Mr. Speaker, picking up on the theme of democracy being a work in progress, under this administration there is surely a lot of work to be done when it comes to democracy.
When it comes to cabinet confidentiality, the member is right. There are certain bodies of information that must be kept confidential and out of public knowledge and sphere. Military secrets are a prime example.
However there are other basic pieces of information pertaining to government behaviour and its accountability to the people of Canada who elect all members, not just government members but opposition members as well, which the public has a right to know about.
A perfect case in point was the recent decision by the President of the Treasury Board to conceal the accounts and the money spent by senior bureaucrats. This decision was justified quite wrongly in my reading of a recent supreme court case by the dissenting opinion of supreme court judges, not the majority opinion but the dissenting opinion.
A number of questions have been raised, even as recently as today, as to why the government would do this. A culture of secrecy, a culture of withholding information seems to be developing, particularly information that could be damaging.
I commend my colleague from New Brunswick Southwest and identify with his feeling of frustration. A very important role that the opposition plays is the role of truth seeker. As the member suggested in his opening remarks, the opposition's role is to probe the government. It is important for the opposition to ask important questions and receive information that the public is interested in and has a right to know.
However, time and time again over the last nine years, the little man from Shawinigan, who is now a big enchilada millionaire from Ottawa, is so far removed from that earlier reputation that it staggers the imagination. Under his guidance and direction, and under the guidance and direction of his staff in the PMO and Mr. Goldenberg, everything that is done to throw up barriers and boundaries as to information being revealed, not only to members of the House of Commons but by limiting access to information, is done just as a matter of course. That concentration of power that has been written about in recent years is occurring at an alarming rate and is being played out here on the floor of the House of Commons daily.
The government's reputation for transparency has been put to the lie. The government's openness was spoken about, prior to elections of course, and talked about in published fairy book documents called the red book. Promises were made to cancel the GST, for example, and promises were made to revisit and renegotiate free trade. We know what happened with those promises. They went out the window.
This government now wraps its arms around the policies that were introduced, at great spending of political capital, by the Progressive Conservative government, and it now calls them its own. It now calls them great ideas and fully endorses them. The Prime Minister was in Europe insinuating that his government brought in these policies. The reason the deficit is under control today is the GST, a much hated tax but a necessary tax. It is a consumption tax. It is a fair tax.
However we cannot revisit that. We cannot rewrite history. The spin doctors and the media massagers within the Liberal ranks did a wonderful hatchet job on ruining the reputation of a party that had the intellectual honesty and courage to put in place a tax that was fair.
The issue of openness in government has never been more threatened than under this administration. A basic motion to produce papers, a motion on the order paper by the hon. member from New Brunswick, was cast to one side. He was told no, that he would have to wait. This is a very serious issue that he has brought to the attention of the House and to all members. It concerns spare parts, which were bought and paid for by the Canadian taxpayer, sitting in a Florida warehouse that is under the control of a convicted felon.
Surely this matter would warrant government attention, let alone government action. Yet the government does not seem to want to talk about it.
He has been given the hand. He has been told to go away. To his credit he has persevered and brought the matter forward. Thankfully there are still procedures in the House that allow him to do so, but they should be given time. We have seen the rules change. We have seen attempts, as he said, to move the goalposts to prevent full disclosure on issues such as this one.
The entire issue of ethics and public confidence has been very much shaken under the government. My hon. colleague from Nova Scotia mentioned the helicopter procurement project. One of the biggest farces ever perpetrated by any government at any time in the history of the country was the cancellation of the helicopter program at a cost of $500 million, not even factoring in the benefits that would have come in terms of technology, component parts that would have been made, and jobs that would have been created in the province of British Columbia. It simply was cancelled.
I remember the Prime Minister's famous words: “I will take my pen and write zero and cancel the program”. Now we have men and women in the armed forces, on the east coast in particular but on the west coast as well, who patrol the coastal waters in unsafe equipment all because of ego and false pride on the part of the Prime Minister. It is a sad legacy.
The culture of clamping down, closure and secrecy is one over which the Prime Minister should hang his head in shame. That will be what historians write next to his name and not any great accomplishment. He drifted through the mandates and did what he could to shut down the House of Commons in terms of accountability and responsibility to the people.
