Charlie Angus

[Democratic Reform, March 6th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there he goes again, attempting to change the channel on Conservative links to corruption. It is very simple—

[Government Appointments, March 6th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, Arthur Porter's rise to the top in the reviewing of Canada's spy services mirrors a series of donations that he made to the Conservative Party. These donations were in clear contravention of SIRC guidelines, yet the Conservatives cashed them anyway. As he was being promoted by the Prime Minister, he was apparently receiving millions in kickbacks, which is why he is now on the run for fraud.

Is Mr. Porter still a member of the Privy Council? Will the government finally come clean with Canadians about its relationship to Mr. Arthur Porter?

[Government Appointments, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that the Conservatives believe it is recess when they need to explain why a man who is facing an international warrant for money laundering was personally chosen by the Prime Minister to oversee Canada's spy agents, why the Prime Minister personally chose a convicted fraud artist, Bruce Carson, into his inner circle and why the Prime Minister's appointees Wallin, Brazeau and Duffy continue to thumb their nose at the taxpayer. This is about the Prime Minister's judgment.

When will Conservatives come clean and clean up the patronage system that the Prime Minister has put in place?

[Government Appointments, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, this really is not the place for schoolyard taunts, not when the government needs to explain—

[Government Appointments, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in 2008 Arthur Porter donated to the Conservatives and three weeks later was appointed to the Security Intelligence Review Committee. In 2009 Arthur Porter donated again to the Conservatives and was appointed chair of SIRC. Then as chair of SIRC, he donated to the Conservatives again. Most of these donations were in clear violation of SIRC's rules and guidelines.

Does the government believe it was appropriate for the Conservative Party to take this money? What steps will the government take to clean up the abuse of its patronage system?

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her excellent work on this file.

We have to expose the lie that has been repeated again and again in this House that the senators are somehow there to represent their regions. Where would the provinces be if they did not have the Conservative and Liberal senators from the Maritimes, who are saying zippo about the EI attack? Where would the people of Saskatchewan have been when the Province of Saskatchewan was fighting for equalization payments? Where would they be without those Conservative senators who said nothing on that?

It is a lie. The senators represent their party interests. They always have. That is why they are fundamentally undemocratic and have to be held to account. They are appointed by the Prime Minister, and they act as sock puppets for the party. They act as an extension of the Conservative war machine. They use the resources the Canadian taxpayers pay them and then use them for the fundraising and political army of the Conservative Party while misrepresenting themselves to the Canadian people as somehow representing the regions of this country.

One cannot show any real examples of their having done this, and it is unacceptable that taxpayers are paying for the partisan work of their bagmen, their campaign organizers and their planners.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased that my hon. colleague invoked the legacy of Jack Layton, who was a dear friend of mine. Jack never accepted that the status quo of arrogance and corruption that existed in the Senate should be allowed to stand.

We see now, in Quebec, that former Senator Fortier has come forward and has said that it is a system that is unnecessary and unreformable. Senator Fortier, Michael Fortier, when he was with the Conservatives, was a very impressive man in terms of his street smarts, his politics. I disagreed with Mr. Fortier on many things, but I am very pleased to see that one of the Conservatives' own, one of these senators, has come forward and has said that it has to go.

A number of senators are speaking up. Lowell Murray has been good on this. Hugh Segal has spoken up. We need to address this unreformed, unrepentant and under-investigation Senate.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, as always, I am proud to rise in the House as the elected member of Parliament for Timmins—James Bay, chosen by the people of James Bay to come and represent them in the House of Commons.

Listening to the discussion this morning about the motion to address the need to begin the process of abolishing the Senate, I remembered, because of my Conservative colleagues, that there was a time when we were actually talking about reform and bringing this anachronism into the 21st century. The Conservatives promised reform. However, they agreed that if they were not going to get reform, they would abolish it, because it is a system that has proven to be deeply entrenched against any form of reform.

Unfortunately, our colleagues in the Conservative Party seem to have fallen off the straight and narrow and have fallen into the cesspool of rum bottle politics in Ottawa. They have gone the route of the Liberals in terms of filling the Senate with a lot of very dodgy appointments: friends of the party, hacks, and people who flip pancakes at Conservative fundraisers. In seven years, they have not come forward with a real plan for democratic reform in the Senate. Therefore, we get back to the original question of abolition.

My colleagues in the Liberal Party are very angry this morning, as they are about any efforts to hold their friends in the system of unaccountable, unelected friends of the party to account.

What we are talking about is not an obscure constitutional debating point. What we are talking about goes to the very heart of democratic accountability in Canada in the 21st century, that being whether a group of people who believe that they have a certain amount of privilege and a lack of accountability should have the right and the power to block the duly elected members of this House, and in doing so, to block the democratic will of the country.

We have to place this motion in the context of the times. There is growing anger and frustration among Canadian citizens, who see the Senate refusing to show any level of accountability and senators thumbing their noses at the Canadian people and showing absolute contempt. Then we are told in the House, by the Liberals, especially, and the Conservatives that as we are not able, as democratically elected members, to hold senators to account. They are somehow above us. I do not believe that this is a principle that any democratic country should accept.

Today the level of frustration has reached a point that we have to, as Parliament, hold those members to account. We have Senator Anne Cools using her position as an unelected senator to stop the Parliamentary Budget Officer from providing information to democratically elected members of Parliament, and by extension, the Canadian people. It is unacceptable. She said that it is a breach of her privilege. That is what senators believe they exist on: their privileges. She called it constitutional vandalism. I will say that there are constitutional vandals, and they are in the red chamber.

Over her career, Senator Anne Cools has been erratic and has said some pretty bizarre things. However, what the Canadian people need to know is that we cannot get rid of her. She is there until she is 75, whether she shows up for work or not, just like the famous Senator Andy Thompson of Mexico. For seven years the guy never showed up for work. Canadians are not even able to remove them. Therefore, Senator Anne Cools can interfere with the work of democratically elected members of Parliament, and that seems okay, because that is her privilege.

Pamela Wallin, who apparently lives on Palmerston Avenue in Toronto, claims to represent the people of Saskatchewan. Pamela Wallin, who is on the board of directors of an oil sands development company, stood up to help defeat a bill that was brought forward to deal with catastrophic climate change. It was passed by the duly elected members of the House of Commons, and she bragged about killing the bill. She said it was a nuisance. Of course, it was nuisance to her. The little people of this country are probably a nuisance to her. However, she gets her perks paid for by the little people who are a nuisance to her.

The situation is unacceptable. We have not even touched on the fact that the senators sit on the boards of major corporations, the banks, the financial sector and private health care interests, and they get to participate in debate and change laws in the country while serving their friends in private industry.

This is not an institution that went wrong somewhere along the way. It was founded on wrong principles, and it needs to be held to account.

One hundred and forty-some years ago, when Canada was establishing its system of governance, the mutton chops who met in Prince Edward Island looked to the House of Lords in England. The House of Lords was set up because England had its long history of class exclusion and hereditary rights. The British Parliament was set up with the House of Lords above the House of the common people. The language itself speaks volumes. They needed a check and balance on the rights of the common people.

For people back home watching this, the common people are Canadians. We did not have a history of peerage and an aristocracy, so what they decided to come up with was the Senate for the check and balance. In some ways they chose something worse. Rather than what the British had, with its lords and men with titles, the Fathers of Confederation decided to pick cronies and friends of the party.

I think of G.K. Chesterton who, comparing England to Ireland, said that what was worse than being priest-ridden was being squire-ridden. However, Canadians have an even worse choice. We are crony-ridden. That is not a balance for legislative approval in a modern democracy.

It is interesting when we see the young tour guides taking people around and showing the Senate. They are fed the fiction that they are supposed to tell people about all the work the Senate does. They say that one of John A. Macdonald's founding principles was that the Senate was there to protect the rights of minorities. That sounds good, but John A. Macdonald was not talking about linguistic minorities, first nations, or new Canadians. What John A. Macdonald said was that we must protect the rights of minorities, because the rich will always be fewer in number than the poor. That was the founding principle. It was a system set up to protect the powerful.

Here we have today the so-called seven years of Senate reform that can be summed up in Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau. That is what the Conservatives have given us. It is like a bad reality TV show. If we look at the goings on in the Senate, it is like Les Bougon. We are going around in our Armani suits. Instead of Honey Boo Boo, we have Pamela Boo Boo. At least Honey Boo Boo has something we could actually think is kind of cute once in a while.

What we are seeing with the senators right now is a scandal. It actually cuts to a constitutional issue. They were chosen by the Prime Minister. He has told Canadians that he can personally vet all their residency requirements, yet Pamela Wallin has a health card for Ontario. She is either a resident of Ontario or the people of Ontario are somehow being defrauded. If she is a resident of Ontario, she is not eligible to say that she is a resident of Saskatchewan. It is not good enough to say that her heart is in Saskatchewan or that she goes back to Saskatchewan. She is either a resident or she is not.

The same is true for Mike Duffy. First he lived behind door number one down in Cavendish. He had not been there in months. Then it was door number two in Charlottetown. Now it is door number three, back in Kanata. He is paying the money back, but he did not rip the Canadian taxpayers off. He just did not understand the form that said that his primary residence was within 100 kilometres of Ottawa. He did not understand that, and every single year, he ticked the box and walked out with $20,000. We see the same with Senator Patterson, of no fixed address.

The senators, all of these men and women, because they tell us that they are eligible for the money, get to collect the money. That is the frustration. They are taking money from taxpayers. They have an institution where it is their word, their pinky swear, that they are entitled to walk out the door with $20,000 in travel expenses and to represent regions they do not live in. They do not have to prove anything to the Canadian people, because they see themselves as above us. That is not a credible system for governance in the 21st century.

We need to deal with the system. Senators refuse to reform, year after year. They have been defiant about it. It has to come back to the House of Commons and then to the Canadian people. If we asked the Canadian people what they would do, they would get rid of them.

[Ethics, March 4th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I know the wounds are starting to hurt them from the lack of accountability and from the fact that the Prime Minister promised Canadians that he would clean up the Senate and he would end the cesspool in Ottawa. What did he give us? He hired jailbird Bruce Carson to his inner circle. He gave us the $7-million Patrick Brazeau. Now we have Arthur Porter on the run from the cops internationally, and people are asking how he got to the top position of the Security Intelligence Review Committee.

This is about the judgment of the Prime Minister. What happened to that zealot who promised that he was going to clean up this place?

[Ethics, March 4th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I will give the hon. member a map of northern Ontario and invite him to come up and see what real constituents are like.

This is a government that promised Canadians—