Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour and a pleasure to bring your sister-in-law's voice to the chamber, along with the voices of all the other constituents from Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
The Speaker has made a ruling that House business must be suspended until the government hands over all documents related to the SDTC scandal to the RCMP. The Auditor General of Canada found that the Prime Minister had turned Sustainable Development Technology Canada into a slush fund for Liberal insiders, with $400 million paid out to them. There was a total of 186 cases of conflict of interest, an astounding number.
I will be asking this more than once: Where is the accountability? The Auditor General made it clear that the blame for this scandal falls on the industry minister, who “did not sufficiently monitor” the contracts given to Liberal insiders.
A July article in the National Post reads: “The former chairperson of a scandal-plagued clean tech fund...was found to have ‘improperly furthered’ the interests of companies she was associated with by failing to recuse herself from the board’s funding decisions, according to the ethics commissioner’s latest report.”
It goes on:
...Annette Verschuren resigned as the president of the board of directors of Sustainable Development Technology Canada...late last year when it was announced that she was the subject of an ethics investigation.... [E]thics commissioner Konrad van Finckenstein found that Verschuren “failed to comply” with some provisions of the Conflict of Interest Act....
She resigned, but the industry minister did not follow suit; he announced that he would not resign. Why was it appropriate for Ms. Verschuren to resign but inappropriate for the minister to do the same?
The previous speaker, my colleague, referenced ministerial accountability. Where is it? This brings back some memories of the sponsorship scandal. Members may recall that the year was 1996 when the Liberals founded the sponsorship program to promote federalism in Quebec. Two Auditor General reports found that the Liberals, under Jean Chrétien, had overseen the spending of $250 million through the sponsorship program between 1997 and 2001. Of those funds, $100 million was redirected to the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party. The scandal led Canadians to vote out the Liberals for the next decade, in favour of Conservatives, who could be trusted with the public purse strings.
Now history is repeating itself. As the early twentieth-century writer and philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It seems that the government has forgotten the past.
Let us fast-forward to today. Here we are once again. Apparently the Liberals feel that they are “entitled to [their] entitlements”, a phrase infamously coined by former cabinet minister David Dingwall. The scandals are numerous and mounting. What I am incredulous about is that, over the past nine years, there has been no accountability from the top. Again, I reference ministerial, or even higher, accountability.
The Prime Minister has thrown those who did not succumb to his will under the bus. Let us think of the Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould and the Hon. Dr. Jane Philpott. However, he himself has not taken any responsibility for what is arguably the most scandal-plagued and corrupt government in recent Canadian political history. I have a laundry list of Liberal scandals to validate my point. I only have 20 minutes, but I am going to take a crack at touching upon just a few of the conflicts of interest and corruption cases here.
Again, I am going to ask this: Where is the accountability? In 2020, a firm in the riding of the then minister of public services and procurement was paid $150 million for COVID-19 vaccines that were never delivered. Medicago was that firm, and it received $173 million in research money, for a total of $323 million in federal aid. Medicago was to build a vaccine factory, but that never transpired. Once again, the Liberals shut down any investigation into why taxpayers paid such an amount and received nothing in return. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common pattern for the government.
Bill Morneau is another former minister who was scandal-prone. He began his political career by violating the Elections Act, for which he was fined. He participated in a series of “department-supported events” in his official capacity as finance minister during the pre-election period for the 2019 election. This “caused the expenses related to those events to benefit the [Liberal Party of Canada]”. This is the same minister who forgot to declare that he had a villa in France. I am to address all questions through the Speaker, so Mr. Speaker, have you ever forgotten a house?
Mr. Morneau also sponsored Bill C-27, which just happened to increase the value of pensions sold by the minister's company Morneau Shepell. When the bill was tabled in the House of Commons, the value of Morneau Shepell shares jumped. Coincidentally, the Minister Morneau held 21 million dollars' worth of those shares. Conflict of interest, anyone? Again, I reiterate, where is the accountability?
CBC reported that when former minister David Lametti left cabinet, many people were wondering why. We have since learned that the former attorney general cancelled a verdict of first-degree murder against Jacques Delisle, a former judge, even though all legal experts were against this decision. Mr. Lametti and the government refused to answer why he had done that, even though Delisle later pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
I am not done yet. In fact, I am just getting started.
The disregard and breaches of ethics kept on coming. In December 2022, the Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development of Canada was found guilty by the Ethics Commissioner of giving contracts to her best friend.
Who can forget, of course, the case of the other Randy? Last July, the ethics committee uncovered text messages showing that the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages continued to direct his company while he was minister. In another sheer coincidence, his company received nearly $120 million in government grants and contracts. Again, conflict of interest, anyone? Where is the accountability? The minister testified that the Randy referenced in these texts was not him, but another Randy who just happened to work at the company that he had a 50% ownership stake in. At the following committee hearing, his business partner testified that, really, only one Randy ever worked at this company and that was the minister.
Friends and family of Liberal cabinet ministers have also inappropriately benefited from their ethical lapses. The Minister of Transport failed to report, as required under the Conflict of Interest Act, that her husband John Knowlton, a director at LifeLabs, was among several businesses awarded COVID-testing contracts, as confirmed by the health minister. Blacklock's reported that LifeLabs received COVID-testing contracts worth $66,307,424 on June 23 and a separate $1.9-million contract on August 20 when the transport minister was the minister of public works. It is another case of “nothing to see here, folks”. Conflict of interest, anyone? Where is the accountability?
Who can forget Scott Brison when he was President of the Treasury Board? He was trying to block the approval for a navy supply ship that was being built at Davie shipyard in favour of the powerful Irving shipyard. He used to chair one of the investment firms as his spouse sat on the board of directors. He then worked with the government to have Vice-Admiral Norman charged with a breach of trust before Vice-Admiral Norman was exonerated of all charges in 2019. Is there no limit to the lengths to which government members will go to to enrich the lives of themselves and of their friends?
I would be negligent if I failed to mention Navdeep Bains, whose name has come up in earlier interventions. He is another former Liberal cabinet minister. As minister of innovation, science and industry, he pledged that the government would demand that the big three, Bell Canada, Rogers Communications Canada and Telus Communications, would lower their prices by 25% in the next two years for cellphone plans that offer between two and six gigabytes of data. In April 2023, former minister Bains was appointed by Rogers to its executive leadership team. The hiring of Mr. Bains does raise concerns, especially in the light of the government's approval of the Rogers-Shaw merger. Did anyone on the government side of the House dare to question the blatant conflict of interest here? Where is the accountability?
Of course, no Liberal scandal chronicle would be complete without mentioning the SNC-Lavalin affair and the WE Charity scandal. I have previously mentioned how former ministers Wilson-Raybould and Philpott were victims of the government's corrupt behaviour. SNC-Lavalin was more than just breaching ethics rules.
The Prime Minister made a travesty of the separation of the power between his office and that of the Attorney General's office. The PM ignored the independence of the Attorney General to help his friends at SNC avoid criminal prosecution. In doing so, he orchestrated a campaign to pressure the Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to overrule the independent public prosecution. No one should be above the law, not even the Prime Minister.
Another infamous scandal was, of course, the WE Charity. This time, it was the Prime Minister's family who benefited greatly. Margaret Trudeau was paid approximately $250,000 for speaking at 28 events, while the Prime Minister's brother Alexandre spoke at eight events and received about $32,000. In testimony before MPs on July 28, Marc Kielburger said Sophie Grégoire Trudeau was reimbursed more than $200,000 in expenses for appearances at WE Charity events, and the WE Charity covered $41,000 in costs for Bill Morneau and his family in 2017 for trips to Ecuador and Kenya to review the organization's humanitarian work.
I would be remiss if I did not touch upon the notorious arrive scam and GC Strategies, the Liberal-friendly company that charged at least $60 million for the app, which was to have cost $80,000. To add insult to injury, 76% of the contractors did zero work on the app. Once again, the Canadian taxpayer footed the bill with zero accountability on behalf of the government.
I am still not done. Unbelievably, there are more illicit Liberal practices to come.
Let us talk about the Prime Minister's Christmas vacation at the Aga Khan's island and the subsequent $50 million in federal funding the Aga Khan Foundation has received since 2016 from the government. The vacation lasted until January 4, 2017, eight days in total. It was later disclosed that the government expenditures for the trip had amounted to $215,000. The Prime Minister then adopted the position that he and the Aga Khan were close friends, and the trip was of a more personal nature, even though they had not seen each other in 30 years.
It is more of the “entitled to my entitlements” philosophy, I guess.
The Prime Minister has a penchant for luxurious vacations. Most Canadians would agree he is justified in taking a vacation; I certainly do. However, I do not believe they would agree he should satisfy his champagne tastes on the taxpayers' dime. Although it took some persistent digging through access to information, the PMO finally admitted it was the Prime Minister and his wife who stayed in a $6,000-per-night hotel suite while attending the funeral for our sovereign Queen Elizabeth II.
The stay at the Corinthia London hotel became just another shameful display of a lack of respect for average Canadians by billing them an astounding $400,000. The Prime Minister and his office were not forthcoming with these details. Witness what we are doing here today and for the past week. Again, it is an abhorrent lack of accountability.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the disastrous trip to India by Canada's first family. As The Economic Times reported at the time, “Trudeau’s time in India was criticised for its lack of official business, not to mention—”