Senator Housakos: Senator Gold, as if it isn’t bad enough that the Auditor General wasn’t informed of the RCMP investigation into the “ArriveScam,” last week when she appeared at a House committee, your Liberal-NDP government shut down her testimony after only a few minutes — claiming that she had nothing more to add.

How would your government know what she did — or didn’t — have to add, Senator Gold? What do you know that the rest of us don’t know? What is your government hiding when it comes to this?

Hon. Leo Housakos: Senator Simons, firstly, what I said at the committee was that I found the testimony interesting. I didn’t say I agreed with it. Second of all, I think you’re talking about an email that went out to stakeholders and party membership of the Conservative Party of Canada, asking them to sign a petition.

I don’t know how the gentleman would have gotten on that particular list. He’s probably a member of the party, and that’s how he got on the list. So, at the end of the day, when you have 680,000 members, as the Conservative Party of Canada currently has — an historic number, the largest number of any political party in the history of the country —

Senator Plett: Wow. How many do the Liberals have?