Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise and speak in this chamber, but not happy about the occasion. We are talking about yet another example of the culture of secrecy that has penetrated the government. It was baked in right from the start and that is the shame of it. Many Canadians are old enough to remember the 2015 election campaign. The government promised to be the most open and transparent government in Canadian history, and the shame of this is how it has flagrantly broken that promise every day of this Parliament. This is a government that is reflexively secretive in all things and scandal-prone from the start.
Going back to the Liberals' promise of openness and transparency to set part of the stage here, this is a government that passed an access to information law after it was first elected, which the Information Commissioner said was a step backward in access to information. The Liberals promised. They succeeded in that 2015 election. They figured out how to eat the NDP's lunch and how to go after traditional NDP supporters. Many members of the NDP, to their credit, have long spoken about openness and transparency, and they had criticized access to information over the decades in Canada. That was one of the promises where the Liberals zeroed in on a group of voters, promised them what they wanted to hear and then broke the promise. This attitude of reflexive and instinctive secrecy governs every bit of conduct of the government. We have seen it time and time again. The government is a scandal-plagued government that has no regard for our laws around ethics and around access to information.
Early on in the government, let us not forget that the Prime Minister broke the law and accepted an illegal vacation. That was one of the first things he did. He became the first Prime Minister to be found to contravene the Conflict of Interest Act. This is the type of scandal we see from the government over and over again. There was the India trip wherein the government sent an invitation to a man convicted of terrorism, convicted of the attempted murder of an India cabinet minister and who assaulted a former premier of British Columbia and member of this Parliament. That is the company the government keeps.
We saw early in the 42nd Parliament, the SNC-Lavalin scandal wherein the Prime Minister brought in a new law by sneaking it into a budget implementation bill. I was at the finance committee. Mr. Speaker, you where there too, I recall. The government snuck a deferred prosecution law into a budget implementation act. At the finance committee, we scratched our heads and wondered what that was doing in a budget implementation act. Even you, Mr. Speaker, and other Liberals around the table were wondering about this.
It was implemented into law and it became pretty clear pretty quickly why that deferred prosecution law was brought in. It was brought in to get a corrupt company off the hook in furtherance of the interests, in his own words, of the member for Papineau, who said this was why it was essential that this corrupt company be granted a deferred prosecution, something hand-delivered to that company for that purpose by the government in a budget implementation act. What we saw from that was a fallout that resulted in cabinet resignation, caucus expulsions and the retirement of the chief clerk of the Privy Council.
It is to the credit of Jody Wilson-Raybould, who stood up to the government and said that this kind of greasy corruption would not be allowed to stand, that she would not allow the Prime Minister and his office to interfere in a criminal prosecution. She was fired as minister of justice, shuffled, then dumped and expelled from the Liberal caucus.
We have a government where the then-fisheries minister tried to give a lucrative clam fishing licence, to a relative. I thank my friend behind me, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, for bringing that to light.
This was all in the 42nd Parliament. This was right from the beginning. We came back into the 43rd Parliament, with much reduced numbers on the other side, in no small part to this kind of dishonest conduct, and what did they do? They picked up right where they left off and handed half a billion dollars over to a friendly but ultimately discredited charity, the WE scandal, where the conflicts of interest of the then-finance minister Bill Morneau and his ties to that organization ultimately led to his resignation. We saw the Winnipeg lab scandal emerge in the 43rd Parliament, where Parliament found the government in contempt over its refusal to table documents for which the production was ordered by the House, by elected members of Parliament who have the right, under the Constitution of Canada.
We have the charter, which guarantees the democratic rights of Canadians, and the Constitution of Canada, which declares that this is the supreme inquisitor for Canadians, that members of Parliament have the right to documents and to compel witnesses in furtherance of holding the Crown and the government to account for Canadians.
There was the refusal to table in the House documents dealing with the espionage that had occurred in a top secret laboratory. We had to order the chief of that agency to the bar to be admonished by the Speaker but the Liberals make sure that they help their own. That member, after being admonished by the House, was shuffled off and given a high-paying job with another agency. That is how accountability works with the government.
We had another election. These guys squeaked their way back in and no sooner did that happen than we had the pandemic. Toward the tail end of the pandemic, they trotted out the ArriveCAN app, an application that did not work and that sent thousands of Canadians to quarantine unnecessarily and in error. We found out that a couple of middlemen made off with millions of dollars. When the parliamentary investigation revealed this, again, the Liberal insiders who were getting rich off this refused to answer questions and had to be brought to the bar again. These were unprecedented steps that had not been resorted to in decades but under the level of corruption of the government, the necessity to obtain information to get to the bottom of scandal after scandal leads us to where we are today.
We are at the point, today, where we have the current SDTC crisis, where we have $400 million that has gone out into the pockets of Liberal insiders and questions that remain unanswered, documents that, again, have been ordered by the House. The House voted for the production of these documents. This is not something that Conservatives have just dreamed up.
This is the House of Commons, where the Conservatives have 121 seats. We do not have enough votes to do this as an act of partisanship. This is what the majority of the House of Commons wants, including members of all parties, except for the Liberals, who, in furtherance of their culture of secrecy, continue to withhold documents. That is why we are seized with this.
Liberals say, “If the Conservatives let us kick this over to committee, we could carry on with the business of government.” However, Canadians want a carbon tax election. That is what we want. We need to settle the issue of getting the documents now, and then we can move on to other matters.