The hon. member across the way, who usually has an opinion about just about anything whether he knows anything about it or not is asking what the person may have to hide. Can I suggest to the hon. member that it is none of his business. If any hon. member of the House has personal liabilities, a mortgage, personal difficulties of another kind that he or she might have discussed with the ethics counsellor, they are not matters for the public record. Does the hon. member reveal to us what he says in a confessional? That is the secular equivalent of what is being asked on the floor of the House of Commons.
What kind of nonsense is this? If it was coming from an hon. member who did not know better, we would half excuse it, but it is coming from the right hon. the former Prime Minister of Canada. In his dying days politically in this Parliament, is that what the right hon. the former Prime Minister of Canada, the member for Calgary Centre, has to say to all of us in the House? Is this prime ministerial for someone who, for a very brief period of time best qualified as gestational, was in office for some nine months, some 20 something years ago, and returns to the House after having gone all over the country and taken almost a year to take his seat? The last thing he can do in the House before leaving is to say to another hon. member that because he is no longer in cabinet the oath of secrecy, the undertaking that was made to someone to reveal private information and anything like that, does not count because he thinks that individual should show the information to the Canadian public and the House of Commons should vote on it.
I cannot use in a parliamentary sense the words that come to mind to describe what I am thinking. I can say to hon. members across the way that the day may come when they would not want that kind of situation inflicted on themselves. Perhaps they should not try to inflict it on others.
I must say that I listened to the last speech from the Conservative member who talked of the code in the future and those things that we are undertaking to do in order to improve this House of Commons that we love so dearly, and that is fine. But that is not the same as breaching undertakings in the past and asking a member of this House to--