Mr. Speaker, what a pleasure it is to speak to Bill C-53.
My, my, my, what a surprise. I thought we were through with all of this patronage with the new government and we are right back to where we started from, all the things we believed in year after year in the country and we are back to where we started.
Lots of times we are asked what the difference is between Liberal patronage and Conservative patronage. The answer is there really is not any difference other than the Liberals have more of it.
Here we are already a little over a year into their term as government and let us have a look at what kind of patronage we are talking about. There are three Liberal Party hacks given jobs to age 75 with the Senate. It is who you know and who you support with this same old traditional party. That is what it is all about, is it not?
One of the recent occurrences I had in my riding was chasing a fellow by the name of José Salinas Mendoza who skipped out due to the incompetence of the immigration department. One of the interesting patronage appointments there which is so indicative of the government is a fellow who was working on the Liberal campaign in 1993 who just happened to donate some money to the party, who just happened to be appointed to the refugee board, who just happened to be a lawyer for José Salinas Mendoza.
How does the government figure all this out? How does it get so convoluted and so entwined in its own party politics, in its own rhetoric, that it keeps appointing people to these kinds of things?
Let us look at our latest boondoggle by the minister of heritage. We have actually caught him in the act of a minister supporting an application for an individual in his riding. How blatant can one get? The reason this is blatant is that these appointments are going on without the community out there, without the people of Canada getting a grasp on exactly what is happening with these political parties; without the people of Canada complaining about these three Liberal Party hacks in the Senate, without the people of Canada complaining about refugee board appointments, about parole board appointments, about immigration adjudicator appointments. We cannot stop this.
Today we are going to ask if we can probably put an end to it by showing the government that the minister should step down. If he could step down maybe the Prime Minister might be looked upon by the bulk of the Canadian people as being forceful, as being a leader of integrity, one who believes in the importance of receiving and approving applications and appointing people to government positions on the basis of merit, on the basis of their qualifications, and not on the basis of whom you know and to whom you donate money.
I have a long list of failed Liberal candidates who donated to this party over here and it looks like a who's who on the list of patronage. I guess that is just how to do it. That is the reward, that is the pie in the sky if you support this party. Maybe you will get the plum, the biggest plum of the Senate, and then you get all these other paid plums down from the Liberal Party. They are all there.
One of the Liberal members wants me to read the list. I have not the time to read the list, it is too long. I only have 10 minutes.
Heritage is something we want to preserve. In the year 2010 and the year 2020 one would presume that we would want to preserve the heritage of 1994. I have to ask: Are we proud enough of what is going on in the country today with the government to preserve it?
I think as we go along with the government we are going to find that when the Reform Party government is in we will not need that department of heritage down the road in the year 2020 because we will not be very proud of what the government is doing today.
The real heritage in the country is where our people come from, what we are preserving of our language and our culture, our parks, all of that kind of heritage. I am not very proud of what is going on with the government today.
I just want to look at a bit of heritage and talk about some of the taxpayer dollars that have been going into the pet projects of governments like this one, from departments of the minister of cultural heritage.
Let us look at some of the simple little dollars that were spent and what they were spent on. A couple of hundred thousand dollars to study religious and historical practice among northern Malagasy speakers is important to the Canadian taxpayer, is it not? That is the kind of money these people spend. Those are taxpayer dollars being spent on their pet peeves. It does not make any sense at all.
Twenty-one thousand dollars was spent on experimental studies of interactive gestures. We can imagine what kind of interactive gestures we have for the government. It should study a few of those.
Let us find the bureaucrats who want to spend $58,000 from the department on an experiment of what it is like to work for the Dominion grocery stores. There is an important issue on which to spend taxpayer dollars. What do you have to do to pay $58,000? In the country today you probably have to earn $120,000 minimum. For anyone out there who made $120,000, or any family out there that made a combination of that, the grant that was spent on what it is like to work for the Dominion grocery stores is one whole year of that family's total income tax.
Whoever authorizes such grants as this should be fired. There is no question in my mind. If that were my organization and I found that kind of waste they would be gone. They would be history.
