Madam Speaker, I am sad and disappointed to be rising to speak to this issue. This regrettable set of ten percenters and this breach of privilege through misleading, false, pernicious, defamatory information targeting a religious community is so damaging in so many ways.
It was a very sad day when these were sent into our communities, and it is a sad day when we have to hear from the members opposite defending this completely outrageous and undermining project.
These ten percenters undermine people's trust in government. They feed into the very kind of mistrust that the public has of their elected representatives. They undermine democracy. We are at a time when barely 60% of the public bothers to vote. Why? Because they do not trust their political representatives.
In my view, every parliamentarian should be aware at every moment that it is their job to restore that trust because that means restoring our democracy. To see those members of the House deliberately and sneeringly undermining the public trust with this kind of divisive, totally distorted smear piece is very sad for our democracy.
I think the previous speakers have pointed out where the information in these ten percenters is loaded with mistruths and where it is propaganda of the worst kind aimed at a religious group. That by itself is more than disappointing. It is outrageous. To then use the public's dollars to do that certainly is, and I do not want to say icing on the cake because there is nothing good about this.
The undermining of the public's trust is a huge breach of the contract that we have with the public. So to use taxpayers' dollars for this is completely and utterly unacceptable.
This is part of a pattern with the government. This is a government that talked about Kyoto and climate change as being a socialist plot to take money out of people's pockets, and then turned around and pretends to care about climate change though we know that with an absence of a plan in four years, it actually does not. It is hypocrisy and an undermining of the public's trust.
These ten percenters are an illustration of hypocrisy that undermines the public, that undermines the public's belief in their—