To my friends, of course committees have the power to investigate. We're doing that right now on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook at the ethics and access to information committee. Of course we have the power. The question is whether we want to use the power or not. This committee can subpoena witnesses. This committee can deliver findings to the House of Commons, and in the full public light of day.
The Ethics Commissioner will do very good work, and you'll only see the report. You won't see the interviews. You won't see the questions. You won't see the cross-examination.
It bears some suspicion, my Liberal friends, that the only people you put on your witness list are people who—two out of three—have already publicly said that they don't think there is anything to see here. It's somehow a coincidence that your witnesses....
Randy, you've offered up witnesses already. We're talking witnesses, so we're going to talk about them today. The people who are alleged to have been involved in what is one of the most serious cases that I've seen in my life in politics are not on your list. The people who are on your list have publicly said, “We feel that everything was done properly.”
In terms of the independence of the judiciary, my friend, that note should have been passed around the Prime Minister's Office some months ago, and if we do respect that, then these allegations that we're now seeing printed in our national newspaper wouldn't have come to light because they wouldn't have happened. That we have very clear rules delineating the ability to try to influence the independence of the Attorney General, to then influence the prosecution counsel...it seems disturbing to me.
To the point around this amendment that SNC-Lavalin lobbied your government exhaustively...and they spent a lot of money doing it, as they did by spending $500,000 in donations to your party and another $100,000 that was illegally donated to your party from SNC-Lavalin.
Here is what your Liberal member on the committee said about this amendment:
What strikes me as being wrong is that these remediation provisions seem to be focused on white-collar crime, or at least limited to white-collar crime.
Further on the member said:
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth in the sense that it seems we're going to let off people who commit a very serious economic crime, which has very serious effects against those who are not capable of negotiating these agreements in other crimes they might be victims of or are perpetrators of. We seem to be letting off people in white-collar crimes with a little slap on the wrist.
Here is what the Liberal chair of the finance committee said:
[T]here is a huge question of whether this should be in a budget bill. Even I will say that.
It was slipped into an omnibus budget bill. It was not a financial measure. Who are we kidding? It was lobbied for by a multinational company. They secured that. The allegation now is that they then lobbied the Prime Minister's Office to then put pressure on the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to give them a plea deal so that SNC-Lavalin could keep bidding on lucrative federal government contracts. That's what this is about. They've been banned from World Bank contracts, and if they were found guilty in court of fraud and corruption, bribery, they would be excluded from bidding on lucrative federal government contracts.
That's what this is about: two sets of rules. As your Liberal members at the finance committee said, it gave them great concern: special rules for those who are well connected and other rules for those who aren't, who are average Canadians, the middle class and those working hard to join it, I think is the popular phrase.
The power of this committee to actually find out what happened here is substantial. We are given this role on behalf of Canadians. To simply say that this is a sophisticated legal book club—that we can explore and study and contemplate these things—would be to forgo our responsibilities when we see something like this.
The witnesses you've offered are suspect, in the sense that they've already made themselves and their opinions on this known. The other principal actors.... I'm going to say this now and I'll say it again. We should perhaps stop trying to speak for Jody Wilson-Raybould. We can invite her. We can offer her the opportunity and she can use her counsel and her very good knowledge of law to decide what it is that she will and will not say. The fact that Liberal committee members don't even want to hear from her is telling.
If you do want to hear from her, Mr. Fraser, put her on the list.
You've phoned some other people. You had somebody phone some other people. You didn't phone Gerry Butts. Well, why not? It bears asking.
What I will suggest is this:
That the Justice and Human Rights committee hold meetings to examine the role of the Attorney General in Canada's system of justice and other pertinent legal matters, and that witnesses list include but not be limited to:
—the three that have been mentioned already, and including:
former minister of veterans affairs, Jody Wilson-Raybould;
principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts;
senior advisor to the Prime Minister, Mathieu Bouchard
and that the Committee meet on Tuesday, February 19th, 2019, at a time set by the Chair
—and it continues as per the original motion.
If my Liberal colleagues think that hearing from Jody Wilson-Raybould isn't of interest to Canadians, if my Liberal colleagues think that not hearing from the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, who's implicated in this affair, is not of interest to Canadians, and that his senior adviser, Mr. Bouchard, is not of interest to Canadians, I'll let you try to explain that. You can't circle around this whole problem and then suddenly say we're just not interested in hearing from the principal actors. It makes no sense. Please don't say that other witnesses may be considered as we....
We're talking about witnesses today, Randy. Let's do it. If you don't want to do that, if you don't want to have those people invited, we're about to have a vote, and you can describe that. But to say that we'll meet in camera and we'll discuss it in private....
It's as obvious as the nose on my face that this is something we have to do—and the nose on my face is pretty obvious.