Madam Speaker, I know that the member has more to say but I am glad you cut him off.
I am again up on the Lancaster Aviation file, the Henry McFliker file, if you will. I want to bring attention to some of the inaccuracies of the parliamentary secretary last night in his response to my question.
Basically my question is this: How could the Government of Canada allow spare parts to leave the country, go to Florida to a third party and wind up in a warehouse owned by a convicted felon in the United States by the name of Henry McFliker?
When I mentioned the inventory that has been dealt with by Henry McFliker, the parliamentary secretary used information that is not accurate. The numbers he quoted were in Canadian dollars and he has underestimated them by at least 100%. The fact of the matter is that if we take Mr. McFliker at his word, and I know that is very difficult to do, he advertised having close to $40 million U.S. in Canadian aviation spare parts and military parts housed in Florida.
This is a serious issue. The reason we have been at this for two years now is that basically I would like to have a level of honesty from the government in terms of how this contract was allowed to be negotiated. What eventually happened to those spare parts in Florida? When Henry McFliker, who was marketing and housing spare aviation and military parts on behalf of the Government of Canada, was arrested, many of his holdings were seized by the government of the United States. To back that up, I have with me documentation from the attorney general of the state of Florida where this court case was heard and where Henry McFliker was convicted.
The question is, what safeguards do we have? Did the government keep an accurate inventory of parts that did wind up in Florida? What did that inventory include? I do not think the government knows what was in that inventory. It certainly does not know the value of that inventory, so if it does not know the value of the inventory how can the member stand in the House and say that everything is okay, that we received fair market value for these parts?
My suspicion is that the Government of Canada did not receive fair market value for those spare aviation parts. The reason is that Mr. McFliker, who owned this warehouse and who was selling these parts, was fined $1.7 million by the attorney general when he was proven guilty of money laundering and drug trafficking and all of the rest of the charges that were thrown at him. He had to pay a huge fine, only two years ago. My suspicion is that he sold off these parts to pay off his obligation to the courts in the United States. In other words, we were the fall guys.
Because of sloppy bookkeeping and all the other reasons that Mr. Gagliano got himself in trouble, as well as the former public works minister, I think that the Government of Canada owes it to the people of Canada to go down to Florida, in co-operation with the FBI, and do a thorough investigation of this file so that we will know.
At the very minimum, Madam Speaker, would you not like to know? Would you not like to see the inventory list of these spare parts and what happened to them? If the government would provide us with that inventory list we actually could track these parts.
Just to conclude, Florida has--