Stephen Harper

[Speech from the Throne, April 4th, 2006]

(Motion agreed to)

[Speech from the Throne, April 4th, 2006]

moved:

That the Speech from the Throne delivered this day by Her Excellency the Governor General to both Houses of Parliament be taken into consideration later this day.

[Election of Speaker, April 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I begin by saying I really will mind if you call me by my former title.

First, on behalf of the government, I would like to congratulate the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands on being re-elected as Speaker of the House. It is a well-deserved honour.

I will say a few words, Mr. Speaker. First, I appreciate your resistance being thrown to the chair today, much more than the last time I did it. However, I will say that I noticed the members were not so reluctant this time. Your re-election is indicative of the trust that all members of the House, all parties in the House, have in your abilities as Speaker.

Some members will know, and I know, Mr. Speaker, that you will know, that we have known each other a very long time. We first became marginally acquainted when you were a young member of Parliament and I was a legislative assistant. We had dinner a couple of times when I was a young member of Parliament. I have always had, as many members of the House have, a great appreciation for your abilities and a great understanding of your aspirations for the country. We only ever had one difficulty, and that was your partisanship. By virtue of your achievement today, you have largely resolved that problem for me.

Over the years, Mr. Speaker, you have demonstrated a commitment to fair, orderly proceedings in this House. You did an exceptional job of navigating what were very choppy waters in the last Parliament. We all have a great confidence that you will do an equally good job in the 39th Parliament.

In closing, once again, I know I speak for all members of the government's side when I congratulate you, Mr. Speaker, on your re-election.

On behalf of the government and all Canadians, thank you for your dedication to the Parliament of Canada.

[Supply, November 24th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, in eight seconds we will empower the independent officers of Parliament to hold our government responsible. We will end the revolving door that has gone on here between lobbying firms, senior ministers' offices and the bureaucracy. We also will end the culture of entitlement, big money and lobbying that is at the heart of the Prime Minister's government.

[Supply, November 24th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, if the hon. member believes that my speech could get a literary award for fiction, he must believe that Justice Gomery has written the longest novel in Canadian history. Unfortunately, those are the facts.

I have said to people in my own party and to others that if I belonged to an organization and led an organization that was found to have been involved in a massive corruption ring using organized crime to defraud taxpayers, I cannot understand why anyone found in that position would want to be associated with that organization.

However that is a decision that the Prime Minister has to make and has to explain. I think Canadians understand now. It is a little rich for the Prime Minister who built his political career and reputation on his so-called detailed knowledge of government finance to now say that he did not know what was going on with the finances of the country.

However we can have that debate another time. My point is that the problems we have do not restrict themselves just to the sponsorship scandal. We have seen just in the last week revelations about David Herle, the Liberal campaign manager, getting an untendered government contract, and a Liberal polling firm led by Michael Marzolini, the Liberal pollster, receiving a verbal contract after the Auditor General said that these were inappropriate. It continues.

All we get over there is trying to justify it. Canadians should not justify it. They must defeat the government to make the statement that it is not acceptable.

[Supply, November 24th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I almost like that question.

The member talks about innocent until proven guilty. However, from the beginning of this scandal, the Prime Minister had no difficulty ascribing guilt or punishing those who just happened to be his enemies within the Liberal Party. We even know now that in the case of Mr. Pelletier he was apparently fired improperly. There is a double standard even within the party.

After Justice Gomery spent all this money and heard all these witnesses, he determined that the Liberal Party played a central role in the sponsorship scandal and that in fact the Liberal Party was the linchpin of the sponsorship scandal. It was the only entity or agent that conceived the program, ran the program and benefited from the program. Is the member seriously suggesting that the people of Canada would wait to remove the government from office only when its leading officials are carted off to jail in handcuffs? Surely we all believe that the people of Canada have higher standards of political accountability than that.

The member tried to make the distinction between the Liberal government and the Liberal Party. If that is a distinction he seriously believes in, and I know the member is an individual of sincere belief on a range of public policy issues, then I would invite him and all members who share that distinction not to campaign in the upcoming federal election under the banner of the Liberal Party of Canada.

[Supply, November 24th, 2005]

We are witnessing the same sort of failures on just about every front.

On criminal justice, we see a government that has lurched from one position to another. For years the Liberals denied Canada had any crime problem. They pushed drug legalization. They said that mandatory minimum sentences did not work. That was only a few weeks ago in the House of Commons. Now, today, they are talking tough on crime in response to 48 shootings on the streets of Toronto.

On trade, the Prime Minister, who came to office promising a more mature relationship with the United States, is now reduced to lecturing the President of the United States for the benefit of the Canadian media because the U.S. administration stopped listening to him a long time ago.

On health care, the Prime Minister promised to fix health care for a generation and considered health care waiting times his top priority in the last election. Now he is content to let the provinces come up with a patchwork scheme of wait time benchmarks and to wait until 2008 before setting targets to reduce wait times. Medical wait times have doubled under the Liberals and the current Prime Minister has only added one more wait time, the time we will have to wait to get action from that do nothing government.

Finally, on the national unity front, the Prime Minister, having missed opportunity after opportunity to work with the most committed federalist premier we have had in the province of Quebec in my lifetime, now wants to sound tough, talking against the new leader of the Parti Québécois, who not only is not the premier of Quebec, he does not even have a seat in the Quebec legislature. He wants to be tough over the Clarity Act, legislation his own Quebec lieutenant does not support.

My position on clarity is known, which is in contrast particularly with that of the Prime Minister, who refused to speak of it during the Chrétien years. Quebeckers, however, be they federalist or sovereignist, do not want to debate the rules of the next referendum. What they do want to debate is how to construct a stronger Quebec within a better Canada. They want more than a choice between corruption and separation, which is all this Prime Minister and the Parti Québécois want to offer them.

A party, and I think this is important to repeat when we are talking about the Clarity Act and the rule of law, that has been named in a judicial inquiry, a royal commission, has been found guilty of breaking every conceivable law in the province of Quebec with the help of organized crime cannot lecture the separatists or anyone else about respecting the rule of law.

The Liberals cannot lecture about respecting the rule of law. They cannot move forward, at least in a straight line on reducing taxes, fighting crime, standing up for our trade interests or reducing wait times in health care. The country cannot go on without a change of government. That is why the House has lost confidence in the government.

The Prime Minister will claim that all this is about trying to provoke an unnecessary Christmas election, as if we all would prefer to campaign in the snow. Even now the Prime Minister could choose to accept the recommendations of the House last Monday and agree to call an election in January for February. The choice to call an election at this time is the Prime Minister's. I acknowledge fully the leader of the New Democratic Party who has given the Prime Minister every conceivable opportunity to do that.

If the Prime Minister does not want to accept the NDP compromise, the official opposition would be prepared to face the public in a general election. The government will say that such an election is about making Parliament work, or about the economy, or about some ghastly, frightening policies of the opposition parties, but that will be nothing but a smokescreen.

If the Prime Minister chooses to call an election this time, the election will be about the choice that Canadians must make: which party can ensure the change of government needed to restore accountability in Ottawa. It will be a choice between old style politics and sweeping new reforms. It will be a choice between a culture of entitlement and corruption and a culture of accountability and achievement, between benefits for a privileged few and honest government for all citizens. That is the choice we face.

While I have complete confidence in the choice the Canadian people will make, I have no more confidence in the choices the government would make if it serves any more time in office.

That is why I move, seconded by the hon. member for Toronto—Danforth:

That this House has lost confidence in the government.

[Supply, November 24th, 2005]

, seconded by the hon. member for Toronto--Danforth, moved:

That this House has lost confidence in the government.

Mr. Speaker, it has now become evident to all observers that the government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons and must be removed.

After 17 months in office, the record of the government--or I should say in many instances its lack of record--has become unacceptable to a large majority of the members of the House, representing an overwhelming majority of Canadian voters.

I want to reflect on the reasons why things have come to this.

In the last election, the Liberal government was narrowly re-elected, with only a minority. In effect, the Canadian people put this government on probation. Why?

Why the limited confidence? Because already in June 2004 the government was seriously tainted by the sponsorship scandal. Ever since Sheila Fraser's devastating report indicating that some $100 million in taxpayers' money was unaccounted for, the public has been deeply mistrustful of the Liberal record of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Events since then have only confirmed the depth and breadth of the sponsorship corruption. Perhaps more important, they have shown that the Liberal Party has no desire to change, no intention to change and no ability to change.

The opposition parties did not begin this Parliament with the hope that it would fail. We have all tried different ways of making it work.

Last fall, all three opposition parties developed consensus amendments to the government's Speech from the Throne rather than just the traditional opposition motion rejecting everything. How did the government respond? It responded by threatening an immediate election.

In February, this party decided that we would support the government's budget based on a number of priorities we shared, including some very modest steps toward tax relief, the Atlantic accords on resource revenue sharing, and the transfer of gas tax revenues to municipalities for infrastructure.

But by April, we believed that the evidence revealed before the Gomery commission left the Liberal Party without the moral authority to govern this country. The testimony before the commission began to confirm a sponsorship program that was a front for massive kickbacks involving organized crime, used by the Liberal Party to fill its own election coffers.

At that point, the New Democratic Party had a serious disagreement with the other two opposition parties. Its preference was to wait to see whether Justice Gomery would confirm the testimony of Jean Brault and others in his report and whether it could find common ground with the government on other issues in the meantime.

The government survived in the spring, thanks in part to its deal with the NDP. However, it ensured its survival by resorting to unprecedented anti-democratic tactics, such as cancelling the opposition days and ignoring non-confidence votes.

Also without precedent was what the government did next, which was an unprecedented and hopefully never to be repeated effort to buy off and to attract members from this party and from other parties, even to the point of being prepared to exchange cabinet seats to do it.

In the eyes of the official opposition, this government has lacked the moral authority to govern ever since.

At the same time, we knew that it would be impossible to bring the government down until the NDP also came to the same conclusion. We knew that without a three-party common front, the Liberals would try once again to beg, borrow or steal votes in order to survive.

The moment of truth finally came with the release of Justice Gomery's report on November 1. This report removed the benefit of any doubt about the depth of corruption within the Liberal Party of Canada.

In his report, Justice Gomery noted:

clear evidence of political involvement in the administration of the Sponsorship Program;—

a complex web of financial transactions—involving kickbacks and illegal contributions to a political party—;

the existence of a “culture of entitlement” among political officials and bureaucrats—

These statements can no longer be dismissed as media speculation or as partisan attacks. These are the findings of fact by a judge in a judicial inquiry. As Judge Gomery concluded, “The LPCQ...cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of its officers and representatives”. The Liberal Party itself is part and parcel of this scandal and corruption.

There is no way that a political party that has been named for its involvement in a massive corruption scandal can be entrusted by the House to remain in office. So far, criminal charges have been pursued against relatively small fry in the sponsorship scandal and no one has gone to jail. As long as the guilty party remains in governing the country, as long as it remains in office, nobody will ever be held truly responsible, nobody will ever be firmly punished and no real reforms will ever be made.

Notwithstanding Jean Chrétien's role, the current Prime Minister himself was part of that fateful cabinet meeting of February 1996 that made it a government priority, a taxpayer priority, to strengthen the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec, which Judge Gomery pointed out was highly inappropriate as, “Cabinet is expected to deal with the interests of the country as a whole, leaving partisan considerations aside”.

As Judge Gomery said, the arrogant attitude of the cabinet to define the interests of the Liberal Party as synonymous with the federation itself “is difficult to reconcile with basic democratic values”. The Prime Minister should have known that. He cannot get away with saying, “Don't blame me. I was only the piano player. I had no idea what was going on upstairs”. As Jean Chrétien said, “He knew what I knew”.

Clearly, this Prime Minister has done nothing about the sponsorship scandal, because the current Prime Minister and his Liberal allies share the same culture of entitlement as Chrétien's Liberal Party.

Since the Prime Minister came to power, we have seen one Minister of Immigration have to resign over favouritism in giving out visas, while the next one billed taxpayers $138 for pizza, all defended by the Prime Minister. We have seen Art Eggleton, a man that Jean Chrétien fired from the cabinet for giving an untendered contract to a former girlfriend, get rewarded with a seat in the Senate.

We have seen the PM's good friends, Francis Fox and Dennis Dawson, also compensated for “good and loyal services” by a Senate seat.

We have seen the unseemly spectacle of a government negotiating severance pay with David Dingwall, the man who hired Chuck Guité to run government advertising, an unregistered lobbyist who received contingency payments that were against government contracting rules, a patronage appointee who quit his job.

We have seen the Prime Minister flying around the country on Challenger jets doing a few hours of government work, then spending the rest of the time campaigning and fundraising, often at exclusive cocktail parties where big Liberal donors pay $5,000 a ticket to discuss public business. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Liberal culture of entitlement goes on. The public must be given a chance to put an end to it.

Unfortunately, and tragically, because this government was so consumed by disinformation and petty politics, so obsessed by its own scandal sheet and its own survival, some things essential for this country fell by the wayside.

Where the government has acted, it has become increasingly erratic and irresponsible. Take for example the government's budgetary policy. In the first budget in February, the government announced modest surpluses and small tax relief measures. But in May, after the deal with the NDP, the Minister of Finance produced the second budget, claiming that the cupboard was bare and that there would be little or no surplus. He then removed the tax relief.

Two weeks ago, in the third budget in less than nine months, all of a sudden there was an enormous $97 billion worth of surpluses over the next five years, enough for a $30 billion package of corporate and personal tax relief. Since that budget two weeks ago, policies have appeared and disappeared at the rate of $1 billion a day, many of them not in any of the budgets.

At this point nobody can believe a word the government says about economic or fiscal policy or anything else, especially the on again off again policies on income trust, which I will not even get into.

[Government Policies, November 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, fortunately we soon will not have to listen to answers like that for a long, long time.

It appears that Liberal penance is expensive. Since the Gomery report, the Prime Minister has been making spending promises at the rate of $1 billion a day, and that does not even include the recent mini-budget.

Since most of these announcements are not funded in any of the three budgets the Liberals tabled this year, why should anyone believe these promises?

[Government Contracts, November 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, a new government will get on with the real inquiry.

Today we learned that Liberal pollster Michael Marzolini did not have to wait for an election. His firm, Pollara, received a $90,000 verbal contract from the Department of National Defence. This was after the Auditor General denounced the government for awarding verbal contracts.

In light of this and the revelations on David Herle, will the Prime Minister come clean and care to tell us about any other Liberals who received inappropriate contracts?