Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for St. Albert—Edmonton.
We are in the middle of a pandemic and Canada's economy has suffered more than most. In fact, the Canadian government has the biggest deficit in the G20. Out of 20 countries, it is the biggest deficit as a share of GDP. We have the highest unemployment rate in the G7, higher than the rate in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. It is much higher, in fact. That is why I rise today: to implore the House to get back to the people's work.
The government has basically shut down the finance committee, which is necessary for responding to this economic calamity and Canada's poor economic performance, in order to cover up the release of blacked out WE scandal documents and to prevent questioning of government and other officials about the scandal. Not only did the Prime Minister shut down this place in August for over six weeks, during which Parliament was unable to do its work to fight for the Canadian economy and defend the lives and livelihoods of Canadians, but, when it came back here, it decided to cripple at least three parliamentary committees, namely health, ethics and finance, to prevent them from working on our pandemic response and repairing the enormous economic disadvantage that we face here in Canada.
Concerned with the destruction of small businesses, the loss of jobs and Canada's poor performance at the bottom of the pack, the Conservatives came forward with a non-partisan proposal that would take the WE scandal out of the finance committee and put it in a special stand-alone, investigative committee. Let finance do finance, let health do health and let this special committee examine this file. Let us get back to work for Canadians.
We expected that this would be a unanimous proposition given that the Prime Minister has claimed to be so concerned about the well-being of Canadians in this pandemic and economic shutdown. Instead, the Prime Minister has said the opposite. He said that if we investigate the WE scandal any further, he will bring down his own government and force an election in the middle of the second wave of a pandemic. Wow. By the way, he says he has nothing to hide. In other words, there is no secret, but Liberals are prepared to cause an election to prevent it from coming out. Nobody believes that. Thou doth protest too much, Prime Minister.
If he had nothing to hide, he would not have shut down Parliament in the first place. If there was nothing to hide, he would not be threatening to bring his government down today. If he did, we can only imagine what his campaign slogan would be: “Give me a majority so that no one can investigate me.” That is effectively what he is asking for. In fact, what is ironic about his election threat is that he admits it has nothing to do with any policy agenda. He does not claim that there is some policy action for Canadians he would like to take but cannot because he is in a minority Parliament. He admits that he is able to do everything from a public policy point of view that he wants to do. It is just that he cannot tolerate the thought that one little committee might ask some inconvenient little questions about the affair that saw him and his family receive over half a million dollars from a group and then saw him intervene to give that same group a half a billion dollars.
All we want to do is ask a few little questions about that. We do not want to stand in the way of the government's policy responses. If they are meritorious, they will pass through the House of Commons. We do not want to stand in the way of a single, solitary parliamentary committee. Let them all do their work. Let us take this WE matter, which the Prime Minister finds so agonizingly distracting, and put it in a separate place, a safe space, where everyone can ask some direct questions and use the powers of Parliament to get some direct answers.
For some reason, the thought of being asked these questions sends the Prime Minister into a panic. The thought of the unredacted documents being made public is causing a crisis in the Liberal ranks. They are now threatening to call an election to prevent the truth from coming out.
That is not the behaviour of a Prime Minister who has nothing to hide. It is the behaviour of someone who has deep secrets and wants to stop the truth from coming out. He is prepared to shut down Parliament to stop the truth from coming out. Now he is prepared to call an election in the middle of the second wave of a pandemic just to bury the truth. That is the behaviour of a Prime Minister who has deep secrets to hide.
We can understand why he would be ashamed for all of this to be known. Here is a great social justice warrior who has gone around telling us how much he is concerned about the downtrodden. He tells us he is a big believer in redistributing wealth from those who have to those who have not. That is funny, because he has no problem taking money from charities, money that little kids donated with the expectation it would go to poor people in developing countries, and putting it into his own millionaire pocket.
His family are millionaires. There was an inheritance from his grandfather, who was a petroleum magnate. He made lots of money in the energy business and passed it down. We have a millionaire Prime Minister. One would think if he was such a social justice warrior, he would be giving money to charities and his family would be in a rush to hand that money out to those with less. No, he is the exact opposite of Robin Hood. He steals from the poor to give to the rich, especially to himself. Here again we have an example of that.
Speaking of that, what kind of charity spends a half million dollars to pay an ultrarich and politically powerful family, or takes a multimillionaire who used to run a billion-dollar company on a $41,000 all expenses paid vacation, when those little school kids thought they were raising pennies, quarters and loonies to help the world's less fortunate? Do members think any of them were told the money would be used to pay off the Prime Minister's millionaire family, or to take the multi-millionaire former finance minister and his family on luxurious vacations? Of course not.
This is not just an example of corruption but of gross personal hypocrisy. That is why the Prime Minister would prefer that we all just stop talking about it, and not just prefer. He is willing to shut down the function of government in the middle of a pandemic to force an end to this conversation. Where does that stop? Will it hereafter set a precedent that whenever a scandal gets too close to the Prime Minister he can simply put an end to Parliament and call an election, effectively banning opposition members from asking questions about how he used public funds to reimburse those who have paid his family? Is that the precedent we now set?
Are we really going to devolve to a point where a prime minister is a king and he slams his fist, says he has heard enough, wants no more questions, wants all investigations to cease and if they do not he will bring the whole place tumbling down? That is the precedent the Prime Minister seeks to create, but we will not be deterred. We were elected to hold the government to account, and we will do exactly that.
We will get to the bottom of this scandal. We will further propose key measures to ensure that no prime minister is able to enrich himself at the public expense the way the current Prime Minister has, and that accountability is once again the law of the land.