Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise this evening to discuss the issue of a public inquiry into the Airbus affair.
This question has been quite active in the last five sitting days of the House. The Liberal Party has been hammering away asking for a public inquiry and giving the reasons why there should be a public inquiry. Finally we learned today that such an inquiry will be called. Unfortunately, we do not know the scope of the inquiry and we do not know when the inquiry will begin. Therefore, it is important that we take a step back and see how this all came to be.
Members will remember hearing this in the House and seeing media reports about it shortly after the government took power. When it became public in government documents, in documents filed with the court, that Mr. Mulroney had accepted a $300,000 cash payment from Mr. Schreiber and did not declare the taxes on it at the time but declared them some five years later through voluntary disclosure to avoid penalty, the current President of the Treasury Board, who was then the minister of justice, asked the department for a briefing on this matter. His thinking, which was right at the time, was that perhaps we should recover the $2.1 million in taxpayer funds that had been given to Mr. Mulroney and that if some of the funds had not been paid out, then they should not be.
We subsequently learned that an order from somewhere on high went to the ministry that they should not brief the minister. Therefore, the minister was not briefed.
The person who is making these allegations against Mr. Mulroney is in a holding facility awaiting deportation to Germany where he faces some tax evasion charges. The day that he was going to court to hear exactly whether or not his appeal would be heard and if he would be able to remain in Canada because he raises certain points, at six o'clock in the morning, the RCMP went to the holding facility and told him they had to bring him with them because new charges were being laid and he had to go to court. He contacted his lawyer and found out that that was not true. Obviously, the government was preparing to, the minute that the court rendered its decision, throw him on a plane and get him out of the country so that he could not file a leave for appeal or ask for a stay of surrender. It would have been very convenient for the Conservative government because nobody else is going to speak in this matter, nobody else has the information that he has. Luckily, his lawyers were able to keep him in the country.
Then we started to find out a lot of other things about the Schreiber-Mulroney affair. We found out that he put a lot of pressure and finally Mr. Schreiber told us that he saw Mr. Mulroney when he was still in office, that he made a deal with Mr. Mulroney for the $300,000 while Mr. Mulroney was still the prime minister and that he gave him the first $100,000 when Mr. Mulroney was still a sitting member of Parliament.
Those allegations came to light and that forced the Prime Minister to react. Last Friday he told us that he is going to name an independent person to advise him on what he should know is his duty to call for a full public inquiry. Today after more pressure and suggestions by Mr. Mulroney that there should be such an inquiry, he said that that person will tell him what the scope of the inquiry should be.
I will tell the minister, through the parliamentary secretary, what the scope should be. It should be a full inquiry, looking at all of the activities among Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Mulroney and the Conservative Party going back to the early 1980s. He should be able to look at the whole question.
Perhaps Mr. Mulroney is innocent of a major crime. Perhaps his only sin is accepting $300,000 in cash and negotiating--
