It was the summer holidays or the Labour Day holiday. That was something the government wished to avoid.
I found it a bit unclear why the government would specifically want to avoid that. Many federal and provincial elections have overlapped with the Labour Day holiday. I can think of, for example, the 1990 Ontario election, when David Peterson, three years into his mandate, went to the polls. He had a big majority. I think the Liberals won 95 seats in the 1987 election. The 1987 election in Ontario was in October, so less than three years into his mandate, he made the decision to drop the writ in early August. It not only overlapped with the Labour Day holiday; it also overlapped with the August long weekend.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe the election was on September 6, 1990. That was when David Peterson was severely punished for calling what Ontario voters perceived to be an opportunistic early election. There was also a bad taste in the mouths of many Ontarians over the record of the Peterson government. A whiff of scandal and corruption surrounded that Liberal government.
If only the same could be said of these Liberals, that there is a whiff of scandal and corruption, because after nine years of this Prime Minister, it's far more than a whiff of scandal. What we have with this government is a culture of corruption that goes right to the top, right to the Prime Minister. We have a Prime Minister who has been found guilty—not once, but twice—of violating the Conflict of Interest Act. We have a Prime Minister who obstructed an RCMP investigation into his potential criminal wrongdoing, which included the fact that he may have obstructed justice, and likely did, when he completely improperly and likely illegally ordered his former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to intervene in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
When the RCMP came before the ethics committee last spring, I asked them why they had suspended their investigation into the potential matter of obstruction of justice on the part of the Prime Minister. The RCMP, when I put to them whether it was as a result of the Prime Minister hiding behind cabinet confidence, whether that was a factor, essentially answered in the affirmative. When I asked whether lifting cabinet confidence might lead the RCMP to reopen their investigation into what happened during SNC-Lavalin, including the conduct of the Prime Minister, they said that was possible.
It's within the Prime Minister's right to invoke cabinet confidence. I'm not suggesting otherwise. There are legitimate reasons for invoking cabinet confidence. In this particular case, while the Prime Minister has the right to invoke cabinet confidence, given what transpired with SNC-Lavalin and what we know, I think Canadians can judge for themselves why the Prime Minister invoked cabinet confidence.
If the Prime Minister had nothing to hide and wasn't afraid that the RCMP could potentially lay charges against him for obstruction of justice, as well as potentially others in his office who were involved in putting pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould.... There were many in his office, right to the top of those in his office, including his then principal secretary, Gerald Butts, who met with Jody Wilson-Raybould more than once, I believe. There was also Katie Telford, the Prime Minister's then and current chief of staff, and Mathieu Bouchard, among others. If the Prime Minister wasn't fearful that either he or the likes of Telford and Butts had done anything wrong, why would he invoke cabinet confidence? Why would he obstruct an RCMP investigation?
If the Prime Minister had nothing to hide, it follows that he would co-operate with the RCMP. He would let the RCMP do their job. He would let the RCMP follow the evidence and would respect the independence of the RCMP to make a determination about whether charges against the Prime Minister or anyone in his office are warranted for putting pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould to shut down the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and, in so doing, to obstruct justice, if the evidence demonstrated that it met that threshold.
I was on the justice committee during SNC-Lavalin. I was the vice-chair of the justice committee at the time. In fact, I can remember sitting down in the committee room below when Jody Wilson-Raybould came before committee and gave her powerful testimony, bombshell testimony, on the type of pressure—