Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's service on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics as the interim chair. He is doing an outstanding job.
I think the real reason behind why the Liberal government does not want to reappoint Mr. Reid is because he has done an outstanding job of exposing the waste and corruption that exists in this Liberal government. That point was made earlier today and I tried to make it in my speech.
As my colleague from Nepean—Carleton mentioned earlier, the Liberals do not trust this commissioner any longer to do their will or their bidding as a lapdog. They have lost their confidence in his ability to continue to toe the Liberal line that all is good and well in the access to information regime.
That is simply not the case. I draw attention to the comments that were made by the Liberal member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell in his speech earlier today on this motion. We heard his diatribe about how the opposition parties were not using their opposition days to their full effect.
That member does not appreciate or respect the right of Canadians to hold the government accountable through the office of the Information Commissioner. In fact, he suggested that it was wasting time to debate a motion that would call upon the government to reappoint an experienced information commissioner who had done a good job of exposing the Liberal government.
The member wonders why the opposition parties would consider it important to debate the appointment of someone he calls “an extremely competent person” or some who has “done an excellent job”. He is someone his government is refusing to reappoint because he has been too effective in exposing the government's waste and corruption.
The member blundered on ad nauseam about the fact that the Liberals had manipulated the process of his appointment. We have heard from another of his colleagues that now there has been a long extended process of hiring someone else.
I do not understand why the Liberal government would have gone to such efforts to replace somebody who has done such an excellent job, somebody it admits is doing an outstanding job. Is it because he was exposing the very things that they were trying to cover-up?