Madam Speaker, I want to note I will be sharing my time with the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.
I am glad to have the opportunity to rise to debate this really important motion today, which is calling for the Prime Minister to go before the justice committee and provide some clarity as to what is actually going on.
What I think we need to do is to first cast back to pre-2006. There was something happening at that time that was very important. The Gomery inquiry was happening with respect to the sponsorship scandal, which was about broad corruption, illegal activities and the funnelling of precious taxpayer dollars to suit the Liberal Party's purposes. It was a really significant issue. Canadians were very concerned about what was going on and in actual fact it put the Liberals into the penalty box for the next 10 years, because Canadians saw what the Liberal government was doing with respect to its ethics and inability to protect taxpayer dollars.
Then the Conservatives took over in 2006 and recognized that there were some significant issues that needed to be addressed. We brought forward the Federal Accountability Act and also set up the office of the director of public prosecutions to try to keep that separation that was so important and to deal with some of the many flaws we had seen regarding large amounts of dollars going from taxpayers to the benefit solely of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Then 2015 came along and we had a Prime Minister who talked about sunny ways, about transparency and about doing things differently, and Canadians listened and gave him a majority mandate. I think what they were given was a veneer and a good talk. However, what we have found over the last three and half years is that was all it was. I have used this example before and I will use it again. If we take a health care example, what we have is a Prime Minister who might have a good bedside manner but is absolutely not the person we would want performing our diagnosis, surgery or behaving in any way we would expect from our leadership.
We are three years in and we have broken promises. We have a deficit that the Liberals promised we would not have. They promised electoral reform, yet look at what happened with that. Then we had a series of ethical violations. There was the Aga Khan issue, where I believe the Prime Minister was found guilty of four violations when he accepted a trip. Does this sound like the Liberals from 10 years prior? It sure sounds like those Liberals to me. We had the handing out by the prior fisheries minister of a lucrative surf clam contract to friends and insiders. Also, we had the Minister of Finance, who managed to forget the villa in France that he owned. Not many of us would forget a villa in France, but he happened to.
What we have seen is not only a series of broken promises but also a number of ethical violations. To me that is a huge betrayal of the trust that Canadians put in the Liberal government in 2015 when it made so many promises to be different and to be better.
This brings us to where we are today, which is really quite a sordid saga that we have in front of us. Many of us were surprised when the former attorney general was unceremoniously shuffled into the veterans affairs portfolio. Certainly, anyone watching that ceremony that day could tell that she was not particularly pleased with what was happening.
This is a government that had promised never to introduce omnibus budget bills. However, for my portfolio, there was an addition to reserve policy that I asked the indigenous affairs committee to look at. The Liberals refused. They voted us down, did not allow us to look at that and it was shoved into a budget bill.
There was also the deferred prosecution agreement clause, which now in retrospect is one of the first dots that we need to connect. We will have a number of dots to connect in order to provide a very clear story.
We have a prosecution agreement. We know a company was working very hard to have that deferred prosecution agreement made into law. Things were going along quite well according to the plan. The plan all along was to allow the deferred prosecution agreement. The Liberals can say what they want with respect to other countries, but clearly it was put there for a purpose.
Then we heard in September that the independent public prosecution office was not going to play ball with the Prime Minister's plan.
The government talks about the importance of sub judice. We heard in a prior speech how critical it was to separate the judicial branch and the legislative branch. We also have an executive branch and there should be a similar separation, but the Liberals are not talking about that today. They so far have not shown they have any respect for the critical importance of the separation of the executive branch with the judicial branch.
We talked about the budget bill. We had the decision by the public prosecution. Now we have what is now a well-documented outreach. This is not the Attorney General of Canada asking for advice or support; this is outreach by the most powerful in the country. Gerald Butts of the Prime Minister's Office and the Clerk of the Privy Council just happened to do outreach to the former attorney general to suggest she needed more context around her decision.
It is absolutely shameful that they would ever suggest that was not pressure. They were the head of the Privy Council and Mr. Butts. The Prime Minister said that when Mr. Butts spoke, it came from the Prime Minister. Do not let anyone ever say that is not pressure when they happened to be giving context, asking if she would rethink her decision when she had already made it.
One of the articles I read this weekend was perfect. It said “How many times does our attorney general have to say no?” The company is still lobbying and it wants a different decision. The Clerk of the Privy Council suggested that this was appropriate pressure. That is not appropriate pressure and I think no one out there believes it was appropriate pressure.
We need the ability not only to hear from the former attorney general, we need to hear from the Prime Minister, because we have potentially not only a breach of interference from the executive branch to the judicial branch. I am not sure that we do not have something criminal going on here and we need to get to the bottom of it.