There are already two reports bearing the Prime Minister's name and a third is on its way. I did not pull this out of thin air. These are facts.
There is one thing that bothers me. I am hearing the comments of people who live outside the Ottawa bubble, Canadians, Quebeckers, people who write to us and who watch at home. These people do not understand how this works.
To explain this to them in simple terms, what we are doing now is akin to a police investigation. We are gathering documents, asking questions, calling witnesses and questioning them. We did this in various committees, such as the finance, ethics and health committees. These committees are like separate police forces that are each conducting their own investigation.
What we are asking for is the creation of a temporary anti-corruption unit, to compare it to another existing organization that we are familiar with. The work of this unit would be to conduct this investigation because we are dealing with facts, facts that all of my colleagues have been talking about since the beginning of the day and that are set out in the motion, and they pertain to the WE Charity scandal, the relationship between the Prime Minister's family and the Kielburgers and what happened with Frank Baylis.
We have evidence, but we do not have enough information to take this any further. Obviously that is why the government is threatening to force an election. It does not want us to get to the bottom of things.
We are essentially telling the Canadians watching us, listening and trying to understand, that we are simply detectives trying to do our jobs. However, right now we understand the frustration that investigators feel when they encounter obstacles in their investigation or when they reach the end of the investigation only to find that no charges can be laid. All we want is the truth. We have enough clear elements here to justify what we are saying.
Earlier I heard the government leader tell Radio-Canada that we just want to shut down government operations. That is completely untrue. On the contrary, we want to free up the other committees so that they can continue their work, since there are votes to review and work to be done. This is work that we want to do, and that everyone wants to do.
We tend to forget that we are in the midst of a pandemic. There are not many of us here in the House, because we cannot all be here. There are empty benches around me, but there are 338 MPs. There are plenty of people available to deal with committees, and creating a new committee with 12 or 15 members would not pose a problem.
Some members are getting bored. They have been at home for six months now, waiting for this to pass. We could give them some work on this committee and no one would complain because that is why we are here. The questions the new committee will ask are the same ones the other three committees have already asked. We are proposing to put everything under a single umbrella, which is more efficient and faster and will help us get to the bottom of this, get our answers and close the case.
However, the government is well aware that it is in trouble for the umpteenth time. It has been in trouble for five years now, and it knows that. One day Canadians are going to hear this, they are going to see us and realize that the Conservatives and the Bloc were right, that those guys are really crooked and this has to stop.
The thing is, there is a pandemic and we all agree that we do not want a general election. If not for the pandemic, I would want to hit the campaign trail to put an end to this. However, we are reasonable, although that does not mean we do not want the truth.
We want to get to the bottom of things for Canadians' sake. Canadians are watching us, and we do not want them to think we are a bunch of clowns they are footing the bill for in Ottawa. That is not what they want.
People know that billions of dollars are at stake and have gone out the door and that there is patronage involved and so on. It is a lot of money. People pay their taxes every year, they send in their tax returns, and they know it will cost them a bundle. These people hope the money will be distributed intelligently, efficiently and for the right reasons, not to help out friends.
The Liberals have been doing this for a century. Every time the Liberals are in power, there is always a story involving their pals.
Even though I was not here at the time, I watched it unfold, like every other Canadian. We see this, and it makes us think of the sponsorship scandal and everything else.
There is a pattern with the Liberals: when they do something like this, they act like it is normal and not so bad. If a Conservative, Bloc or NDP MP had done the same thing, a storm would descend on them and would not stop until they were totally annihilated. When the Liberals do these things, it is not so bad. The parliamentary secretary says that we have been talking about ethics for five years and that it is time to put ethics aside because it is not important. The Liberals basically do not care about ethics.
On our side of the House, ethics are important, especially when it comes to managing public funds. We currently have a serious problem when it comes to the management of public funds, contracts and money handed out to friends. We simply have to get to the bottom of this.
This motion was not presented to force a confidence vote, but rather to organize Parliament's work, to efficiently create a committee that will finish off the investigation started by three or four other committees and produce a report. If, in the end, the report states that the Liberals did a good job, so much the better for them. If, however, the report states that the matter was botched and that the criticism is deserved, they will have to pay the price. That is all. We are just doing our job.
