Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be sharing my time with the member for Victoria.
This is such an interesting discussion. The member lauded the performance of the finance minister, but I want to take us back to the mandate letter that was given to the finance minister by the Prime Minister. He called on him to respect the values of a government. It stated:
We have promised Canadians a government that will bring real change--in both what we do and how we do it....We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government....It is important that we acknowledge mistakes when we make them. Canadians do not expect us to be perfect – they expect us to be honest, open, and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest....you must uphold the highest standards of honesty and impartiality, and both the performance of your official duties and the arrangement of your private affairs should bear the closest public scrutiny. This is an obligation that is not fully discharged by simply acting within the law.
In summary, to me, this meant that not only the letter of the law must be upheld; the Prime Minister asked his ministers to go well beyond the letter of the law.
The finance minister let the public believe, including his fellow Liberal MPs and Bay Street colleagues, that he had placed his assets in a blind trust and he let them continue to sustain that belief for two years without correcting the record. Instead, he has been in a position to profit from policies he has advanced as finance minister over that two year period. The finance minister let that untruth stand. He took action last week, two years too late. It seems the only reason he took that action was because he was finally caught.
The finance minister was directed to take the highest ethical path. Instead, the government is barely scraping by. The minister's self-congratulatory tone last week about his belated tidy up of his ethical lapse is totally out of line. He belatedly took action that he should have taken two years ago if he had followed the Prime Minister's direction or the Ethics Commissioner's secondary advise, and if he had any common sense or clue about how this would play out in public.
This is particularly troublesome, given the hard summer we have had in the small business and entrepreneurial community, being accused of similar ethical lapses and exploitation of tax loopholes.
Paul Williams, a constituents from my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith, wrote:
While I certainly believe in tax fairness, I do not support what the Finance Minister is proposing and the uncertainly and harm that will result. The changes being contemplated go against the notion of tax fairness. In essence, the changes being contemplated will single out privately held business owners--many of whom are middle-class income earners--treating them worse than publicly held and foreign controlled businesses.
I have hundreds of letters like this. The finance minister's proposal scared small business owners and it unjustly accused them of wrongdoing.
As it turns out, the real tax loophole exploiter was the finance minister, which really is the icing on the cake of a really bad four months in the government. His self-congratulatory air last week of suddenly dismantling a so-called tax fairness proposal, which he said back in July he would not change a word of, and had in fact already written the legislation, was also out of line. If he had done what a real legislator would have done, he would have said that it was a consultation and he would have asked people what they thought. He would told people not to be alarmed, that he might or might not do it. Now, all of a sudden, he says that he is willing to hear the advice and willing to keep his election promise on the small business tax cut, which he previously said he would cancel.
He is now dealing with legislation. He is going to accept the rules that our NDP parliamentary leader proposed on facilitating the transfer of intergenerational companies. Six months ago, the Liberals voted it down. Then last week they used it as cover for a real mess. That shows they really do not have the ear and the tone of the country.
At the time of his election, the finance minister owned two million shares in Morneau Shepell worth $32.1 million. Apparently, that holding, as of Friday, would be worth $42 million. That means he has profited over $10 million over the last two years as finance minister.
However, he did not put them in a blind trust. He did not sell them in an arm's-length transaction, as required, within 120 days of taking office. It has since been revealed that Morneau Shepell has a contract with the Bank of Canada worth more than $8 million. The finance minister was asked nearly 20 times about his million shares that he still owns in Morneau Shepell, worth $20 million, before he admitted that he would actually give an answer. Finally, he failed to reveal the corporation that houses his French villa. CBC maintains that the minister only disclosed that corporation to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner just last month, after CBC discovered its existence, and, really, that is when he started to answer questions on it.
It is undeniable, when we turn to Bill C-27, that if it were to become law, Morneau Shepell would significantly benefit in business and revenue, and as a massive investor, the finance minister would personally benefit from the passage of that bill. The minister brought that bill to Parliament. He could have had another member of the party do that, but, instead, he was the lead on it. This was done without consultation and certainly not with the support of constituents in my riding.
Morneau Shepell is a strong proponent and manager of the services related to target benefit pension plans, and could be just one of four firms in the country that would benefit from new pension administration rules if Bill C-27 becomes law. In fact, when the finance minister was at the helm of Morneau Shepell, it lobbied for increased use of target benefit pension plans and became the lead consultant for the Government of New Brunswick in exactly implementing this.
Five days after Bill C-27 was tabled, the value of shares in Morneau Shepell increased by almost 5%, which is an increase that could have allowed the minister to make as much as $2 million. This is really not a middle-class problem. At the very least, this is a striking perceived conflict of interest, since the minister was in a position to further his own private interests through his public duties as a finance minister.
Bill C-27, as much as it benefits Bay Street, would significantly harm workers and pensioners.
Here is what residents of Nanaimo—Ladysmith have told me about Bill C-27.
Pieter Terpstra from Nanaimo writes:
Please, say NO to bill C-27. I am a retired school teacher/logger/proprietor who relies solely on small pensions to survive. I do not want them converted to a target benefit plans. I spent my life working at many different jobs and it's wrong, for them to take away my security in my old age.
It's shameful that [the Prime Minister] promised to protect Defined Benefit Plans and now the government is considering this Bill to change that.
We also have a description of how harmful this is from Deborah Zellermeyer from Ladysmith. She writes:
Bill C-27 allows employers to convert good, defined benefit pension plans, which provide secure and predictable pension benefits, into a much less secure form of plan. Target benefit plans only aim to provide benefits, and they shift all the risk to active plan members and retirees.
Even Harper did not propose the bill, although he floated it, and the opposition was so strong.
The Ethics Commissioner said that she outlined the possible conflict when the finance minister met with her two years ago. She said that there is a loophole she thought should have been fixed, as had been recommended to the previous government as well. Therefore, as New Democrats, with our leader, Jagmeet Singh, we are trying to propose positive alternatives.
We want the Ethics Commissioner to launch a formal investigation into the finance minister. We want the finance minister to withdraw Bill C-27. We want the Liberal government to take the advice of the Ethics Commissioner and close these loopholes so that no future minister ever stumbles into the same morass that the finance minister has, fulfill the promise that Liberals offered to voters two years ago, and restore some faith in the current government.
