Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend has made an excellent point. The member has been very aggressive in putting this matter forward. He has led the House in respect of issues surrounding fairness and equity for aboriginal veterans. He has led the House on that issue, his motion having been approved by the House. As the vice-chair of the standing committee he has exercised real leadership in ensuring that this matter is before the House today.
The long and short of it is that it was through the cooperation of the opposition parties which are represented in the House and their common efforts that the fourth report was approved by the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs. It was approved without the support of the Liberal members. It was achieved only with considerable effort on the part of the opposition parties to craft and arrive at recommendations which we could all support and which were brought before the House to get the debate on the floor of the House of Commons.
One thing was very clear. The Liberal members did not want to see this issue in the House of Commons. They did everything they could to make sure that it died at committee and that it was never brought before the House.
Last week when speaking on another matter, I quoted one of the western world's most famous jurists, Justice Brandeis, whose expression was, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. That adage applies in respect of this matter. What we have to do is shine the light of day on this horrific mismanagement of taxpayers' money.
We have to shine the light of day on the attempts by members of the Liberal government to do everything possible to avoid being accountable on this matter, to avoid repairing and dealing with the healing that aboriginal Canadians require on this issue, and their attempts to avoid any sort of public inquiry, any sort of national truth and reconciliation process, their attempts to continue to jam this into a bureaucracy which at this point has expended in excess of $600 million and has achieved virtually no success.