That is a good point. I am getting some helpful comments from the wise member for Calgary Midnapore. I mean that sincerely. She has just pointed something out that I forgot to mention.
We have had a resignation of the member for Whitby, a resignation of the Treasury Board president, a resignation of the former attorney general, a resignation of the principal secretary and a resignation of the head of the entire public service, Michael Wernick. Therefore, everybody is resigning but no one did anything wrong. Absolutely nobody did anything wrong. They are just resigning for nothing. If the Prime Minister thinks that this is working, he needs to sit down and scribble out that list of resignations to find out the contrary.
We can go through each one. Let us start with the former attorney general. We know why she resigned. She says that she resigned because the Prime Minister said that her continued presence in the cabinet spoke for itself, an attempt to extract a phony endorsement by her of his SNC-Lavalin conduct. She says in a letter she recently released that having heard that comment by the Prime Minister, she decided to resign and that her resignation would speak for itself. In other words, she thought his conduct so appalling in this affair that she was unable to sit in cabinet at all with him as the Prime Minister of that cabinet.
Then we have the former Treasury Board president. She resigned because she said that somebody, and I think she meant the Prime Minister, was trying to shut down this whole matter and prevent the truth from coming out. She said that there is a lot more to this story that has not yet been told, and the Prime Minister is preventing anyone from telling it, so she resigned.
People do not just resign from cabinet for nothing. Being a minister of the federal government is literally a one-in-a-million opportunity. We have about 37 million Canadians and we have about 37 ministers. Therefore, literally, roughly one in a million Canadians is a federal minister. That is how rare and precious an opportunity it is to serve around the cabinet table. People who work their whole lives building up a body of expertise that makes them respected enough to sit at that council of ministers do not just storm off in a huff over an interpersonal spat or because they are friends with someone else who is in a different clique.
That is certainly not the conduct that a doctor or a top renowned lawyer, both of whom are extremely respected, would ever engage in. Both of them would have known and did know the immense privilege it was for them to serve at the cabinet table, and serve with distinction they did. However, they were prepared to give it all up, because the Prime Minister's personal conduct was so egregious they could not bear the thought of sitting at the same table over which he was the chairman.
Then we move down the list of the additional resignations. Gerald Butts has been called the PMO's puppet master. He was the principal secretary of the Prime Minister of Canada. He is personally the best friend of the Prime Minister. Working in the PMO was his dream job. He devoted his entire life to that enterprise. He would not have resigned had his conduct not been extremely serious, but resign he did.
Then we have the Clerk of the Privy Council. This is the head of probably the largest employer in the entire country. Hundreds of thousands of people work as public servants, indirectly reporting up through the chain to the Clerk of the Privy Council. Mr. Wernick devoted his life to the public service, and it would have been his life's work to get up to that position. He would not surrender that opportunity unless this matter was extremely serious.
There we have it, four high-profile resignations, and a fifth if we include the member for Whitby who, at the early stages, linked her departure to this controversy as well.
All of that has happened in the window of two months, but the Prime Minister expects us to believe, having witnessed this spectacular meltdown, that nothing happened. It is just a big misunderstanding and a failure to communicate. If they had all just got together for a cup of coffee once in a while, then none of this would have occurred. It strains believability that all of this is the result of a simple miscommunication.
We on this side of the House have carefully and scrupulously examined the evidence and come to the conclusion that these principled former ministers stepped aside not out of some interpersonal dispute. It is clear they had nothing to gain and much to lose from doing so. They stepped aside because they could not countenance the Prime Minister's attempt to corrupt our criminal justice system. Therefore, the answer is to get to the truth, hold hearings and bring the witnesses. If the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, he will happily agree and he will show up with bells on to offer his very own testimony.
If, on the other hand, he is harbouring more secrets, then he will do as he has done the last two months, which is to try to continue to sweep it under the rug. He has now shut down two investigations: the justice committee's and then the ethics committee's. Does he really believe that Canadians sitting at home watching that spectacle on their televisions believe he has nothing to hide when he does that?
In just over 12 hours, the justice committee will reconvene. That gives the Prime Minister some time to reflect on how he has handled this scandal and whether he thinks he can go on and on trying to silence his critics and cover up the truth. What I would recommend he do is to meet with his committee members before the justice committee gathers tomorrow and tell them that the cover-up is over, that he is no longer going to ask them to go in there and humiliate themselves and disgrace their constituents by voting against accountability, that instead he is just going to ask them to go in and open the investigation and then he will instruct his staff in his inner circle to follow him into that committee room and one by one confess what happened, submit themselves to vigorous questioning and allow the committee to issue a final report.
Even if all that happens, the majority on the committee is still Liberal. That means that the Liberals will have the final pen on the report that the committee writes. We are asking him merely to submit to an investigation by a body on which the Liberals have a majority, so his claims that the whole thing could go haywire make no sense. It is his own party. All we are asking for is a chance to bring the key players in, and there are about a dozen of them, one by one, to tell their stories, confess the truth and answer questions. If he has nothing to hide, surely he will agree to that.
Here I am, standing before members, speaking about the cover-up budget. Just like the other night when the Prime Minister forced his members to stay here for 30 hours to preserve his cover-up, I am inviting him to do what I am sure he would enjoy doing, which is to bring an end to my remarks. I am sure that there have been many days when the Prime Minister would have wished that I would stop talking. This one time, I am giving him the chance to do it. If he walks in those doors, and I know he is here because I saw him earlier, and sits down and says, “The cover-up is over. The committee will have an opportunity to study this scandal—