With a $4-billion infrastructure fund, where time was of the essence in getting that money out the door, the expectation could be that mistakes would be made and subsequently the public accounts committee would look at it. But what we see here is something that appears to show a clear pattern of abuse. This money does not belong to the Conservative Party of Canada. This money does not belong to Conservative members of Parliament, public office holders, or MPs. This money belongs to the taxpayers of Canada. Canada is not a third-world dictatorship, where the country's national flag and emblem is replaced with a party emblem.
When the commissioner appeared on Tuesday before our committee, she made it clear that although ethics is part of her title, it's not part of her mandate. She stated to us that while “ethics” appears in her title, it does not appear in either the act or the code, so it's quite unclear as to the extent to which her mandate extends into ethical issues that are not expressly referred to in either the code or the act. She concluded by saying that in fact one would wonder whether it extends there at all.
So we have three options in respect of how to investigate what appears to be a pattern of abuse of taxpayer dollars. First option: the Ethics Commissioner will be looking at this, but she has sent a clear signal that it's outside her mandate. Our second option is PCO. If we go back to this spring's testimony of the Information Commissioner, we can see some of the problems we have with the PCO—the access to information requests of MPs and journalists being red-flagged, requests sent by departments to the PCO, requests being blocked by the PCO. It is evident that we have a serious problem with access to information, and the PCO is actively engaged in this. So if PCO were to investigate ethical concerns of this sort, there would be real and serious questions surrounding how they would go about it.
So we're left with one option to look into this issue—the elected representatives of the people. Timeliness is important. I believe that Canadians expect us to come clean on this, that this should not be an investigation behind closed doors. This isn't complicated. It's quite evident what's gone on. We should investigate the public office holders, have them appear before this committee to explain themselves. We need to know how this occurred.
The commissioner will have her report. When it lands, she'll most likely state that it's outside her mandate. We can use that for recommendations, so that in the future it does fall within her mandate as an ethics commissioner.
We'll be supporting Madame Freeman's motion.