Madam Speaker, for the members who have just arrived in the House of Commons, it is fascinating to hear the revisionist history from the Conservatives, that they are on the side of the working people and transparency. I could not think of anything more bizarre. I would actually think they were kidding us, but it is this kind of undermining of public confidence that the Conservative Party has specialized in.
The Conservatives' idea of privacy is maximum privacy for their friends and maximum accountability for the public, whereas it really should be maximum accountability for politicians and privacy for individuals. I mention that because there was the Brent Rathgeber bill last session, a Conservative bill, which was a very good bill about bringing accountability to Ottawa. The Conservatives gutted that bill. They gutted a bill that would have disclosed the salaries of the people who worked for the party. They gutted a bill that would have disclosed the kind of money that was being paid out. Brent thought that a $188,000 threshold should be made public. They cut it so that only people making over $444,000 a year had to disclose that.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague this. The Conservatives beat up on the unions, they beat up on first nations leadership, but they protected their friends for the last eight years. Why the hypocrisy?