Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Again, this is a chance for the members of the committee to put their views on the public record in the atmosphere of a committee where all sides are able to ask questions and ascertain their version of what actually happened. A former colleague of the members opposite who has become an unintentional whistle-blower about the practices of the Conservative Party has made public comments, on television at least, to say that in order to get funds for projects in local ridings it is vital and in fact essential to be Conservative, because Liberals, in the case of the town of Markham, aren't able to get the same consideration.
Now, I think Mr. Landon, who has since stepped down or been stepped down—it's hard to say exactly what happened there, but he is no longer the candidate—has said at a number of points that he has been influenced by the Conservative Party itself and has not been able to speak his mind.
I don't know whether that's true, but this is a chance for the Conservative Party to show whether or not they agree that Mr. Landon should be stifled in any respect. His words on a television program were that the news he learned had to be sanitized first by the Prime Minister's Office. I know it sounds somewhat provocative, and I'm not subscribing 100%, but I think it's on the public record in the media. I think Mr. Landon would be an instructive witness to this committee in terms of the practices—because he has proclaimed knowledge of those practices—of allocating funds to ridings.
I would suggest again that the dollars that are at stake here for infrastructure are serious, are large, and any member of this committee who wishes to can look at lists and can see essential evidence that there are massive skews, not targeted based on families and communities and need, but rather, skewed to Conservative ridings as a whole, particularly to those of cabinet ministers in some provinces and in some programs, and to recently acquired ridings, and so on.
Again—this is simply for the furtherance of the public debate—to hear from someone who to the best of my knowledge is still a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party himself and who may in his fulsome statements, as distinct from the ones reported in the media, have other explanations and things to add.... Mr. Landon has shown a willingness to speak out publicly and has an independent cast of mind, and I think he would make a useful witness for a committee interested to know whether the program has gone awry and whether there are influences at work that take these funds away from the purposes for which they were voted, which is to create jobs for unemployed Canadians based on need.