Mr. Speaker, I rise once again in the House, which has to take time from doing its business in order to do what is best for Canadians, to ask the government to respect Parliament and to table the uncensored documents that Parliament requested. We are doing this once again.
This is not new. The same request was previously made of the government with regard to national security and Afghan detainees. The request went to the Speaker and he ruled. I will read the Speaker's ruling because the government heard what he said at that time and it continues to keep blocking access to information. The Speaker stated:
Before us are issues that question the very foundations upon which our parliamentary system is built. In a system of responsible government, the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the government to account for its actions is an indisputable privilege and in fact an obligation.
The Conservative government is walking away from accountability and its obligation to Parliament.
The Speaker went on to say:
Embedded in our Constitution, parliamentary law and even in our Standing Orders, it is the source of our parliamentary system for which other processes and principles necessarily flow, and it is why that right is manifested in numerous procedures of the House, from the daily question period to the detailed examination by committees of estimates, to reviews of the accounts of Canada, to debate, amendments, and votes on legislation.
In other words, how can a government bring forward legislation, ask Parliament to vote on it and then refuse to give Parliament the necessary information it needs, as my colleague just said, to make a reasonable decision on whether it is good for the people of Canada, good fiscal decision making or any such thing when we do not have the information we need to make a decision? Informed decision is what Parliament is about and when we do not have information, we cannot do anything. This is part of the control.
We know the Prime Minister controls his ministers entirely. They are not allowed to do or say anything that he does not allow them to do or say. They even go against the advice of their own departmental officials who have been there for so long and understand the issues advise ministers, the Prime Minister controls the ministers and they say yes or no regardless of departmental advice.
The departments, as we heard, cannot even give information to committees because they are told not to. There are bureaucrats and officials running around in fear of the Prime Minister's wrath. There are NGOs running around in fear of the Prime Minister's wrath.
It is not enough for the Prime Minister to control his ministers, officials, NGOs and civil society. He must now control Parliament. In other words, the Prime Minister seeks to control every single one of the institutions of democracy in this country. There is a word for when a prime minister or leader tries to control the institutions of democracy. Once again, we have the problem of having to come to the House to ask for the government to give us documents so we can make good decisions for Canadians.
It is not only for Parliament to make decisions. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, who helps advise Parliament on what the costs are going to be and whether there are risks involved and benefits to those particular proposals by government, stated: “There is genuine concern that Parliament is losing control of its fiduciary responsibilities of approving financial authorities of public monies as afforded in the Constitution.”
In other words, MPs in Parliament, elected by the people, cannot begin to show fiduciary responsibility because we do not have control over any of the information required to allow us to do so.
He went on to say: “In the recent past, Parliament was asked to approve changes to crime legislation without financial information or knowledge of monies set aside in the fiscal framework”.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer cannot do his work to assist Parliament in making the decisions because he does not have any of the information required. He said: “...in 2006 prior to parliamentary approval of financial authorities as did the previous government in 2005 on its expenditure review exercise. This raises the question as to why the application of Cabinet confidence with respect to restraint measures appears to have changed in such a short period of time”.
I guess it was because an informed Parliament did not necessarily walk in lockstep with the government, and an informed Parliament could say that it does not think it is a good idea. In order to have control over all of us in the House, we do not get the information anymore.
This excuse, whether it is, as in the case of the Afghan detainees, of national security or now cabinet confidence, is being raised every time to withhold information regarding, and I will again quote the Parliamentary Budget Officer, “regarding the assumptions used to translate the private-sector economic forecasts into Finance Canada's fiscal projections”.
Here we have Parliament being controlled by the Prime Minister. It is wrong for any government to try to control Parliament, which is an institution of democracy and which should make its own decisions. But for a prime minister of a minority government to do it is unheard of. The Prime Minister behaves as if he is a dictator, a despot, a ruler, a monarch or whomever else, tells every single person what to do, and we had better click our heels and do it. If we do not, we have to come in here and spend a whole day asking the government to do what it is supposed to do.
The Conservatives ran on accountability and this has been the most unaccountable government we have ever seen.
What is interesting about this is that we just want to have some very clear information. The government has set its priorities. It is going to buy fighter jets. It is going to build new jails when in spite of every single piece of information we have, every single bit of analysis that has been done with regard to jails and institutionalizing criminals is that it does not work. It does not bring down crime.
Of course the government expects us to just agree with it. We ask how much it will cost and we get different stories. We cannot get the actual information that we are asking for so we can decide, for instance, whether or not that is a priority, whether or not this is what Canadians really need, whether or not this will give us the benefits that the government tries to tell us building new jails will bring.
The second issue is lowering corporate tax rates. We have been told that this is the best thing to do at this time. Timing is everything. The thing about priorities and good fiscal management is that the same thing is not done every time. We look at the situation we are in and then decide whether that is the right thing to do at the time.
Canadians understand priorities. Canadians know that they cannot buy a new car, or a new dress, or a new coat if they do not have the money to fix a leaking roof. People make priorities all the time. Ordinary Canadians are tightening their belts. They are deciding what they are going to buy or not buy. They are deciding what decisions to make within their own household expenditures.
The government does not seem to care about that. It wants to build jails and it wants to buy fighter jets. Now the government wants to lower corporate taxes.
If I have to hear another time, somebody from the government side of the House saying, “Oh, but the Liberals did it”. Yes, Liberals did it. We brought down the corporate taxes from 25% to 19%, but we did so in a time when we had 10 balanced budgets. We had $13 billion in surplus and $3 billion in a contingency fund sitting there for a rainy day. We did not do this in a vacuum. It was not the first thing we did.
We had to deal with the deficit left by another Conservative government of $43 billion. We managed to bring that deficit down in three years to remove it. We managed to bring down the debt. We managed to post 10 balanced budgets. The people who showed fiscal restraint and fiscal accountability and good fiscal management were members of the Liberal government, as we have seen in the past when we did those things and brought the deficit down, brought down the debt and had money with which we could then make decisions about priorities. One of the last decisions we made was bringing down the corporate taxes because we knew was that one of the things we needed was to create jobs.
Too many people are working at part-time jobs and cannot make enough money to keep their families going. They are waiting for their mortgages to come up. They do not know if they are going to lose their homes. They are dipping into their savings. They are living off credit cards. The government is paying very little attention to one of the best initiatives that it could take to create sustainable long-term jobs for the people of Canada.
Everyone has told us, including the finance department, that lowering corporate taxes for the large banks and the large businesses is not the way to go. Most of the jobs in this country, nearly 70% of those jobs, are created by small- and medium-size businesses. Yet the government is raising payroll taxes. Over four years it is going to sock it to Canadians and to small- and medium-size businesses to the tune of about $16 billion.
Does the government think that people are stupid? Does it think that everybody is ignorant? Does it believe that if it keeps its documents hidden nobody will know what is going on? This is the most insulting and disrespectful way not only to treat Parliament but to treat Canadians.