Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the Minister of Health.
I think all members of the House are here for honourable reasons. We come here to try to improve the public good, and I think Canadians generally do not appreciate the long hours and the dedication to the public interest that members of Parliament on all sides of the House bring to this difficult task.
We have heard aspersions cast upon the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister of this country, our Prime Minister, is involved in perhaps the most courageous act of political leadership in a generation as he goes before the Canadian people to say openly and honestly, “I want to hear your concerns. I share your anger. We are going to get to the bottom of this and we will do it in a very disciplined way that gets to the truth”.
It is not going to be just wild accusations. It is going to be in disciplined processes before the public accounts committee, before the public inquiry, and through RCMP investigations that are underway. If and where evidence indicates, we would hope that more will be initiated.
Let us go back, because it keeps arising, to the question about when the Prime Minister or other ministers in the government knew about the scandal. And of course that is what it is. I can tell members that the constituents in Vancouver Quadra are angry, as we all are, and want to get to the bottom of it.
This first came to public attention and to government attention in terms of ministers in 2000, with an audit that was started internally in the Department of Public Works and Government Services. That was, by letter of the minister of the day, given to Treasury Board in early 2001. In the fall of 2000, it was on the public works website, including with the audit an action plan to fix some of the managerial and administrative problems that were found.
Let us go forward a year and a half to June 2002, when the public accounts committee, chaired by a member of the opposition in the House, held hearings into the sponsorship scandal, as it was then known. Let us remember that in May 2000 it came forward in the Auditor General's report on Groupaction that there were severe problems with this issue.
The two deputy ministers, one up until 2000 and one after that, gave evidence before the public accounts committee that in their review of both the audit and the action plan there was no breach of statutes, no illegality. What there were, were administrative and managerial problems. There was no breaking of the Financial Administration Act, but there was a breaking of Treasury Board guidelines for contracting.
What they said as well, both of them, before the House committee, was that they as deputy ministers over a four year period had had no political influence on them. That may not turn out to be the truth, but that is what they said and that is the knowledge we had.
Because of the referral from the new Minister of Public Works in March 2002, the Auditor General was invited to look at Groupaction. She reported in May that she found illegality and she referred three cases around Groupaction to the RCMP.
We froze the program. Four million dollars of payments to those companies were frozen; it was anything that was outstanding. The new Minister of Public Works of the day, now the Minister of Finance, revised that program completely and referred 10 more cases to the RCMP in fall 2002.
So to suggest that ministers knew about it and did not act is simply not true. We knew about certain things, the people in government at the time, and we acted on them. When more information came out, the people in government acted further.
Let me just go ahead to December 13, 2003, the day after the current government was sworn in. The Prime Minister cancelled the sponsorship program, even as it had been improved, because of the horrible reputation it had because of the misdeeds that had occurred. He said he would get to the bottom of it.
Then came the Auditor General's report. Showing respect to her and the House, we waited until the Auditor General tabled the report in the House, because of course all hon. members know we cannot refer directly to a report of a parliamentary officer until it is tabled. Otherwise we would be disrespectful and in contempt of Parliament.
Within minutes of that report being tabled, the Prime Minister described and put into action the widest, most comprehensive list of processes to deal with what actually happened in this program: to root out those who are responsible, to chase money, and to have criminal sanctions where appropriate.
He called a public inquiry. We will hear probably tomorrow the exact terms of reference of this wide-ranging, judicial independent public inquiry.
There is the public accounts committee. Last week, the Prime Minister asked in the House that the public accounts committee sit that very afternoon, February 10. It did, and it continues, and people are coming forward. That is what should happen.
The Prime Minister has said he will appear before the public inquiry and the public accounts committee to say exactly what he knew when. To suggest, as it has been suggested, that somehow last week the Prime Minister tried to blame this all on 14 public servants is frankly simply not what happened.
The Prime Minister rose in the House in answer to a question to repeat what the Auditor General had said in public that very morning. The point was that there were 14 public servants, as distinguished from 14,000 public servants in my department, that had been involved on the administrative side of this program. It was not said to in any way excuse or suggest that ministers, that people involved in the political side of government were not involved, and, frankly, quite the opposite. The Prime Minister was inviting everyone who knew anything about this scandal, because that is what it is, to come forward to these processes.
We have now appointed a special counsel for financial recovery. That will be a rigorous pursuit, a further rigorous pursuit, because we have about $3.5 million now seized. It is a pursuit of public funds that have been misappropriated and the criminal investigations continue.
Let me tell you, Madam Speaker, and let me say on behalf of the government what we have heard the Prime Minister say from one end of this country to the other. We will get to the bottom of it. We will find the facts. We will determine who is responsible. We will chase the public money that was misappropriated. We will ensure that it will never happen again.
In conclusion, let me mention some of the tools beyond the inquiry, the public accounts committee, the special counsel and the RCMP legislation. As of January 1 of this year we have, to my mind, the strictest political financing rules in the democratic world to ensure that corporations and unions cannot influence or even give the slightest appearance of influencing public decisions.
We have an independent ethics commissioner being appointed through legislation which is now before the House. We have whistleblower legislation that will be introduced in the House before the end of March. We are reviewing the Financial Administration Act to extend its reach to post-employment politicians, as well as public servants, so that if they are responsible for misdeeds when in office they can be chased after their employment, and also to strengthen the Financial Administration Act to bring the crown corporations properly under the control of the Treasury Board and ensure that their governance and audit committees are strengthened.
This is an extraordinary range of processes and legislative actions. This is why I am in the House and this is why I have been in public life for some time: to ensure that where breach of the public trust occurs we get to the bottom of it, that people are held accountable and that we learn from the experience to put in further rules to protect against it in the future.
