Jim Abbott

[Proceeds Of Crime (Money Laundering) Act, April 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, of course we are in agreement. It is unusual for the Canadian Alliance to agree with the Bloc on many things. Clearly, when one of the members of the Bloc Quebecois has been threatened by organized crime in his constituency, we must pull together. This brings the importance of this to the attention of the House.

On another up note, as a result of a Bloc Quebecois motion which I believe was supported 100% by the House, a subcommittee has been struck to examine the whole issue of organized crime in Canada. I commend the Bloc Quebecois for that. The subcommittee was struck just two days ago. The committee chair has been named and we will start to work on this issue.

Again, I agree with the Bloc it is unfortunate that the opposition has had to push the Liberal government so hard to get it to do the things necessary to get on with the very important job of protecting Canadian society.

[Proceeds Of Crime (Money Laundering) Act, April 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from the member. From time to time he has been quite vocal in his criticism of the Canadian Alliance, and I do not take his intervention today as being that. I take it as being a very responsible intervention. I cannot resist the temptation to say, for a change.

I would suggest very gently that his statement that the government takes these issues seriously is a catch-all phrase for the government. I will be answering his question, but I do want to make this statement. My criticism is that the government has not acted in a timely fashion.

The government had a clear understanding in 1997-98, fully two years ago, about what the expectations were of the G-7. I seriously question the member's intervention when he says that the government has acted in a timely fashion taken the time required. How much time is required? The legislation in its basic form, as it presently sits, was brought before the House and due to the legislative calendar set up by the House leader on behalf of the Prime Minister, who is the leader of this government, it ended up falling off the legislative agenda for a full 12 months. I do not think that is taking the issue seriously and I do not think it is working in a timely fashion.

To answer the member's question, I am stating this as the solicitor general critic for Her Majesty's Official Opposition, the Canadian Alliance. I believe that the government, if it is going to do the things necessary in terms of, as he puts it, bringing on more partners and working in co-operation with other international agencies, the government will have to step up with more resources, more resources in legislation and more resources in dollars and cents.

The government has squeezed the heck out of the RCMP to the point where it did not even have wheels to be able to turn to go down the highway. The RCMP has reached a point of rust-out. The RCMP is a very dispirited organization at this point in terms of its manpower because of the constant squeeze on the salaries of the RCMP.

If the government is going to do what is necessary there has to be full global co-operation between the Canadian government, the other governments of the G-7, the OECD and indeed all governments. The government cannot be seen to be what it is presently, which is kind of treating this whole issue almost like a poor orphan son.

The government needs to step up the resources required in order to get the job done. I do note that the government did come forward with some $500 million plus for the RCMP. It is a start but it is late. The point I am trying to make is that the RCMP requires more resources in terms of dollars and cents and CSIS requires more resources in terms of dollars and cents, but they also require a heavier attention by the government to this very important issue because it permeates every part of our society.

The government is on the right track. I prod it once again though because I do not think it is working nearly quickly enough on this and other very important issues that relate to organized crime and terrorism and the sharing of criminal intelligence around the world.

[Proceeds Of Crime (Money Laundering) Act, April 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, we are debating today Bill C-22, an act to facilitate combatting the laundering of proceeds of crime, to establish the financial transactions and report analysis centre of Canada and to amend and repeal certain acts in consequence.

On December 3, 1998, the solicitor general said that early in the new year of 1999 the government would introduce legislation to curb money laundering. It did not happen in early 1999. In fact it happened in May 1999, but due to the agenda of the government the legislation ended up dying on the order paper. This vital legislation, which was supposed to have been introduced according to the words of the solicitor general in early 1999, was finally reintroduced for passage by the House on December 15, 1999, not exactly early 1999.

Yesterday the solicitor general came to the standing committee on justice and told us that when he had last appeared before the committee he said they would do it and now they have done it. Yesterday was the first day, one full year after he had been there in the first place, that he could sit there and boast about the fact that they had done it. What is involved? It strikes me that if the Liberals were given a hamburger franchise they would do away with the term fast food. I do not understand.

Let us take a look at an article from the Globe and Mail of April 4. It is important that the government get on with it. The article reads:

“The effect of organized crime can be traced in the smallest, most remote communities and in areas as diverse as insurance premiums and ice cream retailing”, law enforcement officers told a conference that ended yesterday in Montreal. “For the first time, organized crime, serious criminal organizations, are actually threatening the democratic institutions of this country and the values that we hold dear. It is a real threat to the way of life we have in this country. It is that serious”.

That was a quote by an RCMP deputy commissioner. The article continues:

—said former Crown prosecutor Louis Dionne, now head of the organized crime directorate for the Surete du Quebec, “You can't see it. You can't smell it. But if you have the misfortune of putting your wet fingers in the socket, it'll hurt you”.

That is where we are. I have actually been questioned by reporters on its significance, on what money laundering is all about. Although Canada is a member of the Paris based international task force against money laundering, it does not get good grades from world experts on this problem. They also say that it would be a good idea, perhaps, to set up money laundering in Canada because the charges are less and the risks are lower.

Why has the government delayed and delayed the introduction of the bill? We will be supporting the bill, but the point is that we would have supported similar legislation if it had been brought in, in a timely manner, two years ago. The bill will leave the House after second reading, go through the committee process, come back to the House, go through report and third reading stages, and then to the other place for senators to do their thing. Why has there been this delay on legislation which I dare say all members of the House would support?

There are members of the House of Commons who are threatened by organized crime directly and personally. They and their families are directly and personally threatened by organized crime. How close can we get to the bone when even members of the House are threatened? I say shame on government members for taking so long to bring in the legislation.

Bill C-22 received first reading in the House of Commons on the December 15, 1999. The purpose of the bill is to remedy the shortcomings in Canada's anti-money laundering legislation as defined in the G-7's financial action task force on money laundering in its 1997-98 report which said:

The only major weakness is the inability to effectively and efficiently respond to requests for assistance in relation to restraint and forfeiture. The use of domestic money laundering proceedings to seize, restrain, and forfeit the proceeds of offences committed in other countries is recognized as sometimes ineffective, and legislation to allow Canada to enforce foreign forfeiture requests directly should be introduced.

In addition, the FATF recommended that reporting requirements in Canada be made mandatory rather than voluntary, as is currently the case, and that a financial intelligence unit be established to deal with the collection, management, analysis and dissemination of suspicious transaction reports and other relevant intelligence data.

Organized criminals, particularly in the drug trade, generate and launder billions of dollars annually. They launder money in order to continue their illegal operations. They move to jurisdictions with strong controls to jurisdictions with weak or no controls, and I have just unfortunately described where the government has allowed Canada to fall. Financial transactions conceal criminal profits to make them appear legitimate.

Yesterday my colleague from Surrey Central gave some examples of the criminal use of money laundering, but it is more than just the criminal use of money laundering. There is also the whole issue of terrorist organizations being involved.

On January 5, 1999, a television report reported on criminal organizations that want to launder money through Canadian business. A multinational company trading in the stock market was found to have ties to the Russian mob. While investigating the company, YBM Magnex, this market investigator traced the company's corporate history back to one of the world's top criminals and head of the eastern European Mafia. The company, now delisted, had stocks valued at $600 million and its principal business was laundering money for organized crime.

The story went on to say there are an estimated $400 billion in profits from the sale of state assets that are now looking to be laundered. It is more than just ordinary criminal activity that we associate with drugs. Now we are talking about the use of money laundering to move state assets from Russia.

As one investigator puts it, Canada and the U.S. are like candy stores for criminals. The unanswered question is how many investors were hurt with the evaporation of the $600 million equity in YBM Magnex.

We have just seen in the last couple of days billions of dollars removed from the stock exchange. Probably hundreds of thousands of retail investors in Canada have been seriously hurt with their speculation in the stock market, but this was a situation where $600 million evaporated in value from the stock market. What about those investors?

Even the former premier of the province of Ontario and very high profile Canadians in the public eye were sucked into the YBM Magnex vortex. The Ontario Stock Exchange and Securities Commission got a deserved black eye for not adequately protecting investors. This followed on the heels of the $6 billion Bre-X debacle. It is little wonder Canada has a less than stellar reputation in the global investment market.

Capital investment is what builds an economy. It is well past time for the federal government to take its responsibilities more seriously and to do things in a more timely manner.

As I mentioned, the member for Surrey Central yesterday gave some good examples of how money is laundered, but what about the issue I have raised of terrorism? According to an RCMP report, Toronto and Montreal groups support the Tamils and Hamas. According to the Ottawa Citizen of Monday, March 27, 2000:

Violent street gangs in Toronto and Montreal are channelling criminal profits to Tamil terrorists waging a bloody fight for an independent homeland in Sri Lanka, says an RCMP intelligence report. An extensive probe by the Mounties found “strong connections” between the outlaw gangs and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, one of the world's most dangerous guerrilla groups. “There is clear evidence to support the relationship and that the money involved is being funnelled to the LTTE for extremist purposes in Sri Lanka,” says the newly declassified report, obtained through the Access to Information Act. The RCMP implicate the Tamil criminal groups in a staggering variety of activities, including extortion, home invasion, attempted murder, theft, importation and sale of brown heroin, arms trafficking, production and sale of counterfeit passports, migrant smuggling, bank and casino fraud, and money laundering. The activity is escalating and likely will become more difficult for police, adds the report.

This is an exceptionally serious issue. I say one last time, shame on the government for the unnecessary delay in bringing the legislation to the House.

Some concerns have been raised about the legislation. Criminal defence lawyers and the federal privacy commissioner warned the reporting scheme could turn Canada into a nation of snitches. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said the transaction reporting regime could become “a bureaucratic monster”. CSIS proposed more selective measures that would target parties known to engage in dubious activities. A writer in the Financial Post , Terence Corcoran, indicated:

If passed, Bill C-22 would give Ottawa fresh authority to trap the innocent, infringe on privacy, collect mountains of information on citizens and put routine money transactions under suspicion. It would also conscript lawyers, banks, accountants and others into a national subculture of informants and snitches.

In a letter to the justice minister last December, the Canadian Bar Association listed some of the threats posed by Ottawa's plan to increase its surveillance over money transactions greater than $10,000. It said routine legitimate business transactions could be disrupted and solicitor-client relationships undermined. “The mandatory reporting of information which may be confidential is a drastic measure and a gross intrusion into a previously protected sphere”. The bill, it said, amounted to “restructuring the relationship of trust between lawyers and clients”.

There are protections under criminal law. I have read that:

At common law, securing a conviction for money laundering requires the Crown to prove four elements of the offence beyond a reasonable doubt. Specifically, it must be proven that the accused (i) dealt with the laundered property (ii) with intent to convert or conceal it. Moreover, the property must have been (iii) derived from the commission of a predicate offence, and (iv) the accused must have had knowledge of that fact. As a result of legislative enactments, however, the Crown is now required to prove only the accused's subjective belief that the proceeds were derived from the commission of the predicate offence, even if this is not the case. This allows the police to arrange “sting” operations.

This is another tool in the ability of the police to be able to go after that.

In addition, all the money laundering offences include a companion offence relating to possession of proceeds, which may result in a conviction even where the Crown is unable to prove the laundering offence. The “possession of proceeds of crime” provision is broader in the Criminal Code than in other statutes; it applies to the possession of proceeds of any indictable offence, not only to predicate offences. While these are not money-laundering provisions themselves, they have proven useful to police in securing convictions in the absence of sufficient evidence to secure a conviction for a laundering offence.

I suggest that this is exactly the fine tuning the committee will have to get into.

There will always be exceptions in criminal law, but on balance the criminal law, as it is presently constituted, works as far as it has gone. Late though the government may be, it is now adding another tool to the tool kit so the police will be able to enact enforcement. This gives us an idea of the balance between entrapment of the innocent and effective tools of law to help our enforcement agencies do their job.

In another article from the Montreal Gazette on December 4 1999, Tom Naylor, an economics professor at McGill University in Montreal, wrote:

Yet money laundering is a contrived offence that has no business in the Criminal Code. And perfectly satisfactory instruments for stripping criminals of their ill-gotten gains already exist.

That is not the point. The point is not to strip the criminals of their ill-gotten gains. It is a byproduct of this and other legislation. The point is to interdict the flow of ill-gotten gains and determine its source. By determining its source, the police can then proceed with proper criminal investigations and proper criminal prosecutions against people who are involved in these illegal activities, which are not only dangerous to our families and our society in the broader context but perhaps even dangerous to the very sovereignty of our nation as we understand it.

Therefore, inflammatory comments about the effect of this legislation are not helpful in this dialogue. Sincere concerns about ensuring that our individual rights and freedoms are protected and sincere concerns about drawing out what the trade-off will be are valuable contributions to this. However, with every law there is a degree of trade-off for the person who is involved in the illegal activity against the freedoms that we as law-abiding citizens have a right to enjoy in our society.

Let us deal with the funding issues of this legislation. Previous attempts to curb money laundering have been hampered at every step by budget problems. Curbing money laundering is a very effective weapon against the drug trade and frontline RCMP officers risk their lives every day in the fight against organized crime. I am not only thinking of frontline RCMP officers who risk their lives, but I am also thinking of the people who co-operate with the RCMP and funnel information to them. Those people also put their lives on the line. We have read and are aware of many situations where people have put their lives on the line and then, due to lack of adequate legislation, the perpetrators of the offence have been able to either walk away or get off with a reduced charge.

The benefits of crime control far outweigh the cost of implementing the programs to curb money laundering. We must ensure resources are available to get the job done.

I have been advised that a separate agency is required to create protection for our freedoms. With the agency standing alone and enforcement regimes like the police and CSIS having to substantiate further requests through courts of law, it is expected there will be sufficient protection for law-abiding citizens. Again, this is something that all members of parliament will be examining very closely when the legislation is before a committee.

We have to make sure that we have proper laws for Canada so that we are not a haven for the proceeds of crime. However, at the end of the day, what we also have to be very clear about is that when we give these tools to the enforcement officers in our community, we also have to be sure that there are proper safeguards built in so that law-abiding citizens are not drawn in.

I will reflect back for a second on the YBM Magnex International Inc. example. We also need this legislation to ensure that law-abiding citizens are not also drawn into the vortex of the money laundering that is currently going on within the boundaries of our sovereign nation.

We will be supporting this legislation but not blindly. We will be ensuring that the rights of all Canadians are protected as this comes back to this legislature.

[First Nations Ombudsman Act, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I want to say that this is a very personal issue to me. My wife and I visited the home of an aboriginal family. We were confronted by six women. One of the women there was just completely shaken with the fact that the chief and council had removed her family from her. She had no place to go. The host who convened this meeting had helped her get her family back by going to the provincial authorities. By doing so, this woman now has her family back. She was really shaken with the concept of self-government because with self-government, where would she go?

That is not the end of the story. The end of this particular story is that the host of this meeting and her family were then told that they must leave the reserve because the people on the reserve, the chief and council, said that they had a requirement for housing, notwithstanding the fact that there are 11 vacant houses on that reserve.

She was not only required to leave, but she was literally frozen out of her house last winter when the chief and council saw to it that the power and water were turned off at her home.

The issue of the ombudsman is a real issue. It is a gut level issue that I have seen and I have experienced. This is something that absolutely must happen if the government is set on the idea of going ahead with self-government. Along with self-government there must be the position of ombudsman.

[Modernization Of Benefits And Obligations Act, April 3rd, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I last had an opportunity to speak to the bill on February 21. In the period of time since then and considering the momentous number of things the bill would change, the lack of interest by the national news media in this debate, particularly in getting the information out to the Canadian public so that it might be made aware of the implications, has been interesting.

I believe that any society in the world is no stronger than its smallest unit. Unfortunately legislation that we pass in the House frequently chips away at the ability of Canadians to organize themselves in any way to enhance their family unit, which is the smallest unit in society.

The Liberal government introduced legislation called the same sex omnibus bill. It will grant a same sex couple virtually all the benefits and responsibilities of common law couples.

Bill C-23, an act to modernize the Statutes of Canada in relation to benefits and obligations, would amend 68 federal laws affecting key departments and agencies. The bill creates a new term called common law partner, defined as a person cohabiting with another person of either sex in a relationship for a year. Probably the most serious single oversight of the Liberals is that they chose not to define the word conjugal. The common definition of a word may or may not become the legal definition. Lack of definition in this legislation requires the judges to make law. Conjugal will likely mean intimate sexual activity.

The government wants us to believe that the bill merely gives same sex couples the same federal benefits as heterosexual couples. As I mentioned at the outset, unfortunately the mainstream news media are basically ignoring the entire issue being debated not only today but for the time it has been before the House of Commons.

I think the word news is made up of the word new in that they want to have something new. I would therefore draw to their attention what my colleagues in the Canadian Alliance have been reading and reading and reading all day long.

It is the opinion of Mr. David M. Brown, a partner in Stikeman Elliott's civil litigation department in Toronto. He practises commercial and corporate litigation and administrative law. Mr. Brown is a sessional lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Queen's University where he has taught trial advocacy since 1989. He was a seminar leader for the civil procedure section of the Ontario bar admissions course.

Mr. Brown has appeared at all levels of court in Ontario and Manitoba, as well as frequently before the Supreme Court of Canada. Major constitutional briefs have included being counsel for interveners before the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada in Rosenberg in 1998 and M v H in 1999.

This person's opinion has some very distinct weight in the context of the minister coming to the justice committee and saying “We are going to define marriage and this is how we are going to do it”.

The Minister of Justice is also a distinguished lawyer. I believe she has taught law at least at one university in Canada. Therefore it is hard for me to understand how she could have missed the obvious item that Mr. Brown has pointed out:

If Parliament intends to state that, as a matter of federal law, “marriage” is the “lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others,” then in my opinion the Minister's amendment does not achieve that objective. As previously stated, the Minister's amendment is not an enacting section—it will not bring into force any legally binding definition of “marriage”. By contrast, if the Bill was amended to enact a definition of marriage for each of the particular acts referred to in the Bill, then Parliament would be giving a clear indication of its intention to the courts and to the public at large.

I mention again that it is a responsibility in a democracy for us to have freedom of the press, but it too has a responsibility to bring to the people of Canada these facts and these words. It is the opinion of this respected scholar that the justice minister, either in haste or perhaps in ignorance, clearly missed the boat by not putting this definition into the enacting part of the legislation. I would not dare suggest any other motivation on the part of the minister.

We have spoken all day long about the fact that this is an attack on marriage. Although it was unlikely intended that is exactly what the bill is. Its consequences will abolish marriage as a specific relationship under federal law.

The purpose of the bill is to open up the unique rights and privileges of heterosexual married couples to those cohabiting in a conjugal relationship. This is very troublesome. To acquire proof of conjugal or sexual relationships between individuals would necessitate a gross intrusion into the bedrooms of Canada. When Pierre Trudeau was prime minister he said the nation had no place in the bedrooms of Canada. Yet the same Liberal Party is now stating that benefits will be available on the basis of sexual intimacy.

Considering that Revenue Canada insists on snooping into every conceivable part of our lives, even to the point of spying on Canadians to establish criminal activity when reporting income tax exemptions and expenses, it is absurd to extend benefits under the Income Tax Act on the basis of private personal activity that cannot and must not be monitored. I make this point very clearly.

There is confusion between the Minister of Justice and the junior minister from Vancouver Centre. There will be court intrusion. Let me state again to single parents that going into the 21st century we recognize there are many single parent families, sometimes based on choice and sometimes based on uncontrolled events. This is why Canadian society has correctly decided, along with the rest of the world's nations, to extend special benefits to people with relationships similar to the heterosexual traditional family unit. Those benefits are extended to single parents, along with family units related by blood, marriage and adoption.

Here is something that is very troublesome. The fact that the government intentionally chose not to include a definition of the word conjugal turns that definition over to the courts. We have seen in at least a half a dozen cases in the last four or five years where the supreme court has intruded into where parliament wanted to go with particular law. I think of the Feeney case in British Columbia. Basically it excluded all sorts of evidence that was taken when a person was in flight from the police having just committed an absolutely terrible murder. He bludgeoned a person to death.

In the so-called Feeney case the supreme court said that all that evidence must be excluded because there was no warrant to walk into the person's house who had just fled the scene of the crime. The House of Commons, therefore, had to deal with this intrusion, and I call it an intrusion, by the supreme court clearly defining where the police can and cannot go. In fact the enforcement powers in Canada have had their ability to move forward and take enforcement actions seriously hampered by the supreme court.

I cite that as one example of the fact that we in parliament have a responsibility to the people of Canada who elected us to come forward with correct, clear and concise legislation. When the government turns around and will not define the word conjugal, it invites the supreme court and any other court to define that word. In other words it invites the courts to make laws that the Liberals do not have the intestinal fortitude to bring forward. When that sees piled on top of it this situation where the justice minister has come forward with an amendment that appears to be doing what Canadians want but in fact will not, is a serious problem in terms of this legislation.

This legislation in my judgment is not at all reflective of the values of people in Canadian society.

[Supply, March 21st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, very clearly what this is about is the mismanagement of funds. There is a difference of opinion between ourselves and the NDP on how to effect these changes. That is part of the political process. Indeed, when we get to an election it will be part of the dialogue.

That is not the issue. The issue is the gross mismanagement and the cavalier attitude that the Liberals have toward hard earned tax dollars. It does not even control the disbursement of those tax dollars. That is the issue.

[Supply, March 21st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, our party will be supporting the motion for the reasons I stated. Clearly there must be a full independent public inquiry into this affair.

This affair is a matter of principle, which is something that the parliamentary secretary clearly did not understand in her presentation for the government today. She said “What is the big deal? This is only one—” and then she gave some kind of fraction, 1/186th or whatever it was. I do not know. It had something to do with Liberal math, so I do not really understand it.

There are dollars and cents involved. However, the most important issue is not the dollars and cents. The most important issue is that the government goes out of its way constantly to pat itself on the back, calling itself a wonderful manager of the Canadian taxpayers' funds, when in fact it is not. It is absolutely cavalier with the money that comes from the Canadian taxpayer to the public treasury. On top of that, it gets involved in a process that is a cover-up, because it works these funds as it sees fit.

Last Thursday and Friday were absolutely classic examples. The minister herself did not have a clue as to whether there was a fourth police inquiry into this affair in the Prime Minister's riding. First she said there was, and then she said there was not. It struck us over the weekend that the people in her department changed the facts so that they ended up supporting the minister's utterances.

If there was ever a reason for an independent public inquiry, this is it, and the time is now.

[Supply, March 21st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, unlike the previous speaker from the Liberals, I would like to speak specifically about the motion that is before the House today and hopefully not get into the same kind of rant that he decided to get into.

The motion reads:

That this House condemn the government for the poor management seen at the Department of Human Resources Development, particularly in the award and use of grants for partisan purposes, and that it recommend the creation of an independent public commission of inquiry, whose members will be appointed by the House, and whose mandate will be to inquire into all practices of that department and to report to the House by September 19, 2000.

I will be keying in very specifically on the issue of the independent public commission of inquiry. There is nothing more important to this scandal than that we get to the bottom of it and the only way we will get to the bottom of it is with an independent public inquiry.

The last thing the Liberals would want is an independent public inquiry. I know this because of my experience in attempting to pursue the involvement of the Prime Minister in the APEC affair as it happened and unfolded in November 1997 in Vancouver.

This government knows by experience that the longer the process is drawn out the less relevant it is. Clearly, it has managed to bury the Prime Minister's involvement in the suppression of Canadians' freedom of expression and their fundamental rights that they hold as Canadian citizens. It has managed to bury this in a totally irrelevant process which, again I say, is why I am speaking specifically to the issue in the motion of the importance of an independent inquiry.

The government's answer to accountability is damage control. It deflects the issue hoping that people become bored and it complicates the issue until it is no longer recognizable. As I said, the APEC inquiry is an absolute classic example of this.

In the Prime Minister's 36 years of public life, he has learned how to use the system to protect himself, particularly by burying the issues.

The Canadian people want simple answers to the question in APEC: Was the Prime Minister involved in suppressing Canadians' freedom of expression? Is there support for my position that indeed that was the case?

Here is why that matters, as expressed by Craig Jones, one of the jailed protesters. He said:

The root issue for me is to what extent we are going to accept the political control of the RCMP by the executive branch of the government.

Why it is important to the people of Canada is the significance of the separation of executive and enforcement or politicians from police. Where there is a dictatorship there are politicians directing the police. Where there is a democracy we are supposed to have a firewall between politicians and police.

To the issue of accountability and to the issue of an independent inquiry, I refer you, Mr. Speaker, to September 21, 1998 when I asked the Prime Minister the following question:

I would ask the Prime Minister one more time...Will he admit that his fingerprints are all over this process, that he is fully responsible for the fact that democratic rights of Canadians were taken away as a public statement, a political statement by him?

The solicitor general of the day said:

I would appeal to the members opposite to recognize the appropriate role for the public complaints commission that was established by parliament. It deserves our support and I would ask the members opposite to give it to the commission.

The relevance to this motion is that the public complaints commission was the incorrect body to be looking into this issue. The relevance to this motion is that I suggest that the human resources development minister's appraisal of the problem, as she sees it under her so-called six point program, is the incorrect vehicle to be taking a look at this.

Let us take a look at the APEC affair to see how this became convoluted and how a proper inquiry ended up being twisted and pulled out of the realm of possibility.

I asked the following question on September 24, 1998:

There is no level of inquiry. There is the public complaints commission, and I quote from the RCMP Act “They only may look into any member or any other person employed under the authority of this act.

That is what the public complaints commission can look into. It is strictly a snow job that the solicitor general is doing—

The solicitor general again said:

This inquiry has exactly the same powers as the kind of inquiry that the hon. member was demanding, very specifically the powers of a broad inquiry.

I point out again that throughout this entire affair the respective solicitors general and the Deputy Prime Minister all said that this was the correct vehicle, which is why we support the Bloc Quebecois motion.

If we are going to get to the bottom of this scandal at Human Resources Development Canada, the only way we will get there is through an independent public inquiry.

On October 20, 1998, I asked the Prime Minister, with respect to the APEC affair, why he was trying to bury this affair under the public complaints commission. I quote the Prime Minister, who said:

I want people to understand that it is the opposition that should apologize for depriving the Canadian people of an independent body to look into that problem.

He was either unaware, uninformed or in fact wilfully said things that were not accurate when he made that statement because this has never been an independent public inquiry. This has always come under the public complaints commission which was never ever designed to uncover the fingerprints of the Prime Minister with regard to this issue.

I must say that Commissioner Ted Hughes has a tremendous task ahead of him. In my judgment he has been doing an outstanding job, yet he is still not getting to the bottom of it.

In February 1999 the Prime Minister committed to the House that everyone from his office and the government would be available to testify. Considering the number of fingerprints the Prime Minister had on the APEC affair, we assumed everyone included himself.

However, totally contrary to the representations made by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the respective solicitors general, and contrary to the answers to the questions that we had posed in question period, the lawyers for the government, understandably, argued in front of the commissioner that the Prime Minister should not appear. It was something of a surprise that the solicitor for the commission itself also argued to the commissioner, in public at the commission hearing, that the Prime Minister not appear. However, it went over the top when the lawyer for the RCMP argued at the public complaints commission that the Prime Minister should not appear.

Again I say that the reason we support the Bloc Quebecois motion that is before the House is because of the importance and significance of an independent public inquiry to get to the bottom of the HRDC scandal.

On February 28, 2000 the Prime Minister said that he did not have to go to the inquiry because he could reply to questions in the House. He has repeatedly stated in the House that he will not answer questions and that we should let the commission do its job. However, forget that, the commissioner is trying to do his job. When it was convenient, the Prime Minister hid behind the incorrect vehicle and this government chose to cover up for the Prime Minister.

I pointed out that there were three important differences between the House and the APEC inquiry: First, witnesses are under oath; second, witnesses may be cross-examined and their statement of facts may be challenged; and furthermore, the answer from a witness may exceed 35 seconds.

In summary, from the example Canadians have before them about the coverup by the politicians directing the police at the APEC inquiry and the fact that the government wilfully chose to hide that inquiry under the incorrect vehicle, the public complaints commission, clearly the House must support the Bloc motion to call for an independent inquiry to uncover the facts relating to the scandal at HRDC.

[Supply, March 21st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I think it might be good if the member were to speak with some relevance to the motion before the House instead of acting like his dog just died.

[Supply, March 20th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I could agree to that. I point out that health care costs have risen by 19% since the Liberals came to power while, at the same time, contrary to the assertions of the other side, the contributions by the federal government to the provincial governments have gone down drastically, down by about 40%.