Debates of April 10th, 2008

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad we are in questions and comments. I appreciate the comments of the member for West Nova, who also was very active on the committee, but I am very disappointed. He needs to talk to the chair of the committee, because unfortunately his picture did not make the report. I do not know why, but it has everybody else who was on the committee.

I do not know what the question was or if there was a question, which is fine. The hon. member is able to make comments. However, I can say that as a committee member it made me a little bit nervous when I found out that the member for West Nova, who was on the committee and asking questions, was also having dinner with Mr. Schreiber.

He made an accusation tonight that there was some connection with the Mulroney group or something, but he also said that based on my questioning. I can tell members that is an absolute falsehood. There was no such connection in any way shape or form.

Mr. Speaker, if you check the blues and see the kinds of questions that my colleagues and I asked of Mulroney and his team, they were not lob balls by any stretch of the imagination.

We had no preconceived favourites, as the member would like to indicate through his comments this evening. We were there to do a job. We did the job I think very professionally, no matter who the witness was, and we did not do any extra activity in terms of having dinner with Mr. Schreiber and getting involved with witnesses we were going to see or had seen and were going to see again.

As for Mr. Schreiber's extradition, his case was before the Supreme Court and he asked not to face his accusers in Germany. He got the extension to come before the committee. From my understanding, all those options have now been exercised and he will now have to face his accusers in Germany for about three or four different types of charges, including fraud. I am sure that process is happening.

The Prime Minister was clear from the very first day when the Leader of the Opposition in the House asked a question demanding a public inquiry on this matter. The answer came from the Prime Minister on the very first question in the House on that particular topic when he stood in his place and said yes, we will engage a public inquiry on this matter.

As for characterizing this side of the House and the leadership from the Prime Minister's Office on this topic as something that we were trying to avoid, and there then being public pressure on us to do something, that was not the case. The fact of the matter is that the Prime Minister, as he does on many important policy issues, uses the House of Commons as it should be used, to make those announcements, to tell Canadians and all parliamentarians the direction this government will be taking. He did it in this case and he did it on the very first question he got from the Liberal opposition leader at the time.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

There are two minutes left for questions and comments, so the hon. member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe may take one minute to ask his question.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard my friends, the member for Peterborough and the other members on that committee, say that there were no findings of wrongdoing. The Canadian public may take from that comment that the Conservative government feels there was no wrongdoing and there are no questions that remain unanswered.

It was Dr. Johnston, in his report, which the member I guess agrees with, who says there are many questions that remain unanswered. What payments were made? When and how and why? The uncertainty surrounding the question remains. The tax treatment by Mr. Mulroney, who declared it five years later, remains. There is much public concern about the connection with respect to the services rendered and the meetings in various hotel rooms across the world. Questions remain. There is a public concern.

When will the member and his colleagues get out of the darkness of denial that was the culture of that committee and face the truth?

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The hon. member for Burlington has equal time.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the committee was not a culture of denial. That is absolutely a falsehood. The member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe needs to check Hansard for tonight's debate, because on numerous occasions I have said there are still unanswered questions and that is why we support having an inquiry. I have said a number of times that this is the purpose.

There were a number of unanswered questions. We are not denying that. We believe in what Dr. Johnston has done in terms of his analysis on that. We are moving forward. We are putting a public inquiry in place. We will get the answers that Canadians are looking for.

Also, I am looking forward to going to Moncton in a few weeks to watch my daughter play volleyball.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, first, I regret to inform the House that the Canadiens have only two goals to Boston's one, but we know that it will only get better.

Second, I would like to inform you that it is my pleasure to be sharing my time with the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe.

There is a lot that has been raised by the member opposite that I would like to deal with. We spent the last six months doing some of this I guess, but one of the questions was about my meeting with Karlheinz Schreiber.

Yes, I met with him a number of times, always in very public places and always to get information. I offered the same meeting with spokespeople for Mr. Mulroney because Mr. Mulroney is a very proud and important man. He does not meet with a member of Parliament; he has a staff that does that.

He had a Mr. Robin Sears who was to meet with me. He called three or four times to set up some meetings hoping that I would refuse I imagine. I accepted every time and he kept changing the time. On the fourth or fifth time, finally, he had to admit that he had no intention to meet with me, so we did not meet.

I spoke to many journalists who had done work on this. I spoke to many people who were named in the books that were written on these matters and got as much information as I could to prepare myself to ask relevant questions of witnesses. First, to see, and this is an important and sensitive question on this matter that spans 30 years, if we should be dredging the bottom again, should we be bringing that to the attention of Canadians, and should we be putting stress on a former prime minister and ministers that were named and some people who were still very active in the lobbying business in Ottawa whose names would be raised.

We had to find out whether it was worthwhile. One of the things that was of interest to me was how it had been set up going way back to the early 1980s and the people who were involved. The set up that was done put this person with the Prime Minister. There was a group that would decide who would do business and people would get rich this way and that way, and that is how the money would move around.

We can look around today and we see many of the same players and many similar structures. We see them around the government.

One of the things that concerned me was that our current Prime Minister had embarked on a great project of rehabilitating Brian Mulroney. He went so far as to call him a valued adviser and mentor. He put many of the people who were surrounding Brian Mulroney into key positions. A partner at the law firm, he put in public works. A former speech writer is now chief of staff at transport. Those are departments that do a lot of contracting. We have the Minister of National Defence who was a very close associate. We have a number of people like that, a number of MPs. The Minister of Justice was a parliamentary secretary.

I remember reading a story in the paper where the former minister of justice, now President of the Treasury Board, when he heard about the $300,000 cash payments to Mulroney, asked his department for a briefing. All of a sudden, no, he was not going to get a briefing.

I do not know if that happens very often in government. I had not seen any of that in my three years in cabinet. The minister could not get the briefing from his department. The minister was moved out and in comes a new one, the current minister who was a parliamentary secretary. All of a sudden there is no such desire to review these matters.

Therefore, I got very interested. I asked for a public inquiry in the House many times and the Prime Minister refused. Government members laughed at us across the way, laughed at us and reminded us of the $2.1 million that had been paid to Brian Mulroney because of the errors at that time. They made a joke of it until finally a letter comes out. Karlheinz Schreiber puts out an affidavit. He raises the question of a meeting with the Prime Minister.

Then all of a sudden there is a meeting with the Prime Minister and Brian Mulroney carrying a letter written by Karlheinz Schreiber negotiated by Elmer MacKay. When that affidavit came out, that was hard on the Prime Minister. For the second week in a row he ran to the national press theatre where he had not been in two years. There were no press conferences before and now, all of a sudden, he had to have many.

He said, at that time, that he was going to name an independent third party to advise him on how he should handle this matter. Then on that weekend Brian Mulroney told the newspapers that we have to have an inquiry. Of course, that was done through Luc Lavoie at the time. That was before Mr. Sears came along. Luc Lavoie was still the spokesman at that time.

On the Monday or Tuesday after a week break we came to question period and our leader pressed the Prime Minister on it. He said that he would ask that person to give him the terms for an inquiry. That is the first time there was talk of an inquiry. Before that it was laughter, denial and delay. There was no way that there would be one.

The person who was charged with doing the reference was Professor Johnston, a highly distinguished Canadian. I have no qualms with Professor Johnston. I do not wish to debate his recommendations. He did what he was asked to do. He did it to the best of ability and to what he believes is right.

We can pick apart everything he says but at the end of the day the Prime Minister of Canada has the responsibility to name a public inquiry. He can delegate any authority he wishes. He can get advice from anyone he chooses but the inquiry is the responsibility of the Prime Minister and he will have to answer for that.

If he now accepts these terms 100% as presented they are his and he must answer for those.

Some of the suggestions made I fully agree with but I have serious reservations when we are looking at a project such as Thyssen. We know the money paid to Brian Mulroney came from that project. Because of the signature of the federal government on the memorandum of understanding, $2 million were generated for the construction of the Bear Head project. A quarter of that was set aside: $500,000 in that account, $300,000 in cash paid to Brian Mulroney by Karlheinz Schreiber and $200,000 more available, exactly one-quarter of the commission.

A few weeks after leaving the prime minister's office, Fred Doucet received $90,000 out of those same commissions, the exact same amount that was paid to Frank Moores, Gerry Doucet and Gary Ouellet, the partners in GCI who were set up to do the business of the federal government. We see an agent of the prime minister leaving and collecting very shortly thereafter. Those are serious allegations.

Now the government is saying that we cannot examine those four gentlemen at a public inquiry. Regrettably, two of them have died, but two of them are still here. Fred Doucet is very much here. He is on the record as lobbying on many of the most expensive files the federal government is dealing with. He has a hand on the back of the current Minister of National Defence. He runs that puppet. He ran it at his leadership. That is his game. When he was in front of the committee I said to him that he was a Cape Bretoner and that he knew about the Bear Head project. I said that he had a direct interest in that and that I was sure he was following it.

The member for Burlington will remember the reply. Mr. Doucet said that he knew of the project in passing but that he did not have a big interest because his job at the prime minister's office was to organize international conferences. He said that he was not too much involved on that. However, a few weeks after he leaves office he receives $90,000 from that project.

Then we have Senator Lowell Murray, a distinguished gentleman and the minister for ACOA at the time. He tells us that in all that period that Fred Doucet was there that he approached him dealing with that many times when he was directly in the prime minister's office and when he was supposedly organizing these international meetings for the prime minister and working out of External Affairs.

We did not bring Senator Murray before the committee. All I know is what I read by Daniel Leblanc or by Greg McArthur but I believe it was LeBlanc who interviewed Senator Murray.

We need to go through a lot of information. We know Mulroney misled us at the committee and gave us misleading information, as he did when he did his examination for discovery for the $2.1 million. We also know that Fred Doucet misled us. Today a high officer of this country was brought up on contempt of Parliament. These people did no less than that person did. Perhaps the proof is less detailed but I believe a public inquiry can do that.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member just went through a few names and talked about their ethics.

We are on the committee for access to information, privacy and ethics. I have a personal ethical issue when the member for West Nova talks about this issue as being a controversial, highly charged issue and meeting separately with witnesses. This, to me, is like the judge. The judge in a case does not, halfway through the case, have lunch or dinner with one of the witnesses he may see, has seen or who may get called back. That is not how it works. It is unethical to do so, in my view.

The member is questioning everybody's ethics on how they handle their business. Does he not feel that he has crossed any ethical lines by meeting people he is cross-examining, to use a legal word, at a committee meeting prior to any decisions or any conclusions being made by that committee?

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, as a member of a parliamentary committee, I am not in the role of a judge, a prosecutor or a defending attorney. I am not a lawyer. My job on that committee is to find out any information I can about the matter that is being studied. Between sessions of a committee, it is my responsibility to prepare myself in order to ask the relevant questions.

I am also on the health committee. I have been on the finance committee for a number of years. It is quite regular for me, on the very day that we are having sessions of those committees, to meet the people who will be appearing as witnesses. They may want to explain to me what it is they are doing on this subject, how they see this going or what they believe our recommendations should be. I agree to meet people who represent all sides at those committees and who want to bring me information. I think that is the road that most MPs take.

Because this is a charged issue, it does not change what we do as members of Parliament in our roles on those committees.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the member's speech because he is always to the point and colourful. However, he missed the point of what Norman Spector said to us and what bearing it had on Bear Head and the prime minister's extremely unethical behaviour in allowing himself to meet with officials representing Bear Head after he knew the project was closed.

What does he think about that?

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, yes, there were meetings of senior cabinet ministers with Fred Doucet and Karlheinz Schreiber. However, it is worse than that. If the member for Burlington thinks it was bad for me to meet with Karlheinz Schreiber, the current Prime Minister met at Harrington Lake with Brian Mulroney, the guy who accepted envelopes full of cash. If it is illegal and unethical to give cash, it is certainly illegal to receive it.

Why did the Prime Minister meet there? What were they discussing? Why was he meeting with a person who he knew had done that devious deed?

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to take part in the debate on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. I was a member of the committee, but only for meetings on this subject. I participated as a member of Parliament and as a lawyer.

I take a little exception to several authors, including William Kaplan, who is a lawyer, suggesting that none of the committee members could question their way out of a wet paper bag. As a lawyer for some 22 years, I at first took exception to that and then cooled off and realized that he was probably right.

It is because of the systemic nature of our committees where people only get five to seven minutes to ask questions and have them answered. Everybody in the legal profession knows that once a person gets a thread of questioning, it would be very nice to be able to finish. As our partisan setup goes around the table, we sometimes lose the thread of the questioning.

The only people at the hearings who had any constant thread of questioning, and this may start out sounding like a compliment, were the Conservative members who asked very simple questions like, “Was the Prime Minister at any of the meetings with Mr. Schreiber? Was the Conservative Party of Canada, formed in 2003, involved in any wrongdoing?” They had a very well prepared list denying any allegations that would touch them. It was very much self-preservation.

They were almost ready to throw out their hero from three months before, Mr. Mulroney, the most green prime minister of the century who they adored a couple of months before. They were almost ready to jettison him, except that as they saw the committee working they realized that maybe Mulroney had his ninth life and it was coming to bear in this very truncated way of questioning people.

Notwithstanding Mr. Kaplan's comments about the method of questioning and before I get into Mr. Johnston's terms of reference and the outcome of his final report, there were three nuggets that my friend from West Nova did not touch upon, so as to not overlap, that did come out of simple questioning from the members representing all parts of Canada.

The three nuggets are quite spectacular. They came out on the public record and were seen by tens of thousands of Canadians. The first is the Bear Head project. Norman Spector, a very credible witness, an esteemed Canadian and a very articulate journalist, gave testimony that as the chief of staff for the right hon. Brian Mulroney he was privy to a conversation where, in exchange for a view given of the viability of the Bear Head project in 1990, the prime minister returned the decision to his chief of staff to kill the project.

Bear Head was dead in 1990. There were to be no more entreaties, no more meetings and no more lobbying by the Conservative government in 1990 onward. Mr. Spector was not challenged on his testimony with respect to that, and that came out as a result of questioning from simple committee members.

What is curious about that, and it is one of the grounds that Dr. Johnston thought was worth pursuing in the public interest, is that as the inquiry goes forward we will understand clearly that Mr. Doucet, having received his commission through the Thyssen-Bear Head-Britain account of money, met with Mr. Schreiber, through the agency of Mr. Doucet and the tacit approval of Mr. Mulroney who was then the prime minister.

During the year 1991, on numerous occasions Mr. Schreiber was escorted into meetings involving ministers, deputy ministers and even the prime minister of Canada after the prime minister of Canada had legitimately said, in a Privy Council sense, that the project was dead. That stinks and the inquiry will get to the bottom of that questioning.

The second aspect that came up during the hearings were the questions, simply asked, “Mr. Mulroney, if you received money, why did you take five years to declare it? And when you declared it, more importantly, did you file a special exemption form or request permission of Her Majesty, through the Receiver General, for permission to do a late filing of money received earlier?”

He said, “The only thing left that is sacred in Canada is the secrecy of our tax returns”. That is in Dr. Johnston's report. Dr. Johnston is not satisfied with that and I will bet that the Minister of National Revenue is not satisfied with that. Mr. Mulroney further stated that a voluntary late disclosure of income form was not required.

It would be very interesting to see during the course of this inquiry whether that opinion holds up. My view from looking at all the evidence as an amateur in this realm, admittedly Mr. Kaplan, as an amateur but as a person who feels that the public has a right to know, and many of the people in my constituency feel the same way, is that Mr. Mulroney received money from Mr. Schreiber as a reward for Mr. Schreiber having had access to the Government of Canada during the time Mr. Mulroney was in office.

It was further in aid of the Bear Head project in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Let us not kid ourselves; I am a proud maritimer, and a project the size and economic impact of Bear Head would be a feather in any politician's cap. It would mean jobs. It would mean a viable product. It would be good for Canada and the economy.

No one is saying that the Airbus planes we fly on frequently are bad planes and that Air Canada is not better served by the planes. That is not the issue. The issue is how did Bear Head advance as a project once it was killed and why was money paid to the prime minister of Canada for that advancement? The inquiry will get to the bottom of that.

With respect to tax treatment, clearly, when the proverbial was about to hit the fan, Mr. Mulroney was alarmed. He met with Mr. Schreiber in 1998 to figure out what was going to be disclosed and when, and decided he had better do something, so in his 1999 tax return he reported the $225,000 to $300,000. I am sure average Canadians would wonder whether they should late file five years later for the extra three installments of $75,000 they got in a brown paper bag somewhere. I am sure it is a very common problem for the average Canadian. Of course, I am being sarcastic, Mr. Speaker. It is not a common problem, unless a person received money and thought no one would know about it and finally five years later the person then began to think someone would find out about it and the person had better file.

The final aspect that came out through the evidence and questioning was that there is no more of an admirable defender of a person, if one hired him, than Luc Lavoie. One could not think of a stronger knight to go to the wall on one's behalf and in one's interest if one hired him.

Yet, having spent $2.1 million on his legal and PR team which included Mr. Lavoie, Mr. Mulroney through all of the interviews in preparing for a defence on the lawsuit and the discovery, did not tell Mr. Lavoie once about the amount of money he received from Mr. Schreiber.

I find that absolutely incredible. It means that Mr. Mulroney did not even trust his most trusted knight in shining armour, his most trusted, valuable, and very worthwhile in the marketplace by the way, defender of interests, Luc Lavoie. He of the deep voice, deep heart and the courageous defender of people, did not tell Luc Lavoie what the amount was, until the proverbial really hit the fan and Luc Lavoie, as we say in the House, was freelancing with the figure of $300,000 because he heard it out there.

I started to question Mr. Lavoie, saying that did not sound very professional and that is when the seven minutes were up. We would have really had a melee that day and I am sure I would have been on the short end of the stick with a man like Luc Lavoie.

Finally, with respect to Dr. Johnston, he was hemmed in by the ineptitude of our committee. I hope that the Prime Minister can follow the words of his own people on the committee, that yes, the questioning was inept. There are so many other questions that need to be answered. We need a wide public broad inquiry.

The Prime Minister should not have his hands tied by having confidential interviews. Those might suffice in cases like Air-India and cases where the public security interests might overwhelm, where private security interests might be of relevance, but this is not a case where either is at play. I encourage the Prime Minister to have as wide open inquiry as he promised once during a campaign. On the very Air-India question, he promised a wide open inquiry on a subject which involved public security interests and private interests under the PIPEDA. Yet, in this case which touches merely politics, frankly, only politics, he--

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It is with regret that I interrupt the hon. member, but now we will have questions and comments and we are going to have a question from the hon. member for Burlington.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have one point of clarification and then I will go and watch the hockey game.

The other three parties in the House put together supplementary reports. There is none from the Liberal Party, so I assume the members agree with what is in the report, including what we found:

As noted at the beginning of this report, the testimony received by the Committee in relation to the Mulroney Airbus settlement revealed many material inconsistencies and contradiction.

The Committee heard witness statements that could not be reconciled with other witness testimony, and in some cases, witness accounts of certain incidents were challenged by persons outside the Committee hearing process. Given the passage of time in relation to these events, the fact that some of the participants are deceased, and the vast array of documentation, much of which has yet to be obtained, let alone fully examined, it is difficult to completely resolve such inconsistencies.

My question for the member, who gave an excellent speech and of course completely unbiased, is this: Do you agree with what is in the report prepared by the researchers, which the committee supported, and do you agree with the statement that is part of the conclusions?

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The hon. member for Burlington should know that when we address other members of the House, we do it in the third person, not in the second person. The only member who gets the second person is the chair occupant.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I am always learning from you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for that clarification.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member quotes from the report. Our position was always that the evidence spoke for itself, as tattered as it was. So many questions were raised by our triaging of the evidence and Dr. Johnston picked up on most of them. Where I would say he has failed, because we probably failed in the way our testimony rolled out and our awkward questions, is on two very important aspects about which the Canadian public will never know.

The first, and I already spoke about in a question, was the settlement of the libel suit for $2.1 million of taxpayer money. Allan Rock said that he would not have settled that case had he known the evidence Mr. Mulroney gave in Montreal was false.

The second aspect is we will never know where the money for Airbus and GCI went. It seems Dr. Johnston has closed that door. It seems the Prime Minister, with the door closed by the adviser who is only relying on our imperfect evidence, will not open that door again because he has something in his craw about his previous defence and glorification of Mr. Mulroney.

I have always said this to my children and other people. The Prime Minister is a good person, but he is very sensitive to criticism and he is very sensitive when he makes mistakes. I am sure in that world over there the Prime Minister never makes mistakes, but he made a mistake in this case. He got too close to Brian Mulroney and he knew it, and he distanced himself after the proverbial started hitting the fan.

The Prime Minister is a very proud man. We should have a proud leader of this country. That is fine, but pride goeth before the fall. In this case the Prime Minister will not open the doors that Dr. Johnston has been forced to close on the libel suit, on tracing Airbus to GCI. He will tie the hands of the future commissioner of inquiry by suggesting that there be confidential interviews, that we do not open doors to subjects about which Canadians want to know.

Ultimately what happened in the 1980s is the Conservative Party of Canada had a party and the party lasted a long time. There were lobster tails, shrimps and scallops all across the country in every PC club 500 reception across Canada. Frank Moores was the chief piper at the party and a good part of that money came from corporate Canada and corporate Europe. Sadly, Mr. Schreiber represents an end, hopefully, of an epic period where foreign money influenced Canadian decisions.

I am not as conspiratorial as my friends in the NDP who see a conspiracy under every coaster on every table, but I do think that foreign money and what Mr. Schreiber symbolized in saying was involved in Conservative Party politics in the 1980s. We will never know now.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

There being no further members rising, pursuant to order made earlier today the motion to concur in the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics is deemed adopted on division.

(Motion agreed to)

A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, on February 29, I asked the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent why the Conservatives had abandoned the Acadian and French-Canadian communities and why this government is acting more and more like Preston Manning’s Reform Party than like Joe Clark’s Conservatives, the farther we get into its mandate. In this case, the question is rhetorical. The Conservatives in the party of the member for Calgary Southwest have no belief in the vitality of the French fact in Canada.

Let us imagine for a moment that this government had not put any figure under the National Defence heading in the March budget. Unimaginable, you say? Of course! But for the action plan for official languages, on page 256 of the budget: nyet, nothing. It says: “to be determined”. That was on February 26, and here we are on April 10, 44 days later, and still there is nothing.

When it comes to making a mockery, the Conservative federal government, speaking from its incompetence, said it was waiting for the results from a consultant so that—obviously—it could drag it out and leave French-speaking minority groups in Canada twisting in the wind. We are talking about the Bernard Lord report. The document was released on March 20, and the Minister of Canadian Heritage, who is responsible for the second action plan for official languages, has said not a word.

The consultations held by the neo-Reform's mercenary brought forth a document that would embarrass a grade nine student. The Standing Committee on Official Languages had already submitted three excellent reports, in May 2007, December 2007 and March 2008, for the information of anyone who was even slightly interested in the Acadian and Canadian French-speaking minority, and so the person responsible for Canadian Heritage and Official Languages had more than was needed to prepare a new five-year plan.

We are talking about valuable reports: the first one on official language minority communities, produced after consultations held across Canada in all of the communities in the fall of 2006, a document 184 pages long; the second, on the Court Challenges Program, so shamefully eliminated by the neo-Reformers, at 44 pages; and the third, a report dealing with the federal public service and the language industry, in relation specifically to renewal of the action plan for official languages, at 49 pages. We have 277 pages of valuable ideas, produced over a 17-month period by some 20 members of Parliament, all united behind 58 recommendations, not to mention the 168 individuals and 108 organizations that appeared and the 56 briefs received. Stack them up beside the Lord report, with its 45 pages and 14 recommendations, and there is no comparison.

The public relations exercise by the neo-Reformers’ little buddy was a shameful waste of public money that talks about things we already knew and is full, absolutely full, of holes. It must be recalled that in June 2007, at the Sommet de la francophonie in Ottawa, the announcement by the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent of what was to become the closed-door and pointless exercise by Bernard Lord was already being denounced by leaders of the francophone minority community in Canada.

The idea that the Conservatives, alias the neo-Reformers, could form a majority government puts me in mortal fear for the Acadian and franco—

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

I am sorry to have to interrupt the hon. member for Gatineau.

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Status of Womenhas the floor.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Status of Women]

Mr. Speaker, the opposition was asking about our government’s commitment to the official language communities. I rise today to reiterate our firm commitment to these communities and to linguistic duality in Canada. We repeated this commitment in the last Speech from the Throne and the budget showed it as well. And yes, we do have two official languages in Canada and not just one in Quebec and the other outside Quebec.

Our government is currently working on the second phase of its action plan. In the first action plan, we provided $30 million over two years, as announced in the last budget in 2007. In the recent Speech from the Throne, the Government of Canada stated that it was drafting the second phase of the action plan.

The government is therefore finalizing the process of developing a new strategy for the next phase of the action plan. Many sources of information have gone into the development of the new strategy, including an evaluation of the activities in the first phase of the action plan and discussions with key stakeholders in the area of the official languages, as well as with the provinces and territories, which are privileged partners. The new strategy will also take into account the results of the community meetings, including the Sommet des communautés francophones et acadienne and the Conference on Quebec’s Anglophone Communities, reports of the standing parliamentary committees and of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, the results of the 2006 census, and the survey of community vitality.

A key element in this process were the consultations on the official languages and linguistic duality undertaken last December and chaired by Bernard Lord. I do hope that Mr. Lord managed to remember that there are still two official languages in Canada, in contrast to my colleague from the Bloc and his acolyte, the hon. member for Joliette, who claimed not two hours ago that French was the language of Quebec and English the only language of the rest of Canada. This was an insult to francophones all across the country, who are fighting for their language.

These consultations helped the government collect the views of representatives of the minority official language communities and of the public in general on its official languages strategies. The consultations were conducted in the spirit of the Official Languages Act and our government’s determination to abide by it. The budget reflects the importance we attach to these consultations. The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages has now received Mr. Lord’s report.

The Action Plan for Official Languages includes initiatives in several federal departments and aims to provide horizontal coordination of government activity. The development of the new strategy is therefore a complex process that must be done very carefully. We are reviewing all the information gathered through these various processes. This will enable us to consolidate, renew, modify, modernize and expand government projects on the official languages, as well as to rely on key partnerships and raise Canadians’ interest.

It is also entirely—

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The hon. member for Gatineau.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Lord tour, as orchestrated by the Conservatives, was a ploy to delay doing something about the already well-known needs of francophone communities, needs that have been growing as ethnolinguistic assimilation has been decimating their numbers at an ever-increasing rate for the past six censuses.

The mere fact of having eliminated the court challenges program is totally unacceptable. The fact that they have had almost two years to come up with a second official languages plan, but that there is less than nothing on the table speaks volumes.

The fact that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages has not yet signed the second action plan proves that the anti-French-language and anti-French-culture neo-Reform ideology is alive and well in the federal government.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the Bloc claims to know the official languages. And he has lived in Saskatchewan. When we hear absurdities such as, “There are two official languages in Canada: in Quebec it is French and in the rest of the country, it is English,” we wonder what has happened to the other francophones. What about the millions of others who speak French and who fight, day after day, to make Canada a country united by its two official languages?

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

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

(The House adjourned at 8:09 p.m.)