Mr. Speaker, I am please to speak tonight following a question I asked some time ago.
The reason for my question is that there has been much comparison made between our Prime Minister and President George W. Bush. I understand and I share much of that concern.
However, it has occurred to me in the last little while that it is a different president that our Prime Minister most closely resembles and that president was Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon did some good things. He opened up relations with China, for example, but his reputation was clouded by a constant and gnawing paranoia, a belief that everybody was out to get him, political opponents, media, academics, peace activists. He became paralyzed by this arrogant need to shut them down. He created his famous enemies list, which included such dangerous people as Paul Newman and Mickey Mouse. He shut them down.
That is what I would suggest that our Prime Minister is doing today when we look at the people and the organizations that he cannot stomach and that he shuts down, fires or forces out. It is quite a list: Bernard Shapiro, the Ethics Commissioner; Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Chief Electoral Officer; John Reid, Information Commissioner; Yves Côté, ombudsman, National Defence; Art Carty, national science advisor; Linda Keen, president of the Nuclear Safety Commission; Adrian Measner, president of the Wheat Board; Johanne Gélinas, Environment Commissioner; Yves Le Bouthillier, president of the Law Commission; and even Mark Warner and Brent Barr, former Conservative candidates who did not tow the line and were forced out.
It is not just people. The first enemy on the Prime Minister's hit list was the truth. Not only does the Prime Minister get rid of any public servant who does not tow the Conservative Party line, he does whatever will benefit him politically, instead of acting in the best interests of Canadians.
He offered “financial incentives” to Chuck Cadman, his words. He orders parliamentary committees to be filibustered so they become non-functional. He refuses to admit that he made an error when he said that the recent affair of the former minister of foreign affairs was a private matter. He released paranoid attack ads on the Leader of the Opposition's yet to be released carbon shift plan.
That caught the attention of a number of people last week, not the least of whom was Dan Gardner who wrote in the paper, I think yesterday, about that. He says, among his other comments, “In pseudo-populism, every politician but the pseudo-populist ”, and that would be the Prime Minister, “is a liar, every expert a fool, every tax unfair. There are no trade-offs required, no sacrifice demanded”.
He ends this line by saying, “The Prime Minister is Richard Nixon on a bad day”.