Mr. Speaker, I am reminded of something Einstein said. To paraphrase it, he said that the problems we have today will never be solved by the same level of thinking that created the problems in the first place. That is clearly true.
The problem as it stands today is that the Liberal government was in power when all these problems first erupted, when Pierre Corbeil was convicted of influence peddling. The same people, the same Prime Minister are saying that they will now be the reformists, the people who will clean up the ethics problems in government. They are the people who created the problems.
It stretches the limits of credulity to suggest that they are the ideal people to clean this mess up. That is why we are asking for someone from the outside to come in, someone who is not in a conflict of interest. Who knows what skeletons are hidden in the closets of Liberal cabinet ministers. Can we really expect that they would put themselves in political peril by bringing in changes that would reveal some of those skeletons? Hardly. That does not make any sense at all. That is why we need someone from the outside to come in.
The problem with what the government has proposed today is that the auditor general may produce a damning report of what she finds as she scrutinizes spending in all the different departments but it may not necessarily be behaviour that is criminal. The RCMP is called in when evidence is found that demonstrates there may be grounds for a criminal investigation.
What about all those other areas? What about all those other incidents that are never reported on, that we never find in a massive bureaucracy that spends $170 billion a year? Clearly we need to have someone from the outside come in, pull it apart, analyze what is going on, raise serious questions and propose some serious answers. If we do not do that, Canadians will never have confidence that the government is spending their tax dollars both ethically and legally. Canadians deserve at least that much.