Mr. Speaker, some of my constituents have written to me asking, “Why is the Liberal government grinding the business of Parliament to a halt?” They have seen reports of the Liberal government doing this. I will break down what is happening here today, why it is so crazy that the Liberal government is allowing this and then what Parliament should be doing in response.
What is happening here? We are debating a motion. This whole process of how we got here started on June 10, when the House of Commons adopted a motion calling for the production of various documents related to SDTC to be turned over to the RCMP for review. For people who might not be familiar with what this means, I will summarize it briefly, and then give a little bit more information afterwards.
On Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, the Leader of the Opposition summarized the problem very succinctly in a question yesterday when he said that a top government executive took $400 million of other people's money and then gave it to their own companies, which is problematic. My colleague for South Shore—St. Margarets and members of the industry committee and the ethics committee have been pulling at the threads of this scandal for over a year now, and they have uncovered a massive conflict of interest that the RCMP should be looking at.
This is what happened: Parliament passed a motion to send documents related to the scandal to the RCMP. Parliament passed the motion, so it is essentially law that the documents that Parliament ordered be sent to the RCMP, and Parliament is supreme. In response to that motion, which was adopted by the House, government departments either outright refused the House order or redacted the documents that they turned over, citing various provisions. However, they actually ignored what the House order said to do.
Again, to re-emphasize it, this was a duly passed motion of the House of Commons. This was not some random demand, but a motion that was debated in the House of Commons and passed by the House of Commons, so it is essentially law. The motion was to force these government departments to submit these documents over. However, what did they do? They flipped the bird at Parliament, saying, “Uh-uh, we're not sending this over”, which raises a whole host of questions about why government departments would not be sending incriminating documents over to the RCMP. Anybody who is watching this should understand that this is highly problematic. It is also problematic because it breaches members' privileges here. Essentially, the government is saying no to Parliament.
When parliamentarians understood what had happened, the Conservative House leader raised something called a question of privilege. He essentially was asserting that the House's privilege had been breached because the government had not complied with the previous House order, which was the motion that was passed to compel those documents.
Why is this important? It is important because what the government did here was to say that it would not turn over incriminating documents to the RCMP on a major scandal, in spite of the House voting to do so. However, the Conservative House leader then said that the privileges of this place, or the rights that we have when we are all representing people, in my case, roughly 120,000, were violated because the order of the House was not complied with.
For somebody who might find that this sounds too technical, it is basically like looking at something in the Criminal Code and saying, “Well, I'm going to do that anyway, and you can't punish me.” With that question of privilege, the Speaker ruled that privilege had indeed been breached and that this was a problem, which is a good thing, and where we are today.
We have a motion in front of the House as a result of this whole rigmarole. Just to be perfectly clear, the government could have prevented all of this, this entire waste of resources. We can think about how much time has been wasted in trying to force the government to do something that it should have done already. How could it fix this? It could just hand the documents over. It could hand the documents over, per the law that was passed in this place. However, no, here we are today. We are now debating a motion that would refer this whole matter to a standing committee for review.
Essentially, what the Liberals are trying to do here is rag the puck on handing over incriminating documents that the House has already ordered them to turn over. The other thing that is absolutely bananas and ludicrous to me, completely bonkers crackers time, is that the government is trying to say that this is somehow a breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights. However, other colleagues in this place have done a masterful job of explaining that Parliament is supreme. By that, I mean that Parliament makes the laws in this place. We have legislative authority in this place.
If we back up, I looked through the record to read some of the arguments that happened during that debate, and there is a reason the House had this production of documents ordered. Why is that? It is because there is a big scandal going on, and we want transparency for our constituents. We want the process that led to this scandal to be fixed. We want to ensure that anybody who was involved in perpetrating the scandal faces consequences. Why? There are several reasons.
As legislators, we have fiduciary responsibilities for tax dollars. This was a giant debacle that wasted tax dollars. Also, when somebody breaks the rules or breaks the law, that should be examined and they should face consequences. However, here, the Liberal government is preventing that process from happening. Why is that? I think we all know why. It is because something in those documents probably points the finger directly back at the government ministers or, likely, the Prime Minister's Office.
Where have we seen this movie before? I have seen this movie before. I think Canadians have seen this movie several times before. As other colleagues in this place have mentioned, this is not the first time the Liberal government has been found to have violated the privilege of the House by withholding documents.
As mentioned, there was a huge scandal that happened in early 2021 about two employees of the level 4 biohazard lab in Winnipeg. When I say this, it sounds so crazy, but it is true. They were alleged to have, and found to have had, transferred samples of viruses back to China. These two people were in a biohazard lab where some of the world's most deadly viruses were, such as Ebola and Marburg, and they transferred samples of said viruses back to China.
The House ordered the production of documents around that issue. Again, in that situation, the government flipped the bird to Parliament and said it was not handing those documents over, no way, no how. It actually went so far as to sue your office, Mr. Speaker. The government actually sued the Speaker of the House of Commons to delay the transfer of these documents.
What ended up happening with these documents? Just to refresh everybody's memories, instead of handing the documents over, the Prime Minister called an early election in 2021, which wiped the table of Parliament at that point. It bought him time. The point here is that the government has a pattern of completely dismissing the privileges that we hold in the House of Commons.
Over my time in Parliament, I have learned a lot of tough lessons, but there has been one guiding principle through all of this for me, and that is that my power comes from nowhere else than from the people who I represent, combined with the rules and sanctity of this place, particularly through privilege.
Therefore, when my privilege as a parliamentarian is violated, so are all the privileges of my constituents. That is why it is so important for us to push on these issues. If we live in a world where the government can just willfully ignore the duly instructed outcomes of a legislative body, where all of us are duly elected and have responsibilities to our constituents, if the government can just ignore us, then this is not a democracy but a dictatorship. We are not far from that at this point. It is not hyperbole to say that, by the government delaying the will of Parliament, it is eroding and weakening democracy.