Madam Speaker, I am honoured to follow my distinguished colleague from Thornhill, who was also a journalist, but at a time when I could not yet read or write, which goes to show the wisdom of the man and especially of what he says.
It is with great pride and pleasure that we second this motion, even if it was moved by the NDP; this it is not a question of partisanship but of ethics. Let us be very clear. Nothing can do more harm to a politician’s reputation than ethical issues.
I want to be clear that when we talk about ethics, we talk about a very fragile issue, so that is why we have to take it seriously. First I want to pay all my respect to the Minister of Finance, not for what he has done but for running in politics. We can see this guy is a knight on Bay Street, but on the other hand, when he is so high, he must have a higher standard of ethics. Unfortunately, that has not been the case for the last two years.
When the current Minister of Finance entered politics, it was a good thing because of his experience on Bay Street. When a figure of such stature becomes involved in politics, the political class as a whole is the better for it. However, politics come with strict ethical standards, standards the minister has failed to meet over the past two years.
Morneau Shepell, a company founded by his father and that he managed to grow quite well, applies federal tax and budgetary measures, the very measures that are crafted by the Minister of Finance. That is what is called a total conflict of interest between his current duties and his former duties in the private family business. The Minister of Finance should have avoided any appearance of conflict of interest from the outset, which, unfortunately, he failed to do.
Let us talk about the Minister of Finance's bilan for the last two years. It is not good. I heard the parliamentary secretary a few minutes ago talk about the economic situation of Canada. Let me remind him that the current government was elected under the hope of a small deficit of $10 billion and zero deficit in 2019. The reality is that the government and the minister tabled a budget that is three times the deficit expected, and it has no idea when Canada will get back to a zero deficit. This is a shame. We have to go back to the worst years of the Trudeau government, the father not the son. That was the government that invented and created the deficit when we were not at war or in a huge crisis. Unfortunately, the son is taking the footpath of his father.
Deficits are three times higher than expected, and no one knows when we will return to a balanced budget. The government pays lip service to lofty principles by saying it will make the wealthiest 1% pay, and yet, three weeks ago, the Department of Finance tabled a study that shows that the wealthiest Canadians pay $1 billion less in income tax than they did two years ago under the Conservative government. Once again, the Liberals pat themselves on the back for their lofty principles when, in truth, they are not getting the job done.
Also, the Liberals cannot go 30 seconds without mentioning how they are helping families and the middle class, when that is not true at all. The Fraser Institute concluded that 80% of middle class families have been paying $840 a year more in taxes since the Liberals came to power. These people say one thing and do the exact opposite, and, when I say “these people,” I mean the Minister of Finance, whom we are discussing today.
Let us now look at the crux of today's NDP motion, the issue of conflict of interest. As I said, the Minister of Finance called the shots at Morneau Shepell, a publicly traded company worth $1 billion. That is fantastic, but that company is in a direct conflict of interest with the Minister of Finance, since he comes up with tax measures and Morneau Shepell applies them. This is the very definition of conflict of interest. I will come back to this in greater detail later.
On top of that, the Minister of Finance is showing that he has a selective memory. The member for Carleton stood up in this House less than a month ago with a document that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Morneau Shepell has a business in the Bahamas, a tax haven. The Liberals had a little egg on their face when they realized that.
They just forgot to mention that they had this company in a tax haven. CBC had to use some hard-core journalistic tactics to find out that the Minister of Finance owns a villa in Provence, in France, and forgot to mention that. This is another example of his selective memory.
It was the same thing when the Globe and Mail revealed barely two weeks ago that the Minister of Finance had not reported all of his assets to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner and that he had not put them in a blind trust or sold them. Once again, it was not handled properly. It is sad to say, but the reality is that the truth did not come out until he was backed into a corner, until he had no choice but to set the record straight. That is what happened with the Bahamas, with the villa in Provence, and with his assets. What a dismal state of affairs we saw last week. We are talking about the Minister of Finance, after all. His week began so well that the Prime Minister said:
“I am the Prime Minister. I will answer all the questions. You have the chance to speak with the Prime Minister. I am here to answer all the questions.” That was the Prime Minister himself.
Apparently he thinks pretty highly of himself. The Prime Minister's treatment of his right-hand man was insulting. I do not want to take anything away from anyone. There are 338 of us here, we are all equal, and so on and so forth, but the fact is that there is the Prime Minister, and then there is the Minister of Finance. We all know that the finance minister is the government's heavy hitter. When the Prime Minister treated him like a newbie, that was an insult to our whole system of government. That is the problem.
He explained the whole thing by admitting that there was a loophole in the rules that allowed him not to declare it. How sad to see such an honest, upright, upstanding man fumble around with such pathetic excuses. No Bay Street baron should ever have to utter such blithering nonsense. Such a person deserves the utmost respect. That is my whole point: this motion is about ethics. When one is Minister of Finance, one's conduct must be 110% ethical, and when one has been at the head of a Canadian corporate jewel with a brilliant international reputation, one must act with utmost dignity.
Unfortunately, the Minister of Finance failed to do so, and now here we are with this motion. I remind members that, in recent months, this minister has been conducting a full-on attack on SMEs, because his leader, the Prime Minister, said that most SMEs were simply used as ways to avoid paying taxes. That is shocking, contemptuous, and insulting. The Prime Minister has an utterly unacceptable bias against small and medium-sized companies.
This minister did everything he could to take millions of dollars from Canadian business owners, when he should have been doing everything he could to help them, to grow their assets, and to create more jobs and wealth. The Minister of Finance finally understands and has taken a step back because of the hard work of the official opposition, led by our extraordinary leader and, frankly, the quarterbacking by the member for Carleton. This member, with the support of members of Parliament, led chambers of commerce from across the country in an attack against the minister's comments.
Once again, we see these people attacking our least fortunate citizens. This weekend, we learned from the Canadian Diabetes Association that the government is trying to squeeze more taxes out of people with diabetes, which is unconscionable. The Minister of National Revenue acknowledged as much and said that they would look into it, because it is very concerning. To me it is not just very concerning, but unacceptable. Only when cornered does this government finally admit fault. That is why, despite my great respect and esteem for the Minister of Finance, we are going to vote in favour of this motion. When the Minister of Finance is also the heir to a hugely successful family business, it is all the more important for him to demonstrate rigour and ethics and avoid any conflict of interest. Unfortunately, over the past two years, this government has had a whole slew of conflicts of interest.