Madam Speaker, I will first say that the point of order raised by my friend from Saskatchewan illustrates the entire thesis of my speech, that we here are a house of common people. We speak on behalf of the commoners, and the first commoners met in fields. That is why this place is green. Therefore, we should always remember the plight of our farmers in this place, especially now, when they are facing an unprecedented attack by a foreign tariff regime against our canola producers. We should remember the thousands and thousands of them who generate billions of dollars of wealth to pay for our schools and hospitals and for the livelihoods of the people who work in them.
When a member from Saskatchewan rises in the House of Commons, it reminds me why we have Parliament in the first place. It is precisely so that such grievances can be raised. I thank him for his point of order, and I do not resent one iota his interruption of my remarks to make it.
Returning to the point of my speech, now that I have laid the historical foundations for our entire system, for all the prosperity we enjoy and for the great country in which we live and by which we have been blessed, allow me to settle today's controversy on that foundation.
We have before us serious allegations against the Prime Minister. These allegations are that he attempted to politicize a criminal court proceeding. This is not just any criminal court proceeding. This is a case involving formal police allegations of fraud and bribery in amounts that exceed $130 million. It is alleged by the police that this corporation gave millions of dollars of bribes to the Gadhafi family and stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the Libyan people.
To quickly recount the allegations made against the company, it is alleged that SNC-Lavalin created a shell company through which it funnelled gifts such as yachts and prostitutes to the Gadhafi family, and that those gifts were used to leverage contracts that SNC would not otherwise have won. It is further alleged that public agencies were defrauded by SNC-Lavalin to the tune of $130 million. Again I say that this is not a victimless crime.
Many people have said not to worry, and that that is just how things are done over there. It is frankly an appalling and racist mentality to suggest that it is acceptable for corporations to get rich by stealing from the world's poor, and I mean stealing, not doing business with but stealing, from the world's poor. It is an appalling suggestion.
Many of these countries find people in squalor. Why is that, when they have the same talents and work ethic as we do? Why are they so poor? They are poor because of corrupt leadership: parasitical corruption that daily drains away the wealth of the nation, that takes from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned and puts it in the hands of those who are more powerful and capable of trampling on the rights of others.
We have signed international conventions to ensure that Canadian corporations never engage in such corruption. The importance of those conventions is this. For the longest time, businesses thought they could pillage countries like Libya and then leave before any of the local authorities, if there were any honest ones, could prosecute. They would return to their wealthy western country and their wealthy western lives and partake of the fruits of their crimes with impunity.
We signed on to international conventions that banned companies from doing that and made sure they got prosecuted at home. Well, Canada is SNC's home, so that prosecution must happen here.
When news that the Prime Minister had attempted to interfere politically with his attorney general to shelve the criminal prosecution reached the OECD, officials with that body took the nearly unprecedented step of putting out a statement of concern. The OECD understood that if member nations are going to start to exempt their corporations from justice in cases of corruption, then we will return to the old days when it was seen as and believed to be, wrongly, acceptable for companies to rob the poor. The only way to stop the hideous practice is to make sure all countries of the OECD have an independent prosecution of those crimes.
It is true that some other countries around the world have deferred prosecution agreements, like the one the government instituted in a budget bill. However, those agreements are to be negotiated and potentially arrived at by independent prosecutors and approved by a judge, not directed by a political authority. In other words, it is the job of the director of public prosecutions, an independent prosecutor created by Stephen Harper's Federal Accountability Act, to examine the deferred prosecution rules in the Criminal Code and determine if a company qualifies.
Now, what are the criteria they are supposed to take into consideration in this determination? One, is it a severe offence? Let us ask, was this a severe offence, or was it a small hiccup? As I have already said, the allegation is of over $130 million of fraud. That is severe. In other words, the company does not qualify for a deferred prosecution agreement on the basis that the offence was not severe; it was severe.
Two, was it an isolated incident? Let us just recount the track record. This is a company that has been implicated in, and in some cases its employees found guilty of, bribery in the bid on the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal. It is a company whose CEO was found guilty of participating in bribery in the McGill health centre contract. It is a company that helped smuggle members of the Gadhafi family out of Mexico in order to avoid justice. It is a company whose members have been charged in places as diverse as Panama, Switzerland, Libya, Mexico and now Canada.
That is just a list of the charges. There have been convictions and many guilty pleas by members of the company, right up to the top and including former CEO Pierre Duhaime, who actually pleaded guilty to fraud.
In fact, this company engaged in a kickback scheme designed to pump $100,000 of illegal donations into the Liberal Party. The commissioner of Canada elections, in an extreme act of leniency, allowed the company to avoid charges in exchange for signing a compliance agreement in this case. In that compliance agreement, the company admits that executives urged employees to produce phony expenses and invoices, gave phony bonuses to those same employees, and then instructed those employees—