We have less than two hours to go before the Liberals do the thing they have spent the last 20 hours saying that they weren't going to do: obstruct accountability in parliamentary committees. The reason they're talking out the clock is that they'll be able to kill this motion and kill accountability. The thing about fishing—they said that this is a fishing expedition—is that you catch fish. This isn't a fishing expedition. I would point to the record of the official opposition in terms of doing the thing we're supposed to do: bring accountability to bear.
If you follow the government's own logic.... If the Prime Minister needs a conflict screen, Parliament has a responsibility to know when that screen is triggered, when it isn't and why. Canadians shouldn't take the government's word for it. They cannot take a Liberal government's word for it. They can't take this Liberal government's word for it. The committee should see the records, analysis and travel details to verify that the Prime Minister is not participating in decisions or discussions that could benefit companies tied to his private interests.
I'm going to briefly explain why—and virtually any intervention, after the last 20 hours, will be brief. The context is really important because we've heard about what a bang-up job they've been doing for the last year. The results speak for themselves. One in four Canadians is suffering from food insecurity. That's not me saying it. That's from the people in lineups at food banks in my community, in Mr. Sari's community, Mr. Sari's community and Mr. Sari's.... I'm going to try to use his name as many times as he did mine in the last round. We're talking about the relentless suffering of Canadians. That's one of the results.
We heard about job numbers from one of the others in their filibuster—about what a great job they've done on jobs. Canada is down 95,000 jobs this year. That's not great for the people who've lost them. It's not great for the people in my community who've lost their jobs. They want to tell us, “Well, these international bodies say that Canada's doing the best.” Do you know what? For the people in my community, those empty words don't fill their empty bellies. They want to see results from the government, and they're not seeing that.
We heard about the wasted time that would come from looking at some of these things. We've had 20 hours of filibusters over two weeks from these Liberals. You cannot take them seriously. It's very much a “let them eat cake” attitude. That's demonstrated by the Prime Minister's in-flight catering. He's taking all these trips. That's great, but he's certainly not packing a lunch. There is an expectation of some belt-tightening done by government when Canadians are tightening their own belts because they're malnourished, suffering and hungry. We're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in in-flight catering costs on single trips. That's shocking.
Why do we need to see this? Why can't we take their word for it? I would look to every other time in the last three years when we've said that a committee should take a look at these things.
Now, Liberal members have said that we can't have opposition motions passed at committee because legislation wouldn't get passed. Well, this motion is not going to take up further committee time. That's number one. Number two, this committee, like the government operations committee and the public accounts committee, is not a committee to which legislation is typically referred. Look at the WE Charity scandal. That would have seen $912 million going to an organization that paid almost half a million dollars to the former prime minister's family members. Look at the $4.6 billion in COVID overpayments that were uncovered through opposition pressure for Auditor General reports and for committee studies, and the $27.4 billion that the Auditor General said should be investigated.
On ArriveCAN, I sat in this very committee room and had Liberal members say across the table that the app was perfect, that it saved tens of thousands of lives, that they got great value for money and that it was a waste of committee time to study it. Well, all of that was demonstrated to be false. The government has failed to demonstrate a single incidence of it saving any lives. We've heard from Canada's frontline border services officers that it made their job more difficult. Also, of $60 million, we saw that, at a minimum, $20 million was just pure grift, just theft from taxpayers. The Liberal members told us that there was nothing to see here. They said, “There's no here, here, so we can't take a look at this.”
The same is true for Sustainable Development Technology, for which we know that nearly $60 million went to 10 ineligible projects—fully ineligible projects—but that was at the same time as they said, “You cannot take a look at this.” When we referred it to the Ethics Commissioner after the Liberal members said there was nothing to see here, we found that the Liberal-appointed chair had broken the very law that we're talking about today: the Conflict of Interest Act.
We have demonstrated time and time again that there is a benefit to this for Canadians. When we find that there's a problem, when we find that there's been a contravention of the rule under the Liberals—we have seen 10 instances in which this Liberal government has broken Canada's ethics laws—what we can do is change the rules, do better and give Canadians confidence in their democratic institutions and their elected officials.
That's the job of all members who aren't part of the executive. You often hear people say, “Well, I'm part of the government.” You may be part of the governing party, but unless the Prime Minister has elevated you to the Privy Council or you're warming the bench as a parliamentary secretary, you're not in government. You're a backbencher, and you need to hold the government accountable. That's the job of all of us. It doesn't just fall on the Conservatives. It doesn't just fall on the Bloc. It's a responsibility that we have to Canadians.
On asking for basic details about when the screen has been invoked and why it has or has not been invoked, I didn't hear any amendments. I heard the bell get clanged about 1,000 times with my name, and I heard the phone book get read in by someone else, but what I didn't hear was any thoughtful amendment.
Is it the contention of Liberal members that there's absolutely no value whatsoever in any further scrutiny of the head of government? Heaven forbid that it become a precedent and that, going forward, we hold everyone in that office to that standard, wherein we have an understanding of that and there is public reporting. I can think of an awful lot of things that are worse than that, such as what we've seen over the last 10 years. Let's not get to the point that people come to expect—Canadians come to expect—that the laws will just be broken. The rules will be broken. That's a legacy of the last 10 years, and it doesn't need to be one of the next 10 years.
We saw in committee when we had a representative from Brookfield here that the system as it's currently designed doesn't do what it's supposed to do. How can a senior executive at Brookfield just text the Prime Minister back and forth? If the Prime Minister doesn't know when the screen is being used, should he be concerned about any text he's getting from Brookfield? He doesn't know that there's something before cabinet. He doesn't know what's being shared. Are Mr. Sabia and Mr. Blanchard reading his texts first? That's not the indication we've received.
Is the communication being screened? That's a big question, and that's certainly not one that's been answered.
If there was a timeline and if the complaints were actually being raised in good faith and not just simply as a filibuster, we would hear reasonable amendments, and we would support reasonable amendments. Is there a particular piece...? Would we agree to pass this right now if we said, “Let's remove something. Let's remove the need to produce emails. Oh, yes, that was it”?
However, that's not it. It's about having any further scrutiny. They know that at 8:15, or whenever bells ring, that will be the last time they're going to need to talk the clock to stop accountability at this committee. They'll be co-conspirators any time, then, that the rules or laws are broken in the future because they would have had the opportunity to do the right thing and to help strengthen the system. They'll have actively made a choice not only to not do that but also to have prevented it from happening.
I know that my conscience will be clean because I will have worked with other members of the opposition and other parties who understand what our responsibilities are. We'll continue to do that; we will keep doing that. It is, mildly put, unfortunate that that's the position Liberal members have chosen to take and that those are the instructions they've accepted and have deployed—a filibuster to stop that. However, those are decisions for them to reconcile. We're going to continue to do the right thing.
I hope that contrast is very clear, though—what happens when one more member from the governing party gets dropped onto the committee. It won't be a question of thoughtful consideration. It will be shutting the lights off.