Madam Speaker, I rise on behalf of the people of Okanagan—Coquihalla to participate in this debate on the House of Commons standing orders. It is important not only for the members of this House but for the general public as well that we have the tools available to us to be able to act in a democratic fashion in the House of Commons. If it were not for the democratic tools, those rules and the standing orders, we would be at the mercy of a majority government that would impose its will on the people of Canada. That would leave us as members of parliament as nothing more than actors and the House of Commons as a mere stage.
I will devote my time today to a discussion of royal commissions and how they relate to the parliamentary system. Under the current standing orders, royal commissions are not included in the rules of the House. They are separate. We should review that. I hope the standing committee will look at some of the recommendations I bring forward today. In recent history we have witnessed some major commissions that have fallen short of what the public was hoping to see from them.
Commissions should be at arm's length from the government. They may have a fairly immediate impact on legislation that comes before the House. An example would be the Somalia inquiry. Now we have Bill C-25 which is supposed to address the changes in the National Defence Act in relation to the military justice system. However, the Somalia inquiry made it clear to many Canadians that royal commissions do not represent the unbiased and autonomous bodies they were intended to be.
It is with the Somalia commission in mind that I speak in the House today with the intent of establishing a practice where parliament is required to have input into the mandate of royal commissions. It should not just be the executive branch of government, but parliament would participate in the mandates of royal commissions. MPs would be active participants through the committee system in the appointments of the commissioners and they would be active in reviewing the recommendations of royal commissions as well. All such recommendations should be automatically referred to a standing committee. The committee would then be required to consider and report to the House. The House could then consider the report.
I will look at the Somalia inquiry which was established in March 1995. This government established the Somalia inquiry with pressure from opposition parties in the House of Commons. The commission's final report was cut short by the government.
As I mentioned, commissions of inquiry are to be at arm's length from the executive branch but in this particular instance the Government of Canada interfered with the commission and did not allow it to complete its report. That is interference. When a process where there is judicial independence is wanted, like a commission of inquiry, there must be that independence.
The incomplete report presented was comprised of five volumes and had 160 recommendations. The Prime Minister put the cost of the Somalia inquiry at some $30 million which in reality was closer to $13.8 million. I will get to that discrepancy a little later.
The minister of national defence stated that the government had created a commission with the most wide sweeping powers possible in Canadian history. That is a direct quote from the then minister of national defence.
The Somalia commission had the mandate to inquire into and report on the chain of command, leadership, discipline, operations, actions and decisions of the Canadian Armed Forces. It was to look at the predeployment of troops. It was to look at the deployment of troops and it was to look at the post-deployment of troops but it was not able to do that because again we had interference by the executive branch of government.
In other words, what I am saying is that because of the process, because of the interference problem with royal commissions, we have a system where the executive branch can ask commissioners to look at this much information in this much time and with this much money to do it.
The system is set up now by design, by the government, to fail. I think there should be a process where parliamentarians have the ability to look into those problems.
From the beginning, the commission of inquiry into Somalia became a battle between the commissioners and the Department of National Defence over documentation, altered documents, government interference on the inquiry's work, the decision to halt the inquiry before the work was completed and the final recommendations that followed.
This government cut the documents short but yet it took almost a year for the commission of inquiry which did not even have anything to start with, not even a paper clip. It could not get the information required from the Department of National Defence. And then when that issue was raised all of a sudden the material flooded in. Some 600,000 pages were delivered to the commissioners.
I have a quote from one of the commissioners: “These documents arrived in disarray, often without an explanation of their significance or context”. Questions arose about inconsistencies in the documentation. Logs were missing or they included entries that had no information in them. Entries were missing. They had duplicate serial numbers.
Commissioner Desbarats stated: “Because attempts were made to destroy some documents within national defence headquarters we are now embroiled in a detailed inquiry into the whole question of cover-up”.
We never got to the question of cover-up. The commissioners at the start of the inquiry said there was a possibility of a cover-up but by the end of the inquiry, in the middle of their investigation, they said there were no allegations anymore. It was the issue of cover-up. There was a cover-up and this commission was not allowed to continue.
Parliament should have been able to intervene and give the direction and find out from departmental officials what was going on. But at the time I stood in this House as defence critic for the third party in the House of Commons and each and every day the minister of national defence would respond to my questions on Somalia by saying let the commission do its work.
The government would not even let the commission do its work. That is inexcusable and that is why there must be some controls, rules and regulations in place for this House of Commons when it comes to commissions of inquiry.
I would like to touch on costs. I did mention earlier that the Prime Minister put the cost of the Somalia inquiry at some $30 million when explaining why the government wanted the commission to finish its work. This is when it was wrapping it all up, when the commission had not even progressed half way through the mandate.
That $30 million figure was inflated. It was absolutely inflated. We know that. The day that figure came out, the day the Prime Minister made that comment, I contacted by phone the Somalia commissioners who told me the accurate figure was $13.8 million.
It was a PR campaign by this government to tell the Canadian public we have got to stop, we spent too much money. It was a PR tactic. Unfortunately it worked. It should not have happened and it is wrong.
Finally, the minister of national defence acknowledged that 132 of the 160 recommendations of the commission were supported while others were simply put on the shelf because they did not fit into the plans of the department.
This is not even the true picture of exactly what happened because, as I explained, the commissioners of inquiry only had the ability to look at the predeployment phase and a portion of the post-deployment phase, never got to the completion of the deployment phase or the post-deployment phase which would have looked at the issue of cover-up.
