Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, April 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised that I struck a nerve with the Liberals when it comes to the abuse of the taxpayers. This is the party that invented it. My colleague is jumping up and down like an angry man. I am not surprised. I have certainly touched a chord with the Liberals.

The member has the gall to refer to mailings and to Bourassa, when Elections Canada has ruled that we did everything perfectly legally. That is different from what happened with the Liberals. It was a government that was corrupt from the beginning. It is as corrupt now. The Liberals are certainly angry.

When their new leader came in, they were going to do politics differently. All they have done in terms of their politics is continually attack the New Democrats for the fact that we stand up for regions, that we go to the House of Commons and talk with them about what is legal and how to do things right so that we can represent people. At the same time, the new Liberal leader is off selling Keystone XL for the oil lobby. We talk to average Canadians; he talks to oil lobbyists.

I know that the member is angry. He is an angry old man, but that is because his party has been relegated to the wilderness for its contempt of the Canadian people.

[Business of Supply, April 1st, 2014]

We can rehabilitate them, Mr. Speaker. I do not know if we could rehabilitate all of them, but we are willing to try. That just shows the kind of people we have on our side; that we believe that people can be reformed, even the old Reformers, who have certainly given up on their sense of accountability.

We are asking for all-party support on this. We are not saying the Prime Minister cannot fly the Challenger. We are not saying his family cannot fly on it, but people like bagmen and buddies have no business getting free and cheap flights on the taxpayers' dime. Let us have some rules. Let us follow the rules. Canadians follow the rules. It is time the government followed the rules.

[Business of Supply, April 1st, 2014]

We have got lots of them, Mr. Speaker. I have been holding this one back, because it comes from one of the most quotable and most ridiculous members of Parliament that have ever sat in this House in the last 150 years.

…the minister has been at his post for five years…. The Sea Kings are no closer to being replaced.… Instead there are Challenger jets to fly the Prime Minister and his cabinet around in luxury.

Who said that? Think, folks. It was the member for Calgary West.

We are having fun with this, but this is not a funny issue. This is about a contempt for the Canadian people. The Prime Minister told Canadians in 2006 that he would clean up this culture of entitlement. Instead, his attitude was that he would clean up the Liberals, and once they were done, then he and his friends would pork out at the trough.

That is not what Canadians voted for. This is not about saying that the Prime Minister and his family should not use the Challenger for security reasons, although I note that the present Minister of Industry said:

There is something else the government can do. If the government wants to show confidence in the commercial airline industry, here is a suggestion. Will the Prime Minister park his Challenger jet and fly commercial skies as other Canadians do as a sign of faith that security works?

That is what the present Minister of Industry said when he was in opposition. He wanted the Liberal Prime Minister to fly commercial air, but he has not said that in cabinet because they enjoy the perks.

Again, this is abuse of the public trust from a government that said it would do something better. The Conservatives are doing it at a time when they are telling senior citizens that the cupboard is bare; when they are telling veterans who served our country, “Hey, buzz off, we are done with you, and we will go to court to fight you”; when they are telling first nations children in the north, “You do not deserve schools because we cannot afford them”. However, when it comes to looking after their pals, there is all the money in the world.

Speaking of which, I go back to the Minister of Justice and his complaint about the cost of food. He wanted to know how they could justify wasting that much money on a flight. Yet we just found out that the Prime Minister spent $32,000 feeding his hand-picked crew who went to Israel. That was $150 per meal, and if we look at what they were serving, oh, man, those sandwiches looked pretty brutal. If they are going to blow money like that, at least they could serve people well.

We Canadians expect better from this Prime Minister and we are not getting it. That is why we brought this forward, and we are doing it in a non-partisan manner. This is what the Conservative Party stood for. We are asking Conservatives to return to their roots. Perhaps they have forgotten where they came from. Perhaps they have forgotten how they used to be offended by the use of taxpayers' dollars to help friends, insiders, and buddies.

This is a moment where we reach out across the aisle to our poor, wayward, lost children of the Conservative Party and try to bring them back into the fold of accountability and say, “This is just one little way of doing this”.

[Business of Supply, April 1st, 2014]

Mr, Speaker, oh, he had to get to dinner, yes. He had the lobster dinner he had to go to.

Here is the man who is the Minister of National Defence, using taxpayers’ resources to go to court to tell veterans of our country that this government has no obligation to them. If we asked any Canadian on the street what they think of our obligation to veterans, they would say that it is shameful that the Conservatives are using taxpayers' dollars to argue that they have no social contract with veterans.

Yet the Minister of Justice had a total social contract with the military when he needed to be picked up from hunting camp to be flown to his lobster dinner. This is the kind of abuse that Canadians-—

[Business of Supply, April 1st, 2014]

moved:

That, in the opinion of the House, government planes, and in particular the plane used by the Prime Minister, should only be used for government purposes and should not be used to transport anyone other than those associated with such purposes or those required for the safety and security of the Prime Minister and his family.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to stand in this place and be chosen to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. I am certainly proud to rise today on the issue of the abuse of the public trust in taxpayers with the misuse of government resources, particularly the use of the Challenger jet.

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.

This issue needs to be debated in the House because we see within the government the continual and deliberate blurring of the lines between the use of government resources that are meant to serve the people of Canada and the partisan narrow interests of the Conservative war machine. Whether it is the misuse of government resources or the redrawing of the websites, everything the government seems to be doing is taking public resources and turning them to the personal use of the party or its friends. That is something the Conservatives used to rail against in the old Liberal regime.

Very clear rules about the use of flights were set up by the Board of Internal Economy. For members of Parliament who do have to charter planes into isolated regions—for example, I have had to charter flights up into James Bay—there are clear rules. Number one is, we have to ensure that the only people on those planes actually are government staff. Anyone else on the plane would have to be put on the flight manifest and would have to pay the full charge. The Board of Internal Economy is very clear on this, so when we find out that a guy who raised $3.5 million for the Prime Minister gets to fly back and forth from Calgary, that is simply not acceptable. That is an abuse of trust.

I would like to read a few quotes that will put this into context:

We have seen the Prime Minister flying around the country on Challenger jets doing a few hours of government work, then spending the rest of the time campaigning and fundraising…. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The…culture of entitlement goes on. The public must be given a chance to put an end to it.

Who said that? It was our present Prime Minister when he was in opposition. Yes, meet the new boss; same as the old boss over there. The issue here is that this is a government that is telling the rest of Canadians that the cupboard is bare and yet the Prime Minister can fly one of his buddies down to watch the New York Yankees at a ball game, where the Challenger jet cost taxpayers anywhere between $8,000 and $11,000 an hour to run. When the government is telling senior citizens in my riding that the cupboard is bare, while it is flying its friends to ball games, I would ask the Canadian people if they think that is fair.

A number of people have spoken out on this issue. I would like to quote them now:

Mr. Speaker, while Canadians are barely coping with higher gasoline prices, the…ministers do not share such mundane concerns. They prefer going from Ottawa to Toronto aboard a luxury jet that costs $11,000 an hour to operate…. How can the Prime Minister justify such a waste of public funds?

Who said that? It was the present Minister of Employment and Social Development.

There are a few others:

Mr. Speaker, if $1 million on airfare were not enough, it turns out, through access to information, that of the 141 flights taken on the Challenger jet between January and July, over $71,000 was spent on food. That does not include the bar bill. That represents an average of $508 per flight, just less than the monthly grocery bill for a Nova Scotia family of four. How does the Prime Minister justify spending the equivalent of the cost of a monthly family grocery bill on an air flight? Just what was on that menu?

Who said that? It was the present Minister of Justice. We all remember him when he was minister of defence. He is the man who ordered a search and rescue helicopter to pick him up from his hunting camp because he was too lazy to come out on his own. He used our military government resources to fly him from his hunting camp.

[Conservative Party of Canada, March 31st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, last night the Conservative Party pulled the plug on Dimitri Soudas, the right-hand man of the Prime Minister. He was bounced after firing a popular Conservative organizer, who blew the whistle on Dimitri interfering with the local ridings. Of course, this is just the latest Prime Ministerial appointment to go south.

The Prime Minister blew the Supreme Court appointment, and his chief of staff is facing the cops. The Conservative brand is now synonymous with Duffy, Wallin, Brazeau, and Carson. Oh, and he rewarded bagman Irving Gerstein, a law-breaker, with a plum appointment.

Speaking of which, here is Gerstein on Soudas: “...I am writing to direct your full attention to the Confidential Memo I received today from Dimitri Soudas, the dynamic...Director of the Conservative Party hand-picked by Prime Minister...”. Yes, hand-picked to handle a pink slip.

What is going on with the Prime Minister's judgment when yet another insider goes down to the eve of destruction?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, March 28th, 2014]

With regard to government funding, what is the total amount, by fiscal years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, allocated within the constituency of Timmins—James Bay, specifying each department or agency, initiative and amount?

[Points of Order, March 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, during question period, the Minister of National Revenue stated in the House that we were being irresponsible by misrepresenting facts. I would like to table some documents from her own department that are actually based on the question. If we are asking questions in the House based on information, it is not fair to accuse people of misrepresenting, hence lying. For that reason, I would like to table the documents—

[Canada Revenue Agency, March 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that is not what the facts say at all about the data being lost at the CRA.

Last year, it lost the financial information of half a million Canadians. Now we find that there are over 3,000 cases at the CRA, and they only bothered to let the Privacy Commissioner know about 1%.

That lackadaisical attitude toward the financial information of Canadians is simply not acceptable. New Democrats say that every time people's data is taken, stolen, or hacked, the Privacy Commissioner needs to be told.

Will the government support this common sense solution?

[Offshore Health and Safety Act, March 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

We are always told that we have to deal with government business instead of those kinds of cheap shots. We are dealing with a serious issue here, the safety of lives, so if the man wants to do a clown act, I would prefer that he does it outside and not within the chamber.