Yes, because I find the same hypocrisy. I find the same difficulty.
In one case, we have a chair of another committee trying to refer what we would call unethical political financing to this committee. Yet we have members of this committee, on many motions from us to open their books and talk about where their election financing comes from and where their election financing is spent, saying, “No, no, not our books, not our books, only the Conservative books.”
So maybe someone...I ask, through you, Chair, the members of the official opposition. Perhaps it can't happen in the House; I know that maybe the chair of the ethics committee isn't one of the people who gets to sit in his chair all the time. They may have to do it in the lobby. But maybe they could ask him what he meant by sending this forward to this committee, because they're refusing to open their books.
You know, we have the case of the sky's-the-limit fundraiser, we have one member of the official opposition saying, “Send it here, open your books, and look at it”, and then we have members of this committee sitting here saying, “We can't open our books and look at all of that stuff, it's only the Conservatives' books that need to be opened.”
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure we can get to the bottom of the sky's-the-limit fundraiser in this committee if we only open the Conservatives' books, because we didn't hold it. As far as I know, none of us even attended. I'd love to play tennis with the Rae boys, but I thought it might get a little pricey.
Maybe through you, Chair, to others on the committee, does anybody know what we got for any of these things at that auction? I'm not sure it ever came back to us. I'm sure after we took off the sky's the limit...any corporation can bid whatever they want, which is truly an illegal donation if that were to happen. Once that came off, because I think they did at the last minute say, “Oh, well, we won't take corporate donations then”, I wonder what the sky's-the-limit donation was.
How did you do on golf with former prime ministers, on hockey games with former goalies, on tennis with former premiers of Ontario? How did you do?
I don't know. I guess we don't have an answer for that.
Sorry, Chair, I guess we'll have to not do it.
I will state just one last time, to clean that whole piece up, the hypocrisy of a chair of the ethics committee bringing forward, or asking it to come here, when we've heard many times here, and asked clearly....
We would already be finished this. I think a member opposite this morning said we would already be done this if we had just gotten to it. We would already be done this. We would already be done Bill C-6. Am I not right? If they had chosen to make it non-partisan and to do a full investigation of election financing, we would already be done. I think we would. This committee works fairly well when it works. We would have had witnesses. We would already be finished.
If we had chosen to open all the books, if we'd chosen to say what's good for the goose is good for the gander—to use a saying that my grandma used to use—then we would have been done.
But what do we get? What do we get? We don't get the opening of everybody's books. No, what we get is the committee wanting to look at only the Conservative Party's books on this issue.
It's not right, not fair, not what we need, and not the way it should have been done.
We've talked about where we started on this, and I can show you, Chair, the minutes of meetings. On Tuesday, September 11, we met. I believe it was on a motion brought forward by Ms. Redman, I believe on a 106(4) motion. Four members of the committee had said, “Why don't we bring this forward?”
On Tuesday, September 11, they brought it forward, and you did, Chair, rule it out of order. I could read your ruling, because you went on at some length about why you chose to rule the way you did. You did some good research and such. But I guess I'll just say that you ruled against them, against the motion. You did so in a procedure that to me still gives me this “when you're right, you're right” feeling. And I still think right should outweigh procedure.
So I still have a problem with the fact that this overruling-the-chair situation goes from a chair making an absolute positive and correct ruling, stating in his ruling why he made it that way....
As you said today, Chair, you don't even have to do that, but you did. In each of these cases you stated why you made the ruling that way. You even showed us, in some cases, the lengths you went to in the case of talking to Mr. Walsh, the legal analyst in the case of the original motion, about trying to get it right. You went to great lengths.
So I still have this problem. I say it smacks of dictatorship. I don't want to use too harsh a term, but I think that's truly where we ended up, Chair.