Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to rise today to represent the good people of Peace River—Westlock in the House of Commons and to bring my voice and their voices to the privilege debate.
The term “privilege” is common parlance these days, and folks here like to talk about their privilege. Sitting in this seat is a privilege. Being a member of Parliament is a privilege and it comes with privileges. One of those privileges is that we get to asked pointed questions of the government. That essentially sums up what the privilege debate we are having today is about: the House of Commons and members of Parliament. The people sent here, elected by their constituents, come to this place to hold the government to account, to ask the government tough questions and to demand a rationale for why things happen or do not happen. That is what we are after today. This debate comes down to the fundamental role of what Parliament is. Parliament is the check and balance on the government.
It is a bit confusing. A lot of times folks say that I am part of the government, and I always correct them and say that I hope to be soon, but at this point I am a member of the opposition. It is a bit confusing because the government lives in the legislative body in our parliamentary system, and the government is captured by the cabinet and the Prime Minister and the apparatuses of government outside of this place. It is our job as members of Parliament to hold the government to account, to make sure the government is doing the things it ought to be doing.
Being in government comes with great privileges, and one of those privileges is holding the debit card of the nation. The government knows the PIN for the debit card of the nation. However, the Liberal government seems to have written this PIN on the backside of the card and then handed the card out all over the place, with no real concern as to who gets access to it and where money is being spent. That is what we are after.
In this place and in government, we run across acronyms of all sorts. The acronym SDTC has come up a lot in this debate. For folks back home watching this, SDTC is Sustainable Development Technology Canada, an organization that was tasked with providing money to organizations that are doing research on sustainability. It has been redubbed the green slush fund because it seems to have been left unchecked by the government.
Some might say that this was not the government; it was an outside organization with a board set up by the government. However, I would point out that most of the people appointed to this board who were making decisions had strong Liberal ties. In many cases, being appointed to this board seemed to have been a reward for past loyalties. That has been pointed out a lot.
The other very interesting thing to note, for those trying to make the case that this was outside the government and the government did not necessarily know about it, is that the deputy minister, who reports directly back to the minister, the person right next to the minister, attended these meetings and would have taken notes, and his or her opinion on these things would have been taken into consideration. The deputy minister represents the minister, so they would have reported back to the minister what took place at these meetings and would have been there to advise the board as to the directions of the minister. The minister can say that he took a hands-off approach, and that is fine, but he still knew what was going on.
I want to thank my colleague, the member for South Shore—St. Margarets, who has done incredible work on bringing this to light. It should be recognized that to some degree, bringing this scandal to light, in light of all the other scandals, has been a challenge. I commend him for his work, because it seems like every other week there is another major Liberal scandal breaking. People have become tired of the scandals that have rocked the government.
We do not need to go too far back to remember the SNC-Lavalin scandal, over which an indigenous woman lost her cabinet position. She is no longer a member of Parliament because of that. The government was trying to manipulate the justice system. We can look back at the WE Charity scandal as well, where the government tried to give away the debit card with the PIN written on the back for $1 billion, again with no accountability. Then we have the Baylis medical scandal. For those who do not know about it, a former member of Parliament, Mr. Frank Baylis, owned a company that got a contract to supply the government with ventilators during the COVID pandemic. Rumour has it that the ventilators were never used. The ventilators were not approved by Health Canada either, yet the government bought 237 million dollars' worth of them, and they appear to have never been useful in Canada. This is the level of corruption we are dealing with, so I again take my hat off to the member for South Shore—St. Margarets for finding out this newest scandal.
I should also mention the ArriveCAN app scandal, where an app that should have cost no more than $200,000 ended up costing the government $60 million. As I pointed out at the beginning of my speech, the government, the Prime Minister and cabinet are responsible for the debit card of the nation, and they appear to have written the PIN on the back of it and handed it out wherever they went. Then when the scandals ensued, they said they did not know about them or that well-meaning Canadians abused the Canadian debit card.
This goes right back to the very beginning, though, to the level of Liberal scandal we saw already right after 2015. When the Prime Minister became the Prime Minister, we can recall his notorious Aga Khan trip, for which the Prime Minister was found in violation of the ethics code and was fined. We have never-ending layer upon layer of Liberal scandals.
The one on SDTC is most closely related to the Winnipeg lab scandal. This scandal is very hard to explain to people because we do not know much about it, although we know there is something there.
What happened is that members of Parliament voted and demanded that the government release documents related to suspicious activities: the arrest of individuals who worked at the lab, a number of trips made back and forth between that lab and China, and Chinese nationals who had access to the virology lab in Winnipeg. We knew that something seemed fishy there, so the House of Commons demanded the documents to get to the bottom of what was going on with that.