Mr. Speaker, I rise in this assembly to speak to the opposed vote calling on the government to remove $1 million-plus from the Privy Council budget. If nothing else, this is a symbolic move to try and tell Canadians that what the government did in setting up this Gomery war room was wrong. We have heard time and time again tonight that the sole purpose of that war room was to do damage control, to spin a message so that Canadians would be confused over what really happened in the sponsorship scandal.
Before I go on, my colleague from Vegreville—Wainwright spoke earlier this afternoon. He said that he recalled a pop tune from years past. He said it had similarities to what was happening here. He said the name of the tune was Turn! Turn! Turn! and that this was like spin, spin, spin. My colleague could not recall the name of the group. For the record I want to help out my colleague and say that song was sung by a group called The Byrds. The song was composed and penned by Bob Dylan.
I raise that because that got me thinking. A very good friend of mine back in Regina Beach by the name of Butch Lasek and I many times talk about songs late into the evening. One of the amazing attributes that Butch Lasek has, and he has many, is he can recall the words to every obscure pop tune ever recorded. What is even more amazing is that the later at night it gets, the more words he can recall.
I raise this because it reminded me of another obscure pop tune that to me shows the similarity between the song and the relationship between the Canadian voter and the Liberal Party of Canada. The name of the song from back in the 1970s is The Snake . It tells the story of a woman who was walking in the countryside late one winter evening and came upon a poor frozen snake that was obviously dying. The woman, being a caring and loving person, picked up the snake, wrapped it in her scarf, took the snake back to her home, nurtured it, fed it, took care of it, kept it warm and eventually nursed the snake back to health.
One day when she was tending to the snake again, the snake now in full health, rose up and bit the woman. It was a poisonous snake. All of a sudden the woman fell back and said to the snake, “Why did you do that? Why did you bite me? I am surely going to die because your bite is poisonous. After all the time I have taken to take care of you and nurse you back to health, you have bitten me”. The snake said, “Well really, stupid woman, it is your own fault. You knew I was a snake when you took me in”.
If most Canadians can see the relationship between the Canadian voter and the Liberal Party, they might understand the words to the song. If they do not, I can have them phone my friend Butch who will explain it to them in clear and uncut terms. But I digress. I can see we do not have many music fans across the way, although we do have one on this side and I appreciate that.
What we are talking about is the fact that once again this government has taken in secret over $1 million of Canadian taxpayers' dollars to fund an operation, not to benefit Canadians, but to spin the truth about what happened at Gomery.
The ironic thing about this as I see it is that the government did not come forward and tell Canadians or tell this House what it was doing. It took an access to information request by the Ottawa Citizen to find out what was happening. Even with that request we still do not know everything. A lot of the information on the transcripts was blanked out. Client-solicitor confidentiality and that type of thing was cited.
We really do not know a lot of the information that was going on in that war room, but we do know a couple of things.
Number one, we know it was a secret operation. No one on the Liberal side announced the Liberals' intention to do this. If it was as open and above board and in the normal course of action as the members opposite suggest, why did they keep it under wraps?
The real irony is that they, being the Liberal Party of Canada, are basically on trial. Justice Gomery is trying to get to the bottom of what happened to $250 million that was stolen from taxpayers, or perhaps it was only $100 million. Let me correct myself: $250 million was the cost of the sponsorship program, but there is $100 million in question that was apparently stolen from taxpayers and funneled back to the Liberal Party of Canada.
We would not have known about that had there not been an access to information request by a member of the media, who later relayed that to the Auditor General, who began her investigation which eventually uncovered what had been happening.
The government keeps saying that it wants to get to the bottom of it, yet it is doing the same thing with this war room. It took an access to information request to find out what it was doing with the war room. Does the government not learn lessons? Apparently not. It continues to do the same thing that got it into trouble in the first place, and that is to misuse taxpayers' dollars.
I will not stand in this House and say that the million dollars that were budgeted to the Privy Council for these war room operations were stolen from the taxpayers, but clearly there is an ethical question. The use of taxpayers' dollars to benefit the government of the day, to limit the damage coming out of Gomery, is something that no Canadian, certainly no Canadian taxpayer, should accept. It is totally unacceptable. What we need, in the essence of true openness and transparency, is a government that merely lets Gomery do his work, as the Liberals continually say to do.
How in the world are we to believe that this was a relevant use of taxpayers' dollars when the intent of the use of the taxpayers' dollars in this war room was to coach witnesses appearing before Gomery? Why could the witnesses not merely go before Justice Gomery and tell the truth? Why did they have to be coached? Why did they have to be prepped? There is only one reason. It is because the Liberal machine, and again as one of my colleagues said earlier this evening, is a great spin machine and I give them full credit for that. The Liberals wanted to make sure that only their message was coming out on a daily basis. They wanted to make sure that no witness who appeared before Gomery would say anything untoward that might get them in further trouble with Justice Gomery and the Canadian public.
What did they do? They took $1 million of Canadian taxpayers' hard-earned money and said, “Here are your lines for today. When questioned, here is how you respond”. Part of the money apparently was also to prepare answers in question period. What answers do they need? We heard consistently, day after day, week after week, month after month from the public works minister, “Let Justice Gomery do his work. I cannot comment on daily testimony because testimony one day may be contradicted by testimony the second day”. We paid $1 million to hear that?
Never did we hear a clear answer from any minister on the opposite side of the House to direct testimony. I must say again, going back to some of the drivel that we heard from members opposite during question period, when they say that testimony one day is going to be contradicted the next, that they are only allegations, as we have said time and time again, much of the sworn testimony that we heard during Gomery were not allegations. They were confessions.
These were individuals who, through their sworn testimony, were implicating themselves. Why would they do that if it was not true? Because it was true. These were confessions under oath of misuse of an orchestrated and systematic method over a 10 year period of taking money from the sponsorship program, taxpayers' dollars, funneling it through friendly Liberal ad agencies and then pumping that money back into the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec to fight elections. These were not allegations. They were confessions. Yet that whole operation, rather than allow Justice Gomery to do his work, as the members opposite say they wished, they set up a war room to control the message.
Why do they need to control the message if we are really looking for the truth? The truth speaks for itself. It always has and it always will, but if they are controlling the information, if they are controlling the message, clearly the only conclusion that any Canadian can come to is that there is something to hide, and we know the government is hiding. We know the government hid the sponsorship scandal and the impact of that money. We know it is trying to hide the truth behind the Gomery commission. We know it is trying to shut down the Gomery commission before Justice Gomery has an opportunity to come to his conclusions.
