Mr. Speaker, I have gone through a very extensive illustration of exactly how corruption has been part of the Liberal government as long as I have been in this Parliament, for five years. At the end of the term here it will be six years.
We have gone through the ad scam, and it was the Paul Martin government that fell for that, recognizing it fell over a $4-million scandal. Now, $4 million is a heck of a lot less than a $400-million scandal. However, the government fell in 2004, almost 20 years ago, over a $4-million scandal, where it was proven that the government had actually given money to companies or money had been funnelled back to the Liberal Party, so money was given to insiders.
At the end of the day, the Gomery commission proved that a lot of that money ended up back in the Liberal Party's hands. It was atrocious. Canadians punished the government for that, sent them packing and sent in a new government in 2006, for good reason. The government was long in the tooth and was effectively paying a lot of money to their friends. The Gomery commission obviously found enough information, on $4 million worth of government graft or corruption, that it acted according to the way it should have.
I have spoken about this and I have spoken about the various other scandals that have happened in the Liberal government. We have talked about SNC-Lavalin. That was in 2018. That effectively tarnished Canada's reputation on the international stage because our largest engineering company was involved in corporate corruption around the world. That means that a lot of Canadian companies were not able to bid on international contracts. That is a huge cost to the country, if we think about how many Canadian companies could not participate in international bids from international organizations because of one bad apple that was in the pockets of the Liberal government.
At the end of the day, the Prime Minister more or less threw one of his ministers completely under the bus in order to get what he wanted, a deferred agreement with SNC-Lavalin and getting the Attorney General to acquiesce to that. This was deemed to be and ruled to be corrupt. It should never have happened.
We know what happened in the Winnipeg labs. The Liberal government ended up calling an election rather than facing the consequences, in front of this House, of an order to produce the documents from the leaks of the Winnipeg labs. Incidentally, that was in 2021, when a civil servant was at the bar in this House, effectively saying that he had some privilege and did not have to provide them. Your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, ordered him to provide the documents.
The government took your predecessor to court in order not to produce those documents. That had never been done before in Canadian history, where the government takes the Speaker, the representative of this Parliament to court, legally weaponizing against this Parliament.
Parliament is supreme. The government is not supreme. The government answers to Parliament. This is our role here as elected officials, to oversee the government, not to just do what the government says. Mr. Speaker, you have been very good at that, as far as making sure the government is held to account. I applaud the Speaker's order here, requiring them to produce these documents. The Winnipeg labs situation was one thing. Incidentally, I wanted to point out that in 2024, the government actually produced 600 pages of documents regarding the leaks at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Now, that was three years later than they were asked for by Parliament.
I want to really expose the lengths the government went to to avoid that. The government called an election in order to dissolve Parliament so it would not have to disclose what had happened, and what it was complicit in allowing to happen, at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. It was scandalous that the government got away with this.
I have gone into the WE Charity in detail but, once again, it was senior members of the government working hand in hand with their friends, with money going back and forth and who is getting paid for what. There was lots of money going to Liberal pockets. It was scandalous and as corrupt as anything I have seen in the government. Luckily, we exposed that. It was one of my first years in Parliament. I recall bringing some of my skill set to the floor at that point in time, because I was looking at the financial statements, looking at one year versus the other years, and saying they were not right. We were actually looking at WE Charity, which was hiding some information. That is an in-out scam if there ever was one.
We have gone through the arrive scam in detail as well. The arrive scam was a lot of money going to two people working in the basements of their homes, money being shovelled out the door. Canadians know all about it. Again, we had one of them at the bar here in Parliament. We had somebody actually answering to parliamentarians about what was going on in their company and how they used a lot of influence with their Liberal friends and government friends in order to get a whole bunch of money shovelled into their bank accounts.
This is corruption. This is lack of oversight. I know that my colleagues on the other side of the House, the government side of the House, are saying that is just incompetence on the government's part, that it is nothing to do with them here and that we cannot tell them to be accountable. The government is supposed to be accountable. Every one of the ministers is supposed to be accountable for their departments.
What was quite clear in the ruling the Auditor General gave when they looked at the green slush fund, which we are addressing here today, was that the Minister of Industry did not oversee the contracts with the conflicted Liberal insiders at all. I want everybody to address that here in the House of Commons.
The Minister of Industry did not oversee those contracts at all. I call him the minister of writing cheques, because that is all he does. He thinks he is there to bring in business to Canada and write billions of dollars' worth of cheques to all kinds of industries, many of which are long-shot gambles. This is Canadian taxpayers' money that he is throwing out without any accountability whatsoever.
We need not just accountability for the money, but also accountability for the contracts, accountability for the people involved, and accountability in making sure we are getting value for money even if the contract is a terrible contract. Does it measure up? The Minister of Industry is clearly not being accountable for that. He should be held to account in this House at the soonest possibility.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars funnelled to Liberals and Liberal friends through the green slush fund. All of a sudden, we were asking for those documents. The Auditor General had found some malfeasance there. The documents came back and they were completely redacted. As my friend, the member for South Shore—St. Margarets, said, the Prime Minister's Office could have run out of toner as there was so much black ink on the page.
I have spoken of various scandals here, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We have spoken about a number of these issues. Let me ask this question: Is this criminal? We do not know yet. We are trying to get these unredacted documents into the hands of the police, so the police can determine if there are criminal charges to be laid here.
We are being held up by the government. Will it be three years like the Winnipeg microbiology lab? Is it going to hold us up for three years to try and shove it under the rug and say nothing happened here? Three years down the road it will say something happened, but not to worry about it. It was so long ago, we do not need to worry about it anymore. That is not the way this Parliament works.
We are asking for these documents. We are asking for these documents to be unredacted and provided to us so we can oversee this process and make sure there is accountability built into it. I am going to ask this question as well: If this is criminal, is what is happening in this House right now a cover-up of criminality? I am asking the people on that side of the House, the people on the government benches. Is this a cover-up of criminality?
If so, once it is determined that this is criminal, how do the Liberals think their complicity in this is going to be looked at by the Canadian public, but also by the police? They tried to hide this evidence from Parliament, which legitimately and legally asked for it. The Liberals decided they were not going to provide it, in a first iteration since Confederation, where the government has repeatedly provided not enough information to this Parliament.
I admit that COVID changed a lot in our country. It was not supposed to change democracy or the way we handle democracy in the House of Commons. We are supposed to practise democracy as if the House of Commons holds the government accountable for its actions, especially its actions in spending Canadian taxpayer money.
I have heard the deputy House leader talk about the charter. This is nonsense. There is no foresight at all to have the charter interrupt Parliament's role in holding the government to account. That is completely made up. It is a fabrication and should not be entertained here at all. If any official at the Department of Justice is putting that forward as an argument, that name should be put forward, because the person should be disbarred very quickly here and should not be practising law in Canada, let alone for His Majesty's government.
This, again, is a ruse put forward by the government in order to not be accountable to this Parliament. The government needs to be accountable to Parliament. Our job here, as His Majesty's loyal opposition, is to hold he government accountable and it is doing its best to obfuscate, confuse and try not to provide the information that is required for us to do our job here as His Majesty's loyal opposition.
Could the Speaker please enforce this as much as he can, as he has done to this point in time, continue to hold those people to account, as we do here today, and continue to enforce his rules as the representative of Parliament, ensuring the rules in the House are upheld and the government is held to account for its abuse of taxpayer funds?