Madam Speaker, we find ourselves here following from the questions I posed to the Prime Minister with respect to the ongoing cover-up we have seen the government undertake, which came out of the very early days of the pandemic.
Early on we saw all parties profess to want to take a team Canada approach and to really want to make sure helping Canadians was the first thing we did, but the first thing the government did was propose legislation that would have given it the ability to tax and spend without parliamentary oversight for almost two years, so that definitely got the radar up of opposition parties and the parliamentary press gallery.
We learned of course that the Prime Minister had dealings with the WE Charity. Later we would learn that this organization had paid members of the Prime Minister's family about half a million dollars in cash and other benefits. What we learned in the very early days of the pandemic, just over a year ago, is that the government was prepared to give a half-billion-dollar, sole-source contribution agreement to the same organization, which would have benefited that organization by more than $40 million.
Tough questions were asked last summer, and we saw unprecedented interest during these committee hearings. We saw the Prime Minister testify, and we had massive document requests of the government. On the eve of those documents being delivered, and they documents that would have given us information about speaking fees paid to members of the Prime Minister's family, the Prime Minister shut down Parliament.
We have this pattern, which has developed with the government since it first came to office in 2015. As revealed in the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner's report entitled “The Trudeau Report”, with the ill-fated trip to billionaire island, and with the SNC-Lavalin scandal in the Ethic Commissioner's report entitled “Trudeau II Report”, we saw that the Prime Minister does not believe the rules of this place, the laws parliamentarians are expected to follow, apply to him and to his government.
Here we are again, with the Prime Minister under investigation for a third time, awaiting a report from the Ethics Commissioner. The House ordered, by a majority vote, that witnesses appear at the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics and at the Standing Committee on National Defence. What did those witnesses do? They were instructed by their employer, by ministers of the Crown, to defy an order of Canada's Parliament.
It is unbelievable, but that is the lengths the Liberals will go to in order to hide the truth from Canadians. It is one set of rules for them and one set of rules for everybody else. They want us to believe they are following ministerial accountability, but what the Liberals have subjected us to is anything but that.
My question tonight is this: Why is it that the government and these Liberals think the rules do not apply to them?