Mr. Speaker, I am rising to ask a follow-up question to a question I had about a month ago in the House of Commons. We are listening to all kinds of stuff, and this pertains to the debate we had today, which was about providing documents to the House of Commons on the green slush fund, the SDTC scandal.

What we are trying to get, of course, is real information that the government has to provide from one of its documents. We passed a motion in the House, supported by all the opposition parties, demanding those documents from the government, as is Parliament's right. However, when I asked for that, I asked if the government thought it was not providing the documents because of incompetence, an oversight or actual corruption.

There are different degrees of a problem in there, but the one we are most worried about is that the Liberals are complicit with some of their friends in giving this money to a whole bunch of people connected to the Liberal Party and not providing a type of oversight, which is what the Auditor General has provided. The response I got back was, effectively, “We have warnings from the Auditor General and we have warnings from the RCMP that this might be a charter issue.” The issue with that fabrication, if I may say that, is that normal jurisprudence on this has us collecting the documents.

Let us remember who is supreme in Canada, in our Canadian Constitution. Parliament is supreme, not the executive, not the RCMP and not the courts. Nevertheless, each of these organizations has a purpose here. Those documents that have to come before Parliament for us to look at and provide to the police authorities are not something they have normally looked at before. In this respect, we are driving that bus forward.

The RCMP will look at the documents and find out if there are charges to be laid. We are not the ones laying the charges. We are the ones who are going to be putting the documents to people who have the ability to make that decision. That is our role, and every one of these organizations has a role. This is Parliament's role. Somehow the government does not think Parliament has a role in this process or any process going forward. It just looks at Parliament as a speed bump.

The government is disrespecting the Speaker because it is he who delivered the request on behalf of Parliament to provide those documents. The government members are asking if they should listen to the RCMP, the expert legal person they spoke to or the House of Commons, which is the Speaker. I am going to tell them right now that, hands down, there is one person they should listen to, and that is the Speaker, in providing that actual ruling.

I am not concerned about the House treading on charter rights, because those charter protections happen at the judicial level. We do our job here, and sometimes Parliament passes legislation that gets overturned by the Supreme Court. That is where that judicial interpretation of charter rights happens, not here. We do our job and do not let a whole bunch of bureaucratese and certain legal opinions move us in one direction or another. There are far better legal opinions at the end of the day that will determine what happens.

I can guarantee members, and I think the Speaker knows this from a previous legal background, that if we seek a legal opinion, particularly on a charter issue, we are going to get six opinions, each pointing in a different direction. Let us get our job done here in Parliament. I beseech this government again to get us those documents so we can see what is behind them, come to the bottom of this and move on with the work of Parliament.

Greg McLean

$598,041.00