Debates of June 21st, 2006

Federal Accountability Act

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I am sorry but I do have to allow the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine time enough to respond to the comment.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, yes, I do believe the bill would create a gridlock.

Expert witnesses have said that many of the new structures that have been put into place did not need to be put into place. The new authorities, if that was what the government wanted to create, could have easily been embedded in existing structures. I will give two examples.

The first example is the public appointments commission. We have the Public Service Commission which already has expertise in establishing criteria for hiring, for promotion, et cetera, within the public service. The Liberals proposed amendments that would have taken the authority of the public appointments commission and embedded that into the Public Service Commission. The government and the NDP voted against those amendments.

The second example is the public servants disclosure protection tribunal. We had unions telling us that should go to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board because it has the expertise. The government and the NDP voted against that. They preferred to create an entirely new structure.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from St. Catharines.

I have been sitting here listening to the members on that side of the House for the last three months and I have come to the conclusion that they do not really know or understand why they are sitting on that side of the House. They think they have some divine right wherever they are and do not understand why they are sitting on the opposite side of the House. Perhaps I should remind them that on January 23, Canadians sent them a message and sent them into the opposition, out of the government, because Canadians lost trust in those people.

I do not understand how they can sit over there as if nothing has happened and keep puffing their chests and screaming at all these things. It is all absolute nonsense. Perhaps they should look at themselves in the mirror and try to analyze why they are sitting over there. Your own leadership candidates are now questioning what you were doing sitting over there for the last 12 years.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

Order, please. The member will please address his remarks through the Chair and not directly to members of the House.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Sometimes we get carried away, Mr. Speaker.

Those members are sitting over there for the simple reason that they do not understand accountability. Their record on accountability was so bad that Canadians were fed up and voted them out of office. We just have to look at what happened in the Gomery inquiry. The member said that there was no corruption in the Liberal Party. If there was no corruption why was there a Gomery inquiry? Why did the previous prime minister try to distance himself from the sponsorship scandal? Where did the money go? Why did the Liberal Party return the money to the government? The Liberals returned $700,000 because they said they had taken it. That is the issue today.

On January 23, Canadians decided to give the Conservatives a chance. We stood up for our priorities. We told Canadians what we stood for. We had no hidden agenda. We promised Canadians this bill and we are delivering. As the President of Treasury Board said, this accountability bill is one of the toughest in the western hemisphere. It brings accountability back to politics, back to running the government.

We just heard about a leadership candidate going after children. That is how much nonsense this has become. The last speaker stood up and tried to defend this by saying that she brought in an amendment to raise the age to 18. I did not hear her say one word about condemning that leadership candidate. I did not hear her say that he was wrong. Why could she not stand up publicly and say that the leadership candidate was wrong? She then pretended that she was now bringing accountability into this thing. She had every opportunity when she was in government to bring in accountability but at that time she found it difficult to do so. However, not the Conservative government.

The member for Halifax tried to put us in the same light as the Liberals when she said that we had no rules for leadership races. She should look at the accountability act under “Reforming the Financing of Political Parties”. It is very clear. I hope her party will support this. It is quite simple. A candidate in a nomination contest or a party leadership candidate cannot receive more than $1,000 in contributions. If that is not accountability, then what is? This is an attempt by the Conservative Party to bring some semblance here. It would take away the influence of business. We know of Liberal cronyism. We must not forget the Dingwall affair and the culture of entitlement that went on for 13 years.

The accountability act would bring Canadians' confidence back because politicians will finally be accountable to the people. They would no longer be accountable to special interest groups or to people who give large donations. The bill is a direct result of the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

I am pleased to say that the Conservative Party is fulfilling its promise and we are delivering on what we said in the election. That is foreign to members of the Liberal Party. They promised so much but what did they deliver? They delivered nothing.

The Liberal candidate was going after children and of course it was quite amusing to see the member from Winnipeg telling him, “Please don't go to schools. Don't attack my children”.

However, on a serious note, the accountability act will bring in what Canadians were asking for. They were looking forward to relying on politicians and those who govern them to do that. They send us their tax dollars without question, but they want us to use them carefully. That is what this accountability act is.

I am extremely happy and proud to be associated with a government that has brought such a strong accountability act forward, but there is more than that, because what we promised is what we have delivered: our five priorities. The opposition may not like it, but the fact of the matter is that this is what we told Canadians and that is what we have delivered.

On July 1 we will have a GST cut of 1%. That is what we promised. It was not what the Liberals promised in 1993, which was that they were going to scrap the GST. We said we would cut it and on July 1 we will cut it.

I also am very happy to note that Liberal Party and of course the NDP were out there saying they opposed the budget, everything in the budget, yet when the budget bill came to the House, they passed it. Some may want to say that they were sleeping. Others may want to say that on the issues they do not know what they are doing and they do not know what they are talking about.

Again, they go out there and they tell Canadians “this is what we stand for”. Then when we look at the record of what they have done, it is absolutely the opposite. One would wonder: if they were so opposed to this budget, why did they pass the budget unanimously? That is because they know the budget is good. We want to thank them for passing the budget.

I am happy to say that I am very proud to be associated with this government that is bringing forward this accountability act and bringing back to the Canadian people the power to make politicians accountable.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was very glad to be part of the NDP's changes to Bill C-2, the accountability act, to ensure that appointments are made in a fair, open and transparent manner, that all appointments are based on merit and that patronage will now be against the law.

Of course there was the committee that interviewed Mr. Gwyn Morgan to head up the appointments commission. Mr. Morgan, the Prime Minister's choice, had called the Kyoto accord “sound-bite junk science”. He was of course against the Kyoto accord. For reasons of his extreme partisanship and also because we felt it would be unsuitable for someone who was heading up the continent's largest gas company to oversee appointments such as those to the national energy board, we found him unsuitable.

At the time, the Prime Minister said that he was going to do away with the appointments commission and he needed to have a majority government to have fairness in appointments, but really, all it took was NDP amendments to make the appointments commission work.

My question is for the hon. member who has just spoken. Will he take a different tack from the Prime Minister, who said he was going to take his bat and ball and go home, and urge his party now to deal seriously with the appointments commission and finally set up compliance with this fair and transparent process that the NDP has helped bring into place?

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the member asked this question. Let me point out that Mr. Gwyn Morgan is one of the best CEOs. He was voted the best CEO of the year for this country. He led one of the best-run companies in the world. He had a stellar record both as a businessman and as a man who contributed to Calgary's art, culture and everything. He was a community driven man. He accepted only $1 to come here to do his share of public service.

Of course, his views may not be what the NDP wanted. That is fine. But it does not mean that if his views did not meet with the NDP's views that the man was not qualified to take one of the best jobs and bring accountability to this country.

[Louise Thibault, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like the parliamentary secretary to indicate whether he agrees with the fact that implementing the principle of responsibility necessarily involves the notion of accountability.

If he agrees with that, how can he—as the Conservative government gloats about having reinvented the concept of responsibility—explain that the first action taken by the leader of his party as Prime Minister was to appoint someone who is not accountable to this House—who cannot be accountable to the duly elected MPs—for the enormous portfolio assigned to him?

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Mr. Speaker, let me say that it is very simple. The government is in this House and the government is held accountable by the opposition. The opposition here has been asking questions in relation to that portfolio and they have been answered, because ultimately the Prime Minister is responsible and he sits in this chamber.

In reference to the Minister of Public Works, he has said that he would be running in the next election to come into this office.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know that we are getting to the end of the session and we have been here a long time. We have heard the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine talk about a couple of movies. One of them was entitled The Nutty Professor. What I find really interesting is that Canadians were forced to watch a movie for the last two and a half years--

[An hon. member]

It was a horror movie.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

It was a horror movie. It was full of suspense, full of emotion, full of intrigue--

[An hon. member]

And bad acting.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

It had bad acting, theft and corruption.

In fact, that movie was a real life story. It was called the Gomery inquiry. We could not change the channel. We had to change the government. On January 23, we did.

That led to a whole host of changes, changes that turned a new leaf and introduced to Canadians a new government, a government with a vision, a government focused on the issues that matter to Canadians and with an action plan to accomplish what Canadians expect, a government that introduced a new culture of accountability which will forever change the way business is done in Ottawa.

It is not a movie. It is real life. The federal accountability act is about fixing the system for Canadians. It is about strengthening and streamlining how government works. It is about making government more effective. It is about providing Canadians with better access to government information.

The federal accountability act will ensure that Canadians have easier access to government information by strengthening the access to information legislation. I want to take a couple of moments to describe these changes in particular.

Through the work of the legislative committee, the federal accountability act will indeed expand the coverage of the Access to Information Act even more to include all agents of Parliament, including five foundations, which are: the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology, the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, and even the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. As well, the act includes crown corporations and most of their subsidiaries, excluded until now because of their commercial nature.

The federal accountability act will expand the coverage of the Access to Information Act to all crown corporations and will make government more open and transparent. Even the Canadian Wheat Board is no longer exempt, based on the amendment that passed this afternoon. Even as late as this afternoon we were working to make sure that this act makes sense, that it is going to work and that it is going to be representative of what Canadians want.

It does not stop there. The government is going to ensure that a broad range of views is considered in exploring ways to further strengthen access to information legislation. Canadians deserve better access to government information. Better access allows Canadians and organizations to participate more fully in public policy development and better assess the Government of Canada's performance. We are not scared to be there. We are not scared to be judged on the performance that we provide.

Our government has been listening and is delivering on its commitments. By expanding the coverage of the Access to Information Act, the government will become more transparent and open. It will provide Canadians with access to more information, and the act will also have the criteria for the future addition of institutions included in the regulations, making them clear, consistent and, most important, transparent. It will provide a duty for institutions to assist requesters without regard to their identity and will clarify the time limit for making a complaint under the Access to Information Act.

As all members of the House know, the Access to Information Act is a complex legislation, with a broad constituency across many sectors of our society. It includes widely divergent views on its administration.

The government is committed to accountability and transparency. That is why the government will invite parliamentarians to engage in a comprehensive debate and to consult with a broad range of stakeholders, as well as to issue a report when it reaches the end of deliberations.

The government is committed to doing the right things and to doing things right to change how business is done in Ottawa. We have proven we can, we will and we will continue to prove that we are delivering on the commitments it made to Canadians.

The reform of the Access to Information Act will be done in collaboration with parliamentarians, with Canadians and with stakeholder groups within our country. The goal is to make government more open, while balancing legitimate requirements for personal privacy, commercial confidentiality and national security. By expanding the coverage of the Access to Information Act, the government will become more transparent and more open.

The Government of Canada belongs to Canadians. It should not obstruct access to information. I promised and committed to the people of my riding, as all of us on this side of the House promised Canadians, that we would clean up government and that is what we are doing. After four short months, our track record speaks for itself. The federal accountability act will strengthen public access to government information, simple and straightforward.

The government has tabled a very important act that went through rigorous parliamentary committee scrutiny, amendment after amendment, debate after debate, hour after hour since April 11.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to rebuild the confidence and trust of the people in St. Catharines, the people in the province of Ontario and the people in every province of our country. Trust is what we are rebuilding.

Accountability is not something that can be simply defined. At the end of the day what we will have is the guiding post that will be the lamp we work under, work through and commit with. This means that each and every one of us, all 308 members sitting as parliamentarians, are still under the same responsibilities that we have acknowledged to the people who elected us. There still is the individual responsibility to ensure we live up to the act.

It takes commitment. It is going to take effort, but we have set a guiding post. By working under that guiding post called the accountability act, I think we will raise the level of respect Canadians have for this institution, for parliamentarians, for the governing party of Canada and for all of us who are here to represent our constituents.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's comments with great interest. I want to go through three parts of his comments and ask him a question at the end.

The member made an absolutely staggering comment. He said that accountability cannot be defined. That is a remarkable statement for someone in a government, professing to put forth an accountability act. How can the member possibly support an accountability act when, in his own words, he cannot define accountability?

My second point is the member spoke about access to information. If he is in favour of access to information, then he should take it up with his Prime Minister as to why he is muzzling the media, why he is muzzling his cabinet, why he is muzzling his members of Parliament and why he is trying to muzzle the public service from doing its job as an apolitical institution.

My third point is on the issue of what Canadians want. They want the same as all of us want because all of us are taxpayers. Canadians want their money to be spent wisely and effectively in the interests of the public.

According to Henry McCandless, an expert on this matter from the Auditor General's office, accountability is the obligation of elected officials to tell the public what they are doing. Bill C-2 will cause a gridlock.

Does the hon. member not admit that this bill, a bill that he cannot define, will cause gridlock in the public service and drive good, young smart people away from joining the public service at a time--

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for St. Catharines.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not about to take a lesson on what accountability is all about from a person who crossed the floor to join a party that simply does not understand accountability, that did not even want to talk about accountability.

When I speak about accountability in terms of definition, we have not tried to pull out Webster's Dictionary and determine what accountability is from a dictionary perspective. We put 13 elements into the accountability act, which have been debated for the last four months. When I speak about defining it, it is about us, as individuals, as parliamentarians, living up to the responsibilities that are defined within those 13 elements of the act.

Clearly, as individuals elected to represent our constituents in Ottawa, we have to be prepared to live up to that act individually, based on our conscience, to do the right thing as we work here. That is what it means to live up to the 13 pieces in the accountability act.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, in the his response to the question by the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, the member for St. Catharines questioned his accountability and whether he should even have to answer that because the member crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberal Party of Canada.

At the same time, though, one of the cabinet ministers, to whom the member has to report, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, crossed the floor from the Liberals to the Conservatives immediately after the election.

I find it interesting that a backbench Conservative would question the fact that --

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Both members who spoke are incorrect. I never crossed the floor. I left my former party, sat as an independent and ran as an Liberal, but I never crossed the floor.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I do not want to get into the elements of debate here. I will allow the hon. member for Windsor West to continue his question.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am working on the member's analogy of the situation and how he characterized that action. However, the member for St. Catharines was questioning the accountability of members crossing the floor.

What accountability is there in his government's legislation right now, which does not have a floor-crossing element, when the member for Vancouver--Kingsway, immediately after the election, crossed the floor for a cabinet position against the wishes of his constituents?

It is unacceptable that we are not fixing that in the legislation before us today. What credibility does the member have on this issue?

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member listened almost closely enough to my response to the question. I indicated very clearly that our party is committed to accountability. Our party was elected to government to bring accountability. We introduced and delivered an accountability act that speaks to the very nature of what we need to clean up here in Ottawa.

The comment I made was very clear. Had the member been listening very closely, he would have heard what I said. Accountability is not on the other side of the House. Accountability is on this side of the House. A member chose to join this party. I think that member did so based on the fact that he knew that delivering on accountability rests in the party that is in government right now.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to hear the intervention from the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca in response to the last totally illogical comment from the member for St. Catharines.

Bill C-2 has been trumpeted by the government as historical legislation and to some degree there is some validity to that, mostly stolen ideas from our former leader and past member, Ed Broadbent. A number of the provisions within Bill C-2 were proposals that he entered into the public record by way of a report issued about 18 months ago, one that was heavily adopted by the Conservative Party at the time and now the Conservative government. As the member for Halifax just mentioned, unfortunately not all of it.

However, there are some key components in it and it is the reason our party has been willing to support the legislation, recognizing it is far from perfect and has some fairly glaring gaps in it, which I will address in a few minutes.

It is important to say that we support it. It has some fairly major advances to deal with what has been a growing level of corruption in some cases, but certainly a growing level of cynicism in the Canadian body politic toward the House and members of this House and toward political parties in our country. It is well past the appropriate time for this legislature and all political parties to address that cynicism, to respond to it and to in effect clean up our act, which the bill, and hopefully soon law, will go some distance in doing.

It begs the question that if we do this will we see a reduction in cynicism? Will we hopefully see an increase in engagement by the average Canadian citizen in politics. Will they pay more attention to it and involve themselves both at election time and in between elections in the determination of policies that are in their best interests and in the best interest of the country as a whole.

We are hoping, and I would say to some degree expecting, some positive outcome in the body politic as a result of this legislation. To that again, I want to acknowledge the phenomenally good work that Ed Broadbent did. He contributed to pushing the Conservative Party and government along these lines and, in effect, showing them the way. It is a debt of gratitude that our country owes to him as a result of all his hard work and vision in that regard.

There are a number of things that it does. It brings into play a new public appointments commission.

In terms of the level of commitment we see from the Conservative Party, we always had suspicions. Because Mr. Gwyn Morgan was in effect shuffled out of the intended role of heading up this commission, in a snit the Prime Minister said “I'm taking my ball, I'm going home”. He said that he would not include the public appointments commission in the bill. It was to heck with all the rest of us, to heck with the country and to heck with the importance of having this appointments commission to in effect clean up the patronage, which has been so pervasive. It was in the previous Liberal government and it obviously was going to be in the current government. However, when he did not get his chosen appointment, he took his ball and went home.

Quite frankly, because we have a minority government, we told the Prime Minister he could not do that and we were going to change the bill, which we did at committee stage. We got the commission back in place. All parties and all members of the House will be faced with the need to ensure that the appointments are only made based on clear criteria.

In the last Parliament Mr. Broadbent prepared a model which a number of committees adopted when they were reviewing appointments. Not as many appointments were reviewed as we would have liked, and I will not say the criteria were always followed, but it was a beginning. We have now come to a much broader scope and positive changes, we hope, in the way appointments are made to our innumerable commissions and boards.

Whether they be crown corporations or small committees, they all play an intricate part in the democracy of the country. For far too long those appointments have been based on who one knew and to which political party one belonged, which was always the party in power. Far too many of these appointments were not based on quality and merit but simply on who one knew and to which political party one belonged. Shortly that will be a thing of the past.

It is amazing that we are at the early part of the 21st century and we are only finally getting to this. We look back and think about the days when a government changed and the entire civil service changed from the most senior official to the least significant part time employee. It was wholesale. To the victor went the spoils was the motto. We did away with that quite some time ago in the public service. We created a public service of a standard based on merit and substance, but we did not do that for the appointments and it continued right up until the present time. We observed in the last government just how terrible that could be. That sense of entitlement was so pervasive and was so negatively viewed by Canadians right across the country.

As the appointments come forward at all levels to be reviewed by committees, the NDP will be vigilant that criteria are based on merit and not on political affiliation. To a great degree we have substantial hope that the quality of the boards and committees and the appointments to sit on those boards and committees will substantially improve to the benefit of all Canadians.

I want to spend a few minutes on a couple of key points that are missing from the proposed legislation. One point has already been referred to by my colleague from Windsor West in one of his comments. It is an issue that the bill did not address. We tried to get it addressed in committee and it was ruled out of order. It is the issue of floor crossing.

Mr. Broadbent, in his writings on this subject, made it very clear to all of us in the House and to the country as a whole that there was a fundamental need to address this issue if we were going to clean up the democratic process in this country and the way the House and the government functioned overall. We should not have individual members of Parliament who stood for election in one party, who canvassed door to door, adopted the policies and principles of that party, and then sometime after gaining the confidence of the electorate and being elected, on a whim, or as a result of incentives offered by the government of the day or on some occasions the opposition party, responding to those incentives most times out of self-interest and not the interests of their constituents. We should not have individuals who certainly were not responsive to the vote that had brought them to their seats determining on a whim or through self-interest to leave the party to which their constituents had elected them to join another party.

We saw several very blatant incidents of that in the last Parliament, but I do not think we saw anything so crass as what we saw after the election. I happened to be driving in the car with one of my sons when I heard the news on the radio. I said, “They have to be wrong. That did not happen”. This was two or three days after the election.

The member for Vancouver Kingsway, now the Minister of International Trade, had been elected to the Liberal Party. He had sat in the previous Liberal government as a minister, and had been very vigorous, aggressive and confrontational in his attacks on the Conservative Party during the election. He led his constituents to believe that he would represent their interests, that he would stick with the Liberal policies and principles, and I sometimes think those two do not go very well together, but leaving that aside, he had convinced his electorate in Vancouver Kingsway that they should vote for him and they gave him the seat. Sixty per cent of the people voted for other parties. In any event, he took that seat under those conditions and within days switched parties.

Did he do it, as he claims, in the interests of his riding? Did he do it because he was offered the incentive of becoming a cabinet minister again as opposed to sitting as a backbench opposition member? We may never know. I suppose history will judge that, but in either event, it is wrong. It is morally wrong. It is ethically wrong. It should not happen.

Mr. Broadbent had made it very clear that his policies would have prevented that. That legislation, if he were the author of it on our behalf and on behalf of the Canadian people, would have prevented that.

That provision should have been in Bill C-2. As I said earlier, at the committee stage we moved amendments to include that provision. They were ruled out of order. We did not even get a chance to have them come to a vote at committee.

I have to say I have some doubts as to whether they would have gone through, as the sense I have of the other three political parties in this House is they are prepared to continue to permit that kind of conduct. They are not prepared to deal with the absolute anger that constituents feel when their elected member, who ran on one basis, makes that kind of abrupt change and they have no control, they have no say until the next election. They are stuck with a member like that for an extended number of years until the term is up and they can get at him again in an election. That is not good enough and it has to stop.

One of the failings of Bill C-2 is it did not address that. The government refused to address it. Obviously given the greetings that the Conservatives gave the member for Vancouver Kingsway, I suppose we should not have expected anything else from them, but it certainly belies their claims of accountability. What is accountable about that? Nothing at all.

We are stuck with that for the time being. At some point the Canadian people will get another shot at this and I believe we will respond at some point with the proper legislation that will prohibit that kind of conduct in the future.

There is another major point that is missing here. In the election and in the run-up to the election, the Prime Minister and the Conservatives made various overtures to the Canadian people about electoral reform. They even included it in the throne speech earlier this year.

The one little thing that we have seen and which is being claimed as being some form of electoral reform is the bill we saw earlier on, and I will put it in quotes, “Senate reform”. Quite frankly, it is a joke. All it does is fix the maximum number of years that unelected, unaccountable senators get to sit in the other place. This is claimed as being some kind of major step forward, which of course it is not at all.

What should have been put in place with Bill C-2 is a meaningful process to have full electoral reform. It may be worth a few shots to actually get the government to accept the reality of what the Canadian people want. Electoral reform is needed. We are out of sync with the rest of the major democracies in the world in terms of exclusively using the first past the post system. The United States is now the last democracy that uses it. England has begun to move significantly, both in Wales and in Scotland, and all the other democracies have moved in one form or another to do away with the first past the post system. They have recognized, going back 100 years in western Europe, that it does not respond properly to full democratic representation, so that every vote counts as the same, so that there is not a wide divergence in results in the reflection of the actual popular vote where a party forms the government, with a significant majority in some cases, with less than 40% of the vote.

We have seen very many examples of that in Canada, at the federal level and at the provincial level. We have seen the anomalies in New Brunswick where the government gets a little more than 50% of the vote and takes every single seat in the province. In British Columbia there were two elections where the provincial government took all but two seats. The party got less than 60% of the vote but took 97% and 98% of the seats. We have not had a government in Canada at the federal level that got a majority of the vote since around the second world war, for more than 60 years now. We simply cannot continue with that system.

I mentioned earlier in my address about the cynicism in the public generally regarding politics in Canada. It is part of that sense that people do not have control over their politicians, over their elected officials. It is not the be all and end all to that, but it is one of the significant pieces that has to be put into play.

When we hear the Conservative government extol the virtues of Bill C-2, we have to keep in mind that there are some gaping holes in it. We are going to support it because it does address some of the accountability issues. It does build in, in a number of ways, protection from some of the worst forms of corruption that we saw in the last government, and which we saw quite frankly in the Conservative government under former prime minister Mulroney. To some degree that will stop, but it is not the end, and we will not get that until we replace the first past the post system.

We are quite prepared to support this bill, but we are saying to the Canadian people and to this House that we are going to continue to work for the further reform that is needed in our democracy.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed listening to the NDP member's comments on Bill C-2 and I share a number of his views. I definitely share his comments regarding the public appointments commission. Happily, opposition members who sat on the Bill C-2 committee did see fit to reinstitute that public appointments commission.

It is interesting to note that the Prime Minister ran on a platform of accountability, integrity, ethics and that a promise made would be a promise kept, but when his choice of a chair for the future public appointments commission was rejected by the appropriate standing committee of the House, he picked up his toys and said that he would not play the game anymore.

When the committee reinstituted the public appointments commission in Bill C-2 it gave very clear directions in the legislation as to what the commission's mandate would be and what authority it would have. The committee also stated:

Before making a recommendation to the Governor in Council that a person be appointed to the Commission, the Prime Minister shall consult with the leader of every recognized party in the House of Commons. An announcement of an appointment shall be transmitted to the Speaker of the House of Commons for tabling in that House.

Now that the Prime Minister has stated that he will not appoint anyone to the positions in the public appointments commission, notwithstanding the fact that opposition members reinstituted this commission and that we are confident that it will stand the test of the other House, is that not just sheer arrogance and hypocrisy on the part of the Prime Minister? Is that not the kind of behaviour that actually breeds the cynicism in the Canadian public that the hon. member of the NDP was speaking of?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I must agree with the member's characterization of the Prime Minister's conduct as being arrogant. There is just no question about that.

The role of the commission is set out very clearly. It is a major step forward in dealing with blatant political patronage at its very worst. The commission is required to do a number of things. When we hear the Prime Minister making statements that the commission will in effect not be allowed to perform its duties because he will not appoint anybody to it, breeds the cynicism that I made reference to as did the member in her question.

My understanding is that Canadians and members of this House were taken aback and insulted by the Prime Minister's attitude in saying that if he did not get his way he would go home with his ball. He appears to have shifted his position and we expect that he will make the appointments. If he does not play the proper role of the Prime Minister in this regard, including the consultation process that is required, which again was an idea that came from Mr. Broadbent, I can assure the Prime Minister that he and his party will pay in the next federal election.