Mr. Chair, like the House leader, the new foreign affairs minister and former international trade minister must expect that we too, like our Liberal colleagues, will want to clarify certain aspects of this saga between the hon. member for Beauce and Ms. Julie Couillard. It is for the purpose of keeping the people of Quebec and Canada informed.
Everyone knows that when the hon. member for Beauce was the foreign affairs minister, he forgot some documents at Ms. Couillard's place. She has said that they were forgotten around the middle of April, or shortly after the NATO summit in Bucharest.
Originally, the Prime Minister said during his press conference that the foreign affairs minister resigned because he had left classified confidential documents—those were his words—in non-secure places. This is what led to his resignation because it was a serious mistake.
I would like to ask a question, and I suppose that it will be the House Leader who answers and not the new foreign affairs minister. If they have strict security rules at the Department of Foreign Affairs, how is it possible that the neither this department nor the office of the minister at the time, the hon. member for Beauce, noticed that the documents had disappeared over the ensuing five weeks?
This all seems very nebulous to me and I would like a clear answer. It has nothing to do with the private lives of the hon. member for Beauce or Ms. Couillard.
How could documents, some of which the Prime Minister has described as “classified”, possibly just disappear for five weeks from the radar screens of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the office of its former minister?