Mr. Speaker, as the NDP critic for public works, I am thankful the minister raised this issue in the House today. I, too, was taken aback at the lack of notice, but she has shared with us some very useful information to shine light on perhaps the untoward influence of lobbyists in policy-making, at least in the years of the early 2000s, prior to the introduction of the Federal Accountability Act, for which the NDP was proud to vote.
We did not see a printed copy of the statement, but the words that jumped out at me was when the minister mentioned the contingency fees, the success fees, paid out to Wallding International Inc. I note that the key principal of Wallding International Inc. is none other than former senior Liberal cabinet minister David Dingwall, who had well-known and long-standing connections to big pharma in his former capacity as a minister in the Liberal government.
For a Liberal minister of the Crown to cease his duties as a cabinet minister and within a year, go out and influence peddle with big pharma for a sole-source contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars for a pre-set contingency fee is not only fundamentally wrong, it is illegal in my view. The only difference between lobbying and influence peddling is about five years in prison, and influence peddling or selling one's influence, one's access to a company, is nothing short of influence peddling.
The minister has done us a great service by shining a light on this sorry bit of Canadian history. We have all known about the very cozy relationship between the Liberals and big pharma. We have all wondered about the drug patent laws, which were in fact the biggest corporate giveaway since the CPR in terms of giving big pharma almost unlimited drug patent laws. The has been essentially draining the coffers of health care budgets ever since, handing billions of dollars to the select, well connected, influential group of pharmaceutical companies that the Liberals used so well.
We all took note of senior Liberal staffers who were like a revolving door. One day they were working in the minister's office. The next day they were working for Pfizer. The next day they were working for a lobbying company. The next day they were back in the office of the Liberals. It was like a revolving door, which we noticed time and time again, ministerial staff going into big pharma and then back out again, or going into the lobbying industry and selling influence like this.
This is perhaps the most graphic illustration of the rot that crept into the Liberal regime in those years than we have seen since the sponsorship scandal. Mr. Dingwall, who was entitled to his entitlements, clearly thought one of his entitlements was to pillage the health care system by selling this privileged access to big pharma and lining his own pockets in the process. It is fundamentally wrong and I can assure members that our parliamentary committee will be seized of this issue, at the earliest opportunity, to conduct an indepth study of these kinds of shenanigans to ensure they can never happen again.