Peter MacKay

[National Defence, February 25th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister declared in December that he had received no proposal from the United States on the topic of the missile defence shield. And yet the Prime Minister's spokesman Scott Reid, said yesterday that he had received a written proposal. Canadians have the right to know what the Prime Minister said no to.

Why is the Prime Minister hiding this important information from Canadians and how does he explain this contradiction?

[The Budget, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague from Winnipeg is very genuine in her commentary and question. While the budget is meagre, half-measures and a slow baby step toward the right direction of giving lower and medium income Canadians more access to their money, measures which I believe will not have an impact for years to come, it would be irresponsible and ignorant of the fact that Canadians do not want another election. If we were to just charge into this process and say that we were going to bring the government down regardless of what it does, it would not be in the interests of anyone, including the hon. member's party or any member of the House.

We are looking at this as a way to be constructive in our criticism, pointing out differences that the Conservative Party would put forward in our belief about what is good for the country, costed common sense measures that we think would improve the quality of lives for Canadians. We may disagree at certain points, but I believe the intent is genuine. I believe all members of the House want to put forward their ideas and have the opportunity to express them on the floor of the House.

[The Budget, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a good question and it goes to basic issues of accountability. In recent days we debated the issue of foundations, taking money from the public purse and allotting it to these areas that are beyond the scope and examination of the Auditor General or even Parliament.

Taking massive sums of money and in some cases massive surpluses from working Canadians, employers and employees and hiding it away from the discretion and examination of the public through Parliament and the officers of Parliament, undermines public confidence. Not only that, it takes a lot of money out of the economy that could be put to good use.

Time and again Conservatives have asserted that Canadians know how to spend their money better than government in most cases. We have seen so many examples of abuse, waste and mismanagement, be it the gun registry, the ad scandal, the HDRC program and the procurement of expensive luxury jets without tendering. Yet the government persists in taking away large sums of money, squirrelling and hiding it away from Canadians. Then in a very patronizing way, it suggests that it knows how to spend it better than taxpayers.

[The Budget, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we have not voted for anything of course. I hear the chipmunks on the other side already chirping. I can see him shaking his head, and I can hear it rattling from here.

The budget promises huge spending commitments for a national day care system. Again, there is no detail put forward. It is much the same as we see with the commitments on the environment and climate change. There are big sums of money, big promises, yet there is no actual detail as to how this is going to be achieved, how this is going to actually benefit Canadians.

The tax breaks I have discussed already. Corporate taxes are reduced by 3% to 19%, but only by the year 2010. The tax cuts will not occur fast enough to ensure that Canadians will improve their standard of living in any near future.

There has been much made of the proposal for our military. Yes, it is a welcome step in the right direction. Previous members of the Conservative Party, previous defence critics, such as Elsie Wayne from Saint John, New Brunswick, for years went on and on about the need to give the military the necessary tools and support.

Since the Liberal government took office in 1993, I am quick to point out that it has cut $20 billion cumulatively from the Canadian Forces. This has left soldiers with aging and dangerous equipment, in some cases barefoot in the barracks as we heard last week from our current defence critic. The forces have been left with a lack of spare parts, a lack of overtime and abysmal living conditions. The list goes on and on.

At least this budget finally acknowledges some of the detriment and some of the harm that the Liberal government has wreaked itself. Yet the Liberals would like the country to stand up and applaud them for putting back a portion of the money that they took away. This is rather reminiscent of a pyromaniac returning to the scene of the crime and offering to help put out the fire. As the chief of the defence staff said a few weeks ago, this administration is responsible for the sorry state of the current military. It amounts to just putting back part of what was taken away.

Our suggestion is, yes, it is a step in the right direction. It is an acknowledgment of need, but the money is not going to come soon enough and it will not come in sufficient amounts.

The Senate committee on defence said that the forces would need at least a $4 billion influx of cash immediately. What we see in the budget is a promise over the long term. Much of it has already been announced, and we know the that money will come will be swallowed up quickly in terms of the commitments for personnel and for equipment.

The long-standing deficits as far as operation and maintenance are yet to be addressed. There is in fact zero money for some of the equipment in the next two years where it is most needed. We continue to make international commitments, yet our ability to protect and ensure that those who do this important work to get that type of equipment in the near future is negligible. The big money plan for the Liberals will not flow for another four to five years.

As Senator Colin Kenny in the other place said in his report of last year on the previous $800 million that had been promised to the military:

The vast majority of the promised capital money will not be spent for five years, or in the case of the Joint Support Ship, ten years. Experience has shown, however, that money promised frequently does not materialize.

That encapsulates much of the commitments that we see in this particular budget.

Before I move on to another issue, I want to talk a little about the state and the size of the DND cash requirement that will follow the international policy statement and the defence policy review. Members of the House will recall that that defence policy review has been promised since the 2002 throne speech, and it was reiterated again last fall. The minister has said that every month we review will be out of the next month. We are still waiting to see some of this implemented.

I would return to a related subject which deals with security and the promise of greater funding for security in this budget. Post-9/11, Canada has had to invest in security measures for counterterrorism, yet the two heads of CSIS, the past and present directors, have confirmed that it is not a question of if Canada will be attacked by terrorists, it is a question of when.

Over the next five years the government will spend another $1 billion overall on security and emergency preparedness initiatives as announced. However, despite the seriousness of global terrorism, the budget base for public security will increase by $170 million in the first year and roughly $200 million each year after. We are again seeing very meagre commitments to this very pressing concern.

The measures outlined in the budget seem to respond to the concerns that have been raised by the Conservative Party and others. In particular I am concerned about maritime airport and border security. This is an area that has been identified time and time again as Canada's most vulnerable point of entry and point of attack. Not to be alarmist, but if something contraband comes into Canada, this is the most likely point of entry. That leaves us vulnerable. There will be more funding allocated to enable container screening and the development of systems of automated targeted and sharing of information with the United States on high risk cargo destined for North America. Only 3% of the current cargo coming into Canada is subject to examination and inspection. Therefore, there is a pressing need in this area.

There will be no new funding for border security. The promise for increased personnel at our borders has been ignored again. Members will recall the tragedy of last year when a border agent in British Columbia, albeit of natural causes, who was working alone. This is the case in many of these single person border crossings.

There is also a recognition of the deplorable state of emergency management after the 9/11 crisis and attack. This has to be approached differently. Critical infrastructure needs to be protected.

These are all areas which arguably have been overlooked in terms of specific funding.

When I think about what could have been done for students, it is abominable that there is nothing in the budget that will provide any immediate relief for students.

My friend talked about the lack of attention to the agriculture sector. This is very true. Families, like the McCarron family from Antigonish, are left wondering what is in this budget for farmers, both east and west. This is an area completely overlooked.

It is the same with the fishery, another long-suffering area in our natural resource sector that was ignored by the budget. Places like Necum Teuch, Sheet Harbour in Guysborough and Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia are communities that are literally left wondering what is there for them in this budget. The modest reductions in income tax will not help working families to make ends meet.

Seniors, persons with disabilities and many Canadians are sorely disappointed that the government has with all that surplus and the opportunity done very little to give Canadians the type of relief and national pay raise they need

[The Budget, February 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I will begin by congratulating my colleague from Medicine Hat. He has done a fine job as the finance critic for the Conservative Party stickhandling through some very substantive issues. I will not comment on his skating skills, but his stickhandling on this particular subject has been tremendous. I am honoured to share my time with him.

As well, I would point out that the leader of the Conservative Party gave a very compelling critique of this budget pointing out its shortcomings, but at the same time recognizing that this is really a page out of the Conservative platform, albeit it does not go far enough. It does not move in a direction quickly enough as we would like to have seen.

It is symbolic of the fact that the Liberal government and the finance minister in particular have recognized the wisdom of the Conservative plan from the last election and have literally pulled much of the initiatives from the pages of that platform. The measures that we see in the budget just take some of the highlights of the Conservative plan.

The Liberals obviously look at the necessity of giving our military more in the way of equipment, more in the way of personnel, a pay raise for those hard-working men and women in uniform, yet much of this is going to be delayed.

In fact, I would describe this budget in many ways as a post-dated cheque. We are not going to see the actual impact of many of these initiatives for years to come, upwards of eight years, five years in many cases. Although the figures themselves seem enormous, when we start to delve into the detail, we find that much of this money will not be delivered on time and perhaps not at all.

What we see with the Liberal government is that much of the commitment goes beyond its mandate. It goes beyond the mandate of any government when it starts promising that these things are going to happen five years down the road. With the volatility of a minority government, it goes beyond arrogance to suggest that the Liberals can make these commitments with any surety.

The tax relief first and foremost that my colleague referred to is certainly meagre. He talks about it being a couple of cups of coffee at Tim Hortons; I would describe it more as a couple of happy meals, but people are not going to be very happy when they actually look at what their take home savings will be.

[National Defence, February 23rd, 2005]

There is a revelation, Mr. Speaker. The United States is an ally.

The Prime Minister was very clear last November when he said that we will certainly have discussions and consultations with Canadians. He agreed to a throne speech amendment that would enable a debate and a vote in the House.

Now we know the Prime Minister took the back door to signing missile defence. He bypassed Parliament. He committed Canada without a detailed proposal or a public debate about the costs or the benefits. He has diminished Canada's influence in the program.

Why did the Prime Minister fumble this file so badly and why has he not come clean with Canadians about this important issue? When did he intend to do so?

[National Defence, February 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, during the Liberal leadership race in 2003, the Prime Minister was singing from a different song book about Canada's participation in missile defence. He said:

If someone is going to be sending missiles over Canadian airspace, we want to be at the table.

U.S. Ambassador McKenna's frankness yesterday confirmed that instead of gathering facts on missile defence, having a debate as promised and having a vote in the House, the Prime Minister did a deal under the table, but denies it.

The defence minister is clearly impaled on a picket fence of indecision. My question is simple. Are we in, are we out or is the Prime Minister dithering still?

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, in fact rumours abound about a number of the programs that are currently operating in the country. Until we are able to have full disclosure and full transparency, this is the great fear that all Canadians share. The Auditor General is perhaps the person with the most credibility at the current time to give those assurances that the money is being spent properly and that there are proper accounting practices.

One example which has been the subject of some discussion in the latest sponsorship scandal involved the Bluenose trust. A very sacred symbol of this country and of my province of Nova Scotia was tainted by this spectacle of money being spent inappropriately, cheques being picked up and commissions being paid for simply delivering a cheque to a crown corporation or to a government foundation.

This type of spectacle absolutely drives cynicism through the roof when it comes to how Canadians view government, view the practice of Parliament and view the spending of their money.

The half measures that are being proposed by the government and the President of the Treasury Board are like being told that we can have a sandwich at the buffet; we are not going to get access to the full disclosure and the full transparency that should come, but we should be satisfied just to take this half measure.

We are not satisfied with that. We are asking the government to move, to support this motion and to get on with doing the important business of giving Canadians value for their money.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as usual, the member for Cypress Hills--Grasslands has cut to the chase. In his plain-spoken way he speaks volumes as to what should happen here.

It is nothing short of a shell game to take the money from one unaccountable and stealth-like program and put it into another foundation where we cannot track the money. The Auditor General herself has no ability, other than voluntarily if that foundation so chooses, to reveal the spending practices. For the Auditor General, there is very little assurance when the President of the Treasury Board says that the government is going to do this in a way that is consistent with other practices. All of this bombast is really just reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic . We are headed for a disaster if these foundations are allowed to continue to function without any accountability, without direct reporting to Parliament, without the Auditor General having the ability to have her officials go in and examine how the money is being spent.

This is what it is about. It is about responsible spending practices and the Auditor General giving the public the ability to judge for themselves whether that money is being spent properly, as we are seeing now with the Gomery commission. Clearly the jury may be out as far as the commission is concerned, but most Canadians know that buying advertising, and buying it only through Liberal friendly advertising firms, is not consistent with how they would like their tax dollars spent.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to see you in the chair, and I am pleased to participate in this important debate. I congratulate my colleague from Simcoe-Grey for her very insightful comments with regard to the motion before the House. Similarly, I think the real crux of the issue was referenced by my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands when he said that this had all the earmarking of another boondoggle, another scandal as we have seen with the likes of the gun registration, the long gun registry, that was going to cost $2 million. We know it has escalated and is now approaching $2 billion. We know the situation involving the sponsorship program has criminal investigations ongoing. We know the Gomery commission is continuing to deliberate over massive misspending and misappropriation of public money.

I think Canadians are most struck with that. It is the absolute magnitude of the amount of taxpayer money involved in these programs.

The motion quite clearly calls for the window to be opened, to air out the government's activities, to shine a light in the corner of the government's spending practices. Clearly, this would be of benefit to everyone. Quite frankly it would be consistent with what the Prime Minister speaks of when he says there is a democratic deficit. It is beyond the pale. It is beyond any excuse why the government would resist this type of motion which seeks to accomplish the very words of the Prime Minister in addressing the democratic deficit.

In the absence of doing so, the democratic deficit widens. What Canadians perhaps do not understand about this exercise is it is aimed at allowing the Auditor General to do what she has done before. For had it not been the work of Sheila Fraser and the Auditor General's office and officials, perhaps the sponsorship scandal would have never been broken wide open.

We did our work here in the House of Commons, and there is a partisan element to that. What was most telling was what the Auditor General disclosed about the sponsorship program. She similarly disclosed in previous reports that the government was breaking every rule in the book to cover up and keep secret its activities around the spending of public money.

The motion is meant to empower and enable the Auditor General to continue with the good work that she has done in the past, and also previous auditor generals, in holding the government to account, bringing about greater transparency and responsibility in spending. Any resistance to this effort is really inexcusable on the part of the government.

Ironically, and I say this as an aside, what we saw happening in the wake of the sponsorship scandal was efforts to curtail the Auditor General from her good work by cutting her budget. That was the government's true response. Then there was the political exercise of putting it off to one side by calling for the commission.

It is incredible, at a time when the public inquiry is still ongoing into the very workings and inner workings of government, that the government would be resistant to somehow expand the mandate of the Auditor General to allow her to have the powers of an external auditor in these foundations to ensure that they are up to par and that they are subject to performance audits by her department. There should not be any question. There should be no hesitancy whatsoever that this should be the case.

The member for Simcoe--Grey laid out a very compelling argument as to what benefits would accrue if the Auditor General were permitted to do this good work. She raised concerns about accountability of these foundations going back to 1997.

In that 1997 audit, the auditor general observed that the Canada Foundation for Innovation, as an example, did not have to report on the results of how it spent $800 million. In 1998, the auditor general again criticized the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, saying that the government was transferring money even before the foundation legally existed.

How can this happen? How can this be allowed to occur when it involves such substantive amounts of public funds? What was the government doing? What were its actions? How was it able to ignore the wishes of Parliament on such an important matter?

Going back to 1996 and coming forward to just this past Auditor General's report, the federal government has transferred $9 billion into foundations beyond the realm, the reach and the examination of the Auditor General.

Let me say that figure again: $9 billion, a staggering amount. If amounts in the range of $100 million and $250 million are being absconded with in the sponsorship program, what is to give assurance to Canadians that this money is not involved in a similar type of monkey business and partisan vote buying that we have seen in the past and which is the very subject of the current Gomery commission?

The Auditor General in her 2002 report stated:

It will be years before the ultimate intended recipients--students, health care providers, and others--receive the money.

This is about diverting money away from where it was intended to be into a potential scheme in which there is partisan activity and reward accruing to the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Auditor General revealed in her report last week that $7.7 billion of the original amount that was put into the bank accounts of the foundations is still sitting there. The Auditor General questioned that the transfers were essentially pre-funding foundations for a number of years. The policy has been that they should not pre-fund, or this is what the Auditor General herself is saying, but these would be exceptions.

It has been suggested by some that the transfer of funds into foundations is a convenient way to reduce the surplus, in other words, cooking the books. We saw that in the finance minister's attempts to somehow tell Parliament and the Canadian people that there was only a $1.9 billion surplus, which later was revealed to be a $9.1 billion surplus. As my colleague from Medicine Hat said, it was a severe case of fiscal dyslexia. There have been lots and lots of examples of the government grossly underestimating what those surpluses were going to be and then somehow money is discovered between the cushions of the finance minister's couch.

The Auditor General has consistently asked that Parliament allow her to examine this information that is available only through an audit of the foundations. Her financial statement for the government for the year ending March 31, 2002 revealed that Parliament is not receiving reports on independent, broad-scope audits that examine more than the financial statements of foundations, including compliance with authorities and propriety and value for money.

It is a very clearcut case, a compelling argument and a plea from the Auditor General for the opportunity to look into these foundations and see that the money is being spent properly. What could be simpler than that?

In last year's budget the government stated that the foundations will be subject to independent evaluations, comprehensive performance reporting and compliance of audits for the use of federal funding. Despite that assurance, it did not happen. The Auditor General as recently as last week said she is still concerned about accountability. She is still concerned about how this money is being spent and hidden away.

She stated that the government has no commitment to provide for performance audits reported to Parliament. She went on to say:

Thus, Parliament does not have adequate information and assurance on the use of more than $9 billion in public funds already transferred to the foundations.

What do we know about how these foundations are spending the money? We know very little. We know of a couple of examples.

Canada Health Infoway, the foundation that was set up to develop efficient health data, spent $30 million administering $51 million. It spent $30 million administrating over $51 million. It started with $500 million in 2001. It got another $600 million the following year and another $100 million in the year after that. In fact, the foundation has so much money it has earned interest. The foundation has earned $32 million in interest on that money while it tries to make up its mind.

The 2001 audit said that foundations such as the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology and Canada Health Infoway had a limited number of directors with signing authority over millions of dollars, even before a full board of directors was established and operating. Again it is a cart before the horse mentality.

Foundations are not subject to access to information. Only a small number of the foundations have actually had annual reports tabled in this place. Only three of the foundations are required to table their annual reports, with enabling legislation. Some of these foundations did not have any provision for the return of funds or assets to the government if they were to dissolve. This is being changed only after the Auditor General complained.

Again, it is the cover-up. It is the efforts after the fact to do the right thing, rather than simply doing what is good for Canadians and allowing for full disclosure.

The assurances of the President of the Treasury Board and his recent ramblings and fulminations do very little to give Canadians the assurances they are looking for. The present government more than any other in the history of this country has not a leg to stand on when it says, “Just trust us with your hard-earned dollars”.