Lost his last election, in 2000, with 28% of the vote.
Employment October 10th, 1997
Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Despite of all the cheer leading we heard this morning, Canadians woke up to the cruel reality that unemployment is stuck at 9%, a level which it has been at or worse for the past 84 consecutive months. To top it off, the Minister of Finance says that he will have to increase interest rates and kill off more jobs.
Does the minister want to be remembered as the Minister of Finance or as the notorious killer of Canadian jobs?
Supply October 9th, 1997
We will leave it at that.
I will draw the debate to a close by simply saying that we can stand here for hours on end and point out all the horror shows attached to financial support for political parties, whether they are kickbacks, tollgating, bribing or whatever. We all know it takes place. No honest member of Parliament will stand and say that this does not occur in our country.
For goodness' sakes, why not open it up to a major public inquiry? Let us do the right thing. We hope to bring credibility to this institution. We hope to bring credibility to government and to our parliamentary system. We have to make some changes. We cannot simply turn a blind eye and pretend that—
Supply October 9th, 1997
This is Friends in High Places here. It is not the book I was referring to. I was referring to Stevie Cameron's book, On the Take . I will send it over to my hon. friend if she has not read.
Supply October 9th, 1997
Let us go on.
Supply October 9th, 1997
My hon. friend raises the interesting question on how much organized labour contributed to the New Democratic Party. It is a fair question.
Let us agree first that before any union makes a contribution to a political party, regardless of whatever the political party might be, the decision is made by officers elected by the membership. How many bank presidents contact their bank shareholders before they make a contribution to the Liberal Party of Canada? Not many. Therein lies a pretty fundamental difference in terms of who is contributing.
I could refer to my friends in the Conservative Party, but they only obtained 46% of their financing from business. Reform is quite far back in the pack at 12% and 3% of New Democratic Party federal contributions for 1996 came from small businesses across the country. The numbers are 55% for the Liberals, 46% for the Conservatives, 12% for the Reform and 3% for the New Democrats.
It is important to know who pays for the Liberal Party's operations. I mentioned the banks and financial institutions. Every one, from what I can gather from the list, contributes significantly to the tens and tens of thousands of dollars annually. Bell Canada of course.
Third on the list is Bombardier. Remember the big contract Bombardier got and gets repeatedly and repeatedly. When we look at the top echelons of Bombardier and the lobbyists who work on their behalf, they are all well connected to the Liberal Party. They coughed up $85 million. BrasCan is in there. BrasCan is always in there supporting the Liberals. Canada Trust is in there. The CBA, the Canadian Bankers Association, makes a healthy contribution. The CNR, CPR and all major accounting firms.
Then we have Glaxo Wellcome and Merck Frosst, two of the large multinational pharmaceuticals. These are the ones that are well connected. They have as their top lobbyist a former member of Parliament and cabinet minister, Judy Erola. She does a wonderful job. From what I can gather, looking at the legislation that governs pharmaceuticals, they write the legislation. Perhaps the minister puts the final signature on it and maybe crosses the odd t or dots the odd i , but basically the legislation is written by the pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Is that the kind of country that Canada wants to be? Is that the kind of country that Canada has become? Unfortunately yes. That is why this nonsense has to change. We need a full investigation into how political parties are funded.
I will not stand here and say the funding of the New Democratic Party is perfect or anything else, but let us open up the system.
My hon. friend did an excellent job in saying that our system is better than the American system. That is praising with very pink praise. That is the most bizarre system where everybody just buys influence in the United States. We are far removed from that, but when we read the headlines and listen to the accusations and comments from across the aisle, it appears that people are buying influence from the Liberal Party. We know they bought influence from the Tories.
A number of Tory cabinet ministers ended up in court, some on their way to jail and some backbenchers who made their living on kickbacks and saying “Listen, give the local association a political donation, give the party a political donation, and we will ensure that you get government contracts”. It went on and on and on.
I will go as far as to say that every significant major contract offered by the government and the Parliament of Canada under the Mulroney era probably involved kickbacks of one kind or another. I could list all sorts of examples that I am aware of personally, but I do not have the facts. I just heard people tell me that if they did not pay the kickback they were laid off, lost their jobs, lost the contract and so on.
I am making those accusations on the floor of the House of Commons. I hope to hear some people say that is not right. Stevie Cameron made them in her book, 600 pages of accusations, and not a single Tory has taken her up on her challenges.
Supply October 9th, 1997
I thank the member for that.
I have a list here that goes back to 1996. This was not an election year. I can imagine when we get the figures for 1997 that they will be hot stuff. Who contributed to the Liberal Party of Canada in 1996? There was the National Bank, CIBC, Wood Gundy and the Royal Bank of Canada. We are not talking about thousands of dollars or tens of thousands. We are talking about many, many tens of thousands of dollars of political contributions.
I could go on. The Toronto-Dominion Bank coughed up $66,000. I have a list of all bank and financial institutions that contributed to the Liberal Party. The total comes to almost half a million dollars for last year. Does it not seem that they have some access that other firms do not have because of that pay-off? Of course they do.
Supply October 9th, 1997
I look forward to the day when the government hires the CAW for anything. The government is against working people. It has demonstrated time and time again that it is against working men and women. To suggest that it would consider even talking to a senior union is inappropriate.
This void has been filled with paid lobbyists. Their priority and motivation is not the people of Canada. It is the clients who are paying for them. They are the people who are advising the government. I hate to say it but it is true. They were advising the previous government and look what we got.
Of course we got NAFTA. All my Liberal friends across the way were saying this was bad for Canada. Then they switched across the aisle and now they are saying this is good for Canada. It is so good that they are going to introduce a NAFTA in steroids called the MAI.
Who is behind the MAI? The Canadian Manufacturers' Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council on National Issues, and the list goes on.
Supply October 9th, 1997
Mr. Speaker, you were absolutely correct. I was going to start quoting from On the Take and Friends in High Places , but I was so disgusted by reading them that I did not want to bring the debate down any lower than it is at the moment. Therefore I will not quote from those books.
This is not a prop. It is just facts that I had in my hand. I want to identify what I believe is a very dangerous trend which has developed in Canadian national politics and government during the last 15 years.
When the Mulroney government was elected it started to phase out some senior professional bureaucrats. These people had dedicated their entire lives to developing good public policy for Canada and Canadians. One of the reasons we had such good public policy over the years was because of the professional dedication of these men and women. They were professional and they worked long hours. They were motivated by one thing only and that was to do a good job for the people of Canada and for the government of the day.
I am afraid to say that most of those people are gone. They have been let go, laid off or were so demoralized they quit. They just could not take the lack of leadership and the sell-out to the private sector that has occurred over the last 15 years.
There are still some very good people around, but by and large the best have left and most of them have left because they were forced out of the system.
That created a huge vacuum at the senior levels of the bureaucracy in terms of public policy creation. Who has filled that vacuum? The paid lobbyists, the people the government hires on contract from the banks to develop amendments to the Bank Act or lobbyists from pharmaceutical corporations to change laws regarding the pharmaceutical sector and so on.
Supply October 9th, 1997
My friend says no. Should we be surprised?
I have the 1996 results of political contributions. Guess what political party got a lot more money from business than any other political party in Canada? Yes, it was the Liberal Party which got $7.8 million in business cash. What does that mean?
If we believe that people who spent nearly $8 million to fund a political campaign will not have any leverage in terms of policy making, we must believe pink elephants are floating around here as well.
Let us acknowledge a certain trend which has developed over the last number of years. I trace it back again to the beginning of the Mulroney government. A decision was made to start phasing out very professional people at senior levels.
Supply October 9th, 1997
My friend can laugh and say “Isn't this funny”. I am not saying it is only the Liberals. I can talk about the long list of Tories that are in jail in Saskatchewan for all kinds of misdeeds.
Let's face it, to a certain extent there are problems across the political spectrum. Today we are talking about Liberal kickbacks, Liberal tollgating and Liberal fundraisers going to people and saying “If you contribute to the Liberal Party of Canada prior to this election I will ensure that you get a government contract”.
This is not new. It has been going on probably since the first election in this country. That is one of the reasons why people are so cynical about national and provincial politics. They know that certain people have undue influence and they obtain that undue influence by, if you like, bribing political parties or politicians.
There have been a number of books written. I remember Stevie Cameron's book On The Take . By the time you finished reading the book you were disgusted with that government.
They were not people who just made a few thousand dollars on a kickback. They were making millions of dollars. There were pages and pages of accusations against backbenchers and cabinet ministers and not a single person has taken Stevie Cameron to court. All the accusations were there.
Then there was Claire Hoy who wrote Friends in High Places . It was on the same theme, that if you knew the right people in the Mulroney government you could make lots of money. A lot of the wealth of today's millionaires in Canada, the people who are on their yachts in the harbours or driving Jaguars, can be traced back to well connected friends in the Mulroney government.
Have things changed with the Liberal government?