Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise again to ask a question related to the Airbus-Mulroney-Schreiber affair.
Here is what we know. We know that Brian Mulroney accepted $300,000 in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber, who was quite well known to the media at the time, and a notorious figure.
He received that money. Karlheinz Schreiber stated it was negotiated while the Prime Minister was still in office. The former prime minister was driven by the RCMP to Mirabel airport to receive his first $100,000 in cash as an MP. We found that out later.
Then we have Mr. Mulroney telling us in the media lately through a friend of his, Mr. Lavoie, that it is the silliest thing he has ever done.
I do not think it was silly at all. It is one of two things. It is either absolutely stupid or it is crooked.
Even Mr. Mulroney's most ardent detractors have never called him stupid. This was the president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada. This was a prime minister of Canada for two terms. This is the man who brought in the GST and who would have known, if this money received was a fee for service, that he had to remit and charge GST on it.
I do not know if stupid would fit, so that leaves what? That is the question we have to determine here.
That meeting was set up by Fred Doucet. Fred Doucet has been with Mr. Mulroney all through this period. He brought Karlheinz Schreiber into the circle and was part of the gang to remove Joe Clark from office and get Mr. Mulroney the job as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party.
We have not heard from Mr. Doucet in a while. After 1993, we did not hear not too much. We know he organized a meeting for Schreiber and Mulroney later on, but what we do see is that there has been a resurgence of the man. He is very important now in Ottawa. We do not see very many files touched by the Minister of National Defence and Minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency that do not have Fred Doucet's name on them.
Here is what we want to know. What were the links between Mr. Doucet, Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Schreiber and many other people around this from 1980 till 1993?
We also want to know exactly how the government acted, this government, and how this Prime Minister acted when he received a letter from Karlheinz Schreiber highlighting these arrangements. How did he act? Did he turn it over to the RCMP? The leader of the official opposition did. When he got that information, he turned it over to the RCMP. Within 14 days, an investigation was reopened by the RCMP.
The Prime Minister said he had it in his files for seven months and did not look at it. PCO officials, junior people at PCO, dealt with this. They were probably people with one or two weeks' training. They dealt with that letter. They looked at it and said it was unimportant in its suggestion that a former prime minister had done all these mischievous deeds, so it was never given to the PMO. If it was given to the PMO, it would have been very junior people who dealt with it there. The Prime Minister's chief advisers would not have been advised of that.
If the Prime Minister tells me that, I am inclined to believe it, but I do not believe anybody else will. I do not think Canadians can believe that.
When I first started asking questions about this, the Prime Minister said there would be no inquiry. He laughed it off, saying there would not be an inquiry.
After two weeks of media stories and questions being asked by the opposition, he came out with a defensive tactic and said that he would have a third party adviser to tell him how he should deal with it because he did not know. He said he did not know how to deal with it. He does not know how to do his job, so he will have a third party adviser.
Then Brian Mulroney himself called up and called an inquiry, so now we have an inquiry, for which the third party adviser is going to give us the terms of reference.
There are two things we need. We need the terms of reference to be sufficiently wide so that we can look back to 1980--