Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I want to thank colleagues again for coming together to address this extremely important matter, which seems to be getting convoluted again by the Liberals.
Mr. Chair, if we can be very clear here, this is about allegations that a minister of the Crown was directing a contract involving taxpayers' funds to advance the interests of the Liberal Party of Canada and the minister's partisan interests. That's what this is about.
I think everybody around here understands the Board of Internal Economy and what it does, but maybe people listening in don't. The Board of Internal Economy has no jurisdiction to rule on a minister on a conflict of interest. Frankly, it works on consensus building. We know that if the Liberals get their way here, they would just shut it down there, just as they're trying to shut down this committee today.
This is very straightforward, Mr. Chair. As Mr. Barrett said, he is very open to Mr. Boulerice's very reasonable time frame—one meeting, two hours. That doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary. What really bothers me is that we hear the Liberal members saying, “Oh, well, if we hear something that is suspicious here, the opposition is going to want to call another witness”, or this or that. Of course, Mr. Chair. That's our job. That's why Canadians have us here.
We are going into an election campaign. The Liberals are going out this summer. We know they don't want to be here; they want to be out there. They want to be handing out money here, handing out money there, with just big smiles everywhere. They don't want to be talking about corruption and ethical issues again, and a Prime Minister being with Mr. Pitfield, for heaven's sake, who was on that illegal vacation he took. They don't want to talk about that. They don't want Canadians to even be thinking about it.
Mr. Chair, I don't want to talk too long here. I opened up and I explained what this is about. I think I explained what the Liberals are trying to do again, which is to filibuster to keep this issue from getting out. Frankly, the more they push back, the more I'm concerned. I think we do have to make sure that Canadians understand that it's about a conflict of interest by a minister. When these questions are being asked, it's our job as opposition MPs to be very reasonable. We're not asking people to spend the entire summer here, but just two hours to get to some very simple answers. If it's going to be open and transparent, those answers will come quite quickly.
I think, Mr. Chair, we have about 10 minutes left. I think the meeting's going to be talked out. That's all I have to say.