Mr. Speaker, it is again my honour to stand in the House to speak to a very good motion. The motion before us is an interesting one. It puts the government of the day into the dilemma of either voting for the motion which makes good sense, or voting against it which means that it wants to continue its policy of cover-up and not dealing honestly and openly with all of the facts on many financial issues that have come forward from time to time.
One of the best ways of providing accountability in government is to have openness. When some access to information requests that I put in were returned to me, we were dismayed that there was so much whiteout. In fact there were pages and pages of blank paper. The code on the blank paper was that it was personal and therefore could not be disclosed.
My contention was then, is now and shall continue to be that the instant it is public money, it should become public information. In other words when I as a member of parliament spend my office budget, I believe that office budget should be accessible to the public. The people of my riding should know how their member of parliament managed the money that was entrusted to him for managing his office.
The minister of a department must account properly not only for his or her own expenditures with respect to the manner in which the minister handles the ministry but also the expenditures within the ministry.
Mr. Speaker, I just noticed that my colleague has arrived so I now want to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Prince Albert. I did not want to advise you until he was physically here because I could easily speak for 20 minutes on this issue.
Many years ago when my wife and I were first married we moved to a little town in Alberta called Duchess. It had a population of some 200 people. It was a really good town and had a lot of fine people. One of my friends from the big city asked how I could stand to live in that little town with everyone knowing what I was doing. I shrugged my shoulders and said “I do not plan on doing anything bad so it does not matter. Let them know what I am doing”.
In that small town I was the whole math department in the high school; I was the department head and the total staff. I did that job for three years in that delightful community. We have many fond memories. We are looking forward to going to a reunion of the class I had way back in the early sixties. It is hard to imagine that those youngsters are now in their forties and fifties. I will be really interested in picking up on that and seeing how they are.
I was accountable. When I walked down the street everybody knew the math teacher was walking from his home to the school. It was such a small town that I lived on the east edge of town and the school was on the outskirts of the west end and it took me five minutes to walk there. It was a wonderful time. It underlined my basic philosophy which I have learned from home which is that one deals openly and honestly with people.
I find it distressing that we have this motion today. First of all, as one of the Liberal members said, it should be redundant. He said it is redundant. I would change the wording simply to say that this motion should be redundant. We should not have to use a day of debate in the House of Commons to debate a motion which says that the government should obey the law.
We do not do that in any other case. We do not say to citizens that today we are going to have a debate and we want people to obey the law about murdering others, or on another day we are going to debate that people should obey the law and not steal from others. We do not revisit old bills, motions and government decisions in this way for other things.
There has been a blatant breach of treasury board guidelines and of decisions which are properly made and should be enforced. Here we are as the official opposition debating whether or not the government should actually obey the law, whether it should obey the rules. My very strong contention is that it should.
Some time ago treasury board put out a directive saying these internal documents which are basically report cards on the operation of the departments should be made public. It should not be necessary to file access to information requests in order to access them.
It is quite ironic that the government will make that decision. It will have a big fanfare when announcing that decision and will say to the people of Canada “Look how wonderful and accountable we are. Here we are offering information”. That is wonderful. It makes a great press release. It makes a great press conference. But what happens when it comes time to release the document? It is not released. The government just does not do it, hence the motion today. Why does the government not insist that the departments follow treasury board guidelines? One of them is being breached.
To make matters worse, when some member of the public, or in our case a member of the official opposition, files an access to information request to get the information that should be public anyway, we are stonewalled. We hit a wall. We know one thing that happens is as soon as such a request goes in, there is a heads up to the minister. We know that. The very first response is “Get the ministerial staff informed. The minister may have to answer questions because the official opposition or some other member of the opposition is raising a question so we had better make sure that we have our spin doctors out”.
It is absolutely ludicrous that the government is much more interested in putting a spin on the facts than simply revealing and dealing with the facts. It is a contradiction of the whole concept of accountability. It basically says that the government wants the people to believe what they hope would be true instead of the government saying it would like the people to know what is true. There is a vast difference in those two concepts. The government often says, “We are so open, look at this directive”. As I said, it looks good on the surface but it would look so much better if it were actually practised.
To paraphrase the HRDC minister, on numerous occasions she has said “We are so wonderful, we released this request for access to information on the HRDC internal audit before it was requested”. To be very blunt, that was not true. We got a copy of a memo that had been doctored. We cannot prove that it was but the suspicions are surely there because the document speaks of the date of reference and says “We received your request on” and I think it was January 23 or January 22, but the date of the memo is January 21. It was the day before. They forgot to change the date on top when they issued the public document.
That, to me, is evidence of a cover-up. What they are saying is “Let us quickly produce a document that proves our case”. Using a word processor they changed one date but forgot to change the date at the top. As a result they were speaking of the next day in the past tense. One has to be psychic to do that or guilty of forging a document. It is part of the cover-up.
The government wants people to believe that it is honest, open and accountable and all that. We want it to be and that is what today's motion is all about.
