Mr. Speaker, we learned this week that the Minister of Finance had been keeping a secret from the House. Since the last election, he has held in his possession stocks in Morneau Shepell, his billion-dollar family business. His holdings amount to tens of millions of dollars. The finance minister has vast powers and long, far-reaching tentacles into all aspects of economic and financial policy in our country. In short, his decisions can make a lot of money for financial companies, like the one in which he had invested tens of millions of dollars.
Morneau Shepell administers pensions. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which reports to the finance minister, decides who will administer the pensions of bankrupt federally regulated companies. The finance minister sets policies to collect $300 billion worth of taxes. The specificity of these tax policies have the potential to help or hinder individual businesses. For example, one policy the government promoted under this finance minister would encourage small businesses to put their money in individual pension plans. Morneau Shepell, his family business, sells those pension plans. It is one of the unique companies that do so.
The finance minister proposed a bill creating something called targeted pension benefit plans. Morneau Shepell is one of the only companies in Canada that administers targeted benefit pension plans. For example, when these plans were created in New Brunswick, it was Morneau Shepell that set them up, and it would be Morneau Shepell that would profit from them if we did it at a federal level. We know this because Morneau Shepell has bragged about that fact on its own website. The finance minister spoke about it when he was the executive chairman of Morneau Shepell.
For these reasons, the minister was in an obvious conflict of interest, in a position that he was able to use his powers to profit a company that was paying him dividend cheques monthly. According to David Akin, a respected journalist, that company was paying him $65,000 a month in dividends, while he was finance minister regulating that same company. Worst of all, he did not tell anybody outside of the Ethics Commissioner.
When Paul Martin was the finance minister and he had vast holdings in Canada Steamship Lines, we all thought it was a conflict of interest. However, at least we knew about it so we could debate it. When he introduced bills that affected shipping lines, we knew what he was up to. The current minister told the media that he was putting his interests in a blind trust. He told Morneau Shepell that all of his holdings would go in a blind trust. He sent out parliamentary secretaries from the Liberal government on Twitter to claim that his holdings were in a blind trust. Only after the truth was uncovered by numerous investigative reporters did the finance minister finally admit he still held those shares and they were not in a blind trust. The minister always does the right thing after he is caught doing the opposite.
This conflict of interest allows the minister to enrich himself at the expense of everyone else. He has not lived up to the standards that are expected of someone with his authority. How does his parliamentary secretary defend the actions of the minister?