Madam Speaker, that was a strange intervention from the deputy House leader of the Liberal Party. He is now claiming that deferred prosecution agreements have nothing to do with budget policy. That is funny. Why, on God's green earth, did the Liberals put it in the budget? They put it in the budget, so they have suggested it is a budget matter. Therefore, we are left with nothing more than to debate it within the context of the budget.
It is funny that this is the second time that members of the government have become confused by what they put in their own budget. I was recently at the finance committee and asked questions about deferred prosecution agreements of finance officials. I wanted to know why the finance minister was meeting with top executives and lobbyists from SNC-Lavalin in the weeks following the director of public prosecution's decision not to extend a DPA to the company. All of a sudden, the chair of the finance committee slammed down his gavel and said that this was not relevant and had nothing to do with finance. I said that was funny because the deferred prosecution agreements were amended into the Criminal Code through legislation in the budget that was passed by the finance committee. The government used an omnibus budget bill to introduce this package of special deals for corporate criminals, and that is exactly why we are debating it today when the budget is before the House of Commons.
Let me return to the issue of the audiotape. The employment minister said over the weekend that it was unethical for her former cabinet colleague, the former attorney general, to tape-record a conversation with the Clerk of the Privy Council. As the former attorney general wrote herself in documents released Friday, it would otherwise have been inappropriate but for the extraordinary circumstances with which she was faced. She had been mercilessly hounded in September, October, November and almost all of December when she received a call from the top public servant and knew it was trouble. She knew exactly what was going to happen on that call, because she and her staff had seen it again and again, 20 different times, which she had documented and proven occurred.
Members of the Prime Minister's inner circle, plus the Prime Minister himself, had interfered with this case, and she knew, based on all of their duplicity and dishonesty with which they approached her again and again, that if she did not have evidence of what happened, they would lie and deny. She was absolutely right, because that is exactly what they have since done. The problem is that they picked the wrong person. They did not realize she would keep evidence. They assumed that Canadians would never know the truth, that they would deny her accounts and everyone would say, “Well, he said, she said, who knows, let us just throw up our hands and move on.” That is not possible when someone is as punctilious and specific as the former attorney general.
Let us consider some of the contradictions that have now been exposed since the release of her documentation. First, when the story broke on the front page of The Globe and Mail in February that the Prime Minister and his team had pressured the former attorney general to offer the company a deferred prosecution agreement, the Prime Minister's response was that the story was false, strictly false, that was it, that was all. Liberals would go on to make specific denials in the 48 hours to 72 hours that followed, saying that the Prime Minister's team neither interfered with nor pressured the former attorney general in the case. That story did not last long, did it?
Later on, the Prime Minister's clerk was forced to go before a committee, where he admitted that there was pressure. He said that there was pressure but that pressure was normal, because it is a high-pressure job. That contradicts the very specific denial that the Prime Minister and his team had uttered.
There was the first change of story.
Then the Prime Minister famously said that if the former attorney general or anyone else had issues with anything they might have experienced in the current government or did not feel that the government was living up to the high standards it set for itself, it was her responsibility to come forward and their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.
The Prime Minister left the impression that the former attorney general had just suddenly concocted a problem after she had moved out of the position of attorney general, that she woke up one day in February and decided she was upset with something that had happened months earlier, and nobody told the Prime Minister. He never heard anything about it. None of his team had heard a thing.
Well, it turns out that the Prime Minister was uttering a straight-up falsehood. There are other words, unparliamentary words, that would describe that utterance, because the evidence is clear that the former attorney general did, time and time again, warn the Prime Minister and his team that their behaviour and their interference were inappropriate. In a September 18 meeting with the Prime Minister and the clerk, she reported that she looked him in the eye and asked if he was interfering with her work as attorney general, at which he backed off and said that of course he was not. She said to him that she strongly advised against it. She said that to his face, yet he would go in front of all Canadians, 37 million Canadians, and deny that she had ever raised any concern at all.
If members do not believe the former attorney general's story, which she documented and put on the public record in the justice committee—something the Prime Minister has not had the courage to do himself—then they only need to listen to the audio of the conversation between the former attorney general and the former clerk of the Privy Council, in which at least half a dozen times she uttered terms like, “I feel very uncomfortable”, “this is very inappropriate”, “I can't believe we're even having this conversation”. Over half a dozen times in that 17-minute conversation, she stated very clearly that what was happening was inappropriate, that the pressure campaign had to stop. She not only cited the conversation that she was engaged in at the moment with the clerk as an example; she also spoke to the clerk about Gerald Butts and Katie Telford's visit to her chief of staff and the pressure they applied.
If we count it conservatively, as I am fond of doing, this was over a half-dozen times in this conversation that the former attorney general raised the alarm to the Prime Minister's top public servant, and what did he say? He said that he had a conversation coming with the Prime Minister and that he was not going to be happy to hear this. Michael Wernick was very clear that he was going to get off the phone with her and get on the phone with the Prime Minister.
This weekend we heard from the Prime Minister that he did not know anything about that conversation, did not know that his top public servant had a conversation like that with his attorney general about an issue that everyone in the government says the Prime Minister was very focused on. In the terms given by the clerk himself, the Prime Minister was “firm” on the issue and was in a “mood” on the issue. This was an issue that was very important to him and he apparently knew that the clerk was calling the attorney general about it, but after the call happened, everyone just forgot to report to the Prime Minister or to his staff that it had occurred. What had been said in that conversation just evaporated into thin air.
A month would go by, two months would go by, and the Prime Minister would never learn of all the things we heard in that recording, not until she relayed them in a parliamentary committee months later. Give me a break.
Nobody believes the Prime Minister was blind to what went on in that conversation. His attempts to say he was will only be met with the derision of millions of Canadians who know better. It is utterly impossible to imagine he would not have known.
Even if people want to imagine it, even if they believe that somehow the clerk forgot to mention it to the Prime Minister, there is more evidence that the Prime Minister knew of her concerns.
Before I move on to that evidence, I just want to say that there is a new explanation out about why the clerk apparently did not tell the Prime Minister about the call, and that explanation is that everyone went on vacation. He did the phone call with the former attorney general in which he basically implored her to help the company get a deferred prosecution agreement so that it would not face trial for its $100-plus million of fraud and bribery, and then she pushed back hard, saying it was inappropriate and that she felt very uncomfortable and it reminded her of the Saturday night massacre. This explosive conversation happened and what happened after a talk like that? They were so exhausted that they went on vacation. Everyone just up and left for Christmas.
The problem is that they did not. Now we have public records that the Prime Minister's vacation did not start for another 48 hours. The clerk and the Prime Minister speak daily, sometimes hourly. Of course, it would have been very easy for him to report the conversation. Furthermore, whatever vacation the Prime Minister had, it would not have lasted longer than a week or two, in which case he would have known about it in January, well before the cabinet shuffle.
Finally, we have the testimony from the clerk, before the justice committee, that this Prime Minister can be reached 24-7.