Madam Speaker, it is always an honour and privilege to rise in the House of Commons to speak on behalf of the great people of southwest Saskatchewan. I have done so many times before, and there seems to be a recurring theme that when I rise in this place, it is to talk about Liberal scandals. It has happened over and over again. If Liberals want to keep abusing the taxpayer, Conservatives are going to keep pointing it out. We will do it as long as it takes and as many times as we have to until they agree to comply with the will of the House of Commons.
What are we here for today? It is about Sustainable Development Technology Canada and the Liberals' failure to produce documents demanded by this House. More than $400 million were funnelled to Liberal-owned and Liberal insider corporations. When Liberals say they are here to deliver for Canadians, what they really mean is they are here to deliver for their friends to make sure they get the first crack at the taxpayer's dollar.
There are public scandals like the Prime Minister's blackface, when he told reporters, “I should have known better, but I didn't.” There are corruption scandals like the SNC-Lavalin affair, where the Prime Minister became the only prime minister to violate the Conflict of Interest Act, which he has done multiple times. The list goes on. In fact, the list is so long that it makes up more than one-third of all corruption scandals at the federal level in our nation's history. One-third of corruption scandals have been committed by the current government in the last nine years.
I wish I could say that the corruption stops there, but it does not. On April 9, 2020, the government received an unsolicited proposal for a youth program from WE Charity. Just a couple of weeks later, the Prime Minister announced a student grant program for this very proposal. In June, when the program officially launched, the Prime Minister said it was not a conflict of interest, despite the charity paying his family members to speak at events, totalling $425,000 in expenses and money paid out. WE Charity co-founder Craig Kielburger also happened to have donated nearly $2,500 to the Prime Minister's leadership campaign back in 2013, and yet we are supposed to take the word of the Prime Minister when he claims his decision on involvement with them was not a conflict of interest. That is not going to happen.
The then finance minister, Bill Morneau, also had two daughters with ties to or working for WE Charity at the time of the scandal. He took paid vacations and attended special dinners, and he did not think it would be wrong to do so. All the former finance minister had to say on the subject afterward was that, in retrospect, he should have recused himself from the discussion. It is not so easy to tell the public someone should have made a different decision after the person has already made it, especially when it is a bad decision. At what point do elected officials need to be expected to make good decisions and not just constantly apologize for making bad ones? As the Prime Minister routinely says, we can all learn from this.
The WE Charity was put in charge of a $900-million grant, with an estimated operating cost of $19 million. However, as we learned, it could have been $43 million as it was under-reported. WE has three branches, including one in the U.K. and one in the U.S. and between those branches, more money has been sent to the organization in Canada than abroad, where it claims to be doing charitable work. Where it claims to do the most charitable work, in Kenya, it is not even listed in the top 50 NGOs. Instead, it is known for North American and European celebrity visits and photo-ops, as a reporter from the national newspaper puts it.
WE Charity also claimed it sent medical supplies as another way it spent on charitable efforts, but its U.S. tax filings in 2019 have no such purchases, and it refuses to make its Canadian statements public. The Prime Minister then prorogued Parliament to halt further investigations into the WE scandal. I wish I could say this was a poor decision on who the Liberals wanted to do business with, but they have shown time and time again that they deliberately do business with either corrupt or conflicted organizations, and it is not until they are publicly exposed that they claim to have regrets about their actions. Like the Prime Minister said, we can all learn from this.
As parents, we try to teach our kids to be sincerely sorry for their actions and not just simply for getting caught. What parents want to see are corrective actions, steps and measures they have taken to make sure that this does not happen again, and yet here we are in a gridlock once again over more Liberal corruption.
It seems to be something that the Prime Minister never learned, possibly was never taught. Either way, he is the one who is in charge of leading this country. We know that a fish rots from the head down and it seems to be true in the case of the government.
Before the WE Charity it was SNC-Lavalin. After the WE Charity it was the Manitoba lab. Then it was the arrive scam. Then it was appointing a sister-in-law as the Ethics Commissioner. Today, it is the green slush fund. What kind of a government thinks it is okay to appoint a sitting cabinet minister's sister-in-law to be ethics commissioner amidst potential investigations into conflict of interest allegations? It is a government that is trying to hide its corruption. That is just unacceptable, no matter what the member for Winnipeg North says.
There have been so many scandals, yet the NDP-Liberals have found ways to avoid accountability for their corruption, the latest being the withholding of documents that belong to the public to hide the names and information of people involved in this corruption. Let us take a look back at how they have avoided accountability before this.
With respect to SNC-Lavalin, the Prime Minister pressured the justice minister to interfere with the lawsuit to get away without prosecution.
With respect to the WE Charity, the government prorogued Parliament to avoid further investigations into the scandal.
When Canadians demanded accountability with respect to the convoy, the Prime Minister responded by enacting the Emergencies Act to avoid being held to account for trampling on the rights and freedoms of Canadians.
The Prime Minister seems to believe that this House belongs to him instead of the people and that is a very serious problem.
In fact, when it came to the Winnipeg lab, he even took the Speaker of the House of Commons to court. The only thing that stopped that from happening was an election conveniently called by the Prime Minister.
Canadians should not have to worry about the institutions of their nation stealing from them. The government has robbed the taxpayers and has made no effort to make things right or to take accountability. The Prime Minister has still not demanded that the taxpayers receive their money back from the arrive scam scandal. Why is it that it is always the taxpayers who get stuck paying for the government's unethical behaviour?
Today, we are in the House debating a privilege motion on the corrupt Liberal green slush fund, the SDTC, and how it laundered more than $400 million of taxpayer money to the Liberals' friends and, in some cases, their own businesses. They refuse to hand over unredacted documents as per the will of the House of Commons and the Speaker's order. These documents, along with everything in this House, belong to the people. They are not the Liberal government's property and it has no right to keep them from the taxpayer, especially seeing how these hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent belong to the taxpayer. The government has no money. It only has taxpayers dollars that it has taken from the taxpayer.
The SDTC has become a playground for conflicts of interest. In 2022, the SDTC appointed Michael Denham, a previous appointee to the BDC by the Minister of International Trade. Mr. Denham has been a generous donor to the Liberal Party, donating thousands of dollars, including to a violator of the Conflict of Interest Act, former finance minister Bill Morneau, who is now “Bill no more”. It is no wonder the Liberal government has been responsible for more than a third of all scandals at the federal level in all of our country's history.
A board member at the SDTC, Stephen Kukucha, not only helped funnel taxpayer dollars into Liberal insider corporations, but has made hundreds of donations totalling in the tens of thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party, including donating to the Prime Minister's leadership campaign in 2013.
There is Annette Verschuren, the director of the board, who was, as members can guess, also a Liberal donor.
Then there is the example of Mr. Kielburger, who invested in the Prime Minister's success to be the head of the Liberal Party and has benefited greatly from receiving either money or positions years later from the government. Somehow it does not occur to the Liberals that this could be wrong, going even so far as to tell the public in the WE scandal that it was not a conflict of interest. I wonder how many others have gotten a return on their investment from the government that we do not even know about yet. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant.
It must be nice to have friends like the Liberals do. It is “I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine”. It should be hard to believe that in just nine years, to say it again, the Liberals have committed more than one-third of all the public corruption scandals in the entire history of the federal government. It should be hard to believe that they think the House belongs to them and are above accountability for their actions. It should be hard to believe that they have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money and have given it to their friends and their own companies. However, it is not, when we look at how the people who are appointed to arm's-length institutions are often donors, in-laws or close friends. Just as bad as conflicts of interest is using the executive powers of the House to appoint insider donors and friends to oversee the accountability that is supposed to prevent this kind of theft from happening in the first place.
Time and time again, those in the Liberal government have proven that they have absolutely no regard for the sanctity of this chamber or for the offices they hold. The Liberal government has managed to tally up, all in all, one-third of all Canadian ethics violations, while having been in government for less than a decade. Liberal grifting knows no bounds. There has been an ethics scandal every single year the Liberal government has been in office.
One of my first speeches in the House of Commons after I was elected as a member of Parliament was about the Joe Peschisolido report, which was a report from the Ethics Commissioner about former Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido, who the Ethics Commissioner concluded was involved in serial ethics breaches, meaning more than one. In other words, it was happening on a regular basis, permeating from the top down, clearly from the Prime Minister to the rest of his cabinet. I talked then about how as a new MP it was unfortunate that what I was speaking about early in my term was the culture of corruption the Prime Minister was continuing to demonstrate over and over again to his caucus and the bureaucracy, then allowing it to happen within the Liberals' own ranks.
From coast to coast, and especially across the southwest, Canadians are struggling more than ever. Just this morning at committee, I heard from witnesses explaining the debt that Canadians are digging themselves into just to afford essentials like food, clothing and shelter. All the while, Liberal insiders are being funnelled taxpayer money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite scandal after scandal and report after report, the Liberals still have absolutely no remorse for what they have done. The house of cards that sits across this chamber keeps trucking along. It is just insane. The Liberals do the same thing over and over again, yet we expect something to change and it never does. Maybe this time they will obey the rules, listen to the will of Parliament and release the documents, but so far, no. Canadians know this, though. Canadians can see the rotten-to-the-core Liberal government and they are ready for change.
It is worth pointing out the complacency of the Liberals' coalition partner the New Democrats, who are so terrified of facing Canadians and losing their pensions that they have refused to help bring the government down. In fact, it is 116 days until the leader of the NDP's pension will be vested. He has been making news lately by telling Canadians that he is absolutely not interested in bringing down the Liberal government. In 116 days from now, on February 25, is he magically going to grow a spine, be willing to take real action on behalf of Canadians and bring the tired, corrupt government down, or is he going to keep propping it up? Are the New Democrats going to pass the election reform bill, which will lock in a change to the election date so the NDP leader can make sure that his caucus members and members on the Liberal side are guaranteed to lock in their pensions, or will they do the right thing and call a carbon tax election at the soonest available opportunity? Is he going to put his pension above Canadians? I guess time will tell.
The Liberals hate the thought of accountability, whether it comes from this chamber or from their own caucus. The former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and the former president of the Treasury Board Jane Philpott were kicked out of caucus for doing the right thing when it came to SNC-Lavalin. As I said, one-third of all federal scandals in Canadian history belong to the Prime Minister and his cronies. The Prime Minister has had as many scandals in his nine years as Canada's first 20 prime ministers did over a span of 137 years. No matter what way we look at it, it is impressive that he was able to do that. That is not to mention that he has added more money to the national debt than every other prime minister combined. I guess when one is involved in that many scandals, of course it is going to cost the taxpayers money.
I would like to remind the House what happened in April: For the first time in over a century, the House called someone to the bar for questioning. That man, Kristian Firth, exercised absolutely no remorse over lining his pockets with taxpayer money.
Even when the most exclusive powers of the House are used, the Liberals do not care. Their friends do not care. They fundamentally believe that they are above accountability and certainly think they are above the will of the House. It is disgraceful. The man summoned to the House back in 1913 was imprisoned because he failed to answer the questions of the House, yet today, the Liberals and the people they empower do it shamelessly and just walk out.
At the core of this debate is the Speaker's ruling on September 26 declaring that this place's privileges had been violated. For nearly 350 years, the supremacy of Parliament was something cherished in Westminster systems like ours across the world. Here in Canada, our government, the executive branch, does not operate outside the confines of this place. It is formed by it. The Prime Minister and his cabinet sit just across the way, where every day they face the scrutiny of the opposition in question period. The centralization of power that the Prime Minister is overseeing should worry everyone in the chamber and everybody across this country, because it flies right in the face of how our system of government works. Parliament is supreme and the Liberals must respect it.
The government is a public entity and everything in the House belongs to the public. When will the Liberals stop hiding their corruption and stop withholding documents that do not even belong to them so the House can get back to work and Canadians can get the answers they are owed?
Another public entity out there, which hits a bit more closely to home, is Parks Canada. It operates Grasslands National Park. If we want to talk about the way the Liberals are abusing the authority they have, we can look at the species at risk. They are trying to tell Canadians and the ranchers down in the Val Marie area that the prairie dog is a species at risk that must be protected. However, a quick Google search shows that the prairie dog is not even a native species to Canada and it is not just surviving but thriving. We see it from the southern tip of Saskatchewan all the way down to Mexico and all the through the central states, yet the bureaucracy the government is overseeing is saying it is a species at risk.
What are they doing with the sage grouse? They are saying that these two species coexist. There is a way to prove they do not coexist and that the prairie dog does not belong in Grasslands National Park in the way the government says it does: The prairie dog likes to eat the root of the sagebrush. Sage grouse, which are called sage grouse for a reason, like sagebrush for its shelter and protection. When the prairie dog eats the sagebrush root, it turns into a tumbleweed and blows away, leaving the sage grouse exposed, at risk and in danger. When Parks Canada is trying to protect another species at risk, namely the sage grouse, it is creating all kinds of issues because of the way it is managing.
Let us talk about the new bridge being built at one of the historical ranches. Parks Canada is building it in a location that was not even recommended by the local RM but decided to plow through with it anyway. There is another species at risk out there called the nighthawk. All of their nests and where they like to be are right in the path of this bridge, and Parks Canada is building right through it. It said forget it; it is building this bridge there anyway.
Parks Canada is deliberately ignoring another species at risk, and it is doing it for triple the cost of what the municipality is able to build similar bridges for. If it would have accepted the proposal of the municipality, it would have had the bridge already done and done for a third of the cost, but, no, we have to get more bureaucracy involved and make it way more expensive.
Rather than just take up the local perspective, the views of the locals, the people at Parks Canada would rather take a view that, again, creates excessive and unnecessary spending. They would rather kick the ranchers out of the park. They say that bureaucrats can manage ranch land better than producers who have been doing it for way longer than the bureaucracy has even been around. It is shameful. If they want to prove to Canadians that they actually care, they would listen to locals. They would listen to the producers down in Grasslands National Park. They would listen to the RM of Val Marie and do what is right.
