Mr. Speaker, what happened at last year's APEC conference when pepper spray met protesters? Will we ever know? Does it really matter?
Here are the questions. Were the protests captured on TV a result of independent police action, or was it the Prime Minister and his office suppressing Canadian rights of association and expression? Were Canadians jailed to protect heads of state or to save ruthless dictators from embarrassment?
Thousands of pages of evidence and audio and video tapes point to the Prime Minister, but that evidence is tied up in legal knots thanks to government paid lawyers. The public complaints commission is shut down for at least six months. In fact the commission was never designed to probe political accountability.
Here is why the APEC scandal matters to Canadians as expressed by Craig Jones, one of the jailed protesters:
The root issue for me is to what extent we are going to accept the political control of the RCMP by the executive branch of the government.
Unlike the Prime Minister, Canadians do not want scapegoats. They want political accountability.