Thank you, Mr. Chair. I should know better not to engage in any baiting by the member opposite and I should continue to speak directly through the chair, and I will attempt to do so in the future.
But it merely underscores what I've been saying all along, that I do not believe that any party in this Parliament has done anything wrong, because we have all engaged in the same regional ad buys, with varying degrees of methodology. I will certainly demonstrate in a few moments why I'd make that contention. To that end, I would suggest there is absolutely nothing to fear from the opposition parties to have a full examination and a full study of the practices of all parties.
In fact, Mr. Chair, as I was mentioning earlier, the only motivation I can see from the opposition members not to agree to this motion and to argue against it continuously is that they do not have a real desire to try to get to the bottom of this, merely to only have one party being studied, and that's for their own political purposes. It probably wouldn't, in their view at least, have the same cachet if all four parties were being examined. So they only want the headlines to say the study of Conservative election practices is taking place. In fact, Mr. Chair, we have filed an affidavit in Federal Court and presented our case, our factual case, and we will be arguing that case in front of a judge, and I would argue that this will be a more thorough examination of what we did in the 2006 election than this committee could ever hope to find on its own.
As a point of reference, I go back to the Mulroney-Schreiber inquiry now being conducted by the ethics committee. Even members of the opposition, whether it be a member of the committee proper or the chair, have at times stated that in their opinion a full public inquiry will actually get more information as to what happened than their own efforts. Similarly, I would argue that the court action we have taken will more fully disclose everything that we did. All of our advertising practices will come under examination in this court case far more fully than any examination, I would suggest, that this committee could possibly hope for.
So if they truly want to find out, or if they are truly concerned, about whether or not the Conservative party broke any rules in terms of our advertising in the 2006 election, that will be determined in a court of law. That will be a far more thorough investigation of the practices in which we engaged than anything by this committee.
