Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure once again to stand in this place and debate a motion brought forward by my colleagues in the third party. It should be no surprise to the members of this place that I certainly will be voting against this motion. There are several reasons for that, only a few of which I will touch upon today in my limited time.
Primarily, I will be voting against this, as most members should, because this is nothing more than a political stunt. The motion brought forward is something the Liberals brought forward hoping will embarrass the government and to try to cause damage to the government, and this is nothing new. I do not begrudge the Liberals the fact that they are bringing a motion forward that they think can gain them some political favour; that is what happens in this place. However, I find it unfortunate that we are doing so at their first opportunity in this new session of Parliament, when there are so many other important issues to debate.
Not only that, I do not know if I am the only one who recognizes the absolute delicious irony in the motion that the Liberals brought forward. What they want to discuss is the fact that there was a $90,000 cheque paid inappropriately, I admit, but paid back to the taxpayers of Canada to try to stem the abuse made by one of our senators. We can contrast that to the Liberal Party's track record. It is the party that perpetrated and embodied the largest political scandal in Canadian history. I speak, of course, of the sponsorship scandal in which millions of dollars was stolen from Canadian taxpayers and that money was then diverted into Liberal bank accounts. Was any of that money repaid? I can answer that partially because the Liberal Party of Canada did agree—