Gerry Ritz

[Government Contracts, June 18th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government has spent its past three terms fine tuning the questionable system of handouts and kickbacks. It is obvious that the Liberals could never truly be trusted or interested in cleaning up a system that has served them so well.

Canadians can have no confidence at all in getting to the bottom of the latest ad scandals unless there is an open public judicial inquiry. When will the minister do the right thing and implement one?

[Government Contracts, June 12th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the minister calls these audits courageous and says what a great job these folks did. We do not argue with that.

Regardless of what the minister says, these audits are really standard procedure. They are done all the time. The public works department maintains a complete audit branch that also does work for other government departments, so they know what they are doing.

Our concern is not with the audits. Our concern is what the government does with the results of these audits. It brings out more rules but more rules do not help when everyone breaks them anyway and no one is forced to adhere to them.

Why will the minister not be truly accountable and table the complete audit with the names attached? Who is he still hiding?

[Government Contracts, June 12th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the government has done its best to cover up the sponsorship program scandal by trying to hide it in plain sight. The minister claims everything was transparent because an audit was posted on the website, a full two months after it was delivered to the department. They were a pretty hectic two months spent planning the damage control with the full participation of the top five ad companies.

Why is the Minister of Public Works and Government Services waving around a copy of a sanitized audit that does not name names? Who is he really hiding?

[Privilege, June 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I rise under Standing Order 48 to bring to the attention of the House a situation that is impeding my work as a member of parliament and the work of other members of parliament as well.

On the evening of June 4, as you will recall, Mr. Speaker, we were convened as a committee of the whole to examine the estimates and priorities and planning for the Department of Public Works and Government Services.

With all due respect to the minister who never hesitated that evening to remind us that he was only nine days into his new portfolio, he nevertheless made a number of promises to provide members with information relating to questions on the estimates that had been raised that evening and that have been raised in question period since. I would like to reiterate the questions which have gone unanswered over the past week.

The Communications Canada organization states that it is headed by an executive director reporting to a cabinet committee. On June 4 I asked who chairs the committee, is the minister on the committee and who else in cabinet sits on that particular committee. In response the minister admitted that he chaired the cabinet communications committee but he also said he could provide to the committee of the whole later on that same evening the membership of the committee.

After a week we have received nothing. I do not think the minister made those promises lightly. After all, he is open and accountable.

In order for us to understand the process that was involved in signing and tendering contracts, we have to know all the players who oversaw the process. Therefore we need to know who are the members of that committee.

We assume that Mr. Gagliano chaired the cabinet committee in 2002 and prior when many suspect contracts were approved, but is he exclusively to blame or were there other cabinet ministers on that committee as well and who are they?

Again on the evening of June 4 I asked the minister to break down the dollar value of contracts that had passed through the process before he arrived to conduct the review. Two hundred of them had snuck through. They are in the pipeline and are supposedly beyond the reach of further scrutiny.

I asked him of the $18 million value he said those 200 contracts were worth that had gone through, how much had gone to Groupaction, Groupe Everest, Lafleur and other companies that were on their preferential list. The minister said:

Perhaps it would be acceptable to the hon. member if I filed it with the committee in writing rather than taking the time to read through all the statistics.

He later added:

Later on this evening, I will advise exactly when, Mr. Chairman, in just a few moments.

Those are his words. We have not seen this to this day. We have yet to receive that information.

The member for St. Albert asked if we could get a regional breakdown on a province by province basis of the $200 million spent on government advertising on those contracts. The minister told us that he would “provide the best breakdown I can as soon as possible”.

That evening the minister said he was interested in creating a more equitable distribution of this questionable program across the country but apparently he does not know what the distribution is now. He has had a week to look into it. He knows these questions were on the list that night.

The member for Edmonton Centre-East asked for details concerning the acquisition of Challenger aircraft. He asked when did the preliminary project review go to cabinet to be reviewed before it was taken out to industry for quotations let alone before it was being ordered. The minister said “I will see if I can find him further information”. Another week has gone by, the order is in process, but we have heard nothing.

Many other questions remain from all opposition parties. I would be glad to provide the minister with a list but I am sure his own minions are capable of going through the manuscript.

In Erskine May, 22nd edition, at page 63, under “Ministerial Accountability to Parliament”, the reference includes the following:

--ministers have a duty to Parliament to account, and be held to account, for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments...; ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament--

Under committee of the whole, Mr. Speaker, that is parliament:

--refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest,--

None of those issues would be outside of that public interest.

Accounting for the expenditure of taxpayers' money is of course the public interest. That is what we are trying to do here and what we were trying to do in committee of the whole for five hours.

Preventing embarrassment to the governing party as many recent disclosures are doing by withholding information--that is not being transparent-- or delaying disclosure--that is not being accountable--or hoping the opposition will go away does not serve the public interest.

Mr. Speaker, if you find this to be a prima facie question of privilege, I am prepared to move the appropriate motion.

[Government Contracts, June 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, those companies handle a lot more than sponsorship money. We see $250,000 more going to a company that photocopies improperly. What the minister is trying to sell here just does not hold up.

We know that even the auditor general raised serious concerns about one firm's work and referred it to the RCMP herself, saying she had to go there. The minister continued that $250,000 shovelled into that company.

Until the minister comes clean and tells Canadians how many files he has referred to the RCMP, how can we be sure that tax dollars are not still flowing to those disgraced firms?

[Government Contracts, June 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the minister of public works pledged that under his tenure his department would be open, transparent and accountable.

Those are lofty ideals. It did not happen. It was just the same old talk.

We have not been able to count on the minister to answer even the simplest question, like how many files has he referred to the RCMP? He is scared to do that.

In light of that, could the minister assure the House that the companies implicated in the files that he referred to the RCMP have been frozen out of any more government money?

[Government Contracts, June 10th, 2002]

Another referral is great, Mr. Speaker, but where is the money? Why is the government not demanding the money back if it did not buy the services that were offered?

Canadians can no longer trust the government to help clean up this mess. We need a full blown public inquiry. When will the minister announce one?

[Government Contracts, June 10th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, thanks to a diligent Globe and Mail reporter and not the questionable internal audits at public works, we learned that the government shelled out $330,000 for a fish and game show that never took place and it never demanded the money back. It is still sitting there.

It is becoming clear that the entire Liberal cabinet sat by while taxpayers are on the hook for another outrageous abuse of their money. If, as the minister says, he is truly serious about accountability and transparency, will he stand up today and tell us which of his cabinet colleagues on his committee signed off on dirty deals like this?

[Government Contracts, June 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, someone took those contracts because they paid the bill. I guess that means they accepted them.

Claude Boulay was right when he stated that it helps to be a Liberal in order to win these big government contracts. In 1997 Groupaction gave $49,000 in donations to the Liberals. Public accounts at the same time show that Groupaction was awarded $10 million in business for that $49,000 investment. Good return. In 1998, the next year, it donated half the amount of money and received half the amount of contracts. There is the linkage. It is there.

Is it not true that the more one gives, the more one receives?

[Government Contracts, June 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, according to public accounts, it pays to donate to the Liberal Party.

Groupaction received over $26 million in business contracts but only since its Liberal friends came to power in 1993. The Liberals claim this is a reputable company but the auditor general says Groupaction's photocopying is substandard. Besides that the report is still jammed in the photocopier because no one can find it.

How can the minister justify that winning big contracts is directly tied to donations back to his party?