Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to address the House. It is also a pleasure to be back in Ottawa to participate in the debate, after being away for a few months in my riding, doing work on behalf of my constituents who had been impacted by COVID-19.
I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Lethbridge.
The day is developing in an interesting fashion. For anyone watching, this is a day that is specifically allotted to the official opposition to choose whatever matter it wishes to bring before the House for debate. The idea that this is somehow hijacking Parliament or that we somehow are not doing our jobs by bringing forward a matter that we consider to be of importance to Canadians is outrageous. We are doing our jobs. This is a day that the government provides to the opposition to bring forward a matter that it believes should be addressed by the House. Therefore, we will take no lessons.
Repeatedly today the Liberals have been saying to the Conservative opposition that we should do whatever they are doing. They want to know why we are not working with them to come up with programs that benefit Liberal-friendly firms. They want us to step aside and let them railroad all over Parliament. When the Liberals shut down Parliament and prorogued it for weeks, they wondered why we did not agree with them. Why do we not all become Liberal members of Parliament and just embrace the government's agenda? That is what the Liberals are asking us to do today.
We have been working with the government on COVID-related matters for months. In fact, I was part of a group that sat down with leadership from all parties to discuss how we would go forward and govern ourselves during this pandemic. In good faith, we allowed for Parliament to take a break because we did not know what the pandemic would bring.
What was the response from the Liberal government? After that act of good faith and after working together to put the safety and security of Canadians first, what did the Liberals do? They tried to jam a bill down our throats that would have removed the power of Parliament until December of 2021. That was the Liberal response to working together.
Forgive me if I do not just stop doing my job as a member of the opposition and give the government a blank cheque to do whatever it wants. We have seen what it will do with it. The Liberals are asking us to just work on COVID-related matters.
The WE Charity scandal was borne out of an attempt to rush money out the door and do it in a way that benefited a Liberal-friendly charity. Charities all over the country are suffering right now. Their donations are down. They do not know how they will make ends meet. The people who they serve are not getting the same level of support.
However, not all those charities have paid half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's family. Therefore, they did not get a half-a-billion program designed by themselves from the government.
The fact that the program has now been abandoned in its entirety tells us that it was a complete and total failure. If the government actually believed in the program, it would have stuck it out. It would have stuck with WE and continued down the road of a completely flawed program that did not serve the people it was intended to serve, but rather served people who had served the Liberal Party through the Prime Minister's family. It also produced some fantastic propaganda videos for the Prime Minister in the past and pumped his tires wherever it could. It was a Liberal-friendly charity that got Canadian taxpayer dollars. That is what we are talking about today.
The motion we are talking about today calls for the creation of a parliamentary committee so the Liberals will finally stop blocking the work of the finance committee, the ethics committee and now the health committee. Right now they are blocking any attempts to get work done at those committees. They have been talking non-stop for days to avoid votes coming to the floor at those committees.
Why would they do that unless they were afraid of what those motions call for? The motions call for the production of papers for documents that had previously been agreed to be released, before the Prime Minister shut down Parliament just days before those documents were set to be released. It was supposed to be for a historic reset. The Liberals needed time to get the brains around the table, as was said in QP today, to come up with a new plan that would launch Canada into the new reality that we would face in COVID-19, post-COVID-19 or a “living with COVID-19” world.
What did they do instead? It was just a rehash of things they have not delivered on over the last five years. There was no grand vision that was launched. There was no reset. It was just a rehash, a warming over of previous Liberal promises that have not been delivered on. Liberals prorogued Parliament to prevent those documents from coming forward. However, the Prime Minister said it was just temporary and that, when Parliament came back, if parliamentarians wished, they could ask for the information again. This was not shutting down investigations; it was just a little delay.
Of course now they have switched tactics and will not allow votes to come forward at those committees, which has prompted us to come forward with this motion.
What is the response to a motion to create a committee? The response is that before they let that happen there will be an election. That is what we are hearing today from the Prime Minister. He bragged about it today. The House leader was similarly threatening to plunge Canadians into an election over the creation of a committee and the release of documents that have been previously ordered released.
These are the reasons the government is giving for threatening an election. What the Liberals are really doing is threatening members of Parliament. They are threatening members of Parliament by saying, if we vote for the creation of this committee, if we vote to have these documents released as was previously voted on and agreed to by all parties, it is go time. It is time for the election. It is time to get signs out, go door knocking in a pandemic. It is “we will stop at nothing”. The ultimate nuclear weapon in a minority Parliament is to threaten an election.
The Liberals have done it to protect the Prime Minister from whatever is in those documents. I do not know what is in the documents. Canadians would like to know. The motion calls for the documents to be examined in camera. The Liberals are threatening an election over letting 12 parliamentarians see documents and not be able to talk about them in public. That is enough to threaten an election.
Conservatives will not be intimidated. We will do our jobs. We will talk about the pandemic and, quite frankly, I resent the use of health workers, small businesses and the people in my community to suggest that if we bring forward this motion to demand accountability, somehow we are not supporting them during COVID. What a ridiculous assertion.
To use health care workers, who did not have PPE at the beginning of this crisis because of the inaction of government, to say that the Liberals are standing up for health care workers and if we vote for this motion, we are not, that is outrageous. To say about small business owners, who are hanging on by their fingernails because the government failed to secure the borders early enough because the government gave bad advice from the start, that somehow if we vote for the creation of a committee we are voting against those small business owners, that is outrageous.
My constituents will not allow the COVID-19 pandemic to be used as a fig leaf to cover up Liberal corruption. I am tired of hearing it. I have heard it all day long. If we do not talk about that every moment of every day, stay tuned. We have another day that is allotted to us to talk about the issues we wish to raise later this week, and not by obstructing the work of the House.
If the government does not cause its own defeat over this motion, we will talk about the failures of the government on COVID-19. We will talk about where we have worked together, but what we will not be is intimidated into silence, into sweeping Liberal corruption under the rug simply because that is what the government wants to threaten us with, saying there will be an election if we vote in favour of a committee. What a ridiculous thing. We are here to work for Canadians, but we are not here to turn a blind eye to Liberal corruption.
We will be voting in favour of this motion and so should all members of Parliament who actually want to get to the bottom of the WE scandal and the Liberal corruption in it.