Madam Speaker, it is a delight to see you in the chair. I was hoping you would be the chair occupant during my intervention on this issue because you and I share something in common. In my formative years, I went to school on the south shore of Montreal and grew up in Brossard. You are the member for that region and you will know my elementary school, Harold Napper. Many people went there, including one of your predecessors, whose wife was the director of the school.
Another thing we have in common is that we both survived the 1995 referendum, and you lived through the sponsorship scandal. That is where I want to begin, because those events, the 1995 referendum and the sponsorship scandal, made me a Conservative. They convinced me that the Liberal Party of Canada was corrupt and would be infinitely corrupt. I remember the table talk with my parents, my friends and people I knew. It became the common, accepted wisdom that the Liberal Party of Canada would always be corrupt and there was no way to save it.
I find myself now, in this chamber, privileged by the people in the riding of Calgary Shepard to be sent here to speak on their behalf, and it is happening all over again. However, this time, instead of the sponsorship scandal, it is now the SDTC scandal, and it is eight times larger than the sponsorship scandal. We are talking close to $400 million that was corruptly awarded to friends of the Liberal Party. Taxpayers work incredibly hard to earn a living in this country to pay their taxes and they have seen them awarded corruptly.
There are two parts to my intervention today. The first part is to talk about the Speaker's ruling on this matter, and the second part is the content of the documents that have led us to this moment and why the governing party is blocking the work of Parliament and not allowing us to proceed.
This could all end if the Liberals would just release all the unredacted documents to the parliamentary law clerk. It would end right there. We trust the law clerk. In this situation, I am fine with the RCMP looking at the documents; it has already put out a statement. If it finds nothing of value in the documents, the matter ends there. It is quite simple. There is no reason to hyperventilate and make up judicial opinions on the floor of the House of Commons or make up arguments about why the charter or the Constitution shields the Liberal Party of Canada from releasing the documents in its possession so we can see how bad the corruption is.
The Auditor General has already said there was corruption. The Auditor General has already ruled on this and so has the Speaker. The House ordered these documents to be produced June 10 with a vote of 174 to 148. No individual member of Parliament has the absolute right to obtain any document that he or she wants, but as a House, as a group of parliamentarians, a majority here represents a majority of the Canadian public and a majority of Canadian taxpayers. The Canadian taxpayer has been defrauded of close to $400 million. The exact number in question is $390 million.
The Speaker's ruling said, “In some instances, only partial disclosures were made, owing either to redactions or the withholding of documents.” That means entire documents were not provided. It goes on to say, “In other instances, the House order was met with a complete refusal.” The Government of Canada, all of the cabinet ministers and every single department do not have the right to refuse an order of this House. The Speaker goes on to say that whether it is wise or not to do so is beyond the point. The House has an absolute right to government documents.
The majority of members of Parliament approve spending. The government exists because Parliament approves spending, so we own these documents; these are ours. When we request them, when we call for them, when we demand them to be given to the law clerks, the government has to give them to us. We are not saying to give us all the documents across all of the Government of Canada. We are saying to give us the documents specific to SDTC, the green slush fund scandal. However, the Liberals have continued blocking the work of Parliament because they refused to give them. There were documents that were redacted, and there were documents that were completely withheld.
In the early interventions that led to the Speaker's ruling, the member for Windsor West argued, as noted by the Speaker, that the “order for the production of documents should be respected”. The New Democrats were absolutely right. He also noted that the Bloc member of Parliament for La Prairie “contended that the government may well have reasons not to meet its obligations, but that the privileges of the House are well established and the order was clear.” It was very clear to all of us when we voted on it.
The time for debate was then. At the time, the government House leader should have made the arguments that are being made now by different Liberal Party members and parliamentary secretaries. However, they did not make those arguments. I went through the record and they were not the arguments they were making.
House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, at page 985, confirms the procedural and constitutional understanding that is well understood by all of us:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers....
The reason for that is simple: We own those papers on behalf of the people of Canada. That is who we are doing this work for. They have a right to have the documents sent to the law clerk and then given to the RCMP. Then the RCMP can do whatever it wants with them. The order of the House does not tell the RCMP what to do. It does not say how the documents should be used or distributed within the RCMP. That is entirely up to the RCMP.
Going back to the ruling, the Speaker said, “The procedural precedents and authorities are abundantly clear.” He further stated, referring to Speaker Milliken's ruling from April 2010 at page 2043 of the Debates, “procedural authorities are categorical in repeatedly asserting the powers of the House in ordering the production of documents. No exceptions are made for any category of government documents”.
I do not understand why the government keeps insisting that Speaker Milliken is wrong. Speaker Milliken, I think we can all agree, in the modern history of our Parliament, is probably the best Speaker we have ever had. If we go through his rulings, we see that he was a wise Speaker, indeed. He was a member of my political formation. He is a man I think many of us would lean on when it comes to procedures of the House. I cannot believe that the Liberal Party of Canada is rejecting the words he said in this House on the production of documents.
Going beyond the powers of the House of Commons, which is an argument the government House leader made, the Speaker respectfully said, “these concerns ought to have been raised prior to the motion's adoption.” He goes on to state:
The House has clearly ordered the production of certain documents, and that order has clearly not been fully complied with. The Chair cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established.
He basically said that the government is in contempt of an order of the House, in contempt of Parliament.
It is simple. This all ends when the Liberals give all the documents to the law clerk. We are not saying to give them to the official opposition leader or to me, but to the law clerk of the House of Commons, appointed by the government, who will see the documents unredacted and transfer them to the RCMP. There are no great complications here.
One of my favourite lines, heard in debate, is this: When someone breaks into a house, do we call the police or do we call a committee? I would call the police. They are the people I go to when I have a problem. No committee can fix the problem of someone breaking in. There is almost $400 million from Canadian taxpayers at stake here, and Canadian taxpayers were bilked out of it.
It is not that this is a recent thing. It is not that it just came about and was discovered later on. It started in 2017. SDTC has existed since 2001 and spent almost 16 years with a clean bill of health from the Auditor General. Then certain Liberal cabinet ministers began appointing their friends and then appointed more friends, and those friends saw friends with companies that needed money and they fleeced taxpayers. Then everything came apart and we had a bizarre kabuki theatre, where the minister abolished the fund and rolled it into something else. The Liberals said that it was all good, that they were moving on, that there was nothing to see here and that it was such a terrible shame that all this money went missing, $390 million. A billion dollars per year was spent and there were no problems whatsoever, but they could not help themselves and reached into the pockets of the taxpayers and gave money to their friends.
Let us look at exactly what happened with SDTC. The Auditor General found that hundreds of millions of dollars were not just misspent but also corruptly awarded, sometimes to companies of board members who were making the decisions at board meetings. There were 82% of the funding transactions approved by the board during a five-year sample by the Auditor General that were found to have conflicts of interest.
I cannot imagine an instructor, a professor or a teacher who is teaching corporate ethics who would look at that and say, “That's okay, we should just roll things under the rug and move on. Mistakes were made, but it's not so bad.” The findings were from the Auditor General's five-year sample. She did not even have the opportunity to look at all the cases of all of the awarding of money.
In her report, the Auditor General said that the same board approved $59 million in projects that it was not authorized to. The Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund was meant to fund green-energy projects, but the $59 million was approved to go to nothing related to the fund, so it was illegally given. I would hope that we would all agree that $59 million is a huge sum of money. Taxpayers have a right to know where the money went and why the decisions were made.
There were people on the board who were awarding cash to each other's companies, which is an obvious conflict of interest. There were Government of Canada officials who sat through the board meetings, so how could the minister claim that he could not have known about it? How is it possible that there are no documents worthy of being given over to the parliamentary law clerk and to the RCMP to investigate and determine how exactly the decisions were made? They were completely in contravention of the conflict of interest laws of Canada, the public office holders rules and SDTC's own act.
I would think that when we appoint people to a board, they would read the act that governs their behaviour, but obviously that did not happen in this case. There were 405 transactions, and 226 transactions were the sample. In 186 of those 226, at least 82%, over $300 million, was corruptly given out. The fund had $832 million that was given out at the time.
There are individuals specifically involved who were on the board and who were involved with a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital. The member for South Shore—St. Margarets brought this up. Do members know who the lobbyist was for a few years for Cycle Capital? It was the Minister for Environment and Climate Change before he became the minister. He was a paid lobbyist and had to register, which is how we know that he lobbied for the company; it is all public information. When he was lobbying for Cycle Capital, that company got $111 million. That was so fortunate for them. How lucky are they?
There are documents that would show which meetings were held, what documents were exchanged and what was talked about. I am sure that there would also be diary notes from public servants in the meetings on how decisions were being made or what was being said. There were 25 times in the year before the minister was elected that he lobbied, which is quite quite surprising. I wonder when he became the nominated candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Others who participated were told at different points that some projects were rejected because they did not meet the funding requirements. They were told, in emails that we know of because they were released by the whistle-blower and by others at parliamentary committees, that they would be helped to find money from other government departments. Soon after that, the former board chair got $12 million dollars from ACOA and the ISET program. Therefore, even in some situations where it is quite obvious that, for conflict of interest reasons, a program could not get money, the money was given out through another fund.
Nine directors, according to the Auditor General, accounted for the 186 conflicts. The nine directors were individuals appointed by the government, by cabinet, to sit on the board and make decisions, and they did make decisions.
The sponsorship scandal was around $40 million, as I remember it. I am sure that with an inflation adjustment it would be a bigger number now, but $40 million is still a lot of money. It is still an incredible amount of money for the taxpayer. We are talking about close to $400 million in this particular case, which is a much bigger sum.
The minister said in June that there would be new transparency rules. New transparency measures would be introduced. Now the Liberal government is giving out money again, but not a single bit of the information has been made available anywhere on the new website. SDTC used to put out a quarterly report on every single company. The new fund, or whatever it has been rolled into, does not do that anymore. It is silent; the information is hidden. There is no more information being given out.
We are supposed to believe that the issue was only the nine directors who were directly appointed by the government. In 2017, the government went out of its way. It replaced the board chair because he was inconvenient. The government appointed its own person into that particular role. That person participated in some of the conflict of interest decisions, sometimes to give even her own company some of the taxpayers' own dollars, when they should not have at all. This goes on and on.
As other members have mentioned in the House, this is not the first time that the Government of Canada, the Liberal cabinet, is refusing to disclose documents. The government actually took the then Speaker to court to stop the release of detailed documents from the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab. We have even gone through two parliamentary committees to try to extract the documents. The government even called an election to avoid having to release them.
There was the SNC-Lavalin scandal, during which the Prime Minister claimed on live television during a press conference that there was nothing to see and that nothing was going on. There was the WE Charity scandal, and there were foreign interference campaigns. Again, in every single situation, at first the government refused to release the documents.
As I often do, I have a Yiddish proverb. I feel that the whole situation is like a bridge. I want to read the proverb into the record in its original Yiddish. I am going to practice.
[Member spoke in Yiddish]
[English]
I will translate: If his, that is, the government's, word were a bridge, I would be afraid to cross it. If we are to believe the government's argument right now that for charter reasons, for constitutional reasons, it cannot release the full documents that the Speaker has ordered released, based on a majority vote in this place of all the MPs, and it is making a bridge out of it, I would not cross it. I would tell every single person in my riding of Calgary Shepard that they cannot trust the government's words. If it has built a bridge out of its words, we cannot trust it. It is old Yiddish wisdom, and it applies right here.
This all ends when the government releases all of the documents; it is really that simple. Then we can get back to the normal work of the House.
There is actually, I believe, another question of privilege coming up after this one, involving “the other Randy”, who, I am told, has also done things in a corrupt way. We are also trying to figure out what is there.
In anticipation of a question I am very likely to get, I do want to remind the other side about two times the Prime Minister made comments about the RCMP's laying criminal charges. One is from a February 2018. The Prime Minister said in a town hall meeting that the police investigation of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman will “inevitably” lead to “court processes”. In April 2017, he had told reporters at a press conference that Norman's case “will likely end up before the courts.” That was about criminal court charges in that case.
The government ran through the mud a senior, decorated vice chief of the defence staff to suit its own goals, and now it claims to us that it cannot tell the RCMP what to do, when it has done it themselves. I do not believe the Liberals. Do not walk across that bridge. They must give us the documents.
