Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Windsor West.
As always, it is a great honour to rise in this place on behalf of the fantastic residents of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, and especially on a very important motion.
As our party's former justice critic, I enjoyed a very good working relationship with the member for Vancouver Granville when she was the minister of justice and attorney general. Although we differed on some policy areas, I knew her to be a person of the utmost integrity, a woman who has stood by her principles and has had a long and storied history both as a public prosecutor and a B.C. regional chief. She commands a huge amount of respect in my home province of British Columbia.
That is why, in her role as the country's first female indigenous justice minister, I was so perplexed and puzzled when I saw the news reports in January that she had been removed from her post and demoted to Veterans Affairs. Normally, I would say that serving our veterans is one of the highest callings in this land. Indeed, being the Minister of Veterans Affairs should be that. However, it is a demotion under the government, because we have seen its policies with respect to veterans and know it is not walking the talk with respect to the people who once wore the uniform. I get that feedback from veterans in my riding and I know the member for Courtenay—Alberni, who serves as our Veterans Affairs critic, also gets it from veterans right across the country.
The other puzzling thing about that demotion was the letter she released to the public, in which she talked about speaking truth to power and that our justice system must always be free from political interference. Those comments, made without any context, puzzled many people and they questioned why the former attorney general would go out of her way to make these obvious statements. We started to connect the dots when The Globe and Mail came out with its huge bombshell story on February 7.
As I said in my questions and comments to the previous speaker, the parliamentary secretary, Robert Fife and The Globe and Mail do not put a story of this magnitude on the front page unless they have gone out of their way to verify the sources of the story. They do not put their careers and indeed the reputation of one of our oldest newspapers on the line with unsubstantiated reports. It is obvious that they spoke to someone with insider knowledge of what went on in the Prime Minister's Office.
The fact is that although the Prime Minister and various Liberals have said that at no time was the former attorney general “directed”, that word was never used by The Globe and Mail. Rather, the word it used was “pressured”, which can be many different things and can come in many different forms. That is worrying because one of the pillars of our democratic system is the separation between the branches of government, and the executive branch of government in particular with the awesome power it wields, and our judiciary. It must be able to operate in a clear and unobstructed manner to ensure that the principles of justice are carried through.
There are other dots that connect this story.
Let us look at the fact that the deferred prosecution agreement provision of the Criminal Code was snuck in. The Liberals might say there were a lot of consultations, but it was extremely undemocratic for them to put this major change to the Criminal Code at the tail end of a budget omnibus bill that clocked in at over 550 pages. Even the Liberal members at the Standing Committee on Finance were questioning their own government as to what this provision was doing there. The government used time allocation to force that bill through. Therefore, did it get the proper oversight and deliberations it deserved? I would say no and venture that most Canadians would agree with me. This is coming from a party that promised Canadians it would do away with the undemocratic process of omnibus bills. What a sham. It is another broken promise in a whole list of them.
The Liberals say that there is nothing wrong here, that there is nothing to hide, but what further corroborates the story is the changing nature of the narrative. We know the Prime Minister spoke to reporters and stated that the former attorney general's continued presence in cabinet spoke for itself, only to result in him having egg on his face the very next day when she tendered her resignation. Does someone who resigns from cabinet lawyer up with a former Supreme Court justice if there is nothing to hide? We have to put all of these things together, the changing narrative and the resignation of one of the top ministers of the government, and ask ourselves if these are the actions and words of a government that has nothing to hide.
That brings me to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. My Liberal friends across the way keep talking about its purported independence. I served on that committee as vice-chair in 2017, and I have a lot of respect for all colleagues who serve on it. However, I was extremely disappointed in their actions last week.
Last week, the Liberals on the committee did not demonstrate independence; they demonstrated they were the loyal foot soldiers of the Prime Minister's Office. This is not a government by cabinet; this is a government by the PMO. That is precisely why SNC-Lavalin met no fewer than 14 times with PMO officials. Why would it waste its time meeting with the PMO if it knew that was where the buck stops? One does not go to the minister of justice or any other minister. One goes to the PMO because one can talk to Gerald Butts, Katie Telford and other major officials in the PMO. That is how one gets things done with the government.
The meeting last week was a bit of a farce. Despite the Liberals' claims of committee independence, they voted down every key witness who would have anything of relevance to say about this whole sordid affair. Yes, the committee is meeting now, but it is meeting in camera, so there is no way the Canadian public is going to know what the deliberations of that committee are. We are not going to know how Liberal members voted. We can tell the public what motions the NDP is intending to move at the beginning of the committee, but Canadians are going to have to read the minutes of the proceedings to find out what motions were passed. We cannot, because we risk violation of parliamentary privilege, talk about what goes on in that committee or what is happening right now. To say that this is open and transparent is a farce.
I am pretty disappointed in my former colleagues in the justice committee. I still have a lot of respect for them. I give every member of Parliament in this place the benefit of the doubt. We all come here to serve our constituents and do the best we can for the country. However, Liberal backbenchers have to ask themselves if they were elected on the ideals that we are seeing today. Are they here to protect their political masters in the Prime Minister's Office or are they here to join with us in the opposition to shed the light of day on this issue, to agree with the NDP's motion to have the Prime Minister waive solicitor-client privilege, to allow the former minister of justice and attorney general to speak, to give her side of the story? All we have heard are the Liberals talking for her; we have not heard from her. It is her right and privilege as to whether she speaks, but we should at least afford her the opportunity to do so.
I was very surprised last week at how many people in my constituency approached me on this issue. The Liberals have to be very careful because these are the kinds of actions that have a very corrosive effect on our politics: the changing nature of the story, the reaction to the scandal and not being truthful with Canadians. It is corrosive for this entire body. In order to salvage what little reputation they have left on this issue, I ask Liberal backbenchers not to side with the PMO but to in fact vote with us to have the Prime Minister waive solicitor-client privilege and to call for a public inquiry to give this issue the airing it fully needs.