Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Repentigny for giving me the opportunity to speak on this matter that is vital to Quebec.
Over the past three weeks, Parliament has focused its full attention on what everyone is now calling the SNC-Lavalin affair. However, over the past three weeks very little has actually been said about SNC-Lavalin. It would seem that no one in Parliament really cares. We only hear about the Prime Minister, his entourage and the former attorney general of Canada. That is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is in Montreal and concerns the workers, who are just ordinary citizens like everyone else.
Let us review the facts. Charges have been laid against SNC-Lavalin for crimes of corruption committed by former executives who have been fired. It must be pointed out that these are serious crimes and those responsible should go before a judge and pay the price for their actions. SNC-Lavalin has more than 3,600 other employees, for the most part at its Montreal head office. These 3,600 employees did not commit serious crimes and are worried about their jobs. If the company is found guilty of crimes committed by a few individuals, the head office will leave Quebec with its employees. That is the situation at SNC-Lavalin, which was founded in Quebec and is one of the 10 biggest engineering firms in the world.
Everybody knows that. The Prime Minister, the former attorney general and the opposition parties, they all know that. In light of the facts, SNC-Lavalin has to pay for the crimes of its former directors. Everybody agrees on that. No one should escape justice.
There are two ways to prosecute SNC-Lavalin. Both are legal and the government can use both. The first is to do nothing, allow the current process to run its course, lose the headquarters and put 3,600 people out of work with everything that entails for their families.
The second is to reach a remediation agreement between the government and the company. That involves having SNC-Lavalin plead guilty, proving that it is cleaning house and paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. It means the company commits to being accountable and proving that it is above board at all times. If not, the charges will be re-filed in court. It means that 3,600 people in Quebec would keep their jobs and would not have to pay for the actions of their former bosses.
With a remediation agreement, it would be SNC-Lavalin that would be convicted, not its employees. The actual criminals would be individually taken to court. This brings us to the part of this crisis that the other parties care about, instead of caring about Quebec workers. Yesterday we heard brilliant testimony from the former attorney general. She provided a lot of detail about how the Prime Minister's Office pressured her and her staff. The Prime Minister pressured her to opt for signing a remediation agreement with SNC-Lavalin instead of standing by while the company moved to the U.K.
The Prime Minister himself asked several times for her to find a way around a trial, to prevent thousands of jobs from being lost in Montreal. I believe the former attorney general's testimony. I believe that she gave us her version of the facts and I thank her for that.
The Prime Minister's Office was clearly doing some arm-twisting to get the former attorney general to do what it wanted. The Prime Minister acted foolishly, which is how we ended up with a full-blown crisis. The Prime Minister was obviously unable to explain the situation to her and convince her that signing an agreement was the best solution for everyone. The Prime Minister was clearly incompetent and his entourage acted like a bunch of entitled amateurs.
However, just because a handful of people, in this case, the Prime Minister and his entourage, act like amateurs, 3,600 others should not have to lose their jobs. Similarly, the crimes committed by a handful of individuals should not result in 3,600 people losing their jobs. The political bubble in Ottawa does not seem to get this.
That political bubble surrounds every non-Bloc MP who has forgotten that partisan jousting and news cameras are one thing and real people are another. Real people have jobs, mortgages to pay, cars, transit passes and families to support. Those are the people we are working for. Those are the people who vote for us to stand up for them. No honest person deserves to lose their job because their boss, the person in charge, the top dog, committed a crime.
The other parties here in Ottawa have chosen to ignore that reality. They know this crisis has already cost the company $1.6 billion in the stock market. They know the company was downgraded. They know that if this company is going to survive, it will have to sell its subsidiaries at a discount and cut jobs. They know that if this goes on for much longer, there will be yet another foreign takeover of a Quebec-based company. They know all this, yet they choose the political bubble in Ottawa.
The reality here in the bubble is that we are in an election year, and slamming the Prime Minister looks good in the polls. The reality here is that none of the other parties are working to resolve this crisis to protect jobs. They want to drag out the crisis to make political gains at the expense of workers in Quebec. They are all playing a dangerous and cynical game, for a goal that has nothing to do with the public interest.
The Conservative Party, which claims to be the party for the economy, is willing to sacrifice a major head office to make the Prime Minister look bad. The NDP, which claims to be the party for the workers, is willing to sacrifice 3,600 jobs to win byelections in British Columbia. The Liberal government, which currently has all the powers to act to resolve the crisis, is hiding and hoping the storm will pass. It is afraid of paying a political price in the rest of Canada, because, yes, saving jobs in Quebec or a Quebec company will cost them in the rest of Canada.
Would the federalist parties bash a company based in Toronto, Calgary, or Vancouver like this? The truth is that the other parties in the rest of Canada are free to hammer on SNC-Lavalin. Let us not forget that the rest of Canada sees Quebec entrepreneurship as the Bonhomme Carnaval with a briefcase stuffed with cash, the image used by Maclean's. We know that in the rest of Canada, the only thing more popular than bashing the Prime Minister is bashing Quebec, even if that means misrepresenting thousands of honest workers as white-collar criminals.
The Bloc Québécois unequivocally sides with the workers, and we are very proud of that. Our priority is to keep the jobs in Quebec and the headquarters in Montreal. The government has all the power it needs to intervene to come up with a remediation agreement with the company without infringing on the rule of law in any way. The Attorney General can proceed through directives or simply take over the SNC-Lavalin case. The law is crystal clear on that, and we must make use of it before the inevitable job losses begin.
If the opposition parties want to behave so irresponsibly, that is on them. They will have to answer for that in the election. However, the Attorney General is responsible for what happens to the SNC-Lavalin employees. He has to put partisanship aside and behave like a statesman by fulfilling the primary duty of an elected representative in Parliament, which is to protect his constituents. That is our role. That is why we are here.