My hon. colleague from British Columbia asks if Mr. Bouchard was asked that question at the justice committee when he testified there. He did not testify there. Nor did he testify at ethics. Nor did the other nine alleged perpetrators, including the Prime Minister, who the former attorney general says interfered to shelve the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
Of the people the former attorney general alleges participated in the interference, we have actually only heard from two of them, which is hard to believe this,.
If we are to believe the text messages, journal entries and audio recordings, there were probably 12 different officials: the Prime Minister himself in his September 17 meeting with the attorney general; the Finance Minister in a conversation on the floor of the House of Commons; the Finance Minister's chief of staff Ben Chin, who sent threatening text messages to senior staff of the attorney general; Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the PMO; Elder C. Marques, senior legal adviser to the Prime Minister; Katie Telford, who said “We do not want to debate legalities anymore. We just want a solution”, in other words, a lawless deal to let SNC off. I could go on.
There are at least nine, maybe 10, who are alleged by the former Liberal attorney general to have intervened and who have not yet testified in addition to the two that have already appeared, and those two have been fired. If these others were to testify and their conduct known, they too would probably have to be removed.
Let me go back to Mathieu Bouchard. Why was he so involved in this? Why do we find his fingerprints everywhere on this scandal? It is a good thing we have the lobbyist registry, because all of this starts with the lobbyist registry.
The registry was created by Prime Minister Harper in that very inconvenient Accountability Act. Yes, it is Stephen Harper's fault. We now know most of, perhaps not all of, the lobbying interactions between SNC and senior public officeholders in the present Prime Minister's government. Did they meet with Mathieu Bouchard? The answer is not once, not twice, but close to a dozen times.
Let me recount the number of meetings that this senior PMO adviser had with SNC-Lavalin.
On February 16, 2018, Mathieu Bouchard met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss infrastructure, budget, justice and law enforcement.
On March 16, Mathieu Bouchard met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss international relations, industry, justice and law enforcement.
On May 16, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss international relations, justice and law enforcement.
On January 31, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss industry, international relations, justice and law enforcement.
On February 28, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss industry.
On April 12, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard, policy adviser to the Prime Minister, met to discuss justice and law enforcement with SNC-Lavalin.
On May 18, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss justice and law enforcement.
On June 21, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss justice and law enforcement.
On July 21, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss justice and law enforcement.
On August 30, 2017, Mathieu Bouchard met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss justice and law enforcement. On September 11, Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister, met with SNC-Lavalin to discuss justice and law enforcement.
They also talked about the budget. Members may remember that in the last Liberal budget, Liberals snuck in an amendment to the Criminal Code, making it possible for SNC-Lavalin to get out of a criminal trial—