Mr. Speaker, I will just take a bit of liberty here, if I may, to address another issue, and then I will get back to the topic at hand.
The heart of Canada's Filipino heritage community will be found in Winnipeg North, and today is a very special day as we recognize Philippine independence. In fact, there is a flag-raising ceremony that will be taking place very shortly on the lawn of Parliament Hill. The Filipino heritage community contributes in every way to all our communities throughout Canada, in every aspect of our society. I just wanted to give that extra plug, especially with the month of June being Filipino Heritage Month.
That is the positive aspect of what I would like to say. I want to try to encapsulate why we are here today debating this particular issue and talk a bit about the motivation and some disappointment. I was rather enjoying the debate we were having yesterday on Bill C-4. We will have a vote on it later this afternoon, after question period.
I wanted to question the motivation, primarily because, over the years, I have seen that the Conservative Party tends to be more focused on the very negative aspects of politics, in terms of things like character assassination or throwing the word “scandal” or “corruption” on anything, and other things of that nature.
It is interesting that we have an opposition day, and the Conservatives have a choice. Good for them for picking whatever it is they want to pick. They picked an Auditor General's report that, in essence, had no new recommendations, other than that it references that we currently have rules in place. I will talk about that in depth. This is an opposition day where there is going to be a vote at the end of the day.
We can contrast that to yesterday, when Conservatives started being critical of the government because the tax decrease we were giving was, from their perspective, not large enough. That is something they started to comment on toward the end of the debate. I would have thought that that would have been a far better motion of public policy, given that we just came out of an election. The Conservatives would have had the opportunity to present their arguments as to how much of a tax break it should have been and why. We do not know what they will do on Bill C-4, but it will come up later today. I hope they vote in favour of it, but they definitely implied that they would have amendments to bring to the bill.
I say that because the opposition has four days of debate, four days on which they can designate the topic. Why would the Conservatives take this particular report from the Auditor General? I suspect it is because they want to go back to their old ways. The newly elected Prime Minister, on April 28, with a new government, has established mandate letters that are exceptionally clear, so that all Canadians can see where the government's priorities are.
Today, because of the motion we are debating, I would suggest to Canadians that the Conservatives continue to be focused on anything that has any whiff whatsoever of any form of potential scandal or corruption, and then they try to tie it to the new administration. We see that in their remarks already today where they try to deny that there is a new administration.