Mr. Speaker, I am happy to be splitting my time with my colleague from Cowichan—Malahat—Langford.
Let us start where we need to start, which is at the beginning.
Let us begin with the motion moved by the member for Carleton:
That the House agree with the Prime Minister’s statement in the House on November 1, 2017, that “sunshine is the best disinfectant”; and call on the Finance Minister to reveal all assets he has bought, sold or held within all his private companies....
This kind of thing happens because a loophole in the Conflict of Interest Act makes it possible for the minister not to be considered in conflict of interest if he holds his shares in a private numbered corporation, which is what the ultra-rich do. However, let us consider this statement by the Prime Minister about his ministers:
...the Ethical Guidelines...apply to you and your staff. As noted in the Guidelines, 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.
It is bizarre that we should have to spend the day on a debate to help the Liberals keep a Liberal promise. That is our intention, and this is an opportunity for the Liberals and the Minister of Finance in particular to save their reputation.
We are simply asking the minister to keep the promise that he and the Prime Minister made to all Canadians to ensure that his private affairs can bear the closest public scrutiny.
We are spending the entire day trying to help Liberals out. It is not an easy thing to do sometimes, because it is correcting bad behaviour. We do not have to do it once, but over and over again, because there is a certain amount of recidivism when we are talking about Liberals and the Liberal culture when it comes to ethics.
Canadians have seen this movie before. The Liberals are entitled to their entitlements. The concern I have is that this finance minister does not even understand that he has done something wrong. It is not just that he has done something wrong with the introduction of a bill that personally helped him and his company, but it is that he does not see any problem with that.
Not only is the behaviour itself bad—the decisions that were made initially not just by the finance minister but by the Prime Minister's Office and the Prime Minister's staff—in breaking faith with Canadians, but after that faith was broken, and it was revealed publicly, the finance minister stands up day after day and asks what the problem is. He is just under investigation by the Ethics Commissioner, he has already had to pay a fine for his French villa, and he says he is moving on; he has no problem here, and why should anybody else?
Having faith in the finance minister is important for Parliament and important for all Canadians, because it is such a powerful position. I think it is important to read out the promise that we are trying to help the Liberals keep today, because it is a promise that the Prime Minister himself made. He came in on a white stallion of integrity and was going to bring forth a new era in Canadian politics and integrity. Here is what the Prime Minister told Canadians, and demanded of all of his ministers, including the finance minister:
...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.
We found out that the finance minister's shares in Morneau Shepell totalled, depending on the date, some $32 million, and when he eventually sold them, they were worth between $6 million and $12 million more. Liberals talk about the personal sacrifices the finance minister has made, but I would love to make a personal sacrifice for which I gained $6 million to $12 million. Most Canadians would love the idea of that being the definition of personal sacrifice: being forced under public pressure to make $12 million profit. I am sorry if we do not hand out Kleenex for the tears that Canadians are shedding for the finance minister, who may have just cleared between $6 million and $12 million profit. It is tough to be him, I guess.
The notion is this, though. It only came to light because journalists dug through records to find out that he was still controlling these shares. They were in a numbered company in Alberta. There is a loophole in the ethics code that has never been exploited before, to my knowledge, because no one thought of it, I guess, where, if he took the shares he owned in Morneau Shepell and simply moved them into a numbered company in Alberta, even though all of the profits would still eventually go to him, and him alone, that was no longer considered a conflict of interest. That is a shell game.
Canadians sitting back and watching this ask who made the money, and we say he did. That seems like a conflict of interest, because he introduced Bill C-27 that directly helped out Morneau Shepell, in which he still had tens of millions of dollars of shares. That seems wrong. If the health minister introduced a bill while still owning pharmaceutical shares worth tens of millions of dollars that helped out that pharmaceutical company, we would scream foul. The finance minister gets up day after day and says the opposition is obsessed with him. He is under a conflict of interest investigation.
It was revealed only after the media dug into his personal accounts, in ways that they could, to find out about the French villa that was in a numbered company that he forgot about. It was only because the media dug into public and semi-private records that they found out he was still controlling shares in Morneau Shepell worth millions of dollars while regulating the pension industry. Hold that thought for a moment. He worked in the pension industry, his company made profits in the pension industry, and he moved into public life to serve the public. He maintains millions of dollars of shares in a pension company while being the regulator of the pension industry, and the finance minister does not see a potential conflict of interest.
Today, we have a motion on which the entire day in the House will be spent asking the Liberals to simply do this: to keep their promise about public scrutiny. It does not end with the Morneau Shepell Bill C-27 affair. We know the finance minister has at least five other numbered companies, the contents of which we know nothing about. The very first test he faced on whether we should trust him or not was around introducing Bill C-27. He failed the test. The Ethics Commissioner is now investigating him because he failed that test. She believes there is enough evidence to launch that investigation.
When it was revealed that the finance minister was going under this investigation, his office tried to spin it and say it was not an investigation, that it was just an examination. That is what his office said. Lo and behold, we found out there is no difference, because in the ethics act the only word for it is “examination”. Liberals are in a hole and they just keep on digging. In fact, I think they went out and bought a bigger shovel.
Never mind that Morneau Shepell, as revealed through an access to information request, still maintains 171 contracts with the federal government. It has contracts valued at $53 million with the federal government while the finance minister maintains shares in Morneau Shepell. It is a minefield of conflicts of interest all over the place, in every decision he is making. One would have thought that if he wanted to keep his promise, knowing all of his personal affairs would bear the fullest public scrutiny, he would have divested.
That a cabinet minister sitting in Donald Trump's cabinet cannot do what this finance minister has done should cause Canadians some alarm. People in cabinet working for the President of the United States, even the current president, have to divest themselves of their interests. Otherwise, they will run into conflicts of interest almost every day. The finance minister still has not come clean. He has not revealed to Canadians what he owns or what his interests are. He says we should trust him, he is a good guy. He may be a good guy, but he is doing bad things.
Doing the right thing after getting caught is not exactly the same as doing the right thing, is it? One does not exactly build up trust by saying that now that he has been caught, he will do this, this, and this. The finance minister needs confidence, not just of the Prime Minister but of all Canadians. If he wants to regain confidence, this would all go away, if he just does this. The only person who can make this story end is the finance minister himself, who simply has to keep his promise that he and the Prime Minister made to all Canadians, to tell us what he owns and how he owns it so that Canadians can judge, because that is who we work for.
We all in this place work for the Canadians who sent us here. The finance minister promised that he would reveal what he owns and how he owns it. He, to this day, has not done that. The only record that we have is his dealing with a pension bill that would directly help out his company. Only after he got caught did he beget generosity toward charities and donate the profits, and we still do not even know how he did that and if he is getting a tax receipt for that. I ask the Liberals to come now, join with us, come into the light, let the sun shine in, and tell us what he owns and how he owns it.