Mr. Speaker, thank you for your comment on the speech I am in the process of making. I greatly appreciate it.
I can understand the member for Bourassa. He was worried because the Liberal Party has been caught with its hands in the till taking money from taxpayers to give it to the party in Quebec. That is unfortunate.
Just imagine, there is a national unity fund. I was listening a moment ago to a Liberal colleague who was saying that hon. members knew that there was a sponsorship program. Yes, we knew there was one, but we did not know that it was there to be stolen from. It was there so sponsorships could be obtained, and not only in Quebec. In our part of the country, we had the Canada Games in Bathurst and Campbellton and the money was used for sponsorships. It was a good system.
As I recall the Auditor General made the comment that it was not a bad program. There are programs that are good, but if they are badly administered, they will be lost. The Auditor General said that she had not asked that the sponsorships be abolished, she had asked that the sponsorship scandal be stopped. She said that the program was badly administered. Justice Gomery said the same thing.
That was done with taxpayers’ money, the money of people who get up in the morning and work very hard. The money comes here to Ottawa, and these people want the government to manage it properly. Today the Liberals are trying to make us believe that they manage money properly. They took $48 billion from the Employment Insurance Fund. They put the money into the general fund to pay down the debt, to balance the budgets and they put it into the sponsorship scandal. It was done with money taken from our people who are suffering and who are hungry. You can imagine what happened when the time came to vote.
On Friday, in L'Acadie nouvelle , in the column headed L'opinion du lecteur , one of our provincial Liberal elected representatives asked me and Jack Layton to make sure that Employment Insurance was on the table if there were any negotiations with Paul Martin. I told our local Liberal member that he should ask his colleague, Paul Martin, to finally grant the best 12 weeks. He should not ask me. I am not the Prime Minister of Canada. He should be asking Paul Martin, his colleague and friend the Prime Minister.