Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am not really sure whether my hon. colleague from the Conservative Party really recognizes the gravity of the situation.

We are dealing with accusations that the Conservative Party sat down to find a way to circumvent the spending limits. If this party were as open and transparent as it is now claiming to be, post-RCMP raids, we would not have had the monkey show here in Parliament that went on for months. The Conservatives were threatening members of Parliament who asked questions. They were shutting down the committees or they were basically running out the back door rather than address the simple question.

The Conservatives are expecting us to believe that they were forthcoming when they went immediately on the attack against Elections Canada, trying to basically trash reputations of independent representatives in this country.

The question was brought to the attention of the RCMP and a judge issued a warrant. There were certainly serious issues about why the Conservative Party members were emailing their local ridings, who were desperate for any kind of money and being told, “If we are going to send you money, we want to ensure that money is coming back the next day. We want access to your bank account so we can get the money back as quickly as we can”.

There are serious questions and I do not know if the member is actually recognizing how much of an impact this has had on public trust. That is why we, as politicians, in representing the hard-working honest politicians in the House in the various parties, have to restore public confidence.

We are not just here on some kind of elaborate shell game. We are not here as a money laundering scheme. We are here to ensure that elections are done in a fair and open manner, and if the Conservative Party had been open from the beginning, it probably would not have been in this trouble in the first place.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2008]

We did not see any of that, Mr. Speaker, and yet the good, hard-working volunteers were struggling. Money was put into the riding but then quickly pulled out. Forty per cent of that riding's budget was used to buy ads elsewhere.

Any average Canadian is going to look at that and wonder what is going on. They are going to ask how a claim can be made that this is a perfectly normal practice? It is not a perfectly normal practice. A perfectly normal practice is when a federal party looks at a riding and considers buying some ads because it feels it might have a chance of winning that riding. Those ads are clearly marked for use in a local campaign. Whether the money is transferred to the local party or whether it is held by the national party is very clear.

What we are dealing with here is something different. We are dealing basically with what amounts to laundering money by sending it to ridings then pulling it back and paying for national advertising. That is the background.

The real issue here is the response when the government party was caught. It tried to hit up taxpayers for rebates that Elections Canada said it was not entitled to receive.

The Conservatives could have looked at this as though they were corporate lawyers and said that because it was a grey area they thought they found a loophole and could get away with it. A Mack truck could be driven through that loophole. The Conservatives were caught. They could have said they learned their lesson.

That was not their response, however. They responded by attacking Elections Canada with a series of insinuations as though Elections Canada was somehow a partisan wing of the Liberal Party, that somehow it was involved in a nefarious attack.

This has really become an open-ended attack on an institution of parliamentary democracy in this country. If the Conservatives are telling citizens at home that they cannot trust the election process in Canada, it is very much a scorched earth policy. That desperate party is trying to mislead the Canadian public about how it circumvented the very clear rules. The Conservatives knew they were circumventing the rules.

Now we are in a situation where the Conservatives have turned their attack on an institution that ensures the validity of elections in Canada. This institution is used internationally. It has set a standard.

The Conservatives have now hunkered down in their war room. A few of their spin doctors are basically trying to run the country. Anyone who asks questions will immediately be attacked. They have launched one lawsuit after another if anyone questions them. Those members have turned the government House committee into a total zoo. I sit on that committee and I find the actions of Conservative members absolutely embarrassing. They have been elected to this place and they are expected to show up and do a job for the people of Canada, and yet they are standing on their heads in an attempt to interfere with that job.

We have seen attempts to stop any investigation time after time. When Elections Canada finally had to bring in the RCMP, the attack was turned on that institution.

We simply cannot have that. We need confidence in our public institutions. We need confidence in parties playing by the rules, whether they like to or not. We as a Parliament are duty bound to declare our recognition of the work Elections Canada does. We are duty bound to say that these partisan attacks simply have to stop.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to be here this morning as the member representing the great region of Timmins—James Bay, and as the NDP critic for democratic reform.

We support the Bloc Québécois' motion. Indeed, the Parliament of Canada must express its confidence in Elections Canada, which is an institution that plays a critical role in Canada's democratic life.

It is a pretty disturbing situation that this motion even has to come forward. We have seen a disturbing trend over the last number of years where the institution of Parliament and the institution of voting has become more and more ridiculed across this country.

I certainly know, in my riding and anywhere I travel in Canada, of the lack of confidence that people have in politicians and the lack of trustworthiness of politicians. Politician jokes are everywhere. They used to be funny, but there is an element that is not funny anymore, because I think what they are expressing is the average citizen's disgust with the fact that Parliament is being turned into something of a circus and that the real decision making is happening in the backrooms, in the boardrooms and in the war rooms of the political parties.

When we talk about the role of Elections Canada in this country, it is to ensure, number one, that we have a fair and open democratic process and that everyone plays by the rules. There is probably not a single member of Parliament in this House who has not been questioned at least once, twice or three times by Elections Canada because they are very thorough.

When we are running elections in 308-odd ridings across this country, most often with volunteers, mistakes are made. There are many hard-working and honest politicians in this House who do their best with their elections committees to ensure that they play by the rules. Elections Canada will double-check, triple-check, and it will come back to us to make sure that we did follow the rules because following the rules is essential to ensure that we actually have a fair and democratic process, so that elections are not simply bought and people do not simply make up the rules on the fly.

When I first ran for office, my campaign manager gave me one piece of advice. He said, “If you are not sure, do not do it”. That is the ethical standard that we as politicians must apply to how we operate our offices, how we operate in dealing with our power as members of Parliament, and how we have to operate our election campaigns. If we are not sure, we should not do it. If it is a grey area, we should leave it alone.

Unfortunately, we have seen, both from the Liberals and from the Conservatives, a general tradition of looking at the rules as though they were corporate tax lawyers looking for loopholes, looking for how to get around the rules, and then coming back and trying to explain it to the Canadian people as though it were a perfectly normal and natural thing that happened.

What has happened in this case with the in and out scandal is not perfectly normal and it is not perfectly natural. The Conservative Party is trying to deflect attention by blaming Elections Canada and referring to the RCMP raid as a publicity stunt. Our nation's police force went and got an injunction because it believed something serious had occurred, a serious breach of public trust. We have heard the Conservatives trying to claim that this is somehow a fight for freedom of expression. They have twisted all the facts to get the attention away, to tell the people back home not to look at the essential issue of what is happening here.

What is happening here is that we had a party that had reached its spending limits and it was trying to find a way to get around those spending limits.

The reason we have election rules in this country is so that parties cannot buy elections. In particular when we have an election that is very close, we have to ensure that people or parties are not able to circumvent the rules to buy the election.

What happened was we had an elaborate scheme that was set up at the party headquarters to find ways to get around this national ceiling, to be able to buy $1.2 million more in national advertising at a time when a party felt that those ads might actually win it the election, so it had to find places to funnel that money.

If we look at the list of ridings where money was funnelled to, it really becomes clear that this begins to look very similar to a money laundering scheme, that the money is moved into ridings on the condition that it will be moved right back out and sent back to headquarters, yet it will appear as clean money because it is being charged technically to the riding, even though the riding has no benefit of it.

I am looking at ridings where money was funnelled into, and I notice a number of ridings in northern Ontario where the Conservatives' chances of getting elected are as dismal today as they were in 2006.

My own riding of Timmins--James Bay is the size of Great Britain and only $25,000 was spent on the entire campaign there. Of that, 40% or $10,000 of a $25,000 ceiling was used by the party to buy ads on a national level.

I remember that campaign well. Our Conservative opponents worked very hard to try and get their message out, and yet I do not remember seeing pamphlets in any great number. We did not see any signs for Stephen Harper, and I am speaking of him strictly in the capacity as a candidate not in the capacity as Prime Minister--

[Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I guess the question that average Canadians are asking themselves anytime a story hits the news about toxic toys or toxic products is the fact that we have system set up whereby our factories are shut down in Canada, factories that have good paying jobs and have for years provided these corporations with excellent profits. They have good safety standards and yet these same companies move overseas and set up under jobber firms where we have all kinds of toxic products. We do not know what is in them. The products are then re-imported back to Canada where they pose a threat to our own citizens and we are supposed to, after the fact, run across and put up band-aids.

Since it has been a deliberate strategy by the corporate sector to move to sweat shop, third world conditions where there are no standards, should we not hold them accountable? I am saying that we should hold them accountable for the damage they do to ensure that any time any of these products come into our country that the giant companies that have been allowing these shenanigans to take place will actually be held accountable.

We have workers in this country, standards in this country and we can produce these products in this country. It is just this perpetual race to the bottom that this government and the former government have been allowing.

[Aboriginal Affairs, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, the minister is misinforming the House. The people did not say that they were going to stay in the community. They were told by the government.

What the James Bay Cree are being left with are underfunded schools, third world infrastructure and no coherent plan for flood plains. We now have Kashechewan and Fort Albany under evacuation and Attawapiskat has moved to stage one evacuation.

The minister cancelled the emergency evacuation centre in Attawapiskat last December because he did not want to fund the school that was going to be built.

Why does the minister continue to roll the dice with the families of the James Bay coast?

[Aboriginal Affairs, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is spring again and once more we are seeing emergency planes having to be used to take people from the flood plain at Kashechewan and Fort Albany.

The people of Kashechewan had a signed agreement with the Government of Canada to relocate them. The government ripped up that agreement and it also walked away on two studies that it commissioned that said that the families had to be moved off the flood plain.

What is it now, four emergencies in three years? Would the minister tell the Canadian people how many floods and evacuations it will take before the government finally moves these families to safe ground?

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, again, as my hon. colleague says, this is a very practical suggestion we have made, to allow this proposal to be scrutinized as it goes forward, but the government is not interested in that.

The government purports to say it is a friend of farmers. We could ask the farmers in southern Ontario what they think about the heavily subsidized corn and grain from the U.S. getting dumped in Canadian markets again and again, upsetting any kind of international standard for food and basic grains.

Why not work with us to ensure that our primary producers will not be overly impacted? Further, why not ensure that at the end of the day, if a biofuels economy happens, that it meets what it was meant to meet, which is to address greenhouse gases, and that it is not simply a make-work project for certain ridings to get large biofuels plants, which rely on subsidized corn that is dumped in from the U.S.?

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, that statement speaks to the importance of what we are trying to discuss here, and that is the need for scrutiny in terms of where this biofuel plan for Canada goes. The question has to be raised at this point.

We all began at a point of believing that the biofuel so-called solution would help us to deal with global warming and would help us bring new farmland into production. However, the evidence overwhelmingly now suggests that something else much darker and unanticipated has happened. There are numerous signs that we are moving toward a global food catastrophe. This is a very serious issue. We are talking also about the fact that many of the great promises of clean carbon are about as reliable as the whole promise of clean coal, which is not clean at all.

The impacts on global warming and on the third world in terms of a food crisis have to be addressed, yet we have a government that says it does not want to have further scrutiny down the road. It wants to have a blank cheque. It wants to continue to push the biofuels economy, just like it has pushed the Athabasca tar sands. The government believes that a certain segment of this society is worth looking after, pampering and ensuring that every one of their little needs are met. Meanwhile the rest of society is being cut loose, shipped down the river along with the working families, the working poor, our first nations. Now people internationally are looking to Canada for leadership in terms of this global food crisis and they are hearing nothing but radio silence from the Conservative Party.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your appearance to ask members to remember that this is the decorum of Parliament and to rise up and work with the New Democratic Party on something that is very simple, which is the need for scrutiny of the government's often shameless record. If the government had submitted to a bit of scrutiny before, it might not be in the trouble it is now.

We are looking to help the Conservatives. We are looking to keep them from getting themselves in further trouble. However, at the end of the day, we have to go back to the fact that this is a very serious issue.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, April 28th, 2008]

This is like the biofuels equivalent of in and out, except it is into government ridings. We see the Conservatives throw cheques around. They stand and say that we should let them do it without any scrutiny, that they should not bring this to the Canadian people and that the people should trust the government. We are in an international food crisis and the government is missing—