Madam Speaker, we are embroiled in quite a debate today. It is a bittersweet week for Canadians. Taxpayers get a look at where their dollars are going and where they would like them not to go.
The whole principle of what we are talking about here is not necessarily the program or what went wrong. We are talking about the concept that the Liberals felt that this public pot of money was theirs to do with as they saw fit. The icing on the cake in this corruption is the kickback scheme. Those guys felt that it was okay to tithe their hand-picked companies to get 10% or 15% back into the Liberal Party of Canada. They saw nothing wrong with that.
This was all pointed out years ago. The Auditor General looked at this before and brought in a scathing report. We have heard lines like “Who's minding the store”? How can the bureaucrats go this far off track and their political masters not realize it?
Therefore, when the members on the front bench stand up day after day in question period and say that they did not know, that they had no clue, we have questions to ask. If this is not a legalistic problem of commission then it certainly must be one of omission. Their line of defence is that they are not corrupt, just ignorant. They are saying that they do not know what they are doing, and that is after 10 years of governing our country.
We have known about this since 1999. Again and again we have had public works ministers come and go in this place because they know where the bodies are. They are shipped off to the witness protection program in Denmark. Now the Liberals are at risk because by bringing the guy back they have ticked him off and he may say a few things. That is good. Canadian taxpayers deserve that.
The whole problem we are getting into here is the government's idea of how to run the public service. It has companies of record that it uses on untendered contracts. It takes a MERX program that has all these tenders out there but no one is allowed to bid because the government has already picked the winner. It just notifies companies to let them know that the bidding it is over and that they should not bother applying. That is how this thing is run. It has gone off the rails, and I wonder why.
We do not need more rules and regulations. The Treasury Board, the last time around, and the finance minister now, who was the public works minister, came out with a whole new set of rules. The rules do not mean a damn thing if nobody follows them. More rules just mean they will bend some more things and still look the other way.
We had heard that this program was frozen, that it was cancelled and that it was cancelled again. How many times do we have to cut the head off this snake? It just goes on and on.
Canadians are finally getting an eyeful of the frustration we feel here and in committee as to how these guys steamroll through their own ideology and then backstop it, hide it and say that is the way things are done, that those are the rules and they are following them. Who made the rules? Who is assessing the rules and who is applying them? It is the government's own folks. It is an internal situation and it is just horrendous.
The former minister of intergovernmental affairs from Quebec said that the whole sponsorship program was not working and that it was not needed in Quebec but the Liberals pressed on with it. Not every program was bad. It was the way they kicked back into their own pockets that was the problem, which is why the public is so upset over this.
The Prime Minister is out there on his “I am not a crook” tour. He is going door to door and program to program professing his innocence and the Liberals are dropping in the polls. The more he says “It's not me, I didn't know”, the more people are saying that he was there, that he was the guy in charge of the money, the vice-chair of the Treasury Board, the referee in all of this, how could he not know. They are saying that if he did not know, then he was not doing his job and therefore he was incompetent, so why would we want him as Prime Minister.
The public is finally getting an eyeful of that, which is good. The honeymoon is finally over after 10 years due to this. It will only get worse. It is the kickback portion of the sponsorship that really put it over the top.
When people have been in Parliament for their second term they become very cynical of what is going on here. When I started looking at how I would address this today I did not know how to get it out to the people. I take calls from folks who are so upset. The BSE situation, the livestock industry and agriculture in the country is my portfolio, but it has been usurped. It has been pushed to the background because of this horrendous program and the callous attitude of these Liberals to use public money. We start to see why they cannot address agriculture in the proper way. It is because they want to funnel the money in their own way.
The Liberals do not give a darn about the agriculture guy, the guy at the farm gate. We have seen that for 10 years. They have ignored an industry to death; death by a thousand cuts. This is where their money is going. Their priority is on what is good for the Liberal Party of Canada, not on what is good for the taxpayers and, of course, the farmers.
I receive many letters. I received one from a lady named Rose Graw of Battleford. I want to read a couple of lines from the letter because it really encapsulates the calls that I have been receiving and how I am feeling. She writes “I watched the Prime Minister yesterday and while it is all fine and dandy, some of the things he says, it is nothing more than political rhetoric. I have absolutely no faith that true justice will be done in the most recent theft of public money. The Prime Minister's inquiries will cost us millions as other inquiries, commissions, et cetera, over the years have cost us. They will only gather dust on some politician's desk”.
She is a cynic as well. She tops the letter off by saying “To say I am angry, disgusted and ashamed of the political rhetoric is an understatement. I would like to withhold my taxes but the government would probably send me to jail”.
That is the feeling out there. I know a lot of my colleagues are getting those same types of e-mails, letters and phone calls.
This tars all of us with the same brush; that we do not understand what the public purse is all about.
We have seen spending under the Liberal government notch up 9% and 11% a year to buy what? Has everybody got a better quality of life in this country? My constituents are not calling in and saying that they are doing so much better under this finance minister and his fiscal prudence that he talked about. It is not happening.
Canadians do not want to see something like this sponsorship fiasco and the culture of corruption. Whether they are taxing junior hockey teams for no reason at all and then stopping it in a Liberal riding, people start to step back and say that everything the Liberals do is about politics. It is not about practical solutions to anything. It is about politics. It is about furthering the Liberal agenda. It has nothing to do with getting Canada back on track and becoming the economic tiger we can be.
After 10 years in government they are now talking about an ethics package. That was in the first 1993 red book. The Prime Minister, who was the finance minister at that time, was the author of that book. Why does it take 10 years, until they get their fingers caught in the cookie jar right up to the elbow, for them to finally start talking about ethics and start to expedite things like whistleblower legislation?
We have introduced many private member's bills from this side that have been rejected again and again. Now the Liberals are starting to say that those bills might be a good thing.
The new President of the Treasury Board, who used to be the chair of the government ops committee, was at public accounts today. He said that it was great. He said that under the whistleblower legislation people would be able to come forward and say their piece. I just cannot understand why they will not allow that to happen. Of course, there is an election in the offing.
Madam Speaker, I am splitting my time with my colleague from Strathcona so I will wind it up there because I know he has a lot of good things to say.
