Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to speak to the concurrence motion. Tonight I wish talk about the report that has been generated by the committee where I and my Conservative colleagues sat through every single meeting. We made sure we were well prepared. There was a tremendous amount of reading material provided to us as members of the committee to prepare for each and every witness.
I want to put on the record what our perspective was regarding the study, as the report would call it, “The Mulroney-Schreiber Affair: Our Case for a Full Public Inquiry”. The motion that got us there stated in part:
--in order to examine whether there were violations of ethical and code of conduct standards by any office holder, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics review matters relating to the Mulroney Airbus settlement, including any and all new evidence, testimony and information not available at the time of settlement and including allegations relating to the Right Hon. Brian Mulroney made by Karlheinz Schreiber and, in particular, the handling of allegations by the present government including the circulation of relevant correspondence in the Privy Council Office and Prime Ministers Office; that Karlheinz Schreiber be called to be a witness before the committee without delay; and that the committee report to the House its findings, conclusions and recommendations thereon.
That is the actual motion that got the committee started. As committee members we went through all those hearings. They were virtually all on television. Many Canadians tuned in and by the end of it many Canadians tuned out because they realized what it was about.
I am not here tonight to support one side or the other. I think the motion was to look at what happened around the Airbus settlement and that was part of the work that was done. Let us be frank, based on the witnesses we called, from chefs at 24 Sussex to a number of former lobbyists here in Ottawa, the actual hearings or study went a lot further than what the actual motion said. But that is fair. Members of the committee had the opportunity to call witnesses and they did, and we heard them all. We asked them all very good questions.
The report that we have in front of us, entitled “What We Heard”, basically has, at the end of the day, one recommendation. The report is a review of what witnesses told us, quotes from them, and the direction they were taking. For 99.9% of it our committee supported that because it is what we heard.
The staff from the Library of Parliament did an absolutely fabulous job in putting together a synopsis of the issues that we had talked about, what the witnesses came to tell and the responses. In the end there was one recommendation and I think that should be clear to everybody, that there was only one recommendation from what we found. It was that the government appoint a commissioner of inquiry pursuant to part I of the Inquiries Act at the earliest possible date and that the commission be granted a broad mandate to inquire into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair.
This report was sent to Dr. Johnston in order to assist him in evaluating what the terms of reference should be for an inquiry and he took that under consideration. He has, as was mentioned before, sent his second report for the independent adviser on what he thinks based on the testimony he heard. Another analysis that he has done is on where the inquiry should go.
At no time did we, as Conservative members of the committee, advocate that there should be no inquiry. The Prime Minister had committed to one. The evidence indicated that there were some questions and I think it became obvious that dealing with this kind of item at a parliamentary committee might not be the wisest way to go, but we did the work that we were required to do and made sure we did the best job we could in terms of asking appropriate questions.
Attached to the report, to which all parties are entitled, is a supplementary report or, as some people call it, a minority report. Each party's position might not be exactly what is in the body of the report, but we all had an opportunity to say what we wanted to do.
One of the things we were very diligent about, based on the motion that brought us there, was we wanted our work to be done in a non-partisan manner, which is very difficult at the committee level, let us be frank. We did our best and asked basically the same set of questions to get the same sort of response from all witnesses in order to be consistent. We wanted a consistent approach to the responses to the questions we asked.
We heard 10 full hours of personal testimony and saw 100 pages of documents from Mr. Schreiber in addition to the testimony of Mr. Mulroney and a number of other witnesses. We asked the question over and over again and everyone answered the same way, that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Mulroney was ever produced. I think the member who spoke previously said the exact same thing in her speech, that there was no real evidence of any wrongdoing on Mr. Mulroney's part.
The real issue we were there for was the Airbus libel case. From my understanding at the time, the Liberal government had sent a letter to Switzerland, which not only accused the Right Hon. Brian Mulroney of wrongdoing, but had already found him guilty. He found that offensive and sued the Liberal government. My understanding is the Liberal government settled.
The Hon. Allan Rock appeared before the committee. He had been the minister of justice at the time and had made the decision. In his testimony, he speculated, that if he had known the information, it may have changed the position he recommended to the then Liberal government in its settlement. However, he admitted to me and all committee members that it was speculation and, from the committee's perspective, it could not clearly say yes or no that it would have changed things.
I am not a lawyer, though I know a number of my colleagues on the committee are. I do not know if we could legitimately say that we knew for sure what the material difference would have been in a lawsuit process, or whether he did or did not have dealings, or whether information was missing, when it came to the actual wording in the letter in this lawsuit. From the Airbus perspective and the reason why this committee was charged with the study, we could not find any conclusive evidence that would have made a difference in the Airbus settlement.
I will get to the recommendations in a few minutes, but in our the conclusions we clearly outlined that the language used was the essential harm and that was the reason the government apologized and paid a cost. The committee was following what Mr. Rock had said. There had been a decade long RCMP investigation into the Airbus purchase and, from the committee's perspective, we could not find anything that would have made a difference in the Airbus settlement.
As for the public inquiry, which we all called for and the Prime Minister committed to, in his second report Mr. Johnston indicates that has been looked after and there may be other issues at which we may need to look. Those are possibilities that the inquiry can follow up on and review. The fact is the Airbus issue is what drove us to this committee, it drove the study and we could not find a single witness to tell us that there was some sort of connection.
On the first day of Mr. Schreiber's testimony he said “absolutely not”. The next day he was not sure, but he would provide us more information. He sent me two binders full of news articles he had photocopied out of newspaper articles and so on. His testimony in front of us was less than credible, confusing and often contradictory over the number of times we saw him. Maybe, and let us hope so, a public inquiry with a lawyer system and a research team behind it will be able to find the truth if that is possible from Mr. Schreiber.
However, we could not find any evidence of wrongdoing from anybody in terms of testimony. There was speculation from some about other issues. There is no doubt that we go into other issues. It was not just about Airbus. We got into other projects that Mr. Schreiber was trying to bring to Canada. We got into the issues of a private deal between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney. There were no facts. It was “he said, he said”. Who knows what the actual truth is? We certainly were not equipped to do that.
On the correspondence branch and how it handled Mr. Schreiber's correspondence, once we saw Mr. Schreiber's correspondence, there were really no witnesses to the issue and it did not become the issue that some people thought it might.
There was the discussion of the transfer of cash and whether it was an appropriate code of conduct for a member of Parliament, a former prime minister. The timing was a big issue and if he had left office as prime minister. If members read Mr. Johnston's report, those are the kinds of allegations that probably we could use a little more investigation from a public inquiry. Maybe out of the public inquiry will come the need for changes to the code of conduct for members of Parliament and public office-holders and that those changes and improvements will be made. I hope the public inquiry will accomplish that.
We did have some recommendations at the end of our report. Let me just read the recommendations on the record so people understand. They are:
Therefore, given:
The lack of any evidence of wrongdoing
That it is unlikely that any substantial new evidence will be produced...
We asked Mr. Schreiber to come and tell us more, but he would not produce anything more or anything that was even remotely useful, unless people like reading articles from the newspaper about pizza-making machines. We could not find anybody who had any more evidence, so there was no new or substantial evidence of any wrongdoing.
Therefore, we recommended:
—that, should the Government deem an inquiry necessary, the terms of reference for the inquiry should be restricted to examining those questions that will lead to recommendations designed to guide the decisions made by public office holders after they have left office.
As I was involved with the committee for months, the people often called me, or emailed me. They asked me what we were doing. It became obvious to them that this was not the appropriate forum. We did the work as we were asked to do, but at the end of the day, people asked whether we should have the public inquiry or not. I am a firm believer, as our Prime Minister has outlined, that we need a public inquiry.
I do not deny the fact that there are still some questions to be answered. None of my colleagues on the Conservative side deny that. Some issues were identified through this study on how public-office holders, and in my view members of Parliament, deal with their business after leaving office to ensure there is a transparent, ethical approach to their life after leaving office and that the public can be confident that there is a set of rules, a code of conduct that will be followed by members of Parliament upon leaving office.
At the end of the day, it was a good experience for us as a Parliament to go through and to understand what was needed in this kind of study. It was not like a study in any other committee that I have been on thus far. I have not been here that long, but I have been on a number of committees where experts can be called to talk about the issues, where we can get opposing sides to the issue. We have people who do the research, we have time to look at these issues and then come up with recommendations and report. We may not get everyone on side around the committee table, but hopefully there is some consensus to make improvements to the operation of government and to the development of policy and of the laws of our country.
In this case, the type of inquiry did not add a whole lot of value to policy. It did not add anything to the legislative branch in terms of what we wanted to do legislatively. It was a learning experience for parliamentarians. We were concerned this kind of inquiry would be a political football, with people trying to make political points. At the end of the day, this showed it did not work, that this was not the right forum for that. A public inquiry is the right forum, so that is the direction we will be heading.
To summarize, we came together to look at all the issues such as why the Liberal government settled on the libel suit on Airbus. We found no evidence that pointed to any issue in that area. We had no evidence of any wrongdoing of any public-office holder. This Conservative government believes there should be an inquiry. There are still a number of questions to be answered, which came out during the meetings, and we have committed to do that.
With respect to my former colleague, the Prime Minister made the right decision by getting a third party to prepare the terms of reference so Canadians could not accuse us of bias in how we set this up or what the inquiry would undertake. That is the whole purpose of having an independent adviser to do that. Nobody criticized the individual's credentials. I never heard it once. We are taking his advice. We will have a public inquiry and we will get answers to the questions that are still unanswered from our public study at the ethics committee.
