Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to talk about the NDP motion. Although it would give me even more pleasure not to have to talk about this issue, the Minister of Finance's indiscretions give us no choice. He wounds our collective psyche by acting as though there was no apparent conflict of interest between his decisions and the companies he owns.
Before I begin my speech, I would just like to remind everyone that our entire democratic system rests in large part on confidence. Canadians elect 338 members of Parliament, the majority of whom form government and a cabinet of ministers whose job is to serve the public. The entire system rests on 36 million Canadians having confidence that those 338 people will act in their best interest and serve them. The things the Minister of Finance did and did not do destroy the confidence underpinning our system.
If the citizens we work for, such as the people I meet on Papineau Avenue or Beaubien Street in Montreal, for example, have the impression that we are here only to serve our own interests, our entire system could fall apart. This is no joke. People need to be absolutely certain that we are here for them and not to fill our pockets. For the past two years, however, the minister has only been fuelling the public's cynicism, when Canadians already fear that we are not here for them, but rather for ourselves first and foremost.
The Minister of Finance could have come clean from the very beginning and distanced himself from his own pecuniary interests. The long and short of it is that he failed to do so voluntarily. That is no accident, much like when he failed to disclose that he owns a villa in France. It really is unbelievable. That is not the kind of thing that ordinary folks tend to forget.