Mr. Speaker, as a former member of the RCMP, I am speaking with some background with regard to cheques.
If the private mansion was not really a business place, there would be no expectation that a payment was necessary. Once it was out in the public, the public works minister started to worry that maybe there was a conflict of interest and was contrary to the ethics of his Prime Minister. He figured he had to do something about this, so his family had a cheque brought forward to show that his family paid for it so there was no conflict of interest.
That would tend to address the conflict of interest if the cheque had been handled in a normal way, but it was not handled in a normal way by Mr. Boulay. It was not returned. The other thing the public works minister could have done was to bring forward evidence that the cheque was written in the proper numbering sequence in his daughter-in-law's cheque book. Those cheques beforehand would have shown when it was written. I suspect it was written in May but we will wait to see what the auditor general finds out.
If the cheque book disappears, I should warn the public works minister that the RCMP or the auditor general will still go into that bank account. They will get photocopies of both sides of that cheque. They will be able to prove when the cheque was written. We will be looking forward to that. There is no way of covering this up now. We have been asking the public works minister to fully clarify this matter. He has not provided the back of the cheque or any of the other evidence that is necessary.
It ends up with the public works minister trying to bring in another person to back up that he is being honest. This happens to be the priest, Father Savoie. They must have some reasonably close connection because Father Savoie says he cannot say anything because this is a seal of confessional in the church. Even that is not honest. A reverend from a university has said that the information the priest has in regard to this cheque is not a seal of confessional and that he can in fact explain it to the police and the auditor general. Here we have another course of dishonest conduct, in my opinion, by not having the full truth come out right away.
With this course of conduct which is enough to cause a police investigation we then have to look at what was given in return. First there was supposed to be the free stay which it turns out had to be covered up. Then there is the $77,000 worth of political contributions to the Liberal Party. When average Canadians see what I have just described, that is why they have lost all faith not in democracy, not in parliament, but in the honesty of the Prime Minister and all of the cabinet ministers.