Mr. Speaker, on that day, the NDP were acting a little silly. They were lightheartedly trying to delay the vote by blocking Gord from coming down the aisle. The NDP were not being out of line or in any way aggressive. Anyone who knew Gord knew he could stickhandle his way past any opponent if he wanted to. However, that is not what the Prime Minister saw. He saw the NDP blocking his agenda, grew impatient, left his chair and crossed the floor, a floor that is two sword lengths for a reason. This is meant to symbolize that we value debate over physical conflict.
The Prime Minister crossed that symbolic floor, grabbed Gord and pulled him through the crowd of MPs. In the process, he elbowed an NDP MP in the breast. The Prime Minister of Canada had physically assaulted two opposition members because he was impatient with parliamentary democracy, just as he is now. That should have been the end of him as Prime Minister, but apparently that is not disqualifying for the Liberals.
Had the Liberal backbench had the courage, they could have removed him then. That would have spared them the optics of kicking out Canada's first aboriginal attorney general from her job for not following the Prime Minister's order to obstruct justice. Had they acted then, Canada might have had a Prime Minister who read his briefing notes about the Communists he admires interfering in democracy, and that is what these documents relate to.
Instead, they sat on their hands and watched passively as scandal after scandal revealed their emperor had no clothes, except for his pretty socks. This should not surprise anyone. Too often, I have heard Liberal MPs refer to the Prime Minister as their boss. That comment alone tells us how upside down the Liberals see democracy. This is well understood in other Westminster-style parliaments, but these Liberals clearly need it explained to them in simple terms. The leader of a party is not the boss. Our constituents are the boss. We work for them. The leader works for us. That is how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work.
Instead, the Liberals have handed all their power to the Prime Minister and his powerful PMO. Now the Prime Minister is rubbing their faces in it. He keeps finding himself in contempt of Parliament because he has nothing but contempt for Parliament. However, it is not just Parliament. Something about the serving Prime Minister makes former cabinet ministers want to bare their soul in the form of a tell-all book. It is almost a form of seeking absolution for the sin of enabling him.
What is alarming is how much these books reveal about the aloof, incurious and arrogant Prime Minister. More alarming is that nothing has changed and every member of the Liberal Party knows it. They see first-hand how he manages caucus. Not once have I ever heard them speak about his democratic approach to party management. Canadians heard how the Prime Minister talked about being a party leader last week. He talked as if he had all the power and the caucus was merely there to be disposed of when convenient.
We are here debating a subamendment, but this is not really a debate. This is an order from the House of Commons. Just like with the cover-up of the infiltration of Communist agents in the Winnipeg lab, the government is refusing to follow an order given to it by the elected representatives of 41 million Canadians. The government has tried everything to prevent the release of the documents. It even tossed in the kitchen sink, doing so with a charter. Only a Liberal would claim that well-connected Liberals have a charter right to steal our money.
They can claim whatever they want. It does not change the fact that they are ignoring an order from the House. In doing so, the government showcases its contempt for Parliament, but it is not only its contempt for Parliament that is showing. By withholding documents demanded by Parliament, the government is showing contempt for its own members. Each of them ran on a platform. We will disagree with that platform strongly and would be happy to keep that platform off the House of Commons agenda until the next election.
What is in those documents that is so damaging to the Liberal Party that it would abandon any future Liberal legislation if it means it can keep the cover-up going a bit longer? Its position only becomes more untenable the minute we think of it for even a second. Eventually, the government shall fall. Eventually, the people truly behind this scandal will be exposed. When that day comes, all of this obstruction by the Liberals will be for nothing.
What will they have to show for it? The only conclusion a reasonable person could reach is that there is more to this and that what happened at SDTC was just the tip of the Liberals' corrupt iceberg. As I have pointed out previously, this scandal is nearly identical to that in the local journalism initiative. There, the government gave 60 million hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a group of media lobbyists. Those media lobbyists, in turn, formed a committee with the job of handing out money to the local media in order to hire a local journalist. Of the seven committee members, five handed cash out to their own companies. In order for a media outlet to receive funding for a local journalist, it must promise to hand over the content the local journalist produces, free of charge, to the Canadian Press news wire. Can we guess which committee the head of the Canadian Press sits on? Everybody in the legacy media knows about this corruption, but not a single one will report on it, even after being called out in the House twice.
Before the current government, the biggest knock against the legacy media was its Liberal bias. Thanks to the Prime Minister, Canadians can add corruption to their list of media complaints, and that is not surprising. Everything the Prime Minister touches becomes tainted by him. Sustainable Development Technology Canada started over 20 years ago, and it had been a rare government success story; however, this bunch then did what they have done to so many Canadian institutions. They ruined it, and what is so egregious is that this never should have happened.
The government was warned. The former president at SDTC warned the minister not to appoint a person who had received funds from SDTC. That minister did it anyway. Now the organization is in shambles, and money is not going to qualified companies. Employees are demoralized because everything they touch becomes worse. How could it not under a Prime Minister who admires a basic dictatorship? At the core of his authoritarian streak is a mentality in which the ends justify the means.
The Prime Minister sees jobs in his riding as an end, so he justifies obstructing justice and sacking an honest minister who got in his way. He saw a routine vote in the House of Commons as an end, so he justified physically assaulting another member of Parliament. He sees handing out cash to well-connected friends as an end, so he justifies ignoring Parliament to keep doing it. Before the Liberal Party's next caucus, all its members need to ask themselves when they will become the means to bring an end to the Prime Minister's misrule.
As I mentioned earlier, the twin scandals of the green slush fund and the Liberal journalism initiative are just the ones we can see from our side of the floor. We know the government hands out so much money so quickly and with so few controls that it can fund a virulent anti-Semite to provide diversity training remotely from his home in Lebanon. Did anyone check to see if Laith Marouf was on any of those evacuation flights?
We are only standing at the base camp of a mountain of Liberal corruption. The government's entire agenda since 2021 has been to create unaccountable pots of money for its friends.
Every Canadian is receiving notices about increased prices for streaming services. Spotify has gone up. Disney+ goes up in November, according to the finance minister.
Of course there are increasing prices to pay for the new streaming tax. Those tax dollars then go to a fund controlled by the Canada Media Fund. That fund is controlled by big telecoms, which pushed hard for this streaming tax. Now those dollars will flow to well-connected groups, hand-picked by Bell, Rogers and the Liberal Party. Some money will trickle down to a makeup artist on the set of CBC's next American-cloned reality show, but most of it will end up in the pockets of Liberal-connected lobbyists.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage surely knows what I am speaking about. She is still listed as a lobbyist on the lobbyist registry. We can talk about a well-connected Liberal. She went from lobbying for a streaming tax to implementing one.
The Prime Minister does not need to dress up as a character from Star Wars again to pull a Jedi mind trick. He just waves his hands at the media and says that these are not the conflicts of interest people are looking for.
Some believe this world sits on a turtle, which sits on a turtle, and it is just turtles all the way down. In Canada, it is just well-connected Liberals stacked atop well-connected Liberals all the way down to our wallet.
That is not the kind of Canada we want to build. Our party is looking toward the future. The Liberal Party is stuck in the past with the ghost of Mackenzie King. The Liberals cling to a dying broadcasting corporation that had its heyday in the 1960s. Their foreign policy would feel more comfortable wearing bell-bottoms. Their race-based policies invoke an even older past. It should not surprise anyone that the Liberals took this dark turn. The Prime Minister only came to rule them out of a mixture of desperation and nostalgia. He promised to make the Liberal Party great again, and they took the bait hook, line and sinker.
As I said at the outset, I have seen Liberal prime ministers battle with Parliament before. What I have never seen is a Liberal Prime Minister who openly admired dictatorships for being ruthlessly efficient at tyranny. We have someone as Prime Minister, for however long that may be, with a predilection for dictators. He has surfed to power on a wave of nostalgia and now ignores the will of Parliament. This should be setting off more alarm bells than it currently seems to be.
Fortunately, Canadians can count on common-sense Conservatives to stand up for Parliament. It is time to bring home democracy.