Mr. Speaker, I thank the member from New Westminster for bringing that question here to the House and to my attention.
Yes, it has puzzled me how the now Prime Minister was able to take credit for what he saw as the best aspects of the Chrétien government and yet has refused to associate himself with those issues in which he was most closely involved as a Quebec minister, as a vice-president of the Treasury Board and as the finance minister.
We look at the HRDC boondoggle; billions of dollars. He was the eye of the needle, as the new finance minister says, through which all spending went. We did not just have the camel going through this eye of the needle. We had the whole caravan going through, and the finance minister, who is now the Prime Minister, saw nothing. How does one fit billions of dollars through that eye of the needle and never figure out that money is disappearing at an alarming rate?
It is the same with the gun registry. Here he is, the eye of the needle, and it is just pouring through there.
What he has demonstrated consistently is that for those programs, for which his government has been most proud, he was in charge of the money and the money disappeared. He was able to do that when he avoided the House for the last year, when he was off on his Liberal leadership campaign.
Now we see the results of trying to live on both sides of that coin. Every day there is another news conference trying to explain why things are not quite the way he explained them the day before.
I want to point out that as a new Conservative Party we have not simply come out of thin air. We draw on a rich history of democratic reform that comes from the old Reform Party and the Alliance Party. We come from a rich tradition of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. We looked at the policies and brought those policies together in one party. We have now put together a fairly extensive policy book that will be worked on as the leadership campaign goes forward and we will present to the people of Canada the real alternative to the corrupt, tired Liberal regime.