Madam Speaker, earlier this year, the Prime Minister appointed Mr. Carney to be his senior economic adviser, and in that role, Mr. Carney would have unfettered access, in theory, to confidential and sensitive economic information, and he would also have unfettered access to people who make policy decisions on economic policy.
The finance minister has on multiple occasions said that Mr. Carney is a very close friend of hers. In fact he is one of her children's godparents. I do not believe she has disclosed him as a close friend, which is all fine in theory, except for the fact that Mr. Carney has, as my colleague has said, multiple business interests that relate to the types of policies that the finance minister or the Prime Minister would be implementing. Now, in his new role, he is ostensibly going to be implementing or suggesting policy himself.
Therefore, clearly this is a matter for the lobbyist commissioner to look at, and I want to say why. First of all, example one is a fact: Right after Mr. Carney was appointed in the role, The Logic reported that Brookfield, the company that he chairs, had started talks with the federal government and the Canada Pension Plan fund to back a new multi-billion dollar fund that Brookfield is raising, and that Brookfield was seeking 10 billion tax dollars from the federal government for the fund. Mr. Carney is the chair of the board. Now he is sitting with power and access to be able to determine the federal budget and economic policy, and his company is asking for $10 billion. That is problem one.
Problem two is that Mr. Carney also sits on the board of Stripe, a payment service. The federal government just struck a deal with Visa and Mastercard to lower payment processing fees, but Mr. Carney's company, Stripe, has elected not to pass that savings along to small businesses, but hoard it for itself. This begs the question of why the federal government did not require Stripe to do this, as would be done in other jurisdictions. Mr. Carney is on the board. He has access to this exact policy. His purview and his access to the finance minister would give him purview to the policy.
Example number three is a very close relationship with the Telesat CEO, Dan Goldberg. Telesat was just given $6 billion by the federal government, shortly after Mr. Carney's appointment.
As another example, overseas there is actually a company admitting that Mr. Carney lobbies the government for the company's joint business ventures on behalf of Brookfield. The company is HomeServe. The CEO, Richard Harpin, in the Telegraph is reported as saying, “Mark is working on our behalf in Government and he did have a meeting on this with Rachel Reeves”, a U.K. senior economic policy person. “It was covering some other issues and the role of Brookfield as a trillion-dollar investor in the U.K. And so it wasn't just this issue,” the subsidies it was looking for, “but he did mention it.” Mr. Harpin also said, “We want to make sure that there's some money allocated to this [from the federal government], that we've got a clear direction of travel when the Budget comes out on Oct 30.”
Here is the point: There is a man who is beholden to multiple corporations who is now directly advising the finance minister, the Prime Minister and the entire governing party on economic policy, and that is wrong. It is not character assassination to say it is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong. I would say it is a character flaw of the man to not see that. I am sure he believes that is altruistic, but it is not—