Madam Speaker, I will sharing my time with my colleague from Oxford.
I am very pleased to rise today to support the NDP motion. We rarely agree, but for once, we will fully support the motion moved by our NDP colleagues. It may not seem like it, but this might be a historic moment in Canada's Parliament.
Let us review this whole story. It all started not that long ago, on February 7, 2019, when The Globe and Mail broke the bombshell story that there might have been some political interference in Canada's justice system. Events unfolded from there. First, we learned why the former attorney general of Canada had been demoted, removed from her position and sent to Veterans Affairs. Many things became clear.
Every day for a week, or nearly 10 days, we saw the Prime Minister weaving a tangled web of stories. He even went so far as to say that it was because Scott Brison left, and yada yada yada. It was all hooey.
How did we get here?
It all comes back to the problems with SNC-Lavalin, a company facing corruption charges all over the world, including here in Canada. It is a very complex issue. The important thing to understand is that the Liberals agreed to give that company a helping hand. They will say they did it in order to save jobs. We are okay with that. They are trying to say that we in the Conservative Party are talking out of both sides of our mouths and that we do not want to protect jobs. That is false. We realize that there are employees who have nothing to do with the corruption the company is charged with. However, something still needs to be done to punish those in charge, the ones responsible for the corruption.
Let me start at the beginning. In response to pressure from that company, the government worked secretly. This comes as no surprise from the Liberals. They slipped a provision into the budget to amend the Criminal Code regarding section 715.3 and subsequent sections. They included this in an 800-page omnibus bill last year.
We all know how it works. We obviously did not read all 800 pages. That approach is used when a government wants to push something through quickly without anyone noticing, but our colleagues on the Standing Committee on Finance noticed. Even the Liberal member for Hull—Aylmer was very surprised to see that. The Liberals said that this measure was to protect white-collar criminals, but they did not really say what it was doing in the budget. Everyone saw it and said that the so-called remediation agreement was going to help someone, but things went no further.
Now, we know that the measure was created and implemented to help SNC-Lavalin. This story has been gaining momentum over the past two weeks. In September, the director of public prosecutions looked into this approach. She said that it would not work and that it was a boneheaded approach. I am speculating here because I do not have an exact answer. Today, we know that the measure that was drafted and included in the law will not help SNC-Lavalin. That was one part of the problem.
The second part of the problem occurred when SNC-Lavalin was informed of the situation. I have here the message that the company sent to its shareholders in October. It advised them that the director of public prosecutions had warned the company that she would not be able to hold discussions to negotiate a remediation agreement.
Enter the budget bill. In September, the justice analyst said that it would not work. Then, in October, SNC-Lavalin acknowledged that it would not work. After that, there is silence. We would not have heard anything anyway because we did not go there. It was not up to us. The justice system would deal with it.
There was a cabinet shuffle after the holidays. Well now, what did the justice minister, our attorney general of Canada, do to be demoted like that? In a fine little Facebook post, she said that she would always stand up for justice and for the law. That was around the middle of January. We did not really understand what was going on. Then, along came that fateful February 7, and we figured it all out.
All the pieces are falling into place. Something happened between October, when SNC-Lavalin representatives indicated that they were unable to make a deal with the government, and the cabinet shuffle. That is when a problem arose, and that is what the motion is all about. We need to conduct an inquiry because it seems that there was political interference in the justice system.
Someone, somewhere, probably in the Prime Minister's Office, asked that something be done to resolve the problem. It is likely that the then attorney general replied that the law would not permit it. Then the other person reiterated their request. I think that is probably pretty much what happened.
Since February 7, as I just mentioned, the Prime Minister has been saying all sorts of things. For our part, we moved a motion on February 13 to call nine people to testify, including the former attorney general, former adviser Gerald Butts, Ms. Telford and six other people working in the Prime Minister's Office.
I was at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights last week. Instead of adopting our motion and shedding some light on this matter, our Liberal colleagues pulled a fast one on us. They showed up with a nice little watered-down motion, saying that they would hold meetings to examine the Shawcross Doctrine and that the new Attorney General would be reconvened, along with two others. The political games persisted. They clearly had no desire to shed any light on this matter.
Yesterday, another bombshell hit Canadian politics. The Prime Minister's friend and adviser, the man who had been behind him from the very beginning, whose strategies got the Prime Minister to where he is today, was leaving. He said that he was leaving but that he had done nothing wrong.
Today they are trying to convince us that there is nothing to see here, but the fact is that things have gotten even more interesting because the head strategist, the power behind the Liberal Party of Canada and the Government of Canada, the guy who told everyone what to do and what not to do, is leaving, and he says he did nothing wrong.
The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights is meeting in camera at this very moment. Obviously, Liberal friends do not want this to play out in public. The Liberal Party is awfully fond of secrecy. During question period, I got the news via a tweet by a Liberal committee member that the committee will be calling the former attorney general to appear. Things are getting interesting indeed. First they try to make someone obey, but she stands up and says no, so she gets the boot. Then another guy says he is out of here but did nothing wrong. Suddenly it seems like things are working out after all, and the former attorney general will probably come back as though nothing happened.
Nevertheless, I can assure the House that we will keep digging. We moved a motion today, and our NDP colleagues will work with us to shine a light on what happened. The only way to do that is to launch an inquiry to get the real facts. We see what the Liberals are up to, and it is not okay. Things have not been okay for three and a half years, but now they are worse than ever. I am not really surprised, because it is in the Liberals' DNA, but for the sake of Canadians, we need to shine a light on this.