Debates of April 2nd, 2019

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Unfortunately, it is not a point of order. What the member did previously is something that is normal to do when members want to bring forward corrections. What the hon. member is doing right now is a point of debate, and therefore unless he is putting forward a motion as part of his point of order, I am going back to the hon. member for Carleton.

I just want to make sure that the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands did not have a motion.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, I do not at this point, but I certainly reserve the opportunity to do that a bit later. I would like to hear my colleague's point of order on the other side. It perhaps pertains to this, because it is incredibly important that we—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

That is fine. I will go to the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, just so that members across the way are aware, the reality is that we are under a budget debate, which provides members the opportunity to stand up and address the budget. The canola issue is of critical importance. I myself am from the Prairies. There are many lost opportunities that result from the tactic the Conservatives have adopted on the issue.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

What the hon. member is bringing forward is debate as well. I would hope he would wait until the opportunity for questions and comments comes along, as I am sure it will at some point, to be able to speak to that.

I do want to remind the member for Carleton that we are speaking to the budget and although there is a lot of latitude there, I am assuming that he will ensure that his speech will relate to the issue that is before the House at this point.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

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—

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

On a point of order, Madam Speaker—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I am sorry, the member is still not in his seat. That is the second time I have let him know that in order to raise a point of order, he has to be in his seat.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, then the company executives told the company employees that they should take these phony bonuses and expense refunds and give them to the Liberal Party of Canada.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would suggest we have lost quorum.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I would ask the member for Carleton to sit down for a second. We are going to check.

We do have quorum in the House at this point.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, just as I was saying the Liberal Party had received these illegal donations from SNC-Lavalin, all of these members came scurrying in. They heard the word “donation” and, all of a sudden, they were very excited and the House went from completely empty to chock full. I am sorry to dangle that carrot in front of my Liberal friends. They can resist everything except temptation.

Just last week, the Prime Minister was at a glitzy Liberal fundraiser where some first nations protesters rose to raise the concern of mercury poisoning. He chuckled at their plight and had them thrown out aggressively by security. However, he was kind enough to thank them for their donation as they went out the door to the great roars of laughter from the $1,500 Liberal donors and glitterati who looked on in the audience.

However, I have digressed and go back to the subject at hand. Was SNC's alleged fraud in Libya an isolated incident? No, it was not. It was part of a long-standing pattern of proven corruption that has been upheld by judges and has resulted in convictions going back 20 years to the present, with convictions being issued as recently as one and a half years ago.

This is a company that had actually developed a coding system to account for bribery within it. It created its own accounting code so that it could go on bribing officials and account for it in a way that neither the tax authorities or anyone else would know what was going on. To do that, to have a special coding system, one has to be systematically focused on the objective of bribing and defrauding other people. In other words, this was not just a few bad apples that went off to Libya, did some inappropriate things and we ought to just let them take the fall and the company move on. This is systematic, rotten corruption that goes to the core of the company and has been prevalent in the heart of that enterprise for many years. In other words, the company does not qualify for a deferred prosecution agreement on the grounds that it was an isolated incident, far from it. It seems to be its modus operandi.

The director of public prosecutions carefully analyzed the facts the company put forward and determined through those facts that the deferred prosecution agreement provided for in law was not appropriate in this case. That is the end of the story, right?

Wrong. It is not end of the story. For the Prime Minister, it was the beginning of the story. The story is a very ugly and sordid tale, but one we have started to hear over the last two months. At that point in time, September 4, 2018, the director of public prosecutions accurately and properly concludes that SNC-Lavalin should go to trial and face the music for its alleged $130 million of bribery and corruption and says so in a letter to the executives, a letter that the company will not go on to reveal for more than a month, during which time its shareholders were kept in the dark. It sounds like a lot has changed over there.

However, the company did not take no for an answer. Lobbyists swarmed to Parliament Hill. The lobbyist registry shows meetings between SNC officials and top-level personnel in the Prime Minister's Office and in the finance minister's office. In fact, the finance minister himself met with the company approximately 10 days after the director of public prosecutions rendered her decision to ensure the trial would go ahead.

After that extraordinary act of lobbying and those 10 days that followed the prosecutor's decision, the political heat started to rise. The former attorney general started to face veiled threats, hounding, pressure and interference. By the way, all of those words I just used were quoted from her mouth. She experienced a September 18 meeting with the Prime Minister where he attempted to strong-arm her into granting a deferred prosecution agreement and shelving the charges. She said she looked him in the eye and asked if he was interfering with her job as the Attorney General, because she would “strongly advise against it.”

So much for his subsequent claim that she never once raised a concern about his personal political interference, but that meeting would only be the beginning. A cavalcade of pressure would come marching through her office again and again.

The chief of staff to the finance minister would reach out in emails and text messages. Other senior staff in the Prime Minister's Office, including the senior adviser, the principal secretary and the chief of staff would all go and meet personally with top-level staff members of the former attorney general, constantly twisting their arms. They said things such as “we don't want to debate legalities anymore” and “there is no solution here that does not involve some interference.” I am not paraphrasing. This is what they said. It is in the notes. Those notes were transmitted by text message to the former attorney general and have since been tabled with the justice committee and made available for all eyes to see.

Then we had that incredible meeting by phone between the former attorney general and the Clerk of the Privy Council in which the clerk said he wanted to talk to her about the SNC-Lavalin issue. That conversation went on for 17 minutes, during which, more than a dozen times, the Clerk of the Privy Council attempted to change the former attorney general's mind. He used terms like the Prime Minister is very “firm”. He used the word “firm” four times. The Clerk of the Privy Council indicated that the Prime Minister was in one of those moods. He said that the Prime Minister would “find a way to get it done, one way or another”.

The only way he could get it done, the only way he could get such an agreement imposed on the prosecutor, was if he removed his Attorney General. More ominously, the clerk said he was worried. “Worried about what?” asked the former attorney general. He replied he was worried because it is never good for the Attorney General and the Prime Minister to be at loggerheads. He warned of a “collision” between the Attorney General and her boss, the Prime Minister.

If someone warns us that we are about to have a collision with our boss if we do not do what we are told, what does that mean? What would we later interpret it to mean if that same boss moved us out of our job only weeks later? Would we think that collision and that removal from the job were two totally unrelated events? Or would we conclude, as the former attorney general did, and most of the rest of the country has, that the Prime Minister removed her because she refused to do his bidding and stop the trial for SNC-Lavalin.

What is interesting about the former attorney general's account is that it has never changed. She came before a committee and testified at great length. She faced aggressive questioning from Liberal members on the committee. An aggressive group of the Prime Minister's supporters in the press have attempted to discredit her. They have tried to poke holes in everything she said, but they cannot find anything.

She did an unprecedented thing on Friday. She handed over 40 pages of text messages, personal notes and diary entries, and of course audio recordings. What did the Liberals say in response? They said there was nothing new there and they are right. There was nothing there. Why? It is because her story had not changed. It upheld every claim she had made. There was not a single solitary contradiction the Liberals could find.

For judges in courtrooms and police officers conducting investigations, when they have to choose between the credibility of two competing individuals, they always gravitate toward the person whose story does not change. In this case, that person is the former attorney general. By contrast, the Prime Minister's story changes faster than his colourful socks. He always has a new story.

Let me note one twist and turn in this drama. The Prime Minister said that if anyone, including the former attorney general, had issues with anything they might have experienced in the government or didn't feel that they were living up to the high standards the government set for itself, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.

However, we have that incredible recording, which was made two months before the Prime Minister made the statement that no one came forward. In it, the former attorney general says to the Prime Minister's clerk:

So we are treading on dangerous ground here—and I am going to issue my stern warning—um—because I cannot act in a manner and the prosecution cannot act in a manner that is not objective, that isn’t independent. I cannot act in a partisan way and I cannot be politically motivated. All of this screams of that.

So much for the notion that no one came forward.

That was one of seven times in that 17-minute conversation that she made similar comments. She said that it was “inappropriate”, that she felt “uncomfortable”, that she was waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, and that it reminded her of the “Saturday night massacre”, a reference to Richard Nixon's firing of justice department officials to cover up Watergate. Nevertheless, we are to believe that no one raised any concerns.

Since then, the Prime Minister's story has been that the conversation did happen but no one told him about it. He said he left on vacation right after the call was made, so no one had a chance to tell him as he was gone. The only problem with that story is that he did not leave on vacation right after the call was made. After that story came out, a few intrepid journalists looked at the publicly available schedule of the Prime Minister and found that he did not leave on vacation for another two days. Two days is a heck of a long time, and it is very easy to brief someone on a 17-minute conversation in a two-hour period.

However, the Prime Minister would have us believe that he could not be briefed because he was busy packing for his vacation. He had to pack lots of socks in order to prepare for that vacation. For two days, he was hunkered down in his closet at home, in his government-owned mansion, preparing for that exhausting vacation ahead. He was packing his bags so that he could go off and surf in Tofino, never to be distracted by a pesky phone call from his top public servant about an issue that the Prime Minister had considered of intense importance only hours before the call happened.

Furthermore, we have the testimony from the clerk, who said, when he was admonishing the former attorney general for not reaching out to the Prime Minister personally, that he was available 24-7. If he was available 24-7, how is it possible that the Clerk of the Privy Council would have no opportunity between December 19 and February 15, a two-month period, to tell the Prime Minister about this exceptional and explosive phone call he had with the former attorney general on this issue of dramatic importance?

That is just one contradiction of that particular claim. The other, of course, is that the former attorney general met with the Prime Minister on September 18 and told him of her concerns. She looked him in the eye at that time. Now we have one documented example of her raising her concerns with him personally. We have the second tape-recorded example of her raising her concerns with the Clerk of the Privy Council. Then we have a dramatic meeting between the former attorney general and the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, the puppet master of the PMO, in which she raised concerns about the inappropriate interference of the Prime Minister's Office in the case. Still, somehow the Prime Minister expects us to believe that he knew absolutely nothing about her concerns or about her decision not to grant a special deal to this company.

That is simply not believable, but if it is truly the Prime Minister's position and he really believes he can defend it, then he can agree with our singular demand today, which is to reopen the justice committee investigation and invite roughly a dozen witnesses, including those accused of interfering with the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. If they have nothing to hide, if he has nothing to hide, he will let them all appear under oath, without restriction, to answer questions. If he walks into this place and offers to do that, I will end my speech now.

In all seriousness, if the Prime Minister were to stand in his place and make the commitment that the justice committee investigation will reopen, then he has my commitment to return to my chair and allow the debate to continue with other speakers so that Canadians can get to the truth. If he has nothing to hide, why would he not do it? What could be the harm in having questions?

He says that there is nothing to learn and that we have already learned everything there is to learn. Okay, then it will just be a redundant exercise. I suppose that would be the first time in the history of Parliament that anything redundant happened or that anyone repeated themselves. I think I have done it a few times in my speech, but no one noticed.

Really, if the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, what harm would it do to bring people before the committee, ask them questions about their role in the scandal and get the answers in a report from the committee before the election? If the Prime Minister truly has nothing to hide, then that is exactly what he will do.

It has been brought to my attention that the Prime Minister is not only going to shut down the justice committee and ethics committee investigations into this scandal but that he has now bailed on question period for today. I have not been able to independently confirm it, but I am understanding from a note just passed to me that the Prime Minister's newly released itinerary shows that he will not be present for a second time in a row.

Of course, Parliament was out last week, so he dodged question period during that time. Yesterday he was missing in action, and today we are told that at two o'clock, when the government stands to answer for its conduct in this scandal, he will once again hide behind other ministers and refuse to appear and defend himself. That tells an awful lot about his guilty state of mind. He knows that his story has been riddled with contradictions. He does not want those contradictions queried before Canada's House of Commons.

Let us move on to the next part of the Prime Minister's story.

He claimed that the reason he was so anxious to interfere in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin is that if he did not, 9,000 jobs would vanish. It was an odd claim, and one I found suspect from the very beginning. I have to say that everything we have learned since then proves it was false.

When Gerry Butts came to the committee and was asked what evidence he had that 9,000 jobs would vanish, he said he had nothing specific. When Michael Wernick was asked if he had any documents or briefing notes he could share with the committee to show that these 9,000 jobs he kept talking about would be gone if the prosecution proceeded, he said no. The Prime Minister was then asked at a press conference if he had any evidence he could produce to show that 9,000 jobs would vanish. Again, he failed to be forthcoming with it.

Why would they have no such evidence? It is because the claim is false.

Let me walk through it piece by piece.

First of all, the Prime Minister's claim that the headquarters of the company would leave in the fall of 2018 if the attorney general did not immediately intervene to give the company a deferred prosecution agreement is easily disprovable by publicly available facts. We know the company signed a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan that required the company's headquarters to remain in Montreal at least until the year 2024. We also know the company just signed a 20-year lease on its headquarters there and announced a multi-million-dollar renovation of that headquarters to accommodate its thousands of Montreal-area employees. Typically, companies that are renovating to accommodate their existing workforce do not get up and leave. It is kind of a waste of money. They do not sign 20-year leases and they do not sign $1.5-billion loan deals that oblige them to stay put for six or seven years. Therefore, the claim the Prime Minister made on September 18 when he met with the former attorney general—the claim that she had mere days to signal negotiations for a special deal for SNC-Lavalin or the company would leave the country altogether—was completely, utterly and demonstrably false.

His broader claim about 9,000 jobs is equally false. The company has $52 billion worth of construction projects located in Canada. It runs the five biggest construction projects in our country right now, and here is the thing about construction: Companies have to do a construction project where the project is located. It is a simple complication. They cannot build a road in Canada from far away in Beijing or in London, England. As an example, Ottawa just hired SNC for a transit project that will go from, roughly, downtown to the south end. The company cannot build 14 kilometres of rail transit in a foreign country and drop it out of the sky from a helicopter onto the nation's capital. The project is here. Therefore, the jobs are here and the jobs are not going anywhere.

The jobs that SNC has moved were moved before the company found out that it would necessarily face trial. In fact, four-fifths of the company's workforce is already outside of Canada, and that was long before the government ever signalled that the company would be required to go to trial. In other words, the movement of SNC-Lavalin jobs out of Canada has nothing to do with the prosecution, and therefore that justification itself is flawed.

Finally, the government has been telling us that if the company is forced to face trial and is ultimately convicted, the consequence would be that it would lose the ability to bid on Canadian contracts.

I am going to read directly from a report on exactly that question that the Deputy Minister of Justice Canada, Nathalie Drouin, wrote to the Clerk of the Privy Council in the matter of SNC-Lavalin. It refers to the Canadian integrity regime. This is the regime that bans corrupt businesses from doing business with the Government of Canada. It says this:

The ability of a company/supplier to contract with the federal government is affected by the Ineligibility and Suspension Policy (Policy). The Policy ensures the government does business only with ethical companies/suppliers in Canada and abroad. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) administers the Policy on behalf of the government.

The Policy sets out when and how a company or supplier may be declared ineligible or suspended from doing business with the government. It provides that a company/supplier is suspended when charged with, or admits guilt to one of a number of listed offences, such as fraud and bribery of foreign public officials. The suspension from being able to contract with the federal government is for a duration of 18 months. This suspension is subject to extension pending the final disposition of the charges.

The report goes on to discuss administrative agreements. It says:

The company/supplier can enter into an Administrative Agreement with the government to stay the suspension. An Administrative Agreement is an arrangement between the company/supplier and the government where the former must adopt certain compliance measures. It is used to mitigate the risk of contracting with a particular company/supplier. For example, the government and a company/supplier may wish to enter in Administrative—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Order. The member for Cariboo—Prince George is rising on a point of privilege.

Circulation of Committee Document

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to comment very briefly on a question of privilege raised on March 19 by the deputy leader of the Official Opposition.

I first want to rebut the comments made by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons.

In speaking about notices of motion being made public, he elided a critical distinction between a notice of motion and a motion moved without notice.

The parliamentary secretary referred to the practice where some publicized a notice of motion filed with a given committee clerk. It is important to understand that those motions could, in theory, be moved at a future in camera meeting, or a future public meeting or they might actually never be moved. Every committee member goes into each meeting in possession of the same facts and the same opportunities to comment on the draft proposals.

To quote my hon. friend, the member for Milton, the motion of concern was “table dropped” at the meeting itself. It was moved without notice, which is a common practice at House committees for meetings convened to discuss “committee business”, such as the March 19 justice committee meeting had been. The problem is that the motion was moved at a private, in camera meeting of the committee, while government staffers, perhaps under PMO direction, were busy telling the world at large what was going on inside the room.

My second and final matter is to quote a few additional authorities for the benefit of the Chair. Beauchesne's Parliamentary Rules and Forms, sixth edition, citation 877(1), states:

No act done at any committee should be divulged before it has been reported to the House. Upon this principle the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, on April 21, 1937, resolved “That the evidence taken by any select committee of this House and the documents presented to such committee and which have not been reported to the House, ought not to be published by any member of such committee or by any other person”. The publication of proceedings of committees conducted with closed doors or of reports of committees before they are available to Members will, however, constitute a breach of privilege.

This principle traces back to Erskine May, the pre-eminent British authority. I would refer, for example, to page 153 of the 20th edition. In the United Kingdom's House of Commons, on May 28, 1968, Mr. Speaker King found, at column 1541 of the official report, a prima facie complaint in respect of the leak of committee evidence heard in private.

It is important to note in that case that no preliminary report was presented from the select committee on science and technology, which had originally taken the leaked evidence. Instead, the complaint was made directly to the House by the committee's chairman. The committee of privileges investigated the matter and recommended that the offending member, Tam Dalyell, be admonished in his place and the House concurred.

The subsequent words of Mr. Speaker King, at page 362 of the Journals for July 24, 1968, speak to the importance of maintaining confidentiality. It stated:

The Committee of Privileges itself, whose Report the House has adopted, has pointed out that Select Committees and indeed Parliament itself depend largely on mutual trust and confidence between members of Parliament and those who appear as witnesses before them and that this confidence would be greatly imperilled by any failure to observe the rules of the House by all those concerned in the work of the Committees. That you have broken such confidence is a matter of high concern to the House and to all who cherish it. I, therefore, as Speaker of the House, and upon its instructions, reprimand you as guilty of a breach of privilege and of a gross contempt of the House.

In another British incident, on October 14, 1975, at column 1134 of the Official Report, Mr. Speaker Lloyd found a prima facie case of privilege concerning an Economist article about a draft report prepared for future consideration by the Select Committee on a wealth tax.

This complaint, too, was raised directly in the House of Commons without any preliminary report originating from the committee. In fact, I understand that it was raised by a member who did not even sit on that committee.

In closing, I support the arguments raised by our hon. colleague, the member for Milton. The precedents are clear that a leak of committee proceedings may be treated as a breach of privilege and that, in serious circumstances like these at hand, there are clear precedents which allow the Chair to make a prima facie finding in the absence of a report on the matter from the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

I understand the Speaker will be back with a ruling. I appreciate the input.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that this House approve in general the budgetary policy of the government.

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was discussing the Prime Minister's claim that all of these jobs would up and vanish suddenly if the former attorney general did not immediately grant the company the ability to negotiate a special deal avoiding prosecution.

Before my hon. colleague rose on his question of privilege, I pointed out that the Prime Minister's claim that the headquarters of SNC-Lavalin would immediately leave if the company had to face a trial was an easily provable falsehood, one that the Prime Minister would have known, given the prodigious resources he has as the head of a G7 government.

Defenders of the Prime Minister's interference have likewise claimed that he needed to protect the company from trial because if it was convicted, it would lose the ability to bid on federal contracts, thus crippling its workforce and causing thousands of people to lose their jobs. That too is false.

I am reading a document that was written November 9, 2018, from the deputy minister of Justice and deputy attorney general of Canada, Nathalie Drouin, to the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Prime Minister's former top public servant. In that document, she says that there is something called a Canadian integrity regime. The document is designed to tell the government what would be the economic consequences of an SNC-Lavalin conviction. It says that the ability of a company or supplier to contract with the federal government is affected by the ineligibility and suspension policy. It says that the policy ensures the government does business only with ethical companies or suppliers in Canada and abroad. It goes on to say that Public Services and Procurement Canada administers the policy on behalf of the government, that the policy sets out when and how a company or supplier may be declared ineligible or suspended from doing business with the government, and that it provides that a company or supplier is suspended with or charged with, or admits guilt to, one of a number of listed offences such as fraud and bribery of foreign public officials.

That is exactly the charge with which SNC-Lavalin is accused of right now, the bribery and fraud of foreign public officials.

The letter continues on to say that the suspension from being able to contract with the government is for a duration of 18 months, that this suspension is subject to extension, pending a final disposition of the charges. It states that there is something called administrative agreements; that the company or supplier may enter into an administrative agreement with the government to stay the suspension; that the administrative agreement is an arrangement between the company or supplier and the government where the former adopts certain compliance measures; that it is used to mitigate the risk of contracting with a particular company or supplier, for example, the government and a company or a supplier may wish to enter into an administrative agreement to stay the suspension, instead of terminating an existing contract due to determination of ineligibility or suspension.

The public works department has only concluded one administrative agreement. On December 8, 2015, it announced an agreement with who? SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., staying a suspension. According to public works that stay means that the SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. is “allowed to continue doing business with the government pursuant to the regime.”

In other words, even though the company had already been banned from doing business with the federal government because of the fraud and bribery charges it now faces, one of the first acts of the new Liberal government in late 2015 was to permit an administrative agreement exempting SNC-Lavalin from that ban. The ongoing concern is that if the company is convicted, a new band will apply. The letter goes on. The deputy attorney general addresses that too:

If convicted, pursuant to the current “interim” Policy, the convicted company/supplier would be ineligible to contract with the government. Depending on the offence for which there was a conviction, the period of ineligibility could be as long as 10 years.

This ineligibility status would remain for the entire period unless the government considered it possible and appropriate to invoke a public interest exception.

The reasons to invoke public interest exemptions are narrow: emergency, where delay could harm the public interest; company or supplier is the only person capable of performing the contract; the contract is essential to maintain sufficient emergency stocks; and not entering into the contract with a company or supplier would have a significant adverse impact on the health, national security, safety, public security or economic or financial well-being of Canadians.

This is important. The whole purpose, we are told, of granting this company a deferred prosecution agreement to avoid criminal trial is because the company would lose its ability to bid on federal projects and, therefore, its employees would suffer harm.

I have just read an excerpt from the policy which says that the government currently has the power to exempt a company from said ban if it is necessary for the economic or financial well-being of Canadians. Let us just pause on this point for a moment.

We are continuously being told that the Prime Minister desperately wanted to save the company from a bidding ban and thus needed to cancel the trial altogether by imposing on the prosecutor the obligation to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement.

We learn, in reading this policy, that if the Prime Minister's only goal in this was to protect the company's ability to continue bidding on federal work, it could have done so even after a trial and a conviction by simply invoking a public interest exemption. It says that right in the policy.

The government would have known that because it already granted a similar exemption to the very same company. Furthermore, if it was not clear enough already that the government had the ability to exempt a convicted SNC-Lavalin from a ban on federal bidding, the public works department was already working on a new policy that makes that even more clear. Public works had proposed to replace the ineligibility and suspension policy with a new policy. It undertook consultations on the revised ineligibility and suspension policy, which closed on November 13, 2018.

Under the new policy, the government would have the discretion to vary or even rescind the period of ineligibility of a convicted company or supplier. The period of ineligibility would be at the discretion of the department.

I know that sounds like a lot of administrative language, but it is extremely important. We keep being told that the company will lose its federal contracts if it is convicted; ergo, the Prime Minister has to take extraordinary steps to prevent that conviction from happening; ergo, he has to pressure his former attorney general to make possible a deferred prosecution agreement. That is what we keep being told.

However, we learn here that none of that was necessary, if the Prime Minister's only goal was to protect the company's ability to continue bidding on federal contracts. The proposed new policy, which the cabinet has the right to approve, without even bringing it before the House of Commons, will allow the Liberal government to exempt SNC-Lavalin from a ban on federal bidding even if a conviction goes ahead. This is more proof that this whole claim that the government was protecting jobs is a lie.

Let me read another story that will further shred the jobs' claim. It was written by the Ottawa correspondent, Abigail Bimman. It says that the Prime Minister “keeps naming this small...town as part of SNC-Lavalin defence, baffling locals.”

The article reads:

Port Elgin, Ont., is a quiet beach town on the shores of Lake Huron, home to about 8,000 people. But in his defence during the SNC-Lavalin affair, the prime minister has named the town at least three times.

“When we’re looking at potential job losses right across the country from Corner Brook to Port Elgin, Ont., to Saskatoon and Regina to Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie, Alta., and Fort McMurray, we are seeing good jobs right across the country that could be at risk,” [the Prime Minister] told reporters in Iqaluit on March 8.

Never mind that most of the people who work for SNC-Lavalin in the aforementioned cities do construction work there, work that can only be done in those localities and therefore the jobs could not be moved from those places. However, let us put that aside and go back to the text of the article.

The article goes on:

He named Port Elgin in a similar context in Montreal on Feb. 28 and Charlottetown on March 4.

Of all those communities, Port Elgin is the tiniest. So Global News headed to Port Elgin to see if they’re worried about job losses—and as it turns out, the situation is just the opposite.

“I think Port Elgin's booming!” said resident Linda Barfoot.

“We're in a protected bubble here,” said another resident who stopped to watch the Global News video of [the Prime Minister] mentioning her town again and again.

That bubble refers to Bruce Power. Twenty minutes down the road from Port Elgin in Tiverton, it supplies a third of the province’s energy and employs 4,000 people full-time. It’s also on the cusp of a $13-billion refurbishment project to extend the life of six of the eight nuclear reactors.

“There aren’t potential job losses at Bruce Power—in fact, there’s a lot of job creation,” said Elizabeth Arnold, who’s lived in town for nearly 40 years. Her husband, she says, used to work for Bruce Power.

“There’s a huge influx of workers for the next two or three years so I’m not sure what [the Prime Minister is] talking about when he says Port Elgin, except that it’s a town in Ontario,” said Arnold.

She seems like a wise local from the area. The story goes on:

Local politicians tell Global News the so-called boom means new subdivisions are being built, schools are filling up and the challenge is getting enough workers to fill positions.

“We’re the fastest-growing community in our region here on Lake Huron and we’ve been ranked one of the best places to live in Canada,” said Saugeen Shores Mayor Luke Charbonneau.

But there is an SNC-Lavalin connection to Port Elgin. It’s home to one of more than 130 offices across the country, adding up to about 9,000 employees total. SNC-Lavalin tells Global News it won’t disclose how many people work in each place.

In Port Elgin, the office occupies a single unit in a small strip mall. On the Thursday afternoon when Global News stopped by, there were just a few cars in front.

And [the] Conservative MP [for Huron—Bruce]'s constituency office sits right across the street.

“The massive job losses the prime minister is predicting is right over my shoulder,” said [the member]. “It’s 10 or 12 people.”

“I think he has it wrong. SNC-Lavalin’s nuclear division is a tremendous business, they’re adding jobs.”

To start with, there are only 10 to 12 people who work there, and SNC is adding to it even though the company knows it is not getting a deferred prosecution agreement. The story goes on:

SNC Lavalin is part of the Major Component Replacement (MCR) project at Bruce Power. SNC has a 40 per cent stake in the Shoreline Power Group Consortium, along with AECOM and Aecon. Shoreline has a $475-million contract for a key part of the MCR, scheduled to begin in January 2020.

In other words, SNC-Lavalin's work there is really going to ramp up in another year. Far from leaving, it is actually going to be expanding, and it knows it will be doing this even though the trial, at this point, is going ahead.

The story goes on:

In a press release from June 2018, Bruce Power says the overall [project] will “create and sustain an average of 825 jobs annually” over the next 15 years.

Neither Bruce Power nor SNC-Lavalin would talk to Global News about whether there is any threat to the broader category of nuclear jobs. SNC would not give details about any employment numbers for specific projects and would not confirm whether previously released job numbers in news releases are still accurate today.

[The MP for Huron—Bruce] is confident that in a worst-case scenario for SNC, if they are forbidden to bid on government contracts for 10 years, nuclear jobs are protected because this isn't a government project.

“It’s a business-to-business transaction between SNC Lavalin nuclear and Bruce Power, and regardless of the outcome, it will have no impact on their nuclear division,” said [the member].

The community's mayor, however, is less certain about SNC's future....

“I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future with SNC-Lavalin, and obviously, that’s a big national issue,” said Charbonneau.

“What we do know locally is that SNC-Lavalin is planning an expansion. They’re looking at adding some additional floor space to the office they currently have, they’re looking at going up to as many as 75 engineers here in Port Elgin.”

This story says that while the Prime Minister claims the company is going to be laying off all these employees in Port Elgin, it looks like the plan, even with the trial going ahead, is to expand the workforce from about 12 people to 75 people, in other words, by over 500%. This of course is in a town where the Prime Minister claims all kinds of jobs will be lost if he does not interrupt the criminal trial.

The article continues:

Mayor Luke Charbonneau tells Global News while he’s concerned about potential job losses connected to the SNC Lavalin affair, he has a lot of confidence in Port Elgin’s booming economy.

He goes on to say, “I feel good that our success is going to continue and that SNC can come along with that”.

The story goes on to state:

The Prime Minister’s Office tells Global News [the Prime Minister] was simply mentioning places across the country where SNC-Lavalin has employees, and the comments were not related to nuclear industry.

Somebody should have told him that SNC-Lavalin does work with the nuclear industry there before he put the company's operations for Port Elgin in his speech. However, these are mere details.

This is another example of the jobs lie that the government has been telling, claiming that if the Prime Minister did not take the extraordinary step of interfering with a criminal prosecution, all of these jobs would up and vanish. Again, the evidence contradicts that claim.

Why is it so important for us to examine that falsehood? The answer is this. If the Prime Minister is not protecting jobs as he claims, who is he protecting? He has gone to such extraordinary lengths to get this company off the hook. He slipped an amendment into the Criminal Code, an amendment he executed through a budget omnibus bill. Once that bill became law, he became infuriated to learn that it had not, within days of getting royal assent and taking effect, been used for SNC-Lavalin. He began an intense campaign that extended from September until January, when he shuffled his cabinet. I am not aware of a single—

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I believe there is no quorum.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

We do not have a quorum. Call in the members.

And the bells having rung:

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

We have quorum.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, moments ago I was referencing the Prime Minister's claim, which we now know to be false, that the company would lose an abundance of employees, that there would be job losses, if the prosecution in the fraud and bribery trial of SNC-Lavalin were to go ahead. We now know that this, in fact, is untrue. The specific examples the Prime Minister gave of jobs that would be lost will not be lost. In fact, in the specific work sites that he highlighted, we now know from the sources on the ground that even if the trial goes ahead, the jobs at those particular project sites will increase in number and not decline as he has wrongly claimed. Of course, I just finished relaying the example of Port Elgin, a town where the Prime Minister claims everyone will lose their jobs if this trial happens. It turns out that roughly 13 people reportedly work for SNC in the town, and this would actually grow to over 70 despite the criminal charges as they proceed.

Let us examine the logic of the jobs argument. Even though the evidence is already thoroughly discredited, let me just look at the logic of it in the first place.

What legal advantage would be conferred upon SNC-Lavalin by shipping a bunch of jobs out of Canada? The company will still have to face the trial and conviction here. Any reputational damage that it faces from that conviction will happen right around the world regardless of whether the company's headquarters or employees are located in this country. Therefore, leaving the country, like felons who would vanish out of the country of their crimes, would not protect the company from prosecution or from penalty.

Furthermore, to whatever extent there is international reputational damage to the company resulting from the trial, the same reputational damage would result from a deferred prosecution agreement, because the company would have to confess guilt to the aforementioned crimes in order for that agreement to occur. In other words, worldwide, countries would still know that SNC-Lavalin is a fraudster and that it engages in bribery if the company signed a deferred prosecution agreement, because the company would have to confess that it committed those offences in order to get such an agreement.

The difference that the Prime Minister was trying to cause by imposing this deferred prosecution agreement was really just to avoid the trial. The trial is the only thing that he would have salvaged the company from by pressuring his Attorney General to extend a deferred prosecution agreement. Therefore, I think we need to see this trial now more than ever. We need to know why there were some people in Ottawa with enormous power that were so desperate to prevent it from going ahead.

Given the evidence I have now demonstrated that it was not about jobs, there must be someone or some group of people who believe their interests are at serious risk by going into this trial for fraud and bribery. We can only speculate. Maybe we will learn that there are more bad apples that have yet to be ousted from the company. Maybe during testimony from witnesses, we will learn of additional offences. We do not know. However, we do know that the company and its friends in the Prime Minister's Office have gone to unprecedented lengths to prevent this trial from going ahead. We will one day, I hope, learn why they went to those lengths.

Yesterday I asked members of the House of Commons to feel free to heckle me and tell me another example of a prime minister who had personally interfered in a criminal prosecution. They could not think of a single example of a prime minister who had done that. Not one of them could list such an example, and that is because there are none. Prime ministers do not interfere in criminal prosecutions.

For example, desperate Liberals' and their strong supporters in some of the media outlets have tried to point to Brian Mulroney's supposed conversations with his then attorney general with regard to the David Milgaard case. Brian Mulroney became prime minister many years after David Milgaard's prosecution, so it was chronologically impossible for Brian Mulroney to have interfered in that prosecution.

I thank the creative member from Winnipeg for trying so desperately hard to come up with an example. I suggest that he look at his chronology book and compare the date of the prosecution and the date former prime minister Brian Mulroney took office. He would find that the two were separated by many years.

That is an example of how an empty wagon makes the most noise. Absent any evidence, we have someone screaming and hollering the random name of a former prime minister in a desperate attempt to draw an analogy with the unprecedented attack of the present Prime Minister against prosecutorial independence. I thank him for his valiant attempt, but I urge him to try harder next time, because in this case, we have a Prime Minister involved in a criminal prosecution. For the first time in memory, we see this, and I welcome anyone to find another example of when a prime minister has personally become involved in directing a prosecutor.

There might have been other examples during the sponsorship scandal, though. We do not know. Although the Liberal Party admitted to stealing $1 million, and although $40 million of cash went missing during the whole affair, and although there were charges against many individuals, for some strange reason, the Liberal Party did not face any charges itself, even though it admitted to stealing $1 million. I have never heard of someone stealing $1 million and then not being charged for the crime. We do not know why it was not charged, but we do know that at that time, the prosecutor was embedded right in the office of the attorney general, who of course, was a minister in the Liberal government.

That is why Stephen Harper created the director of public prosecutions. It was to remove the prosecutorial function from political reach. The Federal Accountability Act, passed in the House in June 2006, which legislation I was honoured to carry through the House as the parliamentary secretary to then Treasury Board president John Baird, created this separate office. Very wisely, it required that any political direction from the attorney general to the director of public prosecutions must happen in writing, and then that writing must be published in the Canada Gazette, which is a document that comes out for all eyes to see. In other words, every single Canadian has the right to know when a politician issues any direction to a prosecutor.

That has never happened since the office of the director of public prosecutions was created in 2006 until the present. More than a decade later, there has not been a single, solitary case where a politician had the audacity to write a directive taking over a prosecution and forcing the prosecutor to do something that he, or in this case she, did not want to do. It would have been unprecedented.

According to a briefing the former attorney general received from her own department, it would have been unprecedented for her to override the decision of the prosecutor in this case. It would have been impossible for her to do it with a clean conscience, because it is clear that the director of public prosecutions had very studiously and carefully measured the case against the law and found that the company was not eligible for a deferred prosecution agreement. Therefore, what the Prime Minister was asking the former attorney general to do was to impose a political decision to break the criteria in the Criminal Code and to effectively cancel a trial that prosecutors had otherwise deemed should go ahead. This is without precedent in the Canadian system, and therefore, we are embroiled in this controversy today.

Those who wonder why such a storm has resulted need only appreciate how impossibly rare it is for politicians to even mention matters that are before the courts to either the judges or the prosecutors.

I will restate the history on this point. When a young Jean Charest was a minister in the Mulroney government, he very innocently, and with pure motives motivated by the public interest, called a judge about a trial. We know what happened to him. He resigned, just like that. There was not a prolonged period of debate. There was not an extended period of conversation. There was literally nothing to talk about. He was a minister. He called a judge. He resigned. It was simple.

John Duncan, a very distinguished former aboriginal affairs minister in the Harper government, a man with an unblemished record of integrity and unimpeachable character, praised by members of all parties for his work, once was approached by a constituent who had a problem with a quasi-judicial body. As a good MP, he tried to help out. He picked up the phone and called the head of that quasi-judicial body, just to be helpful. He had no personal interest in it. Nobody alleged that he was in a conflict of any kind. He was just trying to help a constituent, as all of us do on any given day, but he was a minister and he called the head of a quasi-judicial body. What happened? He resigned, just like that. There was no debate, no nothing.

In fact, a lot of people probably look back at those quaint times, when ministers resigned over spending a few too many dollars on a glass of orange juice or accidentally helping a constituent in the wrong way, and they look at the present day, when we have a Prime Minister who has been convicted of breaking the ethics law in four different places, who took a quarter-million-dollar vacation from someone who met him to get a $15-million grant, and who is accused by his former attorney general and his former Treasury Board president of inappropriately interfering in the criminal trial of a Liberal-linked corporation, and they say, “Oh God, give me those days back.” When politicians were resigning because they spent $17 on orange juice or because they were trying too hard to help a constituent with a case file, those were quaint times. They seem an awfully long time ago, do they not, Mr. Speaker?

However, here we are today. There is something circular about it all, though, is there not? The new Liberal Party looks an awful lot like the old Liberal Party. As I said earlier, the reason Harper created the director of public prosecutions was that we were all highly suspicious of the fact that no one in the Liberal Party was prosecuted, even though it admitted to stealing a million dollars. Therefore, we created the independent prosecutor to ensure that never again could politicians prevent, or encourage unjustifiably, a prosecution from going ahead.

It was precisely because we created that act and that independence that this scandal even came to be known. For once, when our Liberal friends blame Stephen Harper for all the problems and plagues of the world, they are right. It is Stephen Harper's fault. If he had not gone ahead and created prosecutorial independence with the DPP, the Liberals might not have been caught.

It is his fault that they did not get away scot-free with allowing their friends at SNC-Lavalin to avoid prosecution for $130 million worth of fraud and bribery. It is all Stephen Harper's fault. I guess we should not blame the Liberal Party for going back to its old ways and doing again what it has always done before. It is the same old Liberal Party.

To quote Kipling:That the dog returns to its Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire

It is the old story of the Liberal Party. It is right in its DNA. The Liberals are determined to avail themselves of all the splendour of public life. They believe that public office is like a cornucopia of riches to be sprayed about upon oneself and one's friends.

To think that the Prime Minister had absolutely no compunction about vetoing the already approved northern gateway pipeline, killing tens of thousands of jobs in western Canada and billions of dollars of opportunity for first nations communities, 80% of whom supported the project. He had no compunction about vetoing that and killing those jobs, but then he had the audacity to claim that his attempts to protect the executives and senior shareholders of SNC-Lavalin had something to do with jobs. It had only to do with the Liberals' jobs and the jobs of the high-ranking executives who are well linked and tied into the Liberal Party of Canada, the same executives who pumped $100,000 of illegal money into the Liberal Party, and admitted to doing so, through a whole series of despicable, but highly creative, fraudulent techniques. That is the Liberal Party.

The Liberals tell us that the reason they want to aggrandize government is always for some other benevolent purpose. Remember in the sponsorship scandal, it was to save Canada from separatists. They needed the sponsorship program. They had to fight separatists by pumping all this money into the pockets of their friends and into their own party coffers. Now we hear again these phony claims that they are protecting jobs by preventing a criminal trial from going ahead. This seems to be a congenital problem with the party.

Thank goodness we have a strong and abiding official opposition to protect the public interest against exactly these kinds of systematic Liberal abuses. We will continue to do so.

Some people have asked why do we not just relent and let up for God's sake. “Let us move on,” say the Liberals. “Let us talk about something else, anything else.” The problem is that the allegations with which they are faced do not come from Conservatives. They do not come from our friends in the NDP. They come from senior Liberals. Part of the Prime Minister's inner circle said that he engaged in veiled threats, bullying, hounding, interference, inappropriate pressure and a Saturday night massacre. Every term I just used came out of the mouth of a person who was in the Prime Minister's cabinet up until about 60 days ago. That is what his own party says about the Prime Minister.

We should not be surprised. It was not long ago, right before Christmas, that the Ethics Commissioner found the Prime Minister guilty of taking a free $200,000 vacation from someone he was simultaneously meeting with about getting a government grant. The Aga Khan literally sat down with the Prime Minister in the same period of time as the Prime Minister vacationed on his island and asked the Prime Minister for a $15-million grant.

It is an offence in the Criminal Code for any public office holder to accept a benefit from someone with whom he or she does government business, yet the Prime Minister accepted a vacation, the commercial value of which is about $200,000, from someone who was seeking a $15-million grant from him.

That is not a big deal, right? If a junior procurement officer at Public Services and Procurement Canada had taken a weekend of skiing at Tremblant from someone to whom that public servant had issued a contract, that public servant would lose his or her job immediately and might even be charged with a crime. However, when it is the head of the entire government, I guess there is a different set of rules.

Therefore, it is no surprise that the Prime Minister thought the rules did not apply to his friends, because they do not really apply to him. Yes, he was found guilty of breaking the ethics law, but the RCMP did not enforce the Criminal Code on him. He got off scot-free, because he is really powerful.

That has been his life. Most kids grow up in families that face difficult financial choices: Their parents say they can have this or that, but not this and that. Their parents will say there is not enough money for something and tell them to get a summer job to save up for it.

These are not concerns that have ever preoccupied the Prime Minister. He inherited a multi-million-dollar family fortune, as he has called it, and he kept that family fortune in a tax-preferred trust fund, which ensured that income generated from it did not result in higher income tax obligations for him on his T4 slip. In other words, other people were paying higher taxes on much less money while he was enjoying the wealth that had been bequeathed to him by generations before him. This is the very definition of aristocracy.

I do not say that to denigrate his family in any way. The Prime Minister's grandfather ran a very successful business, mostly comprising gas stations. This is a completely honourable way to make a living and earn a life. I do not besmirch his grandfather's good reputation for having left an inheritance to his descendants. We should all aspire to do that.

However, the concern I do have is that because the Prime Minister has marinated in this family wealth his entire life, he finds it impossible to empathize with the concerns of everyday people who do not have family fortunes.

I once stood in the House of Commons and asked the Prime Minister about his tax increases, and he said those things only affected the rich. I pointed out that he took away the children's fitness tax credit and asked if only rich people put their kids in sports. I noted that he took away the transit tax credit and asked if only rich people take the bus. I also noted that he took away the student tax credit for textbooks and asked if all university students were rich. He said that none of those things help the poor, because the poor do not pay taxes.

How out of touch can a person be? This is coming from a guy who kept his money in a tax-preferred trust fund to avoid paying his full fair share on the resulting investment income. To accuse the working poor of not paying tax is insulting.

I would also add that it is factually wrong. Those who earn more than $10,000 a year in Canada, who are not exactly rich, are eligible to pay income tax. They also pay gas tax, GST/HST, payroll taxes and now, as of yesterday, the carbon tax.

Yes, the working poor do pay taxes. They pay too much tax. They do not need to be told otherwise by someone who has inherited a massive family fortune and has done everything to minimize the amount of tax he pays on that fortune.

I will add, now that we are in the House of Commons, that when this Prime Minister was an opposition MP in 2014, he showed up in the House of Commons and voted against a budget by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper that got rid of the loophole for trust funds. How convenient. It was the same trust fund tax loophole that he had been using all of his adult life. He showed up to protect that loophole by voting against the Conservative attempt to close it.

This guy has done everything in his power during his entire career to stuff his pockets with as much money as humanly possible, as much as he can get away with, and to use public office for private enrichment.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I know this issue has been raised a number of times today. I did want to see if the House was willing at this point, through unanimous consent, to revert to Requests for Emergency Debates because of the canola crisis that our western Canadian farmers are facing. In the last two days in Routine Proceedings, this request has been denied by the government, thus not giving us an opportunity to move forward with our emergency debate request.

Mr. Speaker, I am hoping you will seek the unanimous consent of the House to see if we could revert to Requests for Emergency Debates so that the important issue of the canola crisis and the inability of our farmers to ship grain to China can be considered.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Do we have unanimous consent?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, the canola industry represents multi billions of dollars in this country. All the member for Chilliwack—Hope was asking for was a unanimous consent motion to debate—