Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to speak again on Bill C-22 and the amendments proposed by the other place.
Everyone in Quebec and Canada knows what effect this shameless attempt at privatizing the airport could have had if it had gone through and who would have had their palms greased as we say in Quebec with such a patronage-prone, foul-smelling plan as that to privatize Pearson Airport.
All the potential transactions, all the provisions of the privatization contract per se and all the people involved in this privatization attempt have not been brought to light yet.
Again, not only did we not get right to the bottom of the matter, but Bill C-22 still contains provisions which could be conducive to patronage, that which the people and Quebec and Canada detest most about the politics of older parties.
When you read in this bill that we continue to leave it to the Minister of Transport's absolute discretion to compensate promoters if appropriate, I find that is absolutely absurd. My colleagues have been pointing this out over and over since this bill was introduced and will continue to do so at every stage, unless the government changes course along the way.
I must say that this government's attitude toward Bill C-22 and privatization is worse than anything we have seen under the Conservatives. The Conservatives at least were upfront. They were open about their patronage deeds and about the fact they greased the palms of their friends, while the Liberals have a more underhanded, almost wicked, way of doing things. But they continue to do it after having rent their clothes, in fact a closet-full of made-to-measure shirts, starting with the Minister of Transport.
On November 29, 1993, the Minister of Transport himself openly told the media that he was thinking about holding an inquiry, an exhaustive inquiry into the ins and outs of this attempt to privatize Pearson airport. It was after he realized that it was not just Conservatives involved in promoting this project or in the investments connected with the privatization of Pearson, but that there were also friends of the Liberals, who had made contributions to the Liberal Party of Canada, that the Minister of Transport, probably on the advice of his cabinet colleagues, backed down and offered us instead the report by Mr. Nixon, a very close advisor to, not to say a member of, the Liberal Party of Canada.
From the beginning of the debate on Bill C-22, we spent some time cross-checking contributors to the Liberal Party coffers, even Canadian companies who had made contributions, and the principal players involved in Pearson. And we found the connections very easy to establish. It was obvious that somewhere there were people who had such an amazingly underhanded, nebulous influence that it halted the process of inquiry into the privatization, the attempt at privatization of Pearson airport.
Yesterday, the attitude of the Liberal majority to the bill tabled by my colleague from Richelieu on public funding of parties was proof to me that members of the Liberal Party of Canada are just as steeped in patronage as the Conservatives.
They roundly defeated a bill that would have applied, at the federal level, the old dream that Mr. Lévesque made come true in Quebec, namely financing parties with contributions from individual citizens of Quebec and Canada who require defended after, who require that those they elect defend their interests and not the interests of the very rich friends of the regime, especially of the lobbyists who previously belonged to former Liberal or Conservative governments. Their attitude yesterday tells me a lot about the inflexibility they have shown every time we asked them to set up a real inquiry process that would fully elucidate the attempt to privatize Pearson.
Why do we need to get to the bottom of it? Because, if we were able, with the fragmentary information at our disposal, to perceive the possibility of ethical problems and patronage in this issue, it may mean that there were many more in the past under the Conservative government and under the Liberal government before that as well. But above all, it means that the incongruities and strange happenings involving very powerful lobbies connected to the main federal parties may occur again in the future.
The taxpayers of Quebec and Canada find that quite costly. They must find out what happened in the Pearson affair and especially they must be assured that such incidents will not recur in future, where friends of the party, former ministers, senators, people who worked very closely with the government as senior officials affiliated with the old parties got rich at taxpayers' expense. That is why it is important to clear this
matter up. To find out whether the lobbyists accused of having influence-and we are not the ones who say so; it is in the Nixon report, the Liberal Party's report-the lobbyists accused of having extraordinary influence in this contract, lobbyists like Pat MacAdam, a Conservative lobbyist and friend of Brian Mulroney; lobbyists like Bill Fox, a Conservative lobbyist and college friend of Brian Mulroney.
We have been naming names for a long time now, because they should be ashamed if they have done something wrong, they should be ashamed to continue pressuring the government not to order a public inquiry. As professional lobbyists, they are certainly still worrying about the possibility, perhaps only a slight one because, after all, these people are friends, that there will be a public inquiry that would reveal to Quebecers and Canadians the amazing extent of their influence.
So, I go on because I want to make sure that Harry Near, a Conservative lobbyist and long-time supporter, Don Matthews, a former president of Brian Mulroney's nomination campaign in 1983 and former president of the Conservative Party, Hugh Riopelle, a lobbyist and the strong man in Mulroney's office, and John Llegate, Michael Wilson's personal friend, exert no more untraceable influence. They can lobby in a normal and legitimate manner, but when a Liberal report, the Nixon report, says that they exerted an influence which went beyond the bounds of normal lobbying activities, I think that we should have greater doubts than those timidly expressed in the Nixon report.
This deal did not just involve Conservative lobbyists or people close to the Conservative government. That is probably why the Minister of Transport, who went loudly after the Bloc Quebecois members when they told him the truth, that is probably why the Minister of Transport backed down within the space of a few weeks saying: No, there will be no inquiry, just a short preliminary analysis about the possible financial consequences for the Canadian government if we had privatized Pearson. He realized that friends of the Liberal Party were also involved.
As my colleague, our critic for transport, said earlier, there was Senator Leo Kolber, well-known for his haute cuisine dinner at $1,000 a plate. During the election campaign, Mr. Kolber invited all those who could have, according to the Nixon Report, a somewhat obscure albeit overwhelming influence on the government to come and meet the next Prime Minister at a private dinner at $1,000 a plate.
Among his distinguished guests was Mr. Bronfman, who was directly involved in the privatization of the Pearson Airport. Also involved in this deal were Herb Metcalfe, a lobbyist for Capital Hill, a representative of Claridge Properties and former organizer for the current Prime Minister, as well as Ramsey Withers, a Liberal lobbyist with close ties to the Prime Minister.
I think only one or two of these worthy Liberal supporters would have been enough to persuade the Minister of Transport to have a change of heart, since the minister was already not quite convinced that he needed to go after not only the friends of the government, but also of Canada's financial establishment.
The inconsistencies identified by a review and an in-depth examination of the privatization contract should have drawn anyone's attention. I have seen a lot of sales contracts in my lifetime, but none like this one. I have never seen, for example, a central government agreeing, like the Canadian government did, to insert a clause in the privatisation deal in order to cut the duration of the contract in half so that the promoters could avoid paying the Ontario sales tax which would have come to about $10 million.
In complicity with the Canadian central government, which some people find so praiseworthy, the promoters were able to save $10 million in Ontario taxes. I think that is a first, that never before did a federal government deliberately cause prejudice to provincial finances as this privatization contract did.
We also saw other discrepancies in the calculation of the basic rent. The agreement said that Pearson Development Corporation would normally pay to the government 30.5 per cent of its gross revenue from the previous year, up to a maximum of 125 million dollars in gross revenue, and that it would pay a rent equal to 45.5 per cent of gross revenue in excess of this figure.
But according to the Nixon Report, and remember it was prepared by a friend of the Liberal Party, the gross revenue was deliberately reduced in the contract because unusual deductions were included which lowered the rent required from the developers in the future. Given those deductions and the omission of all extraordinary income received by Pearson Development Corporation, the rent for airport facilities was reduced considerably.
We also noticed a few things that made no sense, some very innovative clauses in the Pearson privatization contract; it said that even though the federal government would no longer be involved in airport activities after the privatization, it-that is the taxpayers from Quebec and Canada-would assume all of Pearson's debts. The government was no longer involved, but it would have to pay the debts; so I was paying, my colleague was paying, Quebecers and Canadians were paying for all the bad debts of the Pearson Airport. However, as taxpayers, we no longer had any say in the airport's activities.
I could mention other flaws; we did so at the second reading. There is, for example, the absence of any serious financial analysis. Why should we privatize just about the only profitable airport in Canada without requiring some serious financial analysis? In the case of simple one million dollar deals, for the purchase of companies for example, financial analyses and
spin-off analyses are conducted. The absence of any serious analysis in the case of a transaction of such a scope simply makes no sense.
We could also have talked about the lack of a serious and independent analysis on projected revenue. We could have talked about the lack of analysis of the investors' situation. Those investors' were not very solvent, but with the overall benefits that the federal government was giving them, they were sure to be able to spend the rest of their lives in lavishness.
This attempt to privatize the Pearson airport is highly outrageous. No wonder that Canadian government finances are in such a mess. Why is it that the federal accrued debt will be around $550 billion this year? Why is it that we have so much trouble reducing the deficit below $40 billion annually? Why is it that we cannot control our government finances any more and that we are expecting another warning from the International Monetary Fund in the near future?
If there have been other transactions as dubious, as obscure, as appalling as this one, because it serves the friends of the Liberal Party, of the Conservative Party, in fact, the old Canadian parties, I understand why things are going badly in Canada. I understand why government coffers are being drained at an alarming rate and why the Minister of Finance is forced to take unpopular actions that affect the most powerless among Quebecers and Canadians, in order to serve the friends of the party, in the light of the millions of dollars that were in there, that were concealed there. Since there is no political will to get right to the bottom of that deal in order to avoid others in the future, I understand why Liberals tend to be more drastic than Tories used to be.
Ever since the Minister of Transport introduced Bill C-22, the Bloc Quebecois has been criticizing the fact that no public inquiry, no serious analysis has been made by a royal commission of inquiry.
Every time I look at all the benefits that deal had to offer, I keep asking myself: "Will it be better with the bill?" I think perhaps it could not be better, from a certain standpoint, because the Minister of Transport will still be able to bribe some friends of the Liberal Party of Canada, he will still be able to use his discretion to give his friends tens of millions of dollars, if he so desires, to make up for a potential loss without an analysis being made or a royal commission being established to get right to the bottom of the deal.
I am looking at that in comparision with the decisions the Minister of Finance made when he tabled is last budget on February 22 and reduced the unemployment benefits and the credits for senior citizens. Over the last few days, the Minister of Finance seems to be suggesting that the registered retirement savings plans could also be taxed, but family trusts are still being maintained.
Officials were told not to give any information to members of Parliament about the hundreds of millions that could be concealed there. This is precisely serving the interests of those same friends of the Liberal Party of Canada, or maybe the very rich friends of the Conservatives. It is also serving the 2,000 Canadian millionaires who did not pay a dime in income tax last year.
When I compare that to other decisions of the government, such as the possibility that the Minister of Transport compensate once more friends of the ruling party, I say it is a disgrace. The Liberals should be ashamed of themselves, the Minister of Finance first of all, as well as the Minister of Transport, his accomplice.
As for the Senate amendment, like my friend said, in my view the Senate has no value. It is not a legitimate and democratic authority. Therefore we dismiss everything that comes out of the Senate, good or bad.
