Debates of Nov. 19th, 2007

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

Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that when members on the other side find an issue, they dither and go around in circles. They talk as if nothing happened in the past and everything started from that day forward.

I would like to tell the member that it was his government that sent the troops to Afghanistan. Today, he is standing up and saying that the Liberals had no role to play in sending the troops there. The Liberals are the ones who sent the troops to Afghanistan.

He stood up and said that he does not know what the government's plan is and what it is the government intends to do. I do not understand. We made it absolutely clear in the throne speech. Perhaps like the NDP, you rejected it before reading it, or maybe you did not even read the throne speech. In the throne speech it is absolutely clear what the government's intention is. Let me repeat that.

It is Parliament that will decide on the extension, should there be one, of our troops in Afghanistan. We are there until 2009. The Prime Minister made it very clear that the Parliament of Canada, of which you are members and have the right to vote, will decide if there is--

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

Order. The parliamentary secretary should know by now that he should not be referring to members across the way as “you” and that he should be trying to speak through the Chair.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will address my comments through you. Absolutely, there is no question. If the Liberals are confused because they cannot read a throne speech as clear as it is, that is not our problem. It is their problem.

In reference to telling NATO that we are going to withdraw, the Parliament of Canada has made a clear commitment until February 2009. NATO knows that. The Minister of National Defence repeats that every time he meets with NATO or speaks with the secretary general. He was there just three weeks ago and will be there again in December. NATO is very well aware of what our position is. As a matter of fact, constant dialogue is going on with other NATO members to ensure that the mission in Afghanistan is a success.

I do not understand how one can provide reconstruction when there is no security. Even Liberals understand that, but for some reason they seem to think we can do reconstruction there and leave security to somebody else. Why would we want to leave security to someone else?

We are a collective force. We are a member of NATO. A failure in Afghanistan will have ramifications right around the world. What would be NATO's role in the future? Who would trust NATO in the future? Who will trust Canada's commitment to NATO in the future, if we do not stick with our NATO commitment?

We must understand that Afghanistan is a UN mandated mission. That is what Canada has always done. I just came back from Korea. We went to war in Korea because of a UN request. We are in Afghanistan because of a UN request. The main purpose of our mission in Afghanistan is reconstruction.

I would like to tell my friend on the other side quite clearly that there is only one voice that speaks on behalf of the Government of Canada, and that is the Prime Minister or the Minister of National Defence and no one else.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is very clear from the parliamentary secretary's answer that the government was only kidding when it talked about February 2009. It intends to bring this House to a vote for beyond February 2009. It has no interest in getting other NATO members to do the heavy lifting.

This is not a Canadian mission. This is a NATO mission. We alone cannot be doing the heavy lifting along with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands. It is clear that the government believes that somehow we are totally responsible for what is going on in Afghanistan rather than saying we are overstretched as it is and that we need to bring in the rotation. It has been done before.

Again, we are looking at other options in Afghanistan. It is ludicrous, in fact completely unfathomable for me and the Liberal Party to accept the notion that somehow the Conservatives agreed to February 2009, which is what they brought in, and the House supported the motion, and in the end they now say that we need to be there longer--

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Mr. Speaker, let me assure the member that we are talking with our NATO allies all the time to share the burden of reconstruction and security in Afghanistan. That has been a priority of the minister. He has been speaking with all of our NATO allies and they all understand that it is a NATO mission.

Let me remind my hon. friend again that the House, including him probably, voted for the extension until 2009. We stated prior to that we would seek unanimous consent of the House to extend should there be a need to extend, and he and his party would at that given time have an absolute right to vote for that mission.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure to rise today to follow up on a question I asked in the House on November 1. I asked the Prime Minister to have a full inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair and the full Airbus affair. He adamantly refused, laughed it off and the government laughed it off as well. He did that for two weeks until Brian Mulroney himself ordered an investigation.

What concerns me is the management of the file by the current government. We know the Prime Minister received a letter from Karlheinz Schreiber seven months ago, indicating the dealings that he had with Brian Mulroney, the exchange of money, when the money was transferred and when the negotiation happened. For seven months there was no action by the Prime Minister, zero.

This is a letter that calls into question the following of Canadian laws, a letter that should have been transferred to the RCMP immediately. When the same letter was received many months later by the Leader of the Opposition, he transferred it to the RCMP, which opened an investigation within 14 days after it received that letter.

Karlheinz Schreiber said he sent that letter to Mr. Mulroney when Mr. Mulroney was seeking financial help. In the letter to Brian Mulroney he states:

During the summer of 1993 when you were looking for financial help, I was there again. When we met on June 23, 1993 at Harrington Lake, you told me that you believe that Kim Campbell will win the next election....You also told me that...the Bear Head project [a business proposal] should be moved to the Province of Quebec, where you could be of great help to me. We agreed to work together and I arranged for some funds for you.

We have since found out that the funds were $300,000 given in cash, the first $100,000 of that while Mr. Mulroney was still a member of Parliament. Mr. Mulroney was still prime minister in June at that time, and Harrington Lake is an official government residence.

When this letter came into the correspondence unit in the government building, at Langevin Block presumably, it would have gone to PCO and then from PCO logically transferred to PMO. From PMO, logically when something is that sensitive, it would have gone directly to the Prime Minister or to very senior staff, who would have briefed the Prime Minister.

However, that is not what the Prime Minister would have us believe. He would have us believe that this correspondence with Schreiber was dealt with by junior officers at the Privy Council Office.

I invite you, Mr. Speaker, to speak with people who have at one time or another worked at the Prime Minister's Office or PCO. Ask them how a letter like that would be handled. I think they would tell you that they would not walk it across the hall. They would run it across the hall. That letter is very sensitive, very serious and there is no way it would be fluffed off by junior officers. There could be the chance of the Prime Minister being greatly embarrassed, as he did when he went to speak at the dinner honouring Brian Mulroney not too long after that. However, I do not think it was ever thought that this would become public.

If the Prime Minister did not get this information, I can only think of one reason. It would be that he asked not to receive such information for adoption of plausible deniability.

Now that we have all the information, I would ask the government to ensure that Professor Johnston is given the mandate to ensure his public inquiry includes all the activities by the current government in relationship to the Schreiber-Mulroney affair.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, let me start by correcting a few factual errors. My hon. colleague and all of his colleagues on that side of the House continue to misrepresent the situation with respect to the letter sent by Mr. Schreiber.

My hon. friend has said, and I believe I am paraphrasing correctly, that Mr. Schreiber sent the letter and the Prime Minister received the letter. That is absolutely not true. Mr. Schreiber may have sent the letter, but the Prime Minister never received it and never read it.

Although my colleague seems to be incredulous as to how could this happen, how could a letter of such sensitivity not appear before the Prime Minister, I only point out the fact that the letter's author is someone who has been facing extradition proceedings in the country for eight years. He is facing extradition to Germany because of charges of tax evasion, fraud and forgery, to name only a few.

If that were the character of the author of this letter, why in the world would anyone in the PCO forward this on to the Prime Minister? It does not make any sense. That is why PCO officials have stated quite clearly and quite publicly that they did not forward the letter to the Prime Minister's Office.

When the Prime Minister says that he never received the letter, never read the letter, he is absolutely telling the truth. What my friend is trying to do is make this into some sort of a political witch hunt or a smear campaign to try to connect the dots between the current Prime Minister and the Schreiber-Mulroney affair, which is an affairs that stems back 15 years.

This was an alleged incident that occurred back in 1993 and 1994, around those dates. For my hon. friend to even suggest that this government or this Prime Minister is in any way, shape or form connected to that incident is absolute lunacy. There is no connection whatsoever.

I again point out for my hon. colleague that there is a reason why prime ministers do not see letters such as this. We have to consider the source. The source in this case is someone of very questionable character. This is why that letter never appeared before the Prime Minister.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, what is interesting is I read in the House of Commons not very long ago a letter sent by the same individual to the Prime Minister's Office and “un accusé de réception”, a letter by the Prime Minister's Office stating that the letter by Mr. Schreiber had been received by the Prime Minister and copies of the documentation attached and the letter forwarded to the Minister of Justice. All of a sudden they tell us somehow this one did not get to the Prime Minister.

He started his comments by saying perhaps it was not sent, that Schreiber was lying. It is possible, but that is not what PCO tells us. It did not tell us that it did not receive the letter. The member said it was not forwarded to the Prime Minister.

If a letter of this sensitivity was not forwarded to the Prime Minister, it was because people were told not to forward it to the Prime Minister. They knew what could come in those letters. In my mind, unless proven otherwise, I see a full-fledged cover-up by the Prime Minister's Office.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I rest my case when I say there is nothing more than a smear campaign being attempted by members of the opposition when we hear that type of rhetoric spouted off in this place.

I point out to my hon. colleague that members of the PCO have stated quite clearly and quite publicly that the letter in question was not forwarded to the Prime Minister. Is my hon. friend suggesting that officials, long-time civil servants, are lying or not telling the truth? Is that what he is contending?

It is obvious that Mr. Schreiber had eight years in which he could have brought some of this information forward. Why did he not? Why did he wait until literally days before his extradition hearings were to take place, when the final decision was supposed to be made, before this allegedly explosive, new political information was filed?

It was done so for one reason and one reason only. Mr. Schreiber is trying to do anything and everything in his power to stay in our country. That is the only reason he is making this case.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly the House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 6:48 p.m.)