Madam Speaker, I get a kick out of listening to each of the Conservatives. It is like a crocodile knocking on one's door, offering to babysit their children and saying, “Trust me on transparency.” If someone has no sense of the history, it might sound like a great idea to let the crocodile in the house, but we do have a sense of history.
There is a blatant hypocrisy in the Conservatives talking about accountability on documents, when Stephen Harper was found in contempt of Parliament and shut down Parliament for three months. It was found to be threatening the very Constitution. What was that over? That was over the issue of the torture of people in Afghanistan. It let down Canada's standards around the world and suppressed evidence that parliamentarians had a right to. Stephen Harper did not care at all about transparency, and neither did the Conservatives because they shut down Parliament and refused to let us work.
When I hear the Conservatives talking about transparency and accountability, I refer to Tony Clement and his $50-million slush fund, to Nigel Wright and the secret $90,000 cheque, and to Brian Mulroney and money in a brown paper bag being paid in a hotel room. That is Conservative accountability and transparency in a nutshell.