House of Commons photo

Crucial Fact

  • His favourite word was respect.

Last in Parliament October 2019, as Liberal MP for Regina—Wascana (Saskatchewan)

Lost his last election, in 2019, with 34% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Points of Order May 31st, 2010

Mr. Speaker, on the same matter, the proposed agreement that is the subject of these discussions is a matter of great importance to the House and flows from an order of the House and a ruling by you.

On behalf of the official opposition, I would simply like to underscore the importance of all parties in the House pursuing this matter with great diligence to ensure that it is not punted into never-never land, but in fact is successfully completed within the next very short while.

First Nations University May 25th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, it has been a month since the government provided any new information about First Nations University.

Strong leadership has been shown by Chief Lonechild and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. There is a new board of governors, a new president and a new chief executive officer. A tough financial officer has been reinstated.

There is full support from the Saskatchewan government, the University of Regina, the Regina and the Saskatchewan chambers of commerce, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Will the minister now make that long-term federal financial commitment that is urgently required?

Committees of the House May 25th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, it is my obligation today, on behalf of the official opposition, to respond to the remarks of the government House leader. I thank him for sending me a copy of those remarks but, sadly, they only arrived as he was speaking.

In respect of his last comments about due process, fair play and proper behaviour in this place and in the committees of the House, I would note for his benefit that it has always been the rule and tradition, except for a couple of recent examples on the part of the government, that ministerial statements are provided in a decent interval of time in advance so that the opposition has the opportunity to respond appropriately. I will come back to this point about due process and fair play but I would simply note for the minister that it applies both ways.

In responding to the statement by the government House leader today, one cannot miss the irony or perhaps the ignominy of the minister re-announcing in the House what an aide to the Prime Minister has already announced as government policy on television a couple of days ago. It is another Conservative government policy about secrecy, preventing accountability, stifling transparency, muzzling all of the assistants who work for the Prime Minister and for various ministers in the cabinet and prohibit their attendance at parliamentary committees to give evidence or answer questions. The arrogance and hypocrisy of this position are breathtaking.

The Prime Minister's communications director, Mr. Dimitris Soudas, went on television to announce that he and his Conservative assistant colleagues are important enough and senior enough to speak for the Prime Minister and the government about all manner of government activities, indeed to undertake all manner of government activities, but they can never again be asked a question by a parliamentary committee to account for those activities.

Those people are not juveniles who need to be shielded from scrutiny. They earn something in excess of $100,000 every year and they handle the government's most important business. If they are qualified to hold the jobs they hold and to be paid the amounts they are paid at public expense, then they should be required to respond to House of Commons committee requests for information and answers to questions. Indeed, they are so required.

The position on this matter that is being devised by the Prime Minister and the government is based upon a fiction, a fallacy. The Prime Minister purports to set the rules for parliamentary committees. He claims that he holds the power to dictate who can and who cannot be called as a witness to testify at committee hearings. With the greatest of respect, he is wrong.

The Prime Minister and his government are responsible to Parliament, not the other way around, and the Prime Minister and his government must comply with what Parliament, not the government, determines to be the rules. This was clearly defined and reinforced in the recent case involving the production of uncensored documents about the risk of torture in Afghanistan. Various members of Parliament asked repeatedly to see the uncensored documents, noting that the government could not possibly set itself up as prosecutor, judge, jury and Supreme Court all at the same time, but the government declined. It stonewalled the answers to the questions.

Then, last December the House passed a motion ordering the government to produce the uncensored documents. It was Parliament's equivalent of a subpoena, but again the government stonewalled. It even shut down Parliament altogether through an illegitimate request for prorogation hoping to change the channel. Parliament was put out of business from December to March. However, it did not work. Parliament would not take no for an answer.

The Speaker's landmark ruling in April confirmed, and every legal, constitutional and parliamentary expert agreed, that the House has the absolute right to demand the documents and the government has the absolute obligation to comply. The government does not have the legal right to withhold information that parliamentarians believe they need to hold the government to account.

The situation with witnesses to be called before parliamentary committees is exactly the same. Parliament has the unfettered right to call any and all witnesses who parliamentarians believe have relevant information that is needed to hold the government to account. It is Parliament's decision, not the Prime Minister's decision.

The government's attempt to stymie the work of parliamentary committees, reminiscent of the manual that the government produced a couple of years ago about how to subvert the work of committees, raises the basic question of what the government has to hide.

The Conservative staffers, who have been called to testify recently, have been asked to shed light on two important and legitimate inquiries. One is the effort to track the apparent lobbying activities of former Conservative member of Parliament, Rahim Jaffer, and his business partners who were operating, apparently, through a network of old buddies involving, apparently, a great many ministerial assistants. They were the ones holding the meetings, receiving the representations and passing along the requests for departmental intervention. This is potentially contrary to law and it does demand investigation.

A former minister, connected to those issues, has been thrown out of cabinet, expelled from the Conservative caucus and subjected to a police investigation, all at the behest of the Prime Minister. Obviously the Prime Minister must think these issues are serious. It is ludicrous for the government to maintain the fiction that potential accomplices, wittingly or unwittingly, cannot be asked to tell Parliament what they knew, what they did and why.

The second area of inquiry by Parliament is requiring the evidence of staffers to get the facts about multiple ministers apparently violating Canada's access to information laws by improperly blocking the publication of information. Again, the Prime Minister has commented on this matter saying that it is important to follow the access to information rules but he is now purporting to prevent Parliament from getting to the bottom of the government's behaviour with respect to access to information.

In these matters, it is just not appropriate for the government to take the position that ministerial staffers who are directly involved in these matters may well know more about the facts of what happened and when it happened than the minister would know. It is just ludicrous to suggest that those staffers cannot be called before a parliamentary committee to explain to Parliament how this lobbying activity was going on or how the interference in the access to information process was going on.

Members of Parliament have the right to know what the assistant to the Minister of State for Science and Technology was doing with respect to representations received, or what an assistant to the Minister of the Environment was doing, meeting apparently with Mr. Jaffer in the office of the former minister of state for the status of women. They have the right to know which member of the staff of the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities apparently wrote a note on a government document saying, “From Rahim, get to the department for an answer”. Members of Parliament have a right to know what the staffer to the former minister of public works, now the Minister of Natural Resources, was doing participating in the evaluation of one of Mr. Jaffer's projects.

The questions that are being asked may well be uncomfortable and may raise issues that the government would rather not have raised but the fact is that they are serious issues that need serious attention by the government and they should not be stonewalled by the government.

The government House leader today proclaimed the principle of ministerial responsibility and ministerial accountability. It comes perhaps four and a half years late but at least the government has wrapped itself in those principles.

The question that remains from the minister's statement today is will the government put those principles into effect? Will it stop hiding behind the behaviour of its assistants and conveniently throwing those ministerial assistants under the bus, blaming them for things that go wrong rather than assuming responsibility for the behaviour of those assistants?

I think, for example, of the letter-writing incident involving an assistant by the name of Jessica Craven, who was apparently writing letters of support on behalf of her minister, trying to leave the impression that this was somehow a public groundswell of support on behalf of the minister. The minister denied all responsibility and blamed the assistant.

Then there was the case of Mr. Ryan Sparrow, who apparently ordered officials in the Department of HRSDC to provide misleading information about particular advertising the department had engaged in with respect to the Olympics. I presume that the minister is now going to assume direct personal responsibility for that misbehaviour on the part of the assistant.

Then there is the case of Mr. Togneri, who intervened in the access to information process and ordered the department to unrelease certain information the department had already released in accordance with the access to information rules. I wonder if the minister is now going to claim personal responsibility for that misbehaviour on the part of Mr. Togneri, under this principle just announced today.

Then there is the case of Mr. Owen Lippert, a speech writer for the Prime Minister, who plagiarized a speech given by the former prime minister of Australia and passed it off as a speech by the current Prime Minister of Canada. I presume now that the Prime Minister is going to assume direct responsibility for that misbehaviour on behalf of that assistant.

There are the multiple cases arising from Mr. Soudas, but I will mention just one. He offered advice to the Prime Minister about something that was allegedly said by the Leader of the Opposition about the G8. It turned out to be patently false and completely wrong. The Prime Minister, nonetheless, launched a vicious attack against the Leader of the Opposition. I presume that the Prime Minister is now going to assume direct personal responsibility for the misbehaviour of Mr. Soudas in that particular case, and in other cases.

The point here is that with the announcement the government has made today, will it stop hiding behind its various ministerial assistants and will it, according to the principle of ministerial responsibility and ministerial accountability, now make all ministers, including the Prime Minister, available to parliamentary committees on all topics and in a timely way on request by those committees so that those committees can get the answers they need? If ministerial assistants are going to be barred from speaking to the committees, then surely the ministers must be there—and not just any old time, but they must there to answer questions when the committee wants those questions asked and answered.

The minister speaks about due process and fair play. It applies both ways and the government bears the ultimate responsibility for providing that accountability and responsibility. It cannot blame the opposition for simply asking the questions the government seems afraid to answer.

Points of Order May 14th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for the statement that he has made and the document that he has just tabled.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking you for the landmark ruling that you made on April 27 about the rights of Parliament and the rights of Canadians to transparency, and specifically the right to all of the documents pertaining to detainees in Afghanistan. The parties have been hard at work, and I believe at work in good faith, over the last two and a half weeks to fulfill your expectations. We have been and will continue to be vigilant to ensure that the spirit and intent of your ruling is properly fulfilled.

In your ruling you said that Parliament has an absolute right to see the documents and that the government must comply. Why? So that members of Parliament are equipped with the information necessary to hold the government to account.

Mr. Speaker, you also said strongly and properly that national security is of vital importance to all of us, government and opposition alike, and that we need to find the appropriate means to distinguish between information which is relevant and should be disclosed and national security which must not be compromised. We believe that we have found the way in the document that the minister just tabled.

There remains, of course, work to be done to translate today's agreement in principle into a formal and comprehensive memorandum of understanding among all parties in the House. We expect that detailed work will be done accurately and faithfully, respecting the spirit and intent of your ruling and the gist of the work that has gone on over the course of the last two and a half weeks.

Let me make one key point in that regard. The participants in the process that we are setting up, the MPs and the others who are involved, must be, and must be seen to be, of the highest calibre integrity and intent. They are being assigned a profoundly serious responsibility on behalf of 308 members of this House and, more importantly, on behalf of millions of Canadians. They must be selected carefully and they must not fail.

On behalf of my colleague, the hon. member for Beauséjour, and the opposition whip, who participated with me in the discussions that have gone on, I close by thanking all of the participants in the talks over the last two and a half weeks who have all tried, I believe, to get it right on this most important topic. We still have important work to do, but so far so good. I think we have tried to fulfill the expectations that you have placed on us.

Business of the House May 13th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I would be interested in the government's program for the balance of this week and, especially, the week after the constituency week, which is scheduled to come up after this weekend.

Before the end of May, we have to deal with the estimates of two government departments in the committee of the whole under the provisions in our Standing Orders. We have indicated, on behalf of the opposition, that the departments we wish to call before the committee of the whole are the Department of National Defence and the Department of Natural Resources.

I wonder if the government House leader, when he gives the business plan for the next week or 10 days, would also be able to designate those days.

Petitions May 13th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table a petition today with several pages of signatures in support of the First Nations University of Canada.

Their position, of course, is in addition to the support of the Government of Saskatchewan, the University of Regina, the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Association of University Teachers and many others. The signatories are members of the faculty, staff and general public in Regina in particular, but generally across Saskatchewan.

They call upon the Government of Canada to work with the students, staff and faculty to build a sustainable and viable future for First Nations University of Canada by fully reinstating the federal funding of at least $7.2 million per year.

I am very pleased to table this petition on their behalf today.

Points of Order May 10th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the hon. gentleman was making a specific, concrete offer of a contribution to a hearing aid.

Indeed what I said last week was that I sit one foot away from the hon. gentleman from Toronto Centre and I did not hear him make that remark. If he has now clarified the record, I should pay much closer attention to the hon. member for Toronto Centre. We would all be edified by his golden words.

Points of Order May 6th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I sit right beside the member for Toronto Centre and I certainly heard no such remark. I heard a number of other remarks vigorously expressed because of the lack of quality in the answer, but I certainly heard nothing of the nature that the hon. gentleman has just alleged.

I will most definitely bring this to the attention of the member for Toronto Centre and I am sure he will be in a position to respond for himself. However, I want to make it clear that I sat within one foot of the gentleman and I did not hear any such remark.

Business of the House May 6th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, just as a point of clarification because I think this is a change from what we might earlier have heard. Is it correct that following Bill C-13 the next order of business is Bill C-10?

Business of the House May 6th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the government would unveil its agenda for the balance of this week and next week, including the designation of any opposition days that may fall into that period of time.

I know the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons has been giving this matter some thought and I wonder if he is yet in a position to be specific about the occasion upon which we can have a take-note debate with respect to the east coast shellfish industry.