Mr. Speaker, I respect and admire the hon. member for Wellington—Halton Hills' constant efforts to improve and reform this institution and so many other institutions. Therefore, I take very seriously the points he makes about the Constitution.
As he talked about respect for the constitutional order, it allows me to quote a sentence from the late Mark Rosenberg of the Ontario Court of Appeal, who was an expert in these matters and one of Canada's leading criminal lawyers ever. He wrote this in the Queen's Law Journal:
The most important of these constitutional conventions is that although the Attorney General is a cabinet minister, he or she acts independently of the cabinet in the exercise of the prosecution function.
That was the most important one he thought, which is really important.
The Supreme Court also said in 2002 that we had to respect the fact that an attorney general was “fully independent from the political pressures of the government.”
Was that line crossed here? It does not appear to me that the Liberals are that anxious to find out. If it is simply partisan politics before an election period, I guess we can understand that they would throw back at us that somehow we are just trying to make political hay out of this, that there is nothing here and to drive on. They might be right that there is nothing here. However, they will not let us find out if they hide behind solicitor-client privilege, will not waive it if it does indeed exist, and will not let us hear from the people who need to come and advise Canadians as to what happened.