Again, I don't think that was a point of order at all. I think it actually underlines my case, which is that the role of the ethics committee is to hold government to account, not to hold former staffers in the third party and drag them here to trash their reputation. That is an over-reach of this committee. We've seen already a number of incidents where they've tried to turn this committee into a kangaroo court and they've ended up looking rather ridiculous because they haven't thought this through.
For example, my honourable colleague wrote demanding an investigation into the New Democratic Party convention and then made all kinds of allegations about thousands of dollars of illegal money changing hands, which I don't know if he said he saw or not. The poor Ethics Commissioner was brought before us and the Lobbying Commissioner brought and there was no evidence. This was just a complete smear. I hear him over there still demanding that he had evidence, but he didn't present it.
You can make these accusations sitting around the table. You can trash people if you're the government. But then they never come through with any evidence.
It's like yesterday in the House, where they're now accusing the Liberal Party of suppressing their own vote. I think we saw the issue with the interference in the Federal Court, where he tried to bring a judge before our committee, completely ignoring the standard limitations of parliamentary convention between the role of the courts and the role of Parliament. He said it didn't matter because he was the master of his own house. But of course that's not true.
We saw them attempt to again overturn the Speaker and demand unredacted documents that were at the heart of a court case, a Federal Court case, a direct interference in the court case. Then they used the line that they were the masters of their own house, so that they could abuse whatever privilege they were given under the limited mandate of this committee.
We saw the excellent legal review from Robert Walsh, who sent a real warning shot about the abuse of this committee by the Conservative Party and the attempt to undermine the long-standing sub-judicial convention, the long-standing limitations on the role of parliamentary committees to investigate but not interfere with the courts. But when it suited them, they felt that this was perfectly okay to be able to undermine the parliamentary tradition of this country to score a cheap political point. That's a staggering thing to do when you're in government.
What we do here in Parliament is we establish precedent very much like the court. So when you see a parliamentary secretary come in with whatever the latest hot-button government issue is, their willingness to subvert the long-standing Westminster traditions that don't just affect Canada but actually have repercussions within the parliamentary traditions around the world, you see their willingness to actually shake the credibility and the foundations of how we carry our work out in Parliament, for whatever cheap political purpose of the day.
Today, of course, the real issue is the issue of widespread electoral fraud that is rocking the country, and the Conservative Party is certainly scrambling to blame everybody else. I think they're now blaming Elections Canada for this electoral fraud scheme. So they need a game-changer and they've set upon a former staffer in the Liberal Party as an example they will make. They will drag him before the committee and they will usurp the work of our committee in order to change the station on probably the most serious issue of electoral fraud in memory. It's at least as serious as the recent in-and-out electoral fraud we saw, which the senior heads of the Conservative Party had to cop pleas on because they were busted: they were fully guilty, and they knew it.
They're trying to divert our attention now on this issue of the so-called VikiLeaks. I'm astounded. I sometimes give my colleagues more credit than they seem to be due, but I would have thought that in light of the Speaker's ruling this morning, which I thought was--