Debates of Oct. 28th, 2024

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

I will not be answering it, but I bet the hon. member for Essex can.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is a dynamite question. My hon. colleague is absolutely correct, and I will tell members why. We often hear that politics is a game. Politics is not a game. Politics is people's lives.

What I am hearing from the great folks and small businesses of Windsor-Essex is to please leave them alone, let them go and stop taxing the world from them. They understand that we cannot move on until we get full transparency and that we have a job to do. They send us to Ottawa for a reason and are asking for us to give them the answers. They are asking that we let them make a choice at the ballot box.

My colleague is absolutely dead-on that this is not a game. This is people's lives and people's livelihoods.

[Mike Morrice, Green, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I have shared before when rising for this motion previously, the Greens supported the original motion back in June calling for documents with respect to the mismanagement of SDTC. We support this motion as well so it can go to committee to be investigated. What we do not support is continuing to use House time and resources to day after day speak about the exact same motion.

I have an update for members in case they might be curious. It is the third time I have risen on this point. We have updated numbers on how much money has been spent by the Conservatives on debating this motion. We have now had 96 Conservative members speak to it, which is about 48 hours if we only account for the Conservative speeches. That adds up to over $3.3 million spent continuing to speak to a motion we could vote on if the Conservatives would just stop speaking to it.

Here is my question for the reasonable member for Essex: At what point will he call out the need to stop using House resources and bring this to a vote?

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, House resources are not only for the House of Commons proper but also for committees, so let us speed this process up so we do not drag our feet in committee. If the unredacted documents are released, that is a whole bunch more hours we will not have to spend in committee.

The answer is right there. Let us get behind and vote for this motion, release the documents and get on with House business.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, I thank the member for showing us what a Conservative government would act like. It would not be able to multi-task or strategize in addressing policy issues, as the Conservatives are forcing the House of Commons into a stalemate for one disclosure. It is an important disclosure, yet many different proposals have been provided to a number of Conservatives on how to get past the stalemate. As the previous MP just mentioned, $3.3 million has been spent, which could have been spent on discussing many other important issues, like whether the Kivalliq hydro-fibre link project should be funded by the federal government as a sustainable development initiative.

A very simple solution has been provided to get past this. Does the member agree that we should vote on it so we can debate other matters?

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I suppose the answer is simple, although I was a little confused with my colleague's opening statement with regard to how a Conservative Party would govern, which we are looking forward to. I do not agree with that.

To answer her question, if somebody makes a mistake, they need to be held accountable. We do not just cut into that and say that, while they have made a mistake, we should find a solution. No. Hands need to be held to the fire.

The Prime Minister promised open and honest transparency, and that is what the Conservatives will always stand for. To the member's point, $330 million is a lot of money that I am sure she could really use in her community.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the democracy-defending constituents of the autumn-coloured riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. Today, we are debating a subamendment to the amendment of the motion. That is about as parliamentary a sentence one could say in this chamber. This motion calls for the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to complete a report on the government's green slush fund scandal. The amendment adds some witnesses, along with the subamendment. However, Parliament is what this debate is truly about: Parliament and the government's contempt for parliamentary democracy.

Exposing government corruption is a core function of Parliament. As one of the longest-serving members in Parliament, I have seen off a few governments. There is a natural tension between a government and any Parliament, but the current government is different because the Prime Minister is different. Never before have we had a Prime Minister who openly stated his admiration for the Communists who control China.

It is not unlike the praise that former Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King gave Adolf Hitler. Writing in his diary, the former Prime Minister described meeting Hitler. He wrote that he had personally praised Hitler for the “constructive work of his regime”. The current Liberal Prime Minister has made these comments: “There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green...we need to start investing in solar.’”

Liberals like Mackenzie King were enamoured with how the national socialists turned the German economy around on a dime following the Great Depression. Both past and present Liberal prime ministers seem to forget what prevents them from simply waving their hands and issuing orders like some king is democracy.

These are not just a couple of prime ministers who admired dictators for their good looks and nice socks. These Liberal men were praising dictatorships for their dictatorial policies. If that were the end, if this had just been one comment one time, most people would have forgotten it. However, remarkably, the Prime Minister seems almost maniacal in his commitment to proving his critics correct. He heard the expression “do not judge a person by what they say; judge them by what they do” and took it to heart.

The Liberal government's refusal to obey an order of Parliament is the current thing it is doing. When sports leagues began shutting down in March 2020 and the government decided to follow the lead of the NHL, the first instinct of the government was to grab as much power as it could. The Liberals sought to rule without restoring Parliament for two years. When that was quickly rejected—

[Bardish Chagger, Liberal, Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I know you provide a lot of leniency, but we are on a subamendment moved by the Conservatives following an amendment moved by the Conservatives to a question of privilege that all members of this chamber support. I would like the member to get back on topic so we can advance the matter at hand.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, on the same point of order, the relevance issue is one that I care deeply about. I will note that you have permitted the member for Winnipeg North and many others to repeatedly ask questions unrelated to the motion. You have already granted extraordinary latitude in this debate, so if we are going to narrow the speeches, we will have to narrow the questions.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

I appreciate the point of order. I call on all members to tighten up a bit. We will try our best to stick to the subamendment to the privilege motion we are debating today.

The hon. member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when that was quickly rejected, the Liberals still kept Parliament hobbled for months. That is how it is related.

Let us recall that the biggest scandal at that time was the Prime Minister's decision to hand a billion dollars to a couple of guys who had hired his mom to give some speeches. Those well-connected Liberals from WE Charity, with their billion-dollar made-up program, were to give money out to applicants, just like the green slush fund. Liberals giving money to Liberals to hand out to favoured interest groups sure sounds like a familiar scandal to me, but we will come back to Liberal corruption in a bit.

I mentioned at the beginning of my speech that this motion is not really about Liberal corruption as much as it is about the Liberal government's contempt for democracy, and in particular the Prime Minister's disdain for it. The praising of murderous dictators was alarming, but for me, the day the Prime Minister assaulted two members of the opposition on the floor of the chamber is one that should never be forgotten.

Much of the media focused on the Prime Minister's inadvertent assault on a member of the NDP. Here was a so-called feminist Prime Minister elbowing a woman in the breast. That is the kind of man-bites-dog story the media has always loved. What everyone just glided over was the actual and intentional assault on our dearly departed colleague Gord Brown. For Canadians who do not recall the first time this Prime Minister attacked another member on the floor of the House of Commons, I will recap it.

We were all in the chamber for a vote. Before a vote, the government whip and the opposition whip will walk down the centre aisle here to check to see if everyone—

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

We have another point of order from the hon. member for Waterloo.

[Bardish Chagger, Liberal, Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know the Conservatives have no regard for this institution or democracy, but I would ask the member to get to the question of privilege. We are discussing privilege, privileges most Canadians do not have. We have a lot of important work to do, and she is recounting history. There is a time and place for that, but the Conservative subamendment to this question of privilege is not it.

Can you please ask her to have a bit of regard and respect for this institution and get on topic?

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

I remind members to flow it back as best we can.

The member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

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.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, interestingly enough, the member of Parliament who just spoke was a part of the Stephen Harper government. I will remind her that the current leader of the Conservative Party was the parliamentary secretary to the first Prime Minister in the history of Canada, as well as the Commonwealth, to be found in contempt of Parliament. If we fast-forward to today, we have the current leader of the Conservative Party, I would ultimately argue, once again demonstrating his contempt of Parliament as the Conservatives continue to play this filibustering game.

Would the member opposite not agree that, instead of playing this game, we should be dealing with issues such as foreign interference and her leader's continuing refusal to get the security clearance required? He is putting his party and his self-interest ahead of the interests of the nation. Can she explain why?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite knows that, if the Leader of the Opposition receives a classified briefing, he cannot speak with respect to the contents thereof without contravening the Official Secrets Act. If one does so, one faces years in prison.

The member for Papineau never applied for security clearances. Considering he has admitted to not disclosing his blackface past or his sexual assault of a reporter even to his closest advisers, what else is the Prime Minister hiding from Parliament?

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think you might find this rather funny.

When I was an actor, I was fortunate to work with a Quebec director and actress whom some of you may not know, but my colleagues from Quebec might be familiar with her. Her name is Denise Filiatrault. She is very passionate as an actress and has a very unique style.

When we rehearsed scenes for her, if she thought they did not have enough rhythm and cohesion or were not moving fast enough, she would quickly become impatient. She would start yelling from the back of the rehearsal room. I can still picture her, with a cigarette in her mouth, screaming and asking when we would get to the punchline. She was trying to tell us to pick up the pace, find our rhythm and get on with it.

We are really stuck on this issue. I want to know when we are going to get to the punchline. We have been talking about the same thing, the same motion, just this one thing, for three weeks now.

Earlier a colleague mentioned the problem of homelessness in Canada. We want to talk about that. The number of deaths on the streets of Quebec has doubled in recent years. It is shameful that we are not talking about that.

Here, then, is my question for my colleagues: When are we going to get to the punchline? When are we going to vote?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we will get to the punchline. We will be able to vote once the Prime Minister produces the documents that Parliament has asked for.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, those on the Liberal benches have alleged throughout the debate that it is the opposition grinding this place to a halt. They set aside the issue that, of course, it is the government's own action and refusal to disclose the documents that has led members to wish to debate their corruption rather than to move on to other business. However, there is an important mechanism built into our system of Parliament that can break any impasse. The Liberals can call an immediate election.

Does the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke agree that what the government really ought to do, if it cannot table the unredacted documents and turn them over to the RCMP today, is to at least call an election and elect a new Parliament?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would have to agree with my colleague that the government is beyond redemption. Unless the Liberals table those documents as Parliament requested, they are in contempt.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on something my colleague from Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke said. It was not quite phrased this way, but she said that the Liberal backbenchers had failed to take the actions that could replace the Prime Minister.

I want to draw the House's attention to the admirable private member's bill from the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, generally known as the Reform Act. It put into place changes to the Parliament of Canada Act wherein each caucus of recognized parties has an opportunity, after an election, to decide whether to accept them or not. So far, to give credit for grassroots democracy, only the Conservative Party has adopted the Reform Act.

What allows the Conservatives to be in compliance, basically, with the practice of every other Westminster parliamentary democracy around the world is that a caucus can choose to remove its leader. For example, the Conservative caucus in the U.K. removed Margaret Thatcher and replaced her with John Major.

I recall the events that occurred on the floor. My recollection, as an eyewitness to the events in 2016, was not that the Prime Minister attempted to disrupt democracy but that numerous opposition members were blocking the passage of legislation for House leaders to go forward to the Speaker. It is good for the Speaker to know what our former colleague, Geoff Regan, did not: We do not have to wait for the House leaders to march forward. He could read the motion and the question, put it to a vote and not be concerned about obstruction, which was quite against our rules.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it depends on everybody's perspective, where they were sitting at that point in time and what they saw that evening.

In terms of the Reform Act, yes, I have to thank my colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills, who drafted it. Had the Liberals exercised that themselves in a way where no one was controlling the outcome and no one was bullying anyone else, they would now see, with what is going on with their leadership, how important it is to have a process to eject a leader if they are not adhering to what has been agreed to by caucus.

[Bardish Chagger, Liberal, Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have a very simple question, but I am pretty confident the member will not be able to answer it: Can the member please let us know if any member or political party in the House does not support this question of privilege?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, what I know is that every member of every opposition party agrees that we have to have the documents in question tabled in the House of Commons. I have not done a one-on-one interview with each member to see whether we want this to go forward. Ultimately, we want the documents to come forth so that we can see what the Prime Minister is hiding; it is so much worse than what we already know about.