Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in this Liberal opposition day motion.
As my colleagues may know, I used to work for the Royal Bank. Perhaps that is why I find the whole aspect involving the Royal Bank most disturbing. Of course, it is not the Royal Bank's fault, but this does involve the bank.
We learned during the Watergate days—and I am old enough to remember—that it is the cover-up that is worse than the crime. That lesson from Watergate has lasted since that time through several scandals. If ever there was a cover-up in its most obvious form, it is this allegation that agents of the Prime Minister were responsible for giving Mike Duffy instructions, up to the last seconds before he appeared on television, on precisely how he was to lie to the Canadian people.
We can think of cover-ups of various kinds, but I cannot think of a more obvious example of a blatant cover-up than that. It is bad enough that Senator Duffy did not tell the truth. When he received the $90,000 cheque from Nigel Wright to repay, he did not acknowledge that but rather he claimed that he had acquired a mortgage from Royal Bank to pay back the money. I am certainly not defending Senator Duffy for that, but what is more important in this situation where we are dealing with the integrity of the Prime Minister and his office is not the fact that Mike Duffy, by his own admission, did not tell the truth, but rather that he was acting under the explicit orders of people in the Prime Minister's Office, or so, at least, it is alleged by Mr. Duffy.
Think of it. Agents of the Prime Minister instruct by email, in gruesome detail, the exact lines that Mike Duffy is to use on television to hide the fact that he received this money, allegedly, from the Prime Minister's chief of staff. He was to tell Canadians in a sombre serious way that he and his wife, who I believe was with him on television or at least she was involved in this story, had borrowed money from the Royal Bank to get a mortgage and he was using the proceeds of that money to pay back his debt. I believe that this is just one of many reasons, and an important reason in my view, why the Prime Minister has to come clean and why he has to testify under oath, so that we as Canadians and as parliamentarians can get to the bottom of this story and find out what indeed is the truth.
I do not think we know with certainty that agents of the Prime Minister did act in this way. That has been alleged. There are alleged to be emails. I am not certain that the proof is there. That is one more reason why the Prime Minister, who is responsible for his employees in his own office, has to testify on this and on many other matters.
That is my small contribution as a former employee of the Royal Bank who feels a certain amount of outrage on this subject. With your permission, Mr. Speaker, I will now cede the floor to my colleague, the member for Vancouver Centre.