Mr. Speaker, talk about something ending with a whimper rather than a bang. We had the vaunted ethics agenda of this government, and what has become of it? We had the meaningless package that was presented by the Prime Minister last week which was more of an attack on his leadership rival than anything to do with ethics. Today we have before the House a motion to strike a committee, and I will get into that issue in a few minutes.
This is so unimportant to the government, which is an exercise in low balling, that it does not even bring a minister to present the motion to the House of Commons. I mean no disregard to the member who presented the motion but there is only one member of cabinet here to introduce this vaunted committee.
We also talked about campaign finance reform but now we learn that is a committee that will be struck sometime in the fall. I guess the House will get on with that sometime in the third millennium.
It has been a tumultuous spring for the federal Liberal government, not just with all the infighting and the increasing divisions within that party, but in terms of what Canadians have come to realize. Canadians have come to some very grave realizations about this government. They see that we are governed by a federal government that has betrayed the trust put into it by Canadians, and it has betrayed its promise of good and ethical governance.
The government has shown Canadians that it routinely engages in practices that are worldwide synonymous with unethical conduct. Whether we call it abuse of power, influence peddling, dirty politics or corruption, I think it depends on the particular file we are dealing with. This government has been exposed in systematically misusing the money of hardworking Canadians for its own political benefit.
Canadians now know they are being led by a federal government that has betrayed public trust and broken its promise of an ethically governed country.
This government has not ceased to misuse the funds of Canadian workers for its own political advantage.
It applies political pressure to help its friends. At the same time, it is showing how incapable it is of understanding the true significance of this debate on ethics.
When Canadians pay taxes, they are making an investment in essential public services such as national defence and security and national health care, for example, two of the most important things. These areas of government responsibility have endured serious underfunding in recent years as we all acknowledge.
Our Liberal government has been at the same time misusing taxpayer money and misusing taxpayer investments by throwing money into dubious ventures, where often little or no work is done, to reward its friends in the form of sponsorship and advertising contracts, always the firms, just by coincidence, with important financial ties both ways to the Liberal Party of Canada. This is a betrayal of the worst kind. Canadian families must deny themselves economic betterment by paying taxes that are too high only to be ripped off by a system of cronyism and kickbacks by which the governing party reaps financial benefit.
At the same time the government has shown it has no understanding at all of such basic concepts as conflict of interest and political interference. These are symptoms of a governing party that has governed for far too long. These are signs of a ruling party that has come to identify its own interests with those of the nation. It is an indication that ideas of propriety and impropriety no longer exist in the minds of the people at the top of the government as long as the Liberal Party benefits.
After several months of scandalous revelations that have splashed words like ethics and corruption across all the front pages of our newspapers, we finally find ourselves today doing what? We are debating a motion to address ethics in government. Rather than debating a substantial motion that would address the serious violations of ethical governance that we have seen over the past several months and years from this government for that matter, here we have a debate on whether or not to strike a parliamentary committee whose mandate would be to study and report on a previous report conducted by a similar parliamentary committee over five years ago.
I remember this report well. I was in the House of Commons when the member for Elk Island and others from our caucus were working on that report. I went away for five years, did a whole bunch of other things, had a family, came back and we are right back to the same business. Nothing has changed. It is just like one of those soap operas. One can miss it for several weeks, tune back in and pick up right where one left off. I should add the report we are talking about resurrecting now is the report of course that was never actually acted upon in the past five years. If we ever have had an exercise in smoke and mirrors, it is today.
Let us ask some hard questions about this exercise. Is it really the backbench legislators who have been violating rules of ethical conduct? Is it opposition MPs, for that matter government backbenchers, who have control over the allocation of millions upon millions of dollars in contracts? Have Canadians lost faith in their government because of the actions of private members of parliament who spend their time writing private members' bills and assisting their constituents?
No, we all know what it is all about. This issue has been about the misbehaviour and the unethical conduct of ministers of the government. It has been about cabinet ministers overseeing a system that gives out millions upon millions of dollars in improper contracts. It has been about cabinet managers, senior government officials, who have engaged in endemic ethical mismanagement and who have presided over something that quite frankly appears to be little more than a cash for contracts racket, all to interfere with the bureaucracy and obtain grants and loans for their friends.
Just so I do not throw out those kinds of words without backing up my position, let me take some considerable time to go through the files that we have been debating in the House of Commons over the last several weeks so we understand the scale and diversity of the problems that have been brought forth. In introducing this not so little list actually of stories and of government files, I will begin with introducing some of the characters.
Some of the characters in our little drama are: Groupe Everest, which has donated $83,000 to the Liberal Party since it came to power; Groupaction, which has donated $100,000 to the Liberal Party since the 1993 election; Lafleur Communications Marketing, which has donated over $50,000 to the Liberal Party in the same period; Groupe Polygone, which formerly employed the immigration minister, has also donated to the Liberal Party and to Liberal candidates in both of the last two national elections; and Coffin Communications Group, which donated a total of $20,000 to the Liberal Party in the years 1999 and 2000.
Let me review the various scandals in which the names of these firms have been featured. This by the way includes mention from recent news only. I could go farther back and add to this litany.
First, Groupaction was awarded three contracts worth $1.6 million to “increase the visibility of the Government of Canada”. We certainly could say that it has achieved that recently. The first contract was awarded without a proper selection process. Contracts two and three were virtually identical to contract one, or at least the reports.
Second, in December 1996 the Department of Justice paid $330,000 for a communications strategy for the Firearms Act, but now claimed this year that no work was ever done or even requested. It makes us wonder why, as in so many of these files, no one bothered to ask any questions about this over a six year period, when we could get this information from an access to information request. Presumably every minister and every senior official in these departments knew all about this in the interim.
Third, in 1997, just after it had been incorporated, Media IDA Vision received a five year contract to be the “agency of record for media buys for the government”. It is linked of course to Groupe Everest. From then on, this firm began to receive three-quarters of all government media buys in spite of treasury board guidelines saying that these contracts should not have exceeded one-quarter.
In January 1998, a crown corporation, the CBC, awarded a $4.5 million contract to Groupaction, by telephone no less, for federal advertising announcements during the Olympics.
This one is particularly interesting because of course CBC is a state owned company which specializes, as do all major media outlets, in putting together advertising packages. Then we pay an additional firm to put together advertising packages to go on the government advertiser.
In the summer of 1998, Communication Coffin received $38,000 from public works to purchase $320,000 of advertising, and management of the advertising for the Cascar Superseries and the Grand Prix de Trois-Rivières.
Communication Coffin then billed the government $116,000 for the preparation of three reports explaining how the original amounts of federal funds were spent on advertising and other services at these two auto racing events in Quebec. Two of the Coffin reports have yet to be located.
Then there is public works. The department of public works spent $2.6 million on the Almanach du peuple , an annual publication in French similar to the Farmer's Almanach . The government gave $392,000 more than the cost of the advertising to the French printers, Groupe Polygone.
So this is a case of course of a firm advertising in its own publications and being paid additionally for doing so.
Another case was in 1999. Public Works awarded Groupaction $112,000 for merely passing along a cheque to VIA Rail Canada for a film on hockey legend Maurice Richard. It is hard to imagine anyone in the private sector actually would be interested in making a film about Maurice Richard. This is one of the sports heroes of Canada. Obviously there is a market for it but somehow we have to publicize it here.
In another case, Groupe Polygone received another $330,000 in 1999. I am going to draw attention to that because the figure of $330,000 keeps coming up. Someday we will find out why that is because it is awfully suspicious. The same figure, the same amount comes up over and over again. I bet there is some significance in that. I bet there are some Liberal Party fundraisers who could shed some light on exactly why it is that number. It received that money in 1999 to organize sponsorship for a Quebec hunting and fishing show, Le Salon National du Grand Air . The show never actually happened and the money was never returned. No one even looked into returning it until questions were raised three years later in the House of Commons.
Lafleur Communications is another case. I will have to extend the sitting of this parliament just so I can finish this list. Lafleur Communications was hired by the federal government to provide promotional items such as golf shirt and balls. I will not say that I had any dealings with that. However Lafleur then subcontracted the business, $158,000 worth of items, to a company controlled by Éric Lafleur, the son of Lafleur Communications president, Jean Lafleur. Now everyone in the family is involved in that deal.
Groupe Polygone is another example.
Groupe Polygone got $656,000 for a 50 page report on the life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 2001 edition of the Almanach du peuple . In comparison, the Government of Quebec purchased 155 pages for $39,000.
In other words, the Parti Quebecois government paid somewhere between 30 and 50 times less for the same advertising. It is a rare time that anyone will hear me note the superior financial management of the Parti Quebecois.
In March 2002, the minister of public works spent a weekend at a cottage belonging to the president of Groupe Everest, Claude Boulay. Public Works does business with Groupe Everest. This mistake cost the minister his job.
Perhaps that is why they did not want the minister to present this motion, to remind us that the minister was front and centre in all of these scandals.
I cannot help but add something. I was introduced to the House five weeks ago. The Prime Minister rose and teased us about having eight leaders of the opposition over the past nine years. I have only been here five weeks and there have been two ministers of defence, two House leaders, two ministers of public works and two ministers of finance. By the way, the Minister of Finance is only part time at the moment. We have big problems over there.
Since 1997, Groupe Polygone has received $38.7 million to promote the federal government at hunting and fishing shows, in magazines and books, and on the radio. In total, Polygone has received 17% or $40 million from Ottawa's sponsorship budget, which has totalled $232 million since 1997.
Here is another instance. The justice minister admitted in May that he had gone on fishing trips with Lafleur Communications president, Jean Lafleur, but indicated he always paid his own way. Of course we remember hearing that from the House leader as well until we got the half a cheque. Lafleur did work for the Canada economic development when this Minister of Justice was minister for that portfolio between 1996 and 2000. No doubt, this is coincidental, once again.
In June 2002 the Department of Justice admitted it had kept using Groupaction despite the minister of public works indicating that the firm had been cut off. It has been cut off, unless of course they happened to not hear that announcement, in which case it just kept going on.
That is the pattern. No matter what they say, no matter what happens, the money keeps flowing to these people. Some of that may have to do with the last item I will mention in this long list, and the one I think is the most reprehensible of them all.
In September 2000, before a public works audit was released to the public or even to the rest of the government indicating that there were serious abuses in the sponsorship program, Pierre Tremblay, chief of staff to then public works minister, Alfonso Gagliano, held a special retreat at Hotel du Lac Carling with the presidents, with the dons of the five Quebec advertising companies, identified by auditors as having abused the program. One can only presume that they were either warned of the impending release or developed some kind of strategy for whatever purpose to keep the money flowing to deal with the publicity, not unlike the meeting that was held only a few days later in the Prime Minister's office to work out some of the details.
Again, in September 2000, Pierre Tremblay, Alfonso Gagliano's chief of staff, went away with beneficiaries of the sponsorship program, namely Claude Boulay from Groupe Everest.
That is a good portion of the story's history. When I read all that it is not surprising to figure out why it gets really hard for the media, the public and even some of us to keep all of these cases straight. It is endemic, widespread and all over the place. We are not talking about one thing. We are talking about virtually every contract we look at in that department over a specific time period.
It has led to RCMP investigations, as far as we know, because the Minister of Public Works and Government Services will not tell us what files have been referred to the RCMP. He will not even tell us the number of files. We know of at least six ongoing RCMP investigations.
One is the Groupaction contracts referred to in the auditor general's report. Two is the Coffin Communications $116,000 contract for the three post-mortem reports on how it spent the $320,000 on the ads at the two car races. Three is the RCMP investigation of which we are aware involving Lafleur Communications. It was a $112,000 contract for passing on a cheque from public works to VIA Rail Canada Inc. for a film on Maurice Richard.
Four is an RCMP investigation of which we are aware involving Groupaction's phantom $330,000 contract with Justice Canada to sell the Firearms Act in 1996. We know how successful that has been. It would have been better to save the money to pay for the Firearms Act. The government will need it as the bills get over $1 billion.