Mr. Chairman, the reason I move this motion today is that I don't think the Prime Minister has any intention of creating the full commission of inquiry that he promised Canadians. Perhaps the Conservative government is hoping that Canadians have short attention spans and that they'll forget all about the commitment, in fact the broken promise, to commence a full commission of inquiry into this affair. They are hoping they can once again sweep this whole thing under the carpet.
There has been no evidence that the government is taking any concrete steps whatsoever to get the full public inquiry up and running, appoint the commissioner, rent the space, hire the staff, etc. I have lost confidence that they have any intention to proceed.
I remind committee members that it was the wish of the committee to recall Mr. Mulroney at the end of our list of witnesses in the study we undertook. It was our intention to call him back, for two reasons: to give him the opportunity to respond to some of the testimony that was subsequent to the evidence he gave, and so we could ask some supplementary questions to flesh out the explanation we were told regarding the work he says he did for Mr. Schreiber to earn the cash payments he received in these secret hotel meetings.
As committee members will remember, we invited Mr. Mulroney to come back a second time, and he declined to take us up on that invitation. He refused to attend, as it were. All committee members know that we had the authority and the ability to compel him to attend and we chose not to, as a committee.
The reason the NDP didn't push the point and summons Mr. Mulroney is that we believed the full public inquiry would be up and running shortly and that those outstanding questions would be addressed by the inquiry, perhaps with better resources and ability than our committee had to dig deeper into some of the unanswered questions. That never happened, so my position has changed.
This is why I am compelled to bring this forward today. I believe we have a finite window of opportunity to ever get some of these questions answered. I also believe that Karlheinz Schreiber will not be in this country forever.
If the government is not going to live up to its word and begin the inquiry, then I believe it is up to this committee. It's within our authority and our mandate to revisit the fifth report we made to Parliament and put supplementary questions stemming from that report. That's why the motion is worded as it is, and that's why, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your deeming it to be in order.
I'm not going to talk at length. I'm won't even go through the questions we might have for Mr. Mulroney. There will be plenty of time for that after we go to a vote.
I appeal to members not to block this motion. It is in the public interest that we conclude our work on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, if in no other area than the narrow scope of trying to add substance, flesh on the bones, to what I believe is the cock-and-bull story that Mr. Mulroney gave us regarding what he did for the money, which I believe to be nothing at all. If there is any evidence or documentation to verify that he actually did travel the world trying to sell tanks to foreign countries, I don't think it should be that hard to prove. I think it is our committee's role to dig deeper on that.
I urge the support of committee members for this motion.
Thank you.