Madam Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.
What we are talking about today very much needs to be put in perspective. The Liberals will present this as a kind of he said, she said. We had Gerry Butts try to present it like it was one of those episodes on Friends, that maybe if he had been a bit more sensitive at the time, if he had allowed her to just speak more, she would not have slammed the door on the way out. The Prime Minister did this ridiculous statement about being more compassionate in his cabinet. We are talking about the corrosive power of the 1%.
The Prime Minister has been willing to burn through his credibility. In 2015, people believed him for openness, reconciliation, feminism, doing politics differently and for showing that it would not be the backroom politics of Stephen Harper and the cronyism of Jean Chrétien. However, he has shown a willingness to give us the worst of both worlds. It was about helping his friends at SNC-Lavalin.
He stood in the House day after day and told us it was about 9,000 jobs, but we now know that was false. We never saw the Prime Minister stand up for any jobs when they were Stelco workers, or Sears workers or oil sands workers. Why not Stelco or Sears? Because their pensions were being given over to the family of Morneau Shepell. This is about the power of the 1%.
Now we have the OECD stating internationally that all the alarm bells are ringing over the interference by the Prime Minister in the international bribery case against SNC-Lavalin. The Prime Minister's Office just a few days ago responded to the OECD and promised it a robust, independent set of hearings. That, too, was also a falsehood. The Liberals shut down the justice committee hearings. Why? Because they are doing everything they can to protect the key people around the Prime Minister's Office who interfered with and attempted to obstruct justice. This is the fundamental issue that we have to talk about.
Ben Chin, a public office holder, still has his job. He has not been brought forward to committee. Ben Chin went to the former attorney general and told her that she had to change direction and bring in this deferred public prosecution, otherwise, he said, SNC “will leave Montreal, and it's the Quebec election right now”. Well, we know now from SNC executives that they never said they would leave Montreal.
Therefore, when a public office holder presents a lie in order to interfere with the public prosecution, that could be seen as obstruction, and that certainly would be something we would expect the justice committee to care about, but the Liberals shut that down.
The former clerk of the Privy Council had to give up his position because of his role as a political actor. He went to the former attorney general and said that there would be all these jobs lost, which we now know is false. To imagine the Clerk of the Privy Council making this up in order to interfere with an independent prosecution is shocking. Then he also told her on September 17 that SNC was about to move out of Montreal, which we again now know SNC never said.
Therefore, this was cooked up in the Prime Minister's Office, a series of lies to intimidate the former attorney general into cutting this deal. She told them they were on very thin ice, that this was dangerous ground to be on in attempting to interfere in the prosecution. No wonder the Liberals on the justice committee did not want this heard. It was because of the damaging, corrosive effect on the Prime Minister's credibility and a judgment he was making.
On December 5, Gerry Butts said that he did not like the law, that it was a Harper law and that he could just somehow ignore it. Then he said, when the former attorney general was warning him about political interference, that they would not get through this without “some interference”.
Fortunately, Gerry Butts has left, but Katie Telford is still there, and Katie Telford said she was not interested in the question of legalities. People who do not care about the rule of law should not be anywhere near the exercise of legislative authority.
This is a question the Prime Minister needs to be asked. This is why the justice committee should have done its work, but it did not, and it did not because Liberal members on that committee have become hand puppets of the Prime Minister's Office and have disgraced their position and have left us now open to the OECD.
What do we tell the OECD when Canada is willing to remove the attorney general, when Canada has a Prime Minister who is willing to blow through the President of the Treasury Board, the former attorney general, his chief of staff and the Clerk of the Privy Council in order to push through a deferred public prosecution that the prosecutor said SNC-Lavalin was not eligible for? What do we tell the OECD when the Prime Minister is still suggesting day after day in the House that the government is going to go through with this, that it has a new attorney general and is still talking about moving forward with it? I find this fascinating.
Just what is the Prime Minister willing to do to get this deferred public prosecution? He has burned his bridges on reconciliation and he has burned his bridges as the feminist Prime Minister and he has burned his bridges with Canadians in terms of trust, yet he is still doggedly pursuing the deferred public prosecution, even though the independent office of public prosecutions had to set up a Twitter account to say that it had to remain independent. That is the issue that the OECD is concerned about.
The OECD says there cannot be international rules of law that allow companies to bribe officials around the world. SNC has been barred for 10 years by the World Bank for corrupt practices. If a Canadian company is going to be charged in its home jurisdiction, it cannot just call the Prime Minister's Office and say “make it go away”.
That is the issue here, which is why five former attorneys general have been asking for a police investigation into the actions of the Prime Minister's Office. Why? It is because the former attorney general for Ontario, Liberal Michael Bryant, said he has never seen such a brazen and reckless abuse of authority.
We need the former attorney general to be able to speak, to respond to the testimony of Gerald Butts, to explain what happened in the period when she was removed. We need those questions answered, and the Prime Minister needs to understand that his credibility is getting further and further eroded.
I heard the Liberal voice for the SNC scandal tell us today that the government now has a special adviser. Oh, my God. How do we explain to the OECD that the Prime Minister's idea of a special adviser is to take someone off the Liberal fundraising circuit, someone who is out raising money for the Liberal Party right now, to oversee this? How can we tell the OECD that this will be a robust alternative to an independent all-party investigation? That does not cut it.
Until we have all the participants in this case brought forward and made accountable, until we have an opportunity to understand just how far the Prime Minister is willing to go to subvert the law, to obstruct justice, and have key staff like the finance minister and his staff interfere, Canada will be seen by the OECD and other international bodies as some kind of backwoods crony kingdom for the Prime Minister and the small group around him, who protect CEOs of a company that is not eligible for a deferred public prosecution. These CEOs themselves have said that 9,000 jobs are not at risk.
I will close on this. Just before this case broke, all the senior Liberal cabinet ministers and all the senior officials participated in a special function with SNC-Lavalin. They were the gatekeepers of the great privatization agenda of the Liberal government, but the jobs we are talking about are public jobs. They are jobs that are done by civil servants. They are jobs that are done in municipalities. Then we see the Liberal government, knowing that the company was facing charges, hosting a major event with all key Liberal cabinet ministers and SNC.
This shows that the government never took the issue of the rule of law seriously for a single minute, and that is what has damaged the Prime Minister's credibility. This is going to drag the Prime Minister down until he comes clean with Canadians about the interference and obstruction from his office.