Well, Chair, I always thought the catch line “I'm listening” came from Dr. Frasier Crane, but it works well with you too. It looks good on you.
My point is that if the opposition's motives are sincere in actually trying to correct a wrong and find out if something was actually intentionally done illegally, then they should have no difficulty in supporting my motion. They obviously do, so I have to ask, since we were the only party that has voluntarily agreed to bring our books for examination and they have not, what they have to hide.
We know that the Liberals, of course, have a lot to hide. I wouldn't suggest for a moment that some of the $40 million from the sponsorship scandal might have ended up in any of those campaigns, but perhaps that's part of it; I don't know. All I can say is that without equivocation, the examination of our books could have begun long before this had the opposition merely agreed to support this motion. Without question, they have not done so for strictly political reasons.
I know they are going to be opposing this, or at least disagreeing with my comments and my observations. They did so yesterday in their news conference, but I would suggest to you, Chair, that the more this discussion takes place and the more this discussion becomes known to the general public, the more it will be apparent to members of the general public that it is nothing more than a witch hunt.
Chair, there appears to be a great deal of election speculation going on, at least at this point in time. If you are a political junkie or even a casual but interested observer of politics, I think election fever has ramped up significantly over the past two days. I would suggest that if you polled even most members of Parliament, last week you would probably have found that the majority of members would have said they didn't think there was going to be an election any time soon. Perhaps they'd have said later this year, maybe even later this spring, but they certainly weren't thinking an election would happen imminently.
Well, events have changed significantly in the last 48 hours, Chair, and the observations made by many—particularly the political pundits, those commentators whose job it is to observe and report and prognosticate and pontificate on all things political—are almost of one mind right now. Again, this attitude has changed over the last 48 hours; all those individuals are pretty well agreed in opining that there is likely to be an election now, caused by the defeat of the budget.
They're suggesting that, Chair, because the Liberal Party does not want to face an election on the Afghanistan issue, because as we know....
Chair, I appreciate your wanting me to bring this into relevance. I'll tie the ends together. It's quite obvious the reason this—