Brian Murphy

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great attention to the hon. member's speech on Bill C-26, which will evoke a lot of discussion. I respect where the member comes from both geographically and philosophically, but I cannot agree with everything she said.

I am open to ongoing debate with respect to issues of harm reduction treatment and prevention, and I agree that not enough has been done by the government in this regard.

I have children in the school system in New Brunswick. RCMP officers are in the schools teaching kids about the D.A.R.E. program, and I endorse that. I endorse the good members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in my community. I realize all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill said, but I believe the RCMP has done a wonderful job in the community of greater Moncton in teaching the D.A.R.E. program. This leads me to my question and my disagreement with her in that regard, but perhaps I can tie it together with a question that leads us to a common front.

The Conservatives talk about a law enforcement agenda. They put out bills that need to be enforced, but they do not back them with the actual trooping of our police forces across this country. They make speeches about hiring 2,500 more police officers across the country. In fact, they have made the same speech for two years in a row. They talk about upping the numbers in the RCMP, which is systemically unable right now to grow its numbers because of age, seniority issues and so on. There is an age issue in the force in Codiac as well as an issue with respect to disability, burnout and overwork, all those sort of things.

Will the member give us her and her party's views on the Minister of Public Safety's complete ignorance in putting aside promises with respect to the deployment of community police officers?

[Criminal Code, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member, who has roots in New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and roots in my community of Moncton, the first officially bilingual city in Canada, some questions with respect to language and the Criminal Code. Perhaps she could also comment on the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday in the Paulin case which underscored the need to respect official languages, the languages used by the actors in the justice play for the accused, and how Justice Bastarache basically took a shot at the current government, the Attorney General and the Prime Minister for not caring enough about the fight for the entrenchment of official languages in our justice system. As we know, that case dealt with the RCMP at roadside in the Woodstock area of New Brunswick.

There is a segue here. How important is it to the member, who is now from Toronto not New Brunswick, and for Canada, the Attorney General, the Prime Minister and the Conservative government to respect the nature of our country in serving the justice system in both official languages?

[Foreign Affairs, April 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, obviously that secretary of state thinks a cocktail party is at the highest level.

Brenda Martin's Conservative MP abandoned her and even said she deserved to be in prison. What is more, the secretary of state attended a cocktail party in Mexico instead of meeting with her.

Has a doctor visited Ms. Martin? Will the Prime Minister take steps today to bring Brenda Martin back to Canada tomorrow?

[Foreign Affairs, April 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, legal experts in Mexico point out, contrary to statements coming from the Mexican Embassy, that the Mexican government could legally send Brenda Martin home at any time, but will not do so unless Canada makes it a major political issue.

When will the Prime Minister show that he actually cares about the fate of Canadian citizens? Make the call, make this a major political issue in Mexico today so Brenda Martin can be free tomorrow.

[Committees of the House, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member quotes from the report. Our position was always that the evidence spoke for itself, as tattered as it was. So many questions were raised by our triaging of the evidence and Dr. Johnston picked up on most of them. Where I would say he has failed, because we probably failed in the way our testimony rolled out and our awkward questions, is on two very important aspects about which the Canadian public will never know.

The first, and I already spoke about in a question, was the settlement of the libel suit for $2.1 million of taxpayer money. Allan Rock said that he would not have settled that case had he known the evidence Mr. Mulroney gave in Montreal was false.

The second aspect is we will never know where the money for Airbus and GCI went. It seems Dr. Johnston has closed that door. It seems the Prime Minister, with the door closed by the adviser who is only relying on our imperfect evidence, will not open that door again because he has something in his craw about his previous defence and glorification of Mr. Mulroney.

I have always said this to my children and other people. The Prime Minister is a good person, but he is very sensitive to criticism and he is very sensitive when he makes mistakes. I am sure in that world over there the Prime Minister never makes mistakes, but he made a mistake in this case. He got too close to Brian Mulroney and he knew it, and he distanced himself after the proverbial started hitting the fan.

The Prime Minister is a very proud man. We should have a proud leader of this country. That is fine, but pride goeth before the fall. In this case the Prime Minister will not open the doors that Dr. Johnston has been forced to close on the libel suit, on tracing Airbus to GCI. He will tie the hands of the future commissioner of inquiry by suggesting that there be confidential interviews, that we do not open doors to subjects about which Canadians want to know.

Ultimately what happened in the 1980s is the Conservative Party of Canada had a party and the party lasted a long time. There were lobster tails, shrimps and scallops all across the country in every PC club 500 reception across Canada. Frank Moores was the chief piper at the party and a good part of that money came from corporate Canada and corporate Europe. Sadly, Mr. Schreiber represents an end, hopefully, of an epic period where foreign money influenced Canadian decisions.

I am not as conspiratorial as my friends in the NDP who see a conspiracy under every coaster on every table, but I do think that foreign money and what Mr. Schreiber symbolized in saying was involved in Conservative Party politics in the 1980s. We will never know now.

[Committees of the House, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to take part in the debate on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. I was a member of the committee, but only for meetings on this subject. I participated as a member of Parliament and as a lawyer.

I take a little exception to several authors, including William Kaplan, who is a lawyer, suggesting that none of the committee members could question their way out of a wet paper bag. As a lawyer for some 22 years, I at first took exception to that and then cooled off and realized that he was probably right.

It is because of the systemic nature of our committees where people only get five to seven minutes to ask questions and have them answered. Everybody in the legal profession knows that once a person gets a thread of questioning, it would be very nice to be able to finish. As our partisan setup goes around the table, we sometimes lose the thread of the questioning.

The only people at the hearings who had any constant thread of questioning, and this may start out sounding like a compliment, were the Conservative members who asked very simple questions like, “Was the Prime Minister at any of the meetings with Mr. Schreiber? Was the Conservative Party of Canada, formed in 2003, involved in any wrongdoing?” They had a very well prepared list denying any allegations that would touch them. It was very much self-preservation.

They were almost ready to throw out their hero from three months before, Mr. Mulroney, the most green prime minister of the century who they adored a couple of months before. They were almost ready to jettison him, except that as they saw the committee working they realized that maybe Mulroney had his ninth life and it was coming to bear in this very truncated way of questioning people.

Notwithstanding Mr. Kaplan's comments about the method of questioning and before I get into Mr. Johnston's terms of reference and the outcome of his final report, there were three nuggets that my friend from West Nova did not touch upon, so as to not overlap, that did come out of simple questioning from the members representing all parts of Canada.

The three nuggets are quite spectacular. They came out on the public record and were seen by tens of thousands of Canadians. The first is the Bear Head project. Norman Spector, a very credible witness, an esteemed Canadian and a very articulate journalist, gave testimony that as the chief of staff for the right hon. Brian Mulroney he was privy to a conversation where, in exchange for a view given of the viability of the Bear Head project in 1990, the prime minister returned the decision to his chief of staff to kill the project.

Bear Head was dead in 1990. There were to be no more entreaties, no more meetings and no more lobbying by the Conservative government in 1990 onward. Mr. Spector was not challenged on his testimony with respect to that, and that came out as a result of questioning from simple committee members.

What is curious about that, and it is one of the grounds that Dr. Johnston thought was worth pursuing in the public interest, is that as the inquiry goes forward we will understand clearly that Mr. Doucet, having received his commission through the Thyssen-Bear Head-Britain account of money, met with Mr. Schreiber, through the agency of Mr. Doucet and the tacit approval of Mr. Mulroney who was then the prime minister.

During the year 1991, on numerous occasions Mr. Schreiber was escorted into meetings involving ministers, deputy ministers and even the prime minister of Canada after the prime minister of Canada had legitimately said, in a Privy Council sense, that the project was dead. That stinks and the inquiry will get to the bottom of that questioning.

The second aspect that came up during the hearings were the questions, simply asked, “Mr. Mulroney, if you received money, why did you take five years to declare it? And when you declared it, more importantly, did you file a special exemption form or request permission of Her Majesty, through the Receiver General, for permission to do a late filing of money received earlier?”

He said, “The only thing left that is sacred in Canada is the secrecy of our tax returns”. That is in Dr. Johnston's report. Dr. Johnston is not satisfied with that and I will bet that the Minister of National Revenue is not satisfied with that. Mr. Mulroney further stated that a voluntary late disclosure of income form was not required.

It would be very interesting to see during the course of this inquiry whether that opinion holds up. My view from looking at all the evidence as an amateur in this realm, admittedly Mr. Kaplan, as an amateur but as a person who feels that the public has a right to know, and many of the people in my constituency feel the same way, is that Mr. Mulroney received money from Mr. Schreiber as a reward for Mr. Schreiber having had access to the Government of Canada during the time Mr. Mulroney was in office.

It was further in aid of the Bear Head project in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Let us not kid ourselves; I am a proud maritimer, and a project the size and economic impact of Bear Head would be a feather in any politician's cap. It would mean jobs. It would mean a viable product. It would be good for Canada and the economy.

No one is saying that the Airbus planes we fly on frequently are bad planes and that Air Canada is not better served by the planes. That is not the issue. The issue is how did Bear Head advance as a project once it was killed and why was money paid to the prime minister of Canada for that advancement? The inquiry will get to the bottom of that.

With respect to tax treatment, clearly, when the proverbial was about to hit the fan, Mr. Mulroney was alarmed. He met with Mr. Schreiber in 1998 to figure out what was going to be disclosed and when, and decided he had better do something, so in his 1999 tax return he reported the $225,000 to $300,000. I am sure average Canadians would wonder whether they should late file five years later for the extra three installments of $75,000 they got in a brown paper bag somewhere. I am sure it is a very common problem for the average Canadian. Of course, I am being sarcastic, Mr. Speaker. It is not a common problem, unless a person received money and thought no one would know about it and finally five years later the person then began to think someone would find out about it and the person had better file.

The final aspect that came out through the evidence and questioning was that there is no more of an admirable defender of a person, if one hired him, than Luc Lavoie. One could not think of a stronger knight to go to the wall on one's behalf and in one's interest if one hired him.

Yet, having spent $2.1 million on his legal and PR team which included Mr. Lavoie, Mr. Mulroney through all of the interviews in preparing for a defence on the lawsuit and the discovery, did not tell Mr. Lavoie once about the amount of money he received from Mr. Schreiber.

I find that absolutely incredible. It means that Mr. Mulroney did not even trust his most trusted knight in shining armour, his most trusted, valuable, and very worthwhile in the marketplace by the way, defender of interests, Luc Lavoie. He of the deep voice, deep heart and the courageous defender of people, did not tell Luc Lavoie what the amount was, until the proverbial really hit the fan and Luc Lavoie, as we say in the House, was freelancing with the figure of $300,000 because he heard it out there.

I started to question Mr. Lavoie, saying that did not sound very professional and that is when the seven minutes were up. We would have really had a melee that day and I am sure I would have been on the short end of the stick with a man like Luc Lavoie.

Finally, with respect to Dr. Johnston, he was hemmed in by the ineptitude of our committee. I hope that the Prime Minister can follow the words of his own people on the committee, that yes, the questioning was inept. There are so many other questions that need to be answered. We need a wide public broad inquiry.

The Prime Minister should not have his hands tied by having confidential interviews. Those might suffice in cases like Air-India and cases where the public security interests might overwhelm, where private security interests might be of relevance, but this is not a case where either is at play. I encourage the Prime Minister to have as wide open inquiry as he promised once during a campaign. On the very Air-India question, he promised a wide open inquiry on a subject which involved public security interests and private interests under the PIPEDA. Yet, in this case which touches merely politics, frankly, only politics, he--

[Committees of the House, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the member's speech because he is always to the point and colourful. However, he missed the point of what Norman Spector said to us and what bearing it had on Bear Head and the prime minister's extremely unethical behaviour in allowing himself to meet with officials representing Bear Head after he knew the project was closed.

What does he think about that?

[Committees of the House, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard my friends, the member for Peterborough and the other members on that committee, say that there were no findings of wrongdoing. The Canadian public may take from that comment that the Conservative government feels there was no wrongdoing and there are no questions that remain unanswered.

It was Dr. Johnston, in his report, which the member I guess agrees with, who says there are many questions that remain unanswered. What payments were made? When and how and why? The uncertainty surrounding the question remains. The tax treatment by Mr. Mulroney, who declared it five years later, remains. There is much public concern about the connection with respect to the services rendered and the meetings in various hotel rooms across the world. Questions remain. There is a public concern.

When will the member and his colleagues get out of the darkness of denial that was the culture of that committee and face the truth?

[Committees of the House, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the member’s speech and her work on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

I have one brief question regarding Mr. Mulroney’s lawsuit against the Government of Canada, which was settled using the information that the government had at that time. The information is clear: Mr. Mulroney denied his alleged connections with Mr. Schreiber.

We now know that in the testimony at the preliminary inquiry in Montreal, Mr. Mulroney did not tell the whole truth in answer to the questions put to him by the government’s lawyers. He denied that there was a connection and there had been meetings with Mr. Schreiber. We know that was false. And yet it was the basis of the settlement. Mr. Rock’s testimony was clear: that if he had had knowledge of those facts, there would not have been a $2.1 million settlement. That is money that came from Canadians.

Very simply, I would like to know whether the member agrees with Mr. Johnston’s report, which very clearly concludes that it is not in the public interest to have an inquiry into the settlement of Mr. Mulroney’s lawsuit. In my view, and the view of this side of the House, it is appalling that there will be no testimony in that regard. I would ask the member for her opinion and the opinion of the Bloc on that question.

[Michel Bastarache, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we learned yesterday that Michel Bastarache, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, has decided to take a well-deserved retirement after a long and prolific career.

In 1994, while a professor of law at the Université de Moncton, Mr. Bastarache was appointed to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal. In 1997, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he is well known for his hard work and productive contribution.

An expert in administrative law, labour law and constitutional law, he is especially well known for his defence of linguistic minority rights. Justice Bastarache drafted the Beaulac decision, for instance, which confirmed the right to a trial before a judge or jury in the official language of one's choice

With his retirement, Canada is losing an excellent judge and ardent defender of linguistic minorities. We wish Michel Bastarache a wonderful retirement in Acadie.