Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise this evening to speak to this bill.
I, like other members who have spoken before me this evening, want to thank the 12 members of the committee who put so much time, energy and effort into reviewing this bill. Like other members, there are provisions in this bill I find very positive. The lobbyist registration and the accountability of deputy ministers before Parliament are major steps for this Parliament and certainly I support them.
However, I believe there will be negative outcomes from the bill. A lot of these additional officers of Parliament that are being created amounts to Parliament outsourcing its fundamental job to hold the executive to account.
Tonight I want to spend my few minutes just speaking about accountability in its broadest sense and how perhaps we as an institution are losing sight of this very important concept.
It is my position that this bill, although very beneficial and containing a lot of good provisions, a lot of steps forward which have been very adequately addressed by other members tonight, really has very little, if anything, to do with institutional accountability here in Parliament. In actual fact, what has happened over the last number of years is that we have taken what I consider some fairly major steps backwards.
I should point out before I go any further that I will be splitting my time with the member for Ajax--Pickering.
As all members know, the Canadian Parliament is governed by three branches: the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch. The executive gets its authority of course from the Governor General, who appoints the leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament. That leader appoints the executive. The executive is accountable to Parliament, and of course Parliament is accountable to the Canadian people.
The members of the executive are parliamentarians also, and our job is to provide authority, approve legislation, approve appropriations on the one hand, and hold the government to account. That is our fundamental job in this assembly.
Over the years, there has been a major imbalance between the executive and Parliament. We can see that with the control right now. It did not start with the present Prime Minister. This has been going on and it has been added to by successive prime ministers over the last number of years.
Right now I believe that the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Department of Finance have thousands and thousands of employees, experts and researchers. We in Parliament, I believe at last count, have approximately 80 researchers working for us. There is a tremendous imbalance in what is going on here in Ottawa.
The executive branch has gotten stronger over the years and the legislative branch has gotten weaker, and it cries out for reform. There has been much talk about it over the years, much written about it, but very little done about it. There has been the odd step forward taken, but in the last three or four months we have taken some fairly major steps backwards.
The bill is referred to in this assembly as the federal accountability act, but it really has nothing to do with institutional accountability. My position is that it falsely expropriates the term accountability.
I refer members of Parliament to the work of Mr. Justice Gomery. This was a very extensive report with four volumes. The title of it is “Restoring Accountability”. Mr. Justice Gomery and his commission make 19 recommendations. We would expect to see a number of them in this so-called federal accountability act. Other than three or four, we do not see anything.
Mr. Justice Gomery talked about strengthening committees, about providing more resources for parliamentarians and about major changes to the public accounts committee. None of that is even mentioned in the federal accountability act. Mr. Justice Gomery talked about the accountability of deputy ministers, which was codified in the federal accountability act, but everything else he said was basically ignored.
What we have seen over the last four months has been some major steps backward with regard to the problem of institutional accountability in Parliament. I do not want anyone to interpret this as having started with the present Prime Minister, because it did not. This has been going on for decades. Every successive prime minister who came to Ottawa wanted to consolidate total, absolute and utter power in the Office of the Prime Minister.
What I have seen here in the last five months I find very grievous. The first thing the Prime Minister did before anything else was to put his campaign co-chair, who spent two months working on his campaign, in the Senate. Two or three days after that he made him the Minister of Public Works and Government Services. The previous speaker did not see anything wrong with that and said that it was not a patronage appointment. I do not think anyone in Canada would agree with that. It is a blatant patronage appointment.
I am not suggesting for a minute that is the first time that has happened in the Senate. However, the Prime Minister made him the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, a minister who spends $50 million each and every day and is not accountable to anyone in this institution. I cannot ask him a question for two reasons: first, he is not here; and second, I do not even know what he looks like. I am a member of Parliament who was sent to Ottawa on behalf of the people of Charlottetown, and we have a minister walking around Ottawa spending $50 million a day in taxpayer money and I do not even know what the fellow looks like. That is accountability.
Another major step backward was the appointment of the committee chairs. This was done by a previous prime minister. Parliamentarians came together and one of the leaders of the charge was the present Prime Minister who spoke against and voted against the practice. What was the first thing he did when he became Prime Minister? He appointed not all the chairs but the ones who were government members, which I believe are about 17 of the 22 committees. Members of Parliament issued press releases saying that they had accepted the Prime Minister's appointment to chair such and such a committee. That was a major step backward.
In the campaign literature distributed by the Prime Minister he talked about free votes on everything other than the throne speech, the budget and supply items, which, of course, has all been changed. There are no free votes at all. They are free votes other than the budget, supply and priorities of government.
We have seen some major steps backward in this whole concept of institutional accountability, which I find very troubling.
I hearken back to the four volumes of Mr. Justice Gomery's report. He made certain recommendations that are not being followed. If we are talking about accountability, this is a dishonest debate. It has to do with some good things but it has very little to do with institutional accountability in Parliament.