I don't want to go too far in negotiations because I don't want to breach any confidence we have with other bills or with the NDP, but as I said, I don't think it would be telling tales out of school, and I don't think Mr. Beech or Mr. Blaikie would disagree with me, that a large part of the reason why we can't go ahead right now is a question of the availability of the deputy leader over and above what is in that particular motion.
As I said, I do not want to go too much...I want to maintain that confidence with the Liberals and with the NDP, but to say I'm disappointed is more or less.... Also, I don't think I'd be truthful and honest if I didn't thank the NDP for some excellent efforts in trying to broker a deal here, but here we stand in the room with the wonderful member from the Bloc Québécois and the terrific member from the NDP and without a Liberal in the room. I think many things can be taken from their lack of presence here as to the type of meeting they were intending on having.
I can tell you that in all good faith and reason, Conservatives stand ready to negotiate, to move forward and to work on the people's business, but that is extremely challenging to do without your negotiating partner even bothering to walk the 10 minutes from the Justice or Confederation buildings.
Let's look at the fall economic statement. Let's look at why we want the Governor of the Bank of Canada here and why we want the deputy leader in charge of finance here. We'll go back seven years, to when this government came to power and told us a couple of things.
One, they told us that they—the Liberals—would be “open by default”. They also told us that they were going to be there to help the middle class and those attempting to join it.
Here's where we are with that right now. We have seen a government that has been plagued by scandal. Hardly a year, if not a month, goes by without some type of scandal involving this government, whether it be the SNC-Lavalin affair....
The SNC-Lavalin affair is actually very instructive as to why Conservatives might want to do their democratic duty and their due diligence and review this document, because hidden in what I believe was budget omnibus legislation was the deferred prosecution agreement. Not one parliamentarian, including anyone from our party—to take full responsibility—was able to uncover that. It wasn't until Jody Wilson-Raybould courageously stood up to the Prime Minister against his efforts to potentially direct an investigation, of course, that it really came to light. That's why it's absolutely critical that these documents.... I mean, these documents are billions of dollars, and they have tremendous impact.
I've never really understood why we need to rush these documents down, because they can often cause much harm. We've actually seen this quite a bit with Liberal legislation that has been poorly drafted. They've had to go back and redraft and reset it because it doesn't work.
Of course, the other scandal, a major scandal, was with respect to WE Charity. We saw a company where the government attempted to give them $800 million, nearly a billion dollars, and the reality was that this company actually gave the Trudeau family hundreds of thousands of dollars. We still really haven't gotten to the bottom of that.
Then we look at—