Mr. Speaker, it was a billion. My thanks to my colleague for helping a guy out.
It was a billion dollars, $250 million of which were investments from India to Canada, $750 million of which were Canada to India. That seems like an unlikely outcome for a successful trade mission from Canada to India. I could understand if the Indian government planned a trade mission to Canada and went home with those numbers. Their citizens may be pretty pleased and feel their government did a good job. However, that is not the case. It is the opposite. A $500 million trade deficit on the trip itself and a significant raise in the tariffs for Canadian chickpeas appears to have been the outcome.
Therefore, this is why Canadians are frustrated with the trip. I think it is why most of us, and certainly the Liberals, would like to put it behind us and forget about it, except that another negative outcome of the trip was that it needlessly had a really negative impact on the relationship between the two governments because of a lack of vetting. We are trying to figure out where exactly that misstep occurred, when a person convicted of political violence in India was invited to an event with the Prime Minister. That goes beyond embarrassment. It is an international incident.
Compounding that was the fact that instead of owning up to a mistake from within either the Liberal Party or the Government of Canada, it was still not exactly clear where the error occurred or who was really in charge of the trip, or whether the trip was for political purposes, or official government business. Part of the problem is that we do not know. The person was allowed to get into that event.
It is important to emphasize that the national security adviser was not ad-libbing or deciding to get into a political debate on his own, causing an international incident. It is very hard to believe that. I say that because I want to reinforce the fact that this is not about calling into question the integrity or the judgment of the national security adviser. The Prime Minister then repeated the idea publicly that somehow it might have been a conspiracy of the Indian government to embarrass him. He really should have taken responsibility for what was an error either on the part of the Liberal Party or the Government of Canada. We are trying to sort that out.
It is not just that it was a kind of fluffy extended photo op instead of a real government business trip. It is not that it ended up having negative trade consequences for Canada instead of positive trade consequences. It is that coming out of that trip there was an international incident and a government that has not taken responsibility and has floated at least two competing accounts as to what happened.
On the one hand, the Liberals have an MP who says that he takes the blame, that he is responsible, that it is on him. On the other hand, they have a Prime Minister saying that it might have been a conspiracy of the Indian government. The way he chose to spread that theory was by sending his national security adviser into a media briefing and pushing the story out through that briefing.
In order to move on from this trip, people need to know what happened, how, and who was responsible. An important part of that story is better understanding what happened at that press interaction between the national security adviser and the media.
This motion simply asks to get the national security adviser in front of the public safety committee so that conversation can happen and parliamentarians can get a better sense of what exactly was said, reported, and discussed at that meeting. It would give members an opportunity for cross-examination and to ask some questions in case the account in itself is not exactly clear and there are some extant questions, which is also appropriate, so we can get a sense of what really happened and then put this whole sordid affair behind us.
Unfortunately the Liberal government refuses to enable that final step to get to the bottom of what happened and to have some measure of accountability for what ultimately was very poor judgment on the part of the Prime Minister to go out and promote that theory without any real evidence and without even really standing by it. If we are going to make that kind of allegation about another government, we have to be sure of ourselves. We had better also be darn sure what the point of doing it is and what it is we are trying to achieve. In this sense, the whole thing kind of ties back to the original problem with the trip, which is the purpose never was really clear.
That lack of clarity might have played a part in why the Prime Minister shot his mouth off about a conspiracy in the Indian government instead of being precise about what he wanted to communicate and how. It has all the dressings of poorly managed political crisis management of “Oh no, we made a terrible mistake. We don't want to take responsibility for it. We don't want to own up to it, so what are we going to say in order to try and divert opinion?” This is where we get signs of a Prime Minister who, in a lot of ways, does not have the experience and the tact to conduct himself appropriately on the international stage. Throwing another government under the bus without being willing to back it up is something that is problematic.
There are times when the Canadian government may well take on another government, but I do not think that was the point of the trip. I do not think that was what he was trying to do. I do not think he substantiated those claims, and he does not seem to care to substantiate those claims. It is a real mixed bag.
People would like to move on but we need some answers before we are able to do that. We are in the awkward position of having the Prime Minister and members of his caucus providing contradictory accounts of what happened. Let us get one story, get it straight, and then move on from this.