Mr. Speaker, we have breaking news, and it comes from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It deals, of course with the latest, $400-million, scandal facing the Liberal government. The RCMP confirms that it is investigating the $400-million scandal of the Liberal Prime Minister that has paralyzed Parliament. It also confirms that is has and is using the documents that have so far been turned over by the parliamentary law clerk.
This raises questions about why the government was willing to turn over some of the documents, yet some departments refused outright. Some departments have said they are not even a part of the government, which is an absolutely incredible statement to hear. I want to reference another bit of information about redacted records or the absence of them. The list of departments that did not comply is typed in a very small typeface on an 11-inch by 17-inch sheet of paper.
One in particular stands out: the Department of Justice. There are more than 10,000 pages they are not turning over. Why will the Prime Minister's DOJ not turn over the documents to the cops? What is so damning in them that, while the RCMP confirms they have some of the documents, the Liberals and their co-conspirators are not prepared to turn over the rest? Canadians have a right to know what is in the documents.
As a matter of fact, the Liberal government has a legal obligation to turn the documents over. It is not because I said so; it is because Canada is a democracy. A majority of democratically elected MPs used the powers that have been bestowed on the House of Commons to ensure that when a matter is of public interest, the production of papers is absolute and unrestricted.
What could be more important to the institution of Parliament and to the protection of our democracy than to make sure, in this matter involving more than 180 conflicts of interest and $400 million in a corruption scandal overseen by the Liberal Prime Minister and all the Liberals who have stood up today, especially the parliamentary secretary, who has clocked over 100 minutes in this saga that has paralyzed Parliament, that the government turns over the documents. Why will it not turn over the documents, which are so important, so Canadians can get answers?
Are we looking to be the judge, jury and executioner in this place? No, we are not. We want to turn the matter over to the RCMP. Is the RCMP going to investigate because we told it to? No, the RCMP is investigating because it has reasonable grounds to believe an offence under the Criminal Code has been committed and that it is in the public interest for it to investigate.
The RCMP will lay a charge if it believes there is a reasonable prospect of conviction. Is that why the Liberals are withholding all the documents from all the many departments? There is the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency; it is too afraid to turn over documents. Others include the Canada Revenue Agency, the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, foreign affairs, the department of housing, the Department of National Defence and Natural Resources Canada, and on and on it goes. There are 10 thousand pages from the Department of Justice alone.
We have heard this before from the Liberals with respect to the RCMP. The justice minister has said that it can get a production order, knock on the door and tell the Liberals to turn over the documents. The Liberal government and the Liberal Prime Minister, the one who has been found guilty of breaking the law twice himself, along with his public safety minister and the small business minister, broke the law.
With that as the context, when the RCMP knocked on the Prime Minister's door, in a case of a criminal matter, the Liberals said they could not turn over the documents because of cabinet confidence. This is what is going to happen; this is the game they want to play.
They want this to go to committee, they say, but why? Is it because the documents would be tabled with the committee? No, it would be to study the question of whether the documents should be tabled. The House already ordered the production of the documents, so that is done by a majority of democratically elected members, not the one party with a minority of seats in this House, shrinking returns in every election and evaporating public support. That is not who gets to decide; the majority of democratically elected members does.
That decision has been made. They must turn over the documents, because it is the law, but that does not concern these Liberals or that Attorney General, because they want this to go to committee, and they want the police to come and say, “Can you turn over those documents? You said if we brought a search warrant that you would provide them.” They will say, “We are afraid it is cabinet confidence. Here are those 10,000 pages heavily redacted.”
That is the game that they are playing with our democracy. It makes me wonder, if they are prepared to violate this law, what other laws these Liberals will break. We have seen some broken, as I said before, by the Prime Minister, by the public safety minister and by the small business minister. These Liberals, when they got tired of being found guilty for breaking Canada's Conflict of Interest Act, the laws that are supposed to protect from exactly the kind of thing that led to $400 million in corruption in this latest expense scandal, appointed the public safety minister, who had been found guilty of breaking the Conflict of Interest Act in clam scam, awarding lucrative contracts to his family members.
Again, Liberal insiders are always their priority. They appointed his sister-in-law to be the Ethics Commissioner. How convenient would that be? At Thanksgiving dinner this weekend, they would say, “Nice to see you. Could you pass the stuffing? Also, could you look the other way on this latest conflict of interest affecting the Liberals?” That is what they are cooking up this Thanksgiving weekend, but the production of these documents was ordered by the House.
They, of course, want it to go to committee to bury it. The amendment and sub-amendment put forward are extremely reasonable. The list of witnesses that we would want to testify to provide fulsome answers to committee is incredibly important, but we would be faced with another problem when we get there, and we will get to a point where the House can vote for this to go to committee, once we have had the opportunity to have this debate.
However, then we are going to deal with another issue affecting the government, further paralyzing Parliament. That deals with the employment minister, this Liberal Prime Minister's minister from Edmonton, who, along with his pandemic profiteering business partner, have this unbelievable scandal that has seen a ruling from the Speaker about the rights of democratically elected members to get fulsome, honest answers and information from individuals who are sent for by this place. Again, it is a right of this House to send for people and to send for papers. In that case, the individual, the business partner of the Liberal minister from Edmonton Centre, refused to provide information on who the “other Randy” is.
We need to know that information, because it strikes at the heart of a matter that is incredibly important to Canadians. We learned that the Liberal minister from Edmonton Centre's business while he is serving in cabinet, of which he owned a 50% share, was awarded a contract by his own government. That is not okay, but what makes it worse is that the minister said he had not been in contact with his business partner for all of 2022 in particular. That year is important, because his business partner said the minister had not been in touch with him either for that year. We will take the minister at his word, and it is case closed. Unfortunately, we can trust them as far as we can throw them.
We demanded the production of papers, which is, again, one of those rights that we have, and what did we learn? They were texting and they were talking. Why is that a problem? It is a problem because what he said was not the truth. What the witness, his business partner Mr. Anderson, said was not the truth. What they told the newspaper was not the truth.
It also means a sitting member of the Liberal cabinet was directing the day-to-day business affairs of a company that was netting Government of Canada contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the fact that the service it provided was, as I said, pandemic profiteering. It was like the guys during the pandemic who would go to Costco, buy up all the toilet paper and then sell it out of their van at the end of the parking lot for an inflated price. Instead of just people in the community being the victims, it victimized people across Canada, getting contracts from all kinds of governments, with the name of a sitting cabinet minister as the co-owner of the business.
That is what they have been doing. That is the matter this House is seized with and paralyzed by. It all has to do with conflicts of interest and refusing to follow the law, orders of Parliament. If Canadians have to follow the law, why do the Liberals not have to? I get asked often by Canadians. They want to know why the RCMP will not finally investigate. Here we have a letter from the commissioner of the RCMP dated October 9. It reads, in part, “I wish to inform you that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation into SDTC is ongoing.”
SDTC, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, operated under governments of different stripes up until 2017 with a clean bill of health from Canada's Auditor General. Stephen Harper absolutely oversaw this fund. We hear the Liberals say Conservatives do not want to take any action on environment. Here we are with this clean-tech business, with a billion dollars of Canadian tax money, looking to help start-ups and innovators in the clean-tech space. We think it is incredibly important that we solve issues facing our environment and our climate, with technology and not with a tax on everything. We know, in my province of Ontario, that is going to cost families $1,400 more than they get back in the fake, phony rebates that the Liberals talk up.
We had this fund, SDTC, which was given a clean bill of health by the Auditor General up to 2017, but it was after that when the trouble set in. The current Liberal Prime Minister appointed his choice, a Liberal, as chair of the fund. Can members guess what happened? The Liberal Prime Minister was found guilty of breaking ethics laws twice, so what do we think happened when he put his hand-picked selection in as chair? Well, along came the conflicts of interest, 186 of them, and $400 million that we know about. This is really important because the Auditor General did not look into 100% of the deals done and votes cast at the $1-billion slush fund, but of the cases they looked into, the Auditor General and her army of auditors found conflicts in 80% of them.
There is no other organization in the world that, when it finds out one of its subsidiaries is rife with corruption and alleged criminality, would say, “We are not going to turn over the documents to the RCMP; we are not going to call the cops. We are going to call a committee.” There is no other organization that would do that unless it has something to hide. What do the Liberals have to hide?
I think we know. It is all the things they do not want the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to see. They are worried that the King's cowboys are going to ride in and find all kinds of dirty deals with Liberal insiders getting rich while Canadians were lined up at food banks in record numbers.
StatsCan this week said that income inequality in this country had reached a point never seen in the history of our country since it started measuring it. It is StatsCan that said one in four Canadians do not know where their next meals are going to come from. That is really important because the unemployment rate in this country is not 25%, or one in four, so that means there are millions of Canadians going to work and, between the shift at their first job and the start of their shift at their second job, they need to make a stop at the food bank so they can afford to feed themselves and their children.
That is life after nine years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister. It is not that the Liberals have been spending money to help Canadians get ahead. They have been spending money to make sure Liberal insiders live large. We saw it with their $60-million arrive scam. We see it in this case with the $400 million at their green slush fund, Sustainable Development Technologies Canada. Of course, when confronted with the problem, Liberals denied it, and then they folded the organization only to pull it underneath the industry minister, who was not turning over documents to the police.
We saw it when the Prime Minister tried to reward his buddies at the WE Charity organization, Marc and Craig Kielburger. We saw it when he tried to help his friends at SNC-Lavalin with a get-out-of-jail-free card. When he was called out by the then attorney general, how did he treat Ms. Wilson-Raybould, an experienced Crown prosecutor? He fired her. He threw her under the bus. When the then health minister, an experienced physician, stood up and said what was happening was wrong, what did he do to the second woman in his caucus who spoke out against him? He threw her under the bus too.
It is because it is all about Liberal insiders, like when the Prime Minister gets a phone call from someone who is getting millions of dollars from his government and is looking for a big grant, looking for a couple million bucks, and says that they should talk about it at their island in the Bahamas, and that he should bring the president of the Liberal Party with him so they can all have a nice conversation about it together. It is a free trip for the Prime Minister, but who is picking up the tab? It is always Canadians who are stuck with the bill when it comes to the Prime Minister, who is helping Liberal insiders and his well-connected friends get ahead.
The ask is very simple: Do not break the law. It looks like the Liberals have struggled with that one. Parliament has the legal authority to order the production of these documents, which is a matter of fact. The parliamentary secretary can stand up, wave his arms and shout about it, but it is the law; it is a fact. He does not have to like it—