Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam. I know that he has some prepared remarks on this particular subject.
I am going to spend a little time talking about why I think we are debating this today. It is important, just to bring everybody back to the same place, to read exactly what we are debating. This is a concurrence motion, a motion that came from the committee and that the Conservatives have tabled today. The motion reads:
That the committee report to the House that the MP for Edmonton Centre appear before the committee for two hours independently by Friday, December 6, 2024, immediately following the completion and reporting back of C-61 to the House, and that the report is tabled by the Chair in the House as soon as possible and no later than Monday, November 25, 2024.
The Conservatives then further amended this to say that it would return from committee by January 27.
That is what we are debating. That is what three hours of House time has been seized with, to debate whether or not the former minister, the member for Edmonton Centre, should go and appear before committee on this particular day for this allotted amount of time and have it be reported back to the House.
That is what the Conservatives chose to do. The reason I bring this up is that, like so many times throughout this fall session when we have debated these issues, specifically these procedural tactics, Conservatives are doing this time and time again. I find it very discouraging, because there are so many other things that we could be talking about and so many other issues that we could be discussing. Instead, we revert back to the Conservative go-to of character assassination and trying to drag people through the mud. That is the only way this Conservative Party feels as though it can ever get elected, not to present its ideas to Canadians but rather to, repeatedly and ad nauseam, try to create and inflict maximum personal damage on individual reputations.
It does not even have to be an elected official. The Conservatives will stop at nothing. They will go after renowned Canadians, as we saw last spring. They will go after just about anybody that they think they can get a little political gain out of. That is what we are seeing today, again.
The member for Edmonton Centre, who was a minister, stepped back. He defended himself and said that the allegations against him were not true. He stepped back and said that he wanted to clear his name, wanted to take time to do that and would step back from the ministry in the meantime. That is exactly what he did.
However, it was not enough. It is an honourable way to approach this, but that was not enough for Conservatives. They need to absolutely go after this until they have drawn as much blood out of this situation as possible. I find it so discouraging, and I believe that the majority of Canadians do too. We have to ask ourselves, “What do they not want to be talking about?”
Some fairly substantial bombshell allegations have been dropped recently. The member for Calgary Nose Hill is being implicated in a recent CBC story about having been pressured by foreign diplomats to abandon Patrick Brown's leadership campaign in a leadership race that eventually elected the current Leader of the Opposition to that position. Here is something even more remarkable. Not that long ago, the member for Calgary Nose Hill was in a committee room, she was approached by the media and she jumped up and ran out. There is a video of it all over the Internet right now. She jumped up and ran out.
By the way, this is the member who, not too long ago, referred to herself, and I have to find it here in the story, as a seasoned politician and a seasoned communicator. That is what she said. Those were her words. However, she could not handle the heat of the media coming up to her in a committee room. She got up and she ran out of the committee room. When I see something like that, the first thing I think of is that somebody is trying to hide something.
The member made some comments that are in the story. She said she left the Patrick Brown campaign of her “own volition”; she was not pressured. She is “an experienced politician, [a] seasoned communicator”, and she knows how to handle herself. She certainly does, because she handled herself very well in that comment alone. She skated right by the main issue.
The issue is not whether or not the member for Calgary Nose Hill changed her mind as a result of a conversation. The issue is not even, believe it or not, whether or not she was coerced by a foreign diplomat. That is not the issue either. The actual issue, and what she completely neglects to say because of her incredible communications skills that she rightly points out she has, is that she neglected—