Madam Speaker, I would again just like to briefly read the motion before the House that we are presently debating. It reads:
That this House call for the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into the mismanagement of grants and contributions in the Department of Human Resources Development, and into any attempts to control the disclosure of this mismanagement to the public.
Madam Speaker, you may recall an unfortunate incident that I was a part of in the House, where I ended up using an unparliamentary word to describe the assertions of the minister. I commit that I will not use that unparliamentary word again. It does not change the fact that indeed the minister's statements were factually inaccurate and incorrect. It is what has driven me to request the time to be able to speak to the House about this issue.
Before I get into the specific situation with respect to my own constituency, I would like to say that in taking a look at this entire issue, it has been quite revealing. If we were to take a look back in time, we would discover that the starting point of this entire debacle, at least the debacle of the minister constantly doing cover-ups and constantly attempting to deflect responsibility for her culpability in this issue, all started when the Canadian Alliance asked for an access to information to her department with respect to an inquiry on an audit that had been conducted in her department.
Then, by some strange magic, the people of Canada were asked to believe that the day following our request for that audit information, the minister suddenly discovered that it was just about time that she revealed that information to Canadians.
Some of us found it rather un-credible that she would attempt to have Canadians believe that when we became aware of the audit and we asked for the audit, that the very next day, by some strange magical coincidence, that she was going to reveal the audit.
Right from the very beginning, right from that point forward, we have had the minister doing a constant deflection of responsibility.
I heard a Conservative member of the Chamber earlier today quoting the Prime Minister, who, at the time when he was the opposition leader in 1991, said that every one of his ministers would be accountable to the House, accountable to him and ultimately accountable to the people of Canada.
The Prime Minister's words that he gave Canadians in 1991 ring absolutely hollow. They are an absolute mockery of even the intent of the words he uttered in 1991. It is absolutely shameful that the Prime Minister would allow his government to have reached a point where the HRDC minister is constantly trying to deflect responsibility.
The whole parliamentary system of Canada is based upon the parliamentary system of Westminster. It is based upon accountability and responsibility of the ministers of the government and the minister is constantly trying to deflect responsibility.
Even today, as she was questioned about the fact that clearly there was an interim audit, going back to June the officials in her department at the time that she took over the department were fully aware of the implications of this audit, the implications that her department had fundamentally lost control of $1 billion in spending. She would have us believe in spite of the fact that when she was advised of all the so-called hot issues in August 1999, when her officials had in hand an interim audit, that those officials chose to keep her in the dark.
She can play with words until she is blue in the face. She can stand up and perhaps factually tell us that she was not officially informed until November 17. But those words do not mean anything because it is not feasible, it is not possible, it is not credible that her officials would have kept her in the dark from August through September into October and until November when she was finally told. As has been pointed out by my colleagues in questions in the House, during that period of time she had a chequebook out of which she wrote almost half a billion dollars of Canadians' money to various projects.
Any responsible, reasonable Canadian looking at the way in which the minister is constantly trying to duck, weave, dodge and get around the facts as they are presented would see that it is not credible. The minister is not accepting her responsibility and not accepting her authority over her department.
The reason I became as upset and exercised about this issue as I did, and the reason I went to the extent of having the Speaker remove me from the House for using unparliamentary language, was that when the minister stood up in the Chamber, she did so as part of her process of deflection, as part of her way of getting around the responsibility that is only hers to have.
She said that I personally had been constantly in touch with her office in a way that would promote these grants and funding to my constituents. In fact, I have a very competent staff who advised me and made me fully aware that indeed members of parliament should not be doing that, because if members of parliament do that, they give up the arm's length basis of being able to hold the government accountable for the funds that it is in the process of disbursing.
What basically happened was that we were approached by a business in my community which had put in for a grant. I believe it was in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars. It was for retooling an operation. When it got to a particular point in the process, no matter what those people did, they could not get any information back from the department.
Doing the job that any good MP should do, my office contacted HRDC on my behalf, and I take full responsibility for that, and said that this business was having this difficulty and would they please converse with these people and inform them of exactly what is going on. A second time it was the same thing. It lurched a little forward from that point. Again that business came to us saying it could not get any information out of the department and would we give it a hand. In this instance we just left a message on the voice mail saying, “Would you please contact these people and let them know what is going on. Are the forms filled out correctly and we understand that they have been approved. What is happening?”
The president of the treasury board came to my constituency. I recall saying to her when she was in Cranbrook, “Madam Minister, the frustration for this company is that we keep on hearing that indeed leases have been approved. There are other capital expenditures that will be happening. I am not advocating that they be approved or not, but we are told that they are approved. Please simply inform this company what in the world is going on”.
That is the position I took. That is the reason when the minister said I had been advocating, pushing, shoving or doing whatever it was that she said I was doing, I was so incensed because I had stayed within what I considered to be a very important boundary. Indeed the auditor general substantiates the position that I and my office have taken. I quote from an article:
Mr. Desautels said he feels MPs should not be involved in approving job creation grants to companies and groups in their own ridings, as they currently do under the transitional jobs fund and Canada jobs fund programs, because their participation blurs the lines of public accountability.
“If members of parliament are involved in the decision making process for [job creation grants], that blurs the line and makes it hard for them to play their oversight role of government”.
As the official opposition, we are holding the minister accountable. We are trying to get the facts from the minister, not the facts as constructed in the precise wording she is giving the House, but the facts as to her responsibility and the fact that she is not taking responsibility. That is clearly why every member of the House must vote in favour of our motion this evening, that the House call for the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry.
