Mr. Speaker, there was no change at all. They are broad, but they are not broad enough. Clearly it came to light as time went on that the mandate was limited by the Prime Minister deliberately. In fact, the Auditor General suggested that there be an examination as well of the polling data and the polling contracts that were being doled out by the Department of Finance, at that time the Prime Minister. This mandate for Gomery does not include that.
I totally disagree that somehow again the Liberal Party, through an act of convenience, wraps itself in the charter. The criminal investigations are not marred in any way by the recommendations of Mr. Justice Gomery, whatever those recommendations might be. There are numerous examples. I point to some of them, the Patricia Starr inquiry, the Westray inquiry, the Walkerton inquiry, the tainted blood inquiry, where we saw criminal charges laid and a guilty plea rendered just yesterday. To suggest otherwise is pure folly.
Those inquiries were not stalled in any way from doing their job by virtue of the fact that there were criminal investigations going on. I know about Westray because it happened in my constituency, a very tragic occurrence in a mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia. The criminal convictions that were received yesterday in the tainted blood inquiry similarly demonstrate that these exercises can happen simultaneously.
The commissioner, I would suggest, can add to the work that has to be done in a criminal investigation and the subsequent trial.
The reality here is that the Liberal Party itself should be under investigation, the entire Liberal Party as an organization, just as the Red Cross organization was the subject of a criminal investigation. The difficulty, of course, is the RCMP themselves. I am quoting from Greg Weston's article where he said:
Of course, the Mounties themselves were up to their musical ride in almost $2 million of sponsorship cash, much of it hidden in a non-government bank account in Quebec.
I am not casting any aspersions whatsoever on the good, hardworking, honest members of the RCMP who are the pride of this country, but it is within the upper echelons where we find that, much like senior bureaucrats, they can be co-opted and corrupted into the government's activities.
The government was involved in a conspiracy against the public trust, defrauding the public of hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which went into its political coffers for partisan purposes. That is the subject of the investigation. That is the subject of the inquiry. We should get all the facts. Canadians will ultimately be the judges of who is responsible. I think it may lead right to the Prime Minister's door.