moved:
That this House call on the Government to amend section (k) of the Gomery Commission's terms of reference to allow the Commissioner to name names and assign responsibility.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster.
I am pleased to rise today to speak to our first Conservative opposition day motion in what is coming up to a couple of months now. Although we would have liked to have had one sooner, I can assure the House that we are here to work, to ensure that democracy is upheld and to continue to do the business of the House.
I would like to read for members the motion that would change section (k) of the Gomery commission's terms of reference:
That this House call on the Government to amend section (k) of the Gomery Commission's terms of reference to allow the Commissioner to name names and assign responsibility.
For the benefit of those who are not familiar with section (k) of the Gomery commission's terms of reference, the current wording states:
--the Commissioner be directed to perform his duties without expressing any conclusion or recommendation regarding the civil or criminal liability of any person or organization and to ensure that the conduct of the inquiry does not jeopardize any ongoing criminal investigation or criminal proceedings;....
Because of the current wording, there is some ambiguity about whether Justice Gomery has the ability to name names or organizations responsible for the ad scam.
We want to make it absolutely crystal clear so that there is no ambiguity. We want to ensure that he can deliver a report on what went wrong in terms of process, but more important, recommend changes and also ensure that if there are people who should be further investigated this will be done. It is critically important that at the conclusion of Justice Gomery's commission people are held to account and will suffer consequences.
It is of some concern that under the current terms of reference the commissioner is directed to perform his duties “without expressing any conclusion or recommendation”. That is our concern. We want to make this crystal clear. I know that the government's response has been that under the current wording he now has the ability to assign responsibility and name names. If that in fact is the case the government members should support this motion, because this just really confirms that.
By almost any measurement, with the money involved and the depth of the corruption in ad scam, with the involvement of senior activists, the sponsorship scandal is the worst scandal in Canadian history. We owe it to Canadians to use every available tool to get to the bottom of what happened and punish those responsible.
Members opposite are fond of saying that we should let the commission do its work. I agree. The problem is that the limitations of section (k) in the current Gomery commission could prevent Justice Gomery from completing his task. It is arguable, and I acknowledge this, that the government would say this is already there. If the government truly believes that, then it will have no problem in supporting our motion because it removes any ambiguity.
It is the Liberals who have established a $1 million taxpayer funded war room in the PCO to help reduce the damaging daily testimony from the Gomery commission. When we see the actions of the government and when it sets up a war room to spin its way out of this using taxpayers' money, one has to question what its motives are and where it is going. Political parties set up war rooms. Governments do not.
Let us imagine the current Prime Minister, days after the commission started, taking a million dollars of taxpayers' money to set up a war room to do damage control for the Liberal Party. It goes from bad to worse. The Liberals just do not learn. Political parties spinning a story using taxpayers' money is absolutely unacceptable. That is exactly what they are doing. That party across the way does not need a wire brush. Those members need to finally acknowledge and make a commitment to the truth.
Let us look at what has happened over the past 10 years. We have had information about what has been going on in the program, yet nothing has ever happened. Let us look a few of the facts.
In 1995 a memo from Public Works warned that the program was seriously flawed but nothing was ever done. In 1999 the Treasury Board Secretariat warned that Groupaction was charging exorbitant amounts of money for work that was never done and yet there was no response from the government.
In 2002 an internal audit at Public Works showed that the sponsorship was not being properly tracked. Nothing was done. Worse than nothing, a new agency was created to run the program which had even fewer financial controls.
In 2002 the Prime Minister, then minister of finance, received a letter from the Liberal national policy chair stating that there were “persistent and growing rumours that funds from the sponsorship program are being diverted to partisan purposes”.
What did the current Prime Minister do when he received that memo? He did absolutely nothing. Instead, we have seen nothing but procedural delays ever since this scandal came to light in 2002.
First the government claimed the Auditor General would solve the problem. The Minister of Finance, then minister of public works, stated, “in terms of the management issues, the value for money issues, the proper government framework and administrative issues, there is no more public forum...than the Auditor General”.
The current Minister of Finance, who was then the minister of public works, said that the Auditor General would look after it and solve it. However at the same time we saw years and years where millions of dollars of taxpayer money was being funnelled into the Liberal Party.
It is worth nothing that the minister made these statements as an argument against holding a public inquiry. They refused at the time to have an inquiry. When the Auditor General's report was ready in November 2003, was it tabled? No. What happened? It was the government that prorogued Parliament, another delay. What were they doing? The Liberals were buying time.
In February 2004, the report came out but now it appeared the Liberals required a public inquiry. This decision was something the opposition had been calling for over two years.
However the Liberals were not done with procedural delays. They had a few more tricks up their sleeves. First they used the majority to shut down the public accounts committee before key witnesses could appear. They had some witnesses prior to that but they shut down the committee before all the key witnesses were about to appear. It is important to emphasize that this was not a government scandal but a scandal inside the Liberal Party, so obviously they knew the damaging witnesses.
Today we see yet another concern with section (k) of the inquiry's mandate. It is important to note that section (k), which I quoted earlier, states that:
The Commissioner be directed to perform his duties without expressing any conclusion or recommendation regarding the civil or criminal liability of any person or organization....
I heard the Minister of Public Works state in a news conference that the commissioner does have the authority to name names and assign responsibility. If they believe that, then they should just support the motion. We are not asking them to do anything that would be inconsistent with recent Supreme Court of Canada rulings with respect to inquiries or the Inquiries Act. We just want to remove any ambiguity.
Members have heard the litany of the involvement of the Liberal Party in this file. It is our duty in this House to ensure that the public gets answers, that we get to the bottom of this and that people are held to account.
This issue is incredibly deep with corruption. Millions of dollars were improperly taken from taxpayers. Over half the money was used to buy votes, the other half was used to pay Liberal friendly advertising agencies and millions more were funneled back to the Liberal Party. This is the worst kind of corruption that we have seen in Canadian political history, where millions and millions of dollars were funneled back to the Liberal Party. We have heard witness after witness all implicate--