Madam Speaker, it is interesting that the Prime Minister tried so hard for so long to take over the government and then, once he got there, he has been so ineffective and has done so little. It is important, as my colleague said, that decisions need to be made on the basis of right and wrong and leadership needs to be shown.
It has been disheartening, I guess is the word we could use, to hear Liberal cabinet ministers when testifying saying “I did not know what was going on in my department. It is not my responsibility. Do not blame me. I do not know who you should blame, but do not blame me”. Interestingly enough, that is a defence that not only Gagliano has used, but the Prime Minister has also used that same defence. That really is disappointing because we know now that his staffers were involved early on in choosing companies that would be given advertising contracts. We know they were his closest staffers. Speaking in terms of “our” and “us” in their correspondence representing the minister, we are talking about the fact that they knew those companies were being chosen.
We know they were also involved in adjusting contracts. We know there was a contract that was moved up by $1 million just so one of the advertising companies could get a $170,000 commission and that the minister's staff was involved in that.
It has been interesting because I thought there would be some serious work done here and instead all we have seen is delay. My colleague asked about some specific things that we could do. I am going to talk about some of the things that have been delayed by the Prime Minister. I think if we would move on those, then we would be able to get something done here.
One of the things was same sex marriage. The government does not want to address that issue, so it has moved it into the Supreme Court. It is going to hold off on the reference to the Supreme Court until sometime in the fall so it does not have to deal with it before the election. Show some leadership and deal with the issue.
The second one is the Arar inquiry. We know the story of the gentleman who was imprisoned, came back to Canada and is trying to get some justice here. What did the government do? It announced one more inquiry and put things off one more time, “Let us get through the election. Hopefully we will not have to answer the questions and maybe we never will”.
The third thing was the question about the CSL contract discrepancies. We came forward and asked what kind of contract CSL had. That is the Prime Minister's former company. We were given one figure and then we found out that it was hundreds and thousands times bigger than that, up to $161 million in grants that his company received. We did not get that information directly.
Today we heard one of my colleagues talk about the fact that documents submitted by the head of the Treasury Board are not accurate. When we go through them we find what groups actually got for sponsorship money and it does not match up with the cheques that were paid out. We want to know where that money went. The government could move quickly on that. We think it knows because it has had a couple of years already. We saw it sit with the former public works minister for a long time and nothing happened on that file. We know that some of these things could be done immediately.
There are other things, too, such as a review of the gun registry. How much more money are we going to waste on the gun registry?