Mr. Speaker, first, I thank the minister for her kind words. I am confident that my colleague who has taken over the roll will perform as well as and possibly better than I did. Some might say that is an easy bar to clear.
I will respond to the substantive question this way. I do remember when that story came out about a fundraising dinner for the Leader of the Opposition. I heard about this before anybody else did, and the reason I did is I received a call from Marie-Danielle Smith of the National Post. She wanted to ask about a fundraising dinner, not one that my leader was at, but a fundraising dinner that I held in violation of this new, not yet in effect rule, at which Giant Tiger executives all gave donations of $1,500 each. As members may know, my family runs Giant Tiger. I am now the vice-chair of Giant Tiger and that is the reason I am no longer the critic on this file.
If members had been there, they would have seen my head explode. I was furious. I told her that there is no way she figured this out on her own, that Liberal opposition research was digging around and had noticed that a bunch of cheques came through on the same day and concluded it must be the result of a fundraising dinner. I told her she was being fed this story so she could put it out there and create a make-believe scandal. I pointed out the obvious, that surely she did not think I had to hold a dinner to encourage people from a company that my family owns to contribute.
If the Liberals want to say that having MPs' business contacts give money to them is a scandal, then they should say that. It would have a major impact on a whole group of people on the government side. Getting their research department to try to feed stories to reporters to create make-believe scandals in order to draw attention away from their own government's scandalous behaviour is abominable, but that is the way the Liberal government acts more and more and more.