Mr. Speaker, I want to get to my hon. colleague's remarks, but I just want to say that I have lived at least 21 years of my professional career under some pretty severe rules of conduct and professional behaviour. As a young man I was a principal. I could have put my wife on staff, but I did not because I could see that and we had a code of ethics as board members. I had a code of ethics before me, all written out, as a member of the legislative assembly. If anyone on the board had phoned a bank to guarantee that a contractor would get a job, bingo, he would have been off the board.
The Prime Minister admittedly phoned the Business Development Bank. It was a total conflict of interest. That fact cannot be successfully denied by anybody in Canada.
I would like to ask the hon. member this: cannot your constituents see that it is a total conflict of interest and the Prime Minister should admit that guilt now and come clean on defending what is supposed to be a code of ethics for all members of parliament?