Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to rise to speak to this motion, notwithstanding that other important business has been delayed by it. It is an important question.
I want to start by responding to some of the issues raised by the Liberal member for Ajax—Pickering, because he did speak in a tone that I can only call high sanctimony. It was a tone that is highly inappropriate for a Liberal on this matter, because of course the events the Iacobucci commission looked into were all events that occurred under the watch of a Liberal government.
If we are to look for true accountability, it is not the Liberal Party that should be complaining. The Liberals should be looking into themselves to explain why they failed to provide appropriate oversight and adequately protect the rights of Canadian, rather than making a ridiculous assertion that the events that happened in 2001 and 2002 are somehow the responsibility of a Conservative government here in the year 2009.
That said, I want to address some of the specific issues. I will point out that the report before us from the parliamentary committee and, in fact, the Iacobucci commission itself would not even have existed if it were not for this Conservative government having inherited the problems that existed before and that needed to be addressed. I will read from Mr. Iacobucci's report. It says:
By Order in Council dated December 11, 2006, I was appointed under Part I of the Inquiries Act to conduct an internal inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin.
Therefore, this is actually a report that was initiated by the Conservative government. I heard words from the Liberals about the importance of these kinds of public inquiries and how they should be regarded. Let us remember that the Liberal government refused to hold such an inquiry. It is only because of the Conservative government initiating it that we are able to address these issues and respond to them as we have.
I also heard a complaint that one of the things we have not implemented from the O'Connor report and the Iacobucci report is a national oversight body for national security. As I have stated many times publicly, including in the House, we have not done that yet because we are awaiting the outcome of the major commission on the Air India terrorist event. That is a major commission of inquiry that, once again, was initiated only by this Conservative government. That was after the previous Liberal government refused for over a decade to undertake such a commission of inquiry.
The members say that we do not need to wait for that commission of inquiry. I can understand that he does not want to wait to hear what it says, because the Liberals of course spent a decade obstructing, delaying and preventing such a commission of inquiry from happening. Keep in mind that it is an inquiry into the worst-ever terrorist incident in Canadian history. The Liberals, who claim to care about these things, refused to establish a commission of inquiry into that.
We have done that in our government. Everyone I have spoken to who is associated with the commission of inquiry has urged me to await the outcome of that inquiry so that we can take into account what everyone agrees were serious failings in co-operation among intelligence agencies and how that investigation and prosecutions were handled. There is much value that will come of it.
As a responsible government, we will continue to await it. I would like it if the report came sooner. That being said, the information that will be gleaned from it will be very important for us, by all accounts, to be able to have effective national security oversight. Unlike the previous government, we are not interested in the appearance of doing things; we are interested in delivering real results and improving the way we manage our national security and oversight to ensure that the errors we have seen in the past are not repeated again in the future.
I did want to outline these points at the outset because those who may have been following this debate might have had a very different impression if they heard the words of the Liberal member for Ajax—Pickering. In no way did he ever reflect on the fact that the problems we are dealing with are very much the responsibility of his party when they were in government. They are things we are trying to address.
I do want to thank the members of the public safety committee for the work they did in examining the important issues that were raised by both the O'Connor and Iacobucci commissions of inquiry. National security and the protection of Canadians is obviously one of the most important priorities for any government and that, of course, applies to—