Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to finish at least one of the thoughts that I was trying to develop before I ran out of time.
Let me conclude the way I began. The whole purpose of this exercise is to deter and to stop this time honoured tradition of the corporate SLAPP suit from infiltrating into the House of Commons and into our parliamentary process. Libel chill should not silence members of Parliament. We cannot allow it to silence members of Parliament. It would be too easy. As I say, it costs $1,000 to file a statement of claim to begin the process of libel proceedings of a defamation lawsuit.
In this case, Brian Mulroney sued the people of Canada, not the Government of Canada, for $50 million for saying that he took money from Karlheinz Schreiber and the government paid him an out of court settlement of $2.1 million for the defamation lawsuit, claiming that he was defamed.
Therefore, he is no stranger to this practice. Believe me that did silence things. Back then when Brian Mulroney filed that first defamation lawsuit, the RCMP slammed shut their investigation, all avenues of investigation ended, the government issued letters of apology, it apologized to everybody under the sun for having implied even that he may have taken money from Karlheinz Schreiber and then paid him $2.1 million.
I guess he learned that trick so well, that he did it again. As soon as a member of Parliament became a nuisance, became too effective, he slapped another lawsuit on him. Then the rules of the House of Commons kicked in to do his dirty work for him. It was not even the courts necessarily that silenced him this time. He exploited a loophole, a weakness in the Conflict of Interest Code, which forms a part of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, and that effectively silenced my colleague from West Nova.
I do not care from what party my colleague. It is fundamentally wrong. I will stand in this place and defend his right to speak even if I do not agree with what he says all the time. It is wrong when any one of us is attacked in this way by an outside force, especially when it is really in self-interest. The self-interest in this issue is not on the part of my colleague, the member for West Nova. It is on the part of the guy who sued him, who was watching his backside. We were getting too close to the truth about what happened between Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber and he and his lawyers went into damage control and tried to silence MPs.
We cannot allow that to happen. I am proud that we are working hard today, in one of these final days of this session of the 39th Parliament, to correct this situation so it cannot happen again. By the time we resume in the fall, we hope it will be in the context of new rules where libel chill will not silence MPs and this whole notion of the corporate SLAPP suit will no longer affect my right to stand in this place and say the things that need to be said.