Mr. Speaker, that is exactly the point. As we dive into this, we learn more. What has happened with this whole commission is really tragic: this money was funnelled into the Liberal Party of Canada. Quite rightfully, Canadians are just sickened by it, almost to the point that they do not want to hear about it anymore because it just keeps going from bad to worse.
We hear about $40 million to “prepare” government witnesses, but they have all been given their own lawyers and that means millions more. It just never ends. First of all, people were directly involved with siphoning off taxpayers' money and stuffing it into suitcases and sprinkling it throughout Quebec and now we are giving them more taxpayer money to defend themselves.
It does not end, and it is so fundamentally wrong. Let us imagine that the current Prime Minister had come along and acknowledged from day one that yes, he knew stuff was going on but it was a Liberal Party problem and so he just opened up the books and came clean. We all know that this is Liberal Party problem. Every donkey in the country knows that this is a Liberal Party problem.
The Liberals talk about the 20 million documents they had to photocopy for the commission. I have no doubt they did. I would be more interested in the ones they did not photocopy, the ones that made it to the shredders. I wonder about the 20 million they sent and the boxes. I wonder if they said, “There is a warehouse full of documents there. Those are not damaging to us. Let us photocopy them and send them”. We know that a lot of documents made it to the shredders.
This is not the way a modern, civilized government should operate. It is even worse to see the current government continuing to try to defend itself, to prepare, to say that it is clean, when it is absolutely crystal clear that millions of dollars were shuffled into the Liberal Party
. Now the Liberals are trying to defend spending more money than the commission itself. The commission is at $32 million, but they are at $40 million and it is going up. They are racking up higher bills and spending more money than the commission itself just to try to prepare witnesses, to prepare them to tell the truth. There is something fundamentally wrong here.