Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the comments of my friend from the Liberal Party.
Getting the Prime Minister to actually answer some questions with regard to this scandal, which goes right to the heart of his office, is not just in the interests of New Democrats but of all Canadians.
We have seen time and again, and we saw it minutes ago in question period, the Prime Minister refusing to answer the most straightforward and simple questions. There can only be a couple of options: either he is unable and he does not have the information or he is simply unwilling because he knows that telling the straight, consistent version will condemn him in this scandal.
However, the challenge for the Prime Minister, we argue, and my friend did this as well, is that everyone involved in the Wright-Duffy affair is intimately connected to the Prime Minister, so it goes to the heart of his own ethics and judgment.
The Prime Minister was only able to get away with this, and Mike Duffy was only able to do the purported theft, and Wallin, Brazeau and all these guys, because the Senate is so dysfunctional at its heart that it not only allows for this kind of behaviour, it even encourages it. There is no accountability at all.
All we have heard from my friend's party so far about getting at the very roots of this issue is to simply appoint more Liberal senators. Some of them have ended up in jail for some of the same misdeeds, so clearly that is not a solution.
While we want the Prime Minister telling the truth and that is what has to happen in a consistent way, we also need to understand that this is a scandal that, at its heart, is the making of the Prime Minister's terrible judgment. It is also the making of the institution down the hallway that allows parties to put in failed candidates; former and current bagmen, as they themselves admitted; and people who do not rise to a high enough ethical standard to get elected. They are stuffed down there to help out the parties.
Does my friend think it is appropriate behaviour for senators, appointed by their parties, to use taxpayer funding to fundraise on behalf of those parties, to use that taxpayer money to raise funds for either the Liberal or Conservative parties? It is a very simple, straightforward question.