Stockwell Day

[Prime Minister, March 26th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, even his own Liberal backbenchers are now calling for an inquiry. The cover-up and attempts at obstruction are no longer working. The Prime Minister must shed some light on Shawinigate.

Will the Prime Minister finally set up an independent commission of inquiry to determine whether or not he behaved improperly?

[Prime Minister, March 26th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, with the Prime Minister in the House maybe we can get a direct answer. So many facts have now come out that prove his statements over the last two years to be inaccurate. Every day there is more evidence that points to a possible conflict of interest and cover-up.

There is only one way to clear the air. Would the Prime Minister call an independent judicial inquiry to clear the air on the Shawinigate scandal?

[Ethics Counsellor, March 22nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is one thing to say but it will be another thing to prove. We will watch that.

For two years the Prime Minister has also been saying that his holding company which owned the golf club shares was held in a blind trust, but we know the Prime Minister called the ethics counsellor in January 1996 about the shares. Yesterday, after two years, the Prime Minister finally admitted that he was aware of and involved in the negotiations to resell those shares.

How could the Prime Minister say his investments were in a blind trust when he now admits that he knew the details of the shares and the deals?

[Ethics Counsellor, March 22nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, they can weakly applaud that weak response but section 50 of the Canada Business Corporations Act requires the golf club to maintain a record of the names of each shareholder and the date and details of every transaction.

Now the golf club's lawyer and spokesperson have said that Mr. Prince's name was never entered on the corporate records. He can talk all he wants about Mr. Prince or the records. This is new information. He cannot refer to what the ethics counsellor said earlier.

Based on this new information not previously known to the ethics counsellor, will the Minister of Industry do the right thing and—

[Ethics Counsellor, March 22nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, for two years the Prime Minister has been saying that he sold his shares in the Grand-Mère Golf Club long before he started pressuring a crown corporation to give money to the hotel next door.

Just two days ago the golf club's lawyers wrote that the transfer of shares was only approved but not that it actually ever took place. Just yesterday golf club spokesmen said that they never knew who owned the shares. I will quote. They said “From 1993 on we did not know exactly who it was”. My question is for the Prime Minister. Who owned those shares?

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, that is an interesting ruling which I respect, although I am not familiar with it. I will just make observations and not reflect pejoratively in any sense.

The nation observed a motion by opposition members to endorse something that was proposed at one point. That something was a promise by the Prime Minister and the government that we would have an ethics commissioner. It was a promise taken from the red book. We took the words verbatim because we agreed with the proposal. I have said as opposition leader that where possible we will agree with and support the government on things that are good for our nation. We took that promise verbatim and made it a motion because we agreed. We wanted MPs to be able to vote freely. I will just make the observation that the Liberal MPs voted down their own promise.

That is the type of freedom that we are looking for in the House of Commons to restore the confidence of Canadians.

The concentration of powers in the PMO is not irremediable. It is not part of the Canadian Constitution. It has developed as a convention, a disciplinary habit that has diminished the role of all duly elected MPs.

This concentration undermines democracy and the respect the Canadian population has always had for its elected representatives. Each member of this House has the responsibility to stand up and be heard, to show that the principles of democracy are dear to him or her. MPs have a duty to show that democratic principles are more important than the carrot and the stick, than reward and punishment.

These things are more important. Standing for democracy is more important.

When the parliament opened, our first task was the duty of electing a Speaker. It makes a big difference to the House of Commons and to the Canadian people when the Speaker is perceived as someone who is fair to all parties. We believe that is the case here. The election of a Speaker by members of the House is something that most Canadians have taken for granted, even though it is actually a fairly recent convention.

There is a story from our past concerning the election of Speaker that I believe serves as an example to the members of the House of Commons. It is a story that shows that members are not, and do not have to be, helpless pawns in a parliament ruled by the Prime Minister's office. It was back in 1827. I know, Mr. Speaker, that you would be familiar with this not because you were ever near that particular era, but because you are a student of these things. It was the Assembly of Lower Canada that elected Louis-Joseph Papineau to be its Speaker.

When Papineau asked the governor for official approval, the governor refused to confirm his appointment. The members of the Assembly of Lower Canada did not submit humbly to this. They refused to elect anyone else and they stuck to their guns. It was difficult, and it took courage.

The government had to interrupt its activities. Nothing happened for a year, but eventually democracy prevailed. A new governor confirmed Louis-Joseph Papineau as Speaker.

The Prime Minister and others might argue that the machinery of government control is more important than the members of parliament themselves. However we have to remember that these constituents whom we represent are more important than the so-called machinery that comes out of the office of the Prime Minister. The people of Canada are more important than the machinery. Government should be for people, not people for government. Sometimes and too often in this assembly, it is the other way around.

We hope the creation of a special committee to make recommendations on modernizing and improving these procedures will be a first step. However, the real change we are calling for demands far more than what a committee can deliver and more than what a committee can recommend. What we are asking for, I believe, is going to demand character and virtues like courage.

We could wait for three or four years until the Canadian people decide to change the government, but we know that in that period of time many more Canadians will be asking themselves why they should bother to vote when their MPs cannot even speak for them once they arrive in Ottawa.

We can wait for the next election or we can act as MPs ought to act, and start exercising the power that is ours, in order to get some changes made.

If we show that we really want to do our job here in Ottawa, the Canadian public will understand.

We need more free votes in the House of Commons. We have to abandon the convention, and this is not a constitutional issue, that any losing vote for the government is a vote of non-confidence. We need to address that.

Let us give real power to committees and allow members of committees to elect their own chairs instead of having the Prime Minister make the appointment. Let us have the chairs and the vice chairs elected by secret ballot, just as the Speaker is now elected. It is good for the Speaker, it should be good for the chairs.

Let us allow private members to bring bills that actually come to a vote without having to pass through a party dominated committee process.

I know many of my colleagues from across the aisle share my concerns. They would like democratic reform to proceed just as we do. The MP from Toronto—Danforth, as a good upstanding Liberal MP, said “Parliament does not work. It is broken. It is like a car motor working on two cylinders”. Another Liberal MP and former Quebec cabinet minister said “Being in the backbench we are typecast as if we are all stupid. We are just supposed to be voting machines”.

We need to change that. If these MPs have the bravery and the courage to talk about change like that then we need to embrace that change.

Government members and opposition members alike know that the people of Canada want us to do better. They want us to deliver true change and real democracy. We have a list of things that have to be done.

When the hon. member talked about the changes he wanted to see, I was waiting expectantly. I was thinking he was going to make some recommendations for change would break the ground for democracy and usher in fresh breezes of freedom to the House of Commons. I thought that when Canadians heard the Liberal House leader speak they would say “That's fantastic”. He unleashed to the Chamber just moments ago the waves of freedom which would cause us to surge onto the beaches of democracy. Let us listen to those.

He wants to move closure from 11 p.m. to 8 p.m. Now there is a democracy breaking move. How about this? He said “Let us deal with restricting a committee report concurrence motion”. I wonder if he said that when he was out on the hustings. Did he stand before constituents who were talking about freedom and say “We will bring something in to restrict a committee report concurrence motion?”

I am not trying to diminish these tiny moves but they should just be mere shadows of changes that are far more monumental, the shadows of changes that will bring true democracy into the House and restore for Canadians the sense that they own this place.

I close with the words a wise person said to me the first time I was elected. I was quite jubilant that particular night. As I was leaving the party which was going on, he said “I want to know if you know the definition of the word instant”. I asked him what the definition was. He said “Usually it is the time it takes an elected member to go from representing his or her constituents to representing the government”.

We need to remember that. We need to think of our constituents and think of freedom and democracy in this place.

I agreed to share my time, and I thank members for agreeing, with the member for Fraser Valley who has also been a leader in the area of true democratic reform which will vitalise the process in Canada and send a message to all Canadians, including young people, that the government truly is here to work for them.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I thank hon. members for their agreement. I stand in the House today in support of the motion to create this special committee to recommend ways to modernize and improve procedures in the House. It is a step in the right direction. The Canadian Alliance and I hope it will signal the beginning of a very worthwhile journey.

Being somewhat skeptical, I have to say that we do not want to prejudge where the journey will finally take us but we do hope it leads to an enhanced sense of democracy, not just in the House but also in the country. In the last election only 61% of registered voters even bothered going to the polls. It was the lowest turnout in recent Canadian history.

Of those who did vote we know that 41% supported the Liberals, giving them a majority in the House of Commons. When we take a closer look and include all the registered voters who did not bother to cast their ballots, we see that the present government has the support of about 25% of Canadians. That is a sobering thought and a sobering reality.

What do these numbers tell us? One of the things the polls show us is that Canadians are becoming increasingly cynical about politics and about whether their votes mean anything. As a matter of fact they are feeling increasingly alienated from the whole process of government itself. That is a disturbing situation and the results of the committee could actually have something to do with remedying that. That is why we look forward with hope, although I say that with some scepticism, to the final results.

It is up to every elected member in the House to win back the trust of the Canadian people. People will be watching the committee. It will be reported on quite properly, and it is up to us to prove to citizens everywhere that democracy is alive and well and living in Ottawa in these halls and in this Chamber. That will be the challenge for the committee.

We are seeing some signs that change is in the air. These signs are fragile. They are like the first green shoots of the crocuses and the daffodils. We hope that these changes will prove to be as inevitable as the first signs of spring. We hope that happens.

We applaud the Speaker's ruling on a question of privilege concerning the justice minister, where the Speaker deemed that the justice minister had in fact acted inappropriately in releasing certain documents to the media before members of parliament had the opportunity to view those important papers.

We applaud the independence of the Chair in making that ruling. It gives us hope. It speaks to a regard for the highest principles and not partisanship. The power to effect real democratic change rests with every member of the House, but the ability to exercise that power will at times take courage and a willingness to stand on principle.

Canadians are really not seeing members of parliament exercising the power we have been granted constitutionally. They see power concentrated in the hands of a few, mostly unelected advisers in the Prime Minister's Office. That is what most Canadians see. They see the MPs who are elected to represent them voting the government line.

We see government MPs being referred to by the Prime Minister in the most cynical of terms as terra cotta warriors that stand in line and vote the way they are told. That is a denigrating way, in my view, of treating one's own colleagues and one's members of parliament. It must sting when Liberal MPs read that about themselves and they see what their Prime Minister is calling them.

I have said before and I will say it again that the Prime Minister and the Liberal government treat parliament as a rubber stamp for the plans which are drawn up in back rooms. It is clearly too often the case and that is not right. The House of Commons should be a place where real debate takes place and real action takes place on that debate. Debate that originates in the living rooms, kitchens, coffee shops and workshops of the country should be brought to the House.

As a recent example, we know that many members of parliament on the government side share our concern about the plight of farmers in Canada. Yesterday those members buckled to pressure from the Prime Minister's Office and they actually voted down a motion which would have given aid to farmers. Yet we know many of those members, had they been able to stand for their constituents, would have supported that aid.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I can give assurance that my remarks will be no more than 15 minutes at the most. The remarks of the member for Fraser Valley would be approximately 10 minutes. We will definitely work toward that.

[Modernization Of House Of Commons Procedure, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, if you seek unanimous consent, I believe you would find agreement for me to split my time with the member for Fraser Valley.

[Ethics Counsellor, March 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the question is very simple: Whose names were on the registry between 1996 and 1999?

The Prime Minister is shaking his head. He wishes this would go away. The future hopeful leader is wishing it would go away. That is a lot of baggage to carry.

The only question we are asking is whose names were on the registry between 1996 and 1999? That is all we are asking.