Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her remarks and her grasp of the issue.
My message to the Canadian public would be that as offensive as it is that the Prime Minister's chief of staff gave $90,000 to some errant senator, we are missing the bigger picture. There is an expression, a medieval nursery rhyme, that says:They hang the man [...]
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
That is the bigger picture that we are losing here. It is up to us as members of Parliament to fight for the integrity of our parliamentary institution, because there are people who are willing to run roughshod and cut a swath through everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy to achieve their own ends. They do not have a mandate to trample all over Parliament. They may have a mandate to govern, but it is with the checks and balances that people smarter than we are put in place to make sure that Parliament works. It is not working now. It is dysfunctional.