth in the world. There were only four other countries ahead of us. By 2001 when the initial scandal was breaking, when the initial knowledge was coming out about the scandal, we had dropped to 11th place.
We do not have the most recent rating, but we can imagine what just the last couple of weeks of testimony before the Gomery commission have done, just that alone. We have obviously dropped to way down on that list. The reason we have dropped on that list is not just the scandal, the misconduct and the illegality; it is also the reaction of the government when something like this breaks.
We keep hearing the Liberals say, “But we have done this, we appointed the Gomery commission. We have put in place some lawsuits. We have appointed a special legal adviser. We have introduced legislation on whistleblowers”. But in each and every case and any number of other ones they may want to bring forward in terms of their response, it is the Canadian taxpayer who is funding this. This has cost this Liberal Party and this Liberal government not one red cent. They just keep putting money up; your money, Mr. Speaker, my money, and the money of the taxpayers of Canada, and that figure is growing.
To rely on information from the CBC and the analysis it did in the last couple of days, these are huge dollars. The CBC estimates $72 million as of this week, and it is growing. Some of this is hidden in many respects. Justice Gomery has spent $32 million for the work that he and his commission have done, and for the commission counsel and funding provided to parties that are part of the commission. That is $32 million.
There is an additional $40 million internal to the government. Justice Gomery and the commission counsel indicated this week that they do not believe they will go beyond the $32 million. They see the end in sight for what it will cost. I have to say that I am always a bit worried about an estimate that clear, but I am fully confident it will be very close and will not exceed it by much.
There is also the $40 million the government has spent among various departments. It is not over and it is going to grow. This week the Liberals announced that lawyers from within the government, defending the government and parts of the government and former civil servants, just got an additional $10 million in legal fees.
A point needs to be made about this because of some of the comments made by the public works minister earlier today about the mandate of Justice Gomery. He in fact has no mandate and is specifically prohibited in his mandate from making any determination of not only criminal liability, which is understandable because our criminal courts have not dealt with those people who have been charged so far and presumably more that are coming, but he is also not allowed to make any determination of civil liability.
What that means, taking out the legal terminology, is that he cannot say that Mr. Guité or Mr. Corriveau are responsible for this $1 million or that $5 million or that $6.7 million. He is prohibited from doing that under his mandate.
There are additional costs: our international reputation and what it is costing us for the Gomery commission. Let us go back for a minute to how much it has cost us in the sponsorship program.
As much as the public works minister wants us to believe that this money was used for good causes, some of it was but a large amount of it was not. It went to fees and commissions for which absolutely no work was performed.
It would appear, from the evidence that has been coming before the Gomery commission inquiry, that a significant amount of that money was filtered into both the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Liberal Party of Canada in donations.
In addition, it is clear from the sworn testimony that money that did not go into their coffers, services that were rendered, not accounted for and not attributed to the party, were also delivered. People were put on staff in private corporations but they were working entirely for the Liberal Party of Canada and no attribution of their salaries or benefits, which is clearly a breach of the law and part of the scandal.
To some degree what the motion by the Bloc Québécois does is it gives the government an opportunity. Mr. Brault testified that $1.2 million in benefits and services never showed up on the Liberal Party's books, but the Liberals used that $1.2 million in the last election. That money should be paid into this fund and held until the terms of the trust are met and then paid to the Canadian government.
An additional several hundred thousand dollars went directly in contributions, probably as much as $800 thousand, from individuals and corporations involved in this scandal. That should be paid into this fund and it should be paid out of the funds of the Liberal Party.
The point that was made earlier today, which I support, is that this should not come from the rebates that we get, either as a party at the time of election or the ongoing support that is paid by the government to support political parties based on how well they did in the last election.
There is no question that the Liberal Party of Canada in the last election and probably in the two previous ones benefited from this dirty money. It should not be allowed to do that again in this coming election.
Let me just talk about the coming election. I think the point was made again today that Canadians, overwhelmingly, delivered the message after the last election that they wanted this minority government to function. A poll this week showed that 87% of the country still feels that way.
However we are getting a mixed message from the electorate because it is quite clear, both from the opinion polls and from what we hear when we go back to our ridings and talk to our constituents, that they are so angry and so outraged at the conduct of the government, both in the scandal and in their reaction to the scandal, that they want the government out of office.
We know it costs between $200 million and $250 million to run an election in this country. I believe, from everything that I see in this House and the frenzy that is going on in the country generally, that we will have an election after less than one year and that election will cost the Canadian taxpayers $200 million to $250 million.
We would have spent that money eventually but it should have been over a four year term period rather than a nine month one. This will be another added cost of this scandal.
I want to go back to the province of Quebec and the abuse that it has taken on this. I think one of the reasons that both my party and the Conservative Party are quite willing and, in fact, proud to support the motion is that it is coming from the Bloc Québécois.
As the Bloc leader made clear in his address today, he remains a sovereignist, I remain a federalist and we respect each other's position. However he and I know that the individual voter in Quebec has been humiliated and that another cost will come from the high risk of another referendum over Quebec's separation. We have to expect that this humiliation, this anger and this outrage from individual voters in Quebec will translate itself into support for the sovereignist movement. This is another cost of this scandal.
We have the cost for the Gomery commission. We have the cost of the scandal itself and those costs add up, it would appear, to at least into the $200 million range. We have the cost of a coming election, again in the $200 million to $250 million range. We have the cost to our international reputation but, perhaps most important, we have the cost of democracy.
This scandal has damaged democracy in this country. It has grossly increased the cynicism of all the electorate toward politicians generally. It has undermined our faith and our confidence in our public system of government. It will take a generation or better to repair that. The motion today gives the government the opportunity to start us down that road.
I do not have much hope, quite frankly, that the Liberals will take advantage of this opportunity because they have had so many up to this point over the last few years and not once have responded. Not once have they come to the front of this chamber and admitted their responsibility or admitted where the system broke down, and they will probably not do it now. They do not get it but the electorate will punish them in the election that is coming. However our democracy will still suffer.
