Debates of Oct. 9th, 2024

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings on the motion at this time. Accordingly, the debate on the motion will be rescheduled for another sitting. The hon. member will have three minutes to pursue his speech when we next return to the issue.

The House resumed from October 8 consideration of the motion, and of the amendment.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is difficult to keep track of all the scandals, the cover-ups and the government's defiance in the House. The narratives, the consistent and flagrant—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I have a point of order from the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Madam Speaker, I did not want to interrupt the member, but we return to Routine Proceedings, which means the presentation of petitions.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

We return to the debate on privilege. Routine Proceedings will be tomorrow morning.

The hon. member for Thornhill.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member must be new here.

I was saying we cannot keep track of all of the scandals. We are here again, day after day, asking for accountability. “It is hard not to feel disappointed in one's government when every day there is a new scandal”. Do members know who said that? Those were the words of the Prime Minister more than 10 years ago, back when he was somebody who at least pretended to care about honesty and transparency.

That was then and this is now. We are nine years into the Liberal-NDP government and it has proven that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is another day and another scandal, just another reason we are here. Indeed, we are deeply disappointed in the government.

We have $400 million of taxpayer money in question. That is more than in the sponsorship scandal, another scandal the Liberals are well known for in Canadian history. We have over 186 conflicts of interest, as determined by the Auditor General, and more Liberal arrogance and sanctimony that seem to suggest “rules for me, and not for thee”.

We have already been here for a week trying to make the government turn over the documents, at least to the police, and comply with an order from the Speaker. The Speaker ruled that what the government is up to, or whoever's advice it is taking, is against the rules and it should produce these documents for the House. However, the government refuses to listen, ignoring the order right here in the House, an order of Parliament, and a decision of the Speaker, in a blatant effort to obstruct the truth and hide the paper trail.

That is why we are here, day after day. If the Liberals are trying this hard, there must be something really bad in those documents, and we are going to find out somehow. We are going to be here for as long as it takes for the people of this country to get accountability for the corruption, and for the Liberals to turn those documents over to police, so this place can get back to doing the work of Parliament.

The Liberal government wants to send this motion to committee, where it will die an ungraceful death out of the view of Canadians, and Conservatives will not let that happen. We know that when somebody takes something from us, we do not call the committee; we call the police. That is exactly what we are asking the government to do. That is exactly what the order of the House asks it to do.

There is a way to bury this out of sight and out of mind, and out of accountability, to skirt the consequences of whatever the Liberals are hiding. Like I said, we will be here for as long as it takes for Canadians to get the accountability they deserve. We know the Liberal corruption will just continue if we do not do something about it.

The Liberals have proven time and time again that they will put their interests, and the interests of their wealthy, well-connected friends, above everything else, even at a time when Canadians are skipping meals and just trying to get by.

The international trade minister proved that when she spent tens of thousands of dollars on media training provided by a close friend and then claimed not to know she could not do that.

The international development minister proved that when he paid nearly $100,000 to a sister of one of his staffers for media training. He did not even try to cover it up. He gave the money to a food marketing company for “political PR”. Judging by his performance, it certainly was not worth the cost.

The former finance minister Bill Morneau proved it again and again, like when he somehow forgot he owned a luxury villa in France, or when he sold off the shares to a company that he directly influenced as finance minister.

Let us not forget about the Prime Minister, who breached conflict of interest rules while in office. He used his position to get VIP treatment from foreign officials in violation of ethics laws. He did it again during the WE Charity scandal, funnelling nearly a billion dollars into an organization that employed members of his family and members of the finance minister's family.

Who could forget SNC-Lavalin, where the government spent months inappropriately pressuring the Attorney General to give preferential treatment to a big, powerful Liberal-supporting company, despite a paper trail of corrupt actions from here all the way to the Great White North? There was also the former Liberal MP who got over $200 million on a sole-source contract to provide equipment that was never used. I know it is difficult to keep up with the scandals. I find it difficult too and I work here.

Then, of course, there is the arrive scam scandal. The Liberals paid $54 million for an app that could have been built in a weekend for $250,000, an app that did not work and inadvertently sent tens of thousands of people into quarantine. They covered up that scandal, just like they are covering up whatever they are covering up today.

It is a shame that we see all this grift and corruption happening in Ottawa. These are just a few examples. I think about what my family and parents would say about this.

My parents came to this country with nothing. As many members of this chamber know, they were refugees from a Communist eastern European country. My dad drove a taxi and worked in a small business so that my mom, my brother and I could go to school. My parents paid their taxes. They did what they were asked to do by society. They scrimped, saved and worked harder than anybody I have ever known just to give us a better life.

It is those tax dollars that the government is using to ship to Liberal insiders. It is the tax dollars of single mothers who have to work overtime just to have a little bit extra every month so they can pay for food or fill up another tank of gas in their car. It is the tax dollars of seniors who have to make a choice between eating, heating their home or paying for medicine because the cost of living in Canada has become just too high for them. It is the tax dollars of those who recently came to this country with a vision painted for them by the government, only to find that things here are far from what they expected and were promised.

A million people in my province alone used a food bank in the last month. The best that the government could do for them was to take their money and use it for people whose only qualification for it was to have a Liberal membership card. It gave almost $400 million to a board it appointed so its members could give that money to their own companies. That is what we are discussing here today. Then the government goes back to those middle-class families, because it is the middle-class families who are using food banks, to tell them that their taxes are too low and that they should pay even more in taxes so that it can do more of this.

We can debate for days in Parliament to get the government to turn over the evidence of its wrongdoing to the police. It does not even have the basic respect to tell Canadians what is going on with their tax dollars. If it did, we would not be here for the seventh day in a row. It is covering up the evidence again. That is exactly why we are here, and we are going to be here until it produces those documents, as the Speaker said it should.

Speaking of Liberal membership cards, I think we should talk about corruption in the government. I do not know that we can do that without bringing up Mark Carney, carbon tax Carney, as we like to call him, and I think many other Canadians are now calling him.

Just a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister gave carbon tax Carney a plum job of being the new phantom finance minister, giving him a job that he so desperately wanted. He is getting all the perks of being a finance minister. He will get to set economic policy and give the Prime Minister advice. However, he has none of the burdens, such as the pesky ethics and conflict of interest rules that every other member would have to go through if they still worked in the private sector like he does.

That means Mark Carney gets to continue to sit on boards of massive corporations, such as Brookfield, where he can continue the time-worn Liberal tradition of enriching insiders with Canadian tax dollars, the exact same thing the Liberals refuse to produce documents for in the House today. It took him just days to get there. Already, Brookfield is asking Ottawa for another $10-billion new fund. That is a fund that Brookfield would pocket with management fees. We have no idea how much he is going to get paid for that. We have no idea what that looks like and what the returns will be. These are just a few of the jobs. The chair of Brookfield is one of them. The Prime Minister's phantom finance minister is another.

On top of that, Mark Carney has another job. He is going to be the guy who will be in charge of raising dough for the Liberals in the next election campaign, and he is already sliding into people's inboxes asking for money if they are on the Liberal donor list, unless they end up in their spam folder, which it seems most Canadians have by now.

At some point, the breaking of the conflict of interest rules here become so obvious. It is also obvious that there is disappointment in so many other things that the government does. It would start to become comical if it were not such a serious issue. Maybe Mark Carney can call the other Randy and give him some pointers on conflict of interest. This is what I am talking about. We cannot even keep track.

That brings us to where we are today with Sustainable Development Technology Canada. That is the organization we are discussing today. Essentially, it is a billion-dollar slush fund, with Canadian tax money spent at will. It was supposed to give money to companies developing new technology that would grow our economy, help reduce our carbon footprint and all of that, but what actually happened? That is what we do not know. Nearly $400 million was misspent. Ten businesses did not fit eligibility requirements, but they got $60 million. Board members had the rules right in front of them, but they chose not to follow them or were simply unable to.

We have a minister who disregarded all of that, who simply did not pay attention. His job is to pay attention. We know that 82% of contracts analyzed by the Auditor General had conflicts of interest. If there was a school of corruption, these guys would be honour students. The Auditor General raised the red flags. Members from many parties in this House raised red flags too, even the New Democrats, who are practically still best friends with the Liberals. They ripped up the agreement a couple weeks ago but taped it back together, and now we are in a weird time where they sort of yell at them a bit. However, the Liberals refused to respect the order of this House, an order that reigns supreme in this country, an order from the Speaker.

We have been here before. We already knew that Liberals disrespect laws and all kinds of ethics norms for how ministers and the Prime Minister should behave. He broke the law. That is just one more example of how the Liberals disrespect Parliament. We saw it when they tried to use the COVID crisis as an excuse to give themselves unprecedented spending powers, probably to funnel more money into Liberal pockets. We are still unravelling some of that.

That is exactly what happened just months later. The Liberals got caught red-handed in the WE Charity scandal, and rather than face Parliament, they decided to prorogue Parliament in a clear effort to avoid accountability. Some say that maybe there is an expectation they will do that again.

Then there was the Winnipeg lab case, where again and again they were held in contempt of Parliament for refusing to produce documents and stonewalling the investigations of this House. That is just another case of incompetence and corruption, and exactly what we are going to keep talking about on behalf of all Canadians who want accountability and answers from them.

It is clear that there is only one avenue left. The government clearly does not care about the Ethics Commissioner or the Auditor General because it disregards them so often. There used to be something called ministerial accountability in this place. When ministers are involved in scandals, they get promotions, kept in cabinet or shuffled to a different role where maybe they are out of the spotlight for a bit, but nobody ever faces consequences. It is obvious that this extends to the Liberals' disrespect for Parliament too.

It is time to call in the big guns, the RCMP. The Liberals should turn over the documents to the RCMP. If this happened in any business, the business would not have to go to some committee. It would turn everything it had over to the cops, especially if it was telling Canadians that it had nothing to hide and if it was boasting, like the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, who boasts every day in this House that he has had four investigations on this.

However, the Liberals are refusing to provide documents, and their arguments change as the days go on. First it was some weird argument about a charter violation, which is questionable because some ministries turned over documents. It is only charter violations if the government does not want us to see documents that have something really bad in them. I am going to say this very slowly so that people at home understand it: The charter is there to protect people from the government; it is not there to protect the Liberals from giving almost $400 million to their friends.

Their story changed again. I think that the latest refrain is that Parliament does not have to demand the documents because the cops do not want all the documents. If we have nothing to hide, then turn over the documents. I am sure there is something to hide, because otherwise we would not be in the seventh day of speaking at length to this very motion about an obstruction and a defiance of a Speaker's ruling.

The Liberals should be able to turn the documents over to the police so Canadians can get the accountability they deserve and so we can get this place back to work for all the people who cannot afford to eat, for the two million people who use a food bank across the country over the course of a month, and for those who cannot afford a home because the price of a home has doubled over the last nine years.

The price of rent has doubled. The price of a mortgage payment has more than doubled, with inflation and interest rates rampant and out of control over the last number of years, putting Canadians further and further behind. There is crime, chaos, drugs and disorder in our streets. What is happening in this country, with the burning of a Canadian flag in one of our largest cities, in front of an art gallery, where people shout in the streets now, “death to Canada”?

Those are the things, the work, Parliament should be getting back to. Some ministers do not have the courage to get up and condemn them, and there is an awful lot of silence from everybody in the backbenches on issues like that. Instead they get up and make argument after argument. Some make less sense than the last ones they put forward, and their story changes every single day.

Conservatives will be here for as long as it takes for Canadians to get the accountability, for the Liberals to turn over the documents to the police so they know who got rich and which Liberal insiders with Liberal memberships got rich with $400 million of tax money. That is what we are here to do. I assure Canadians that when they get the answers to those questions, they are not going to like them.

The Auditor General has only so much power. It is Parliament that is supreme and can order the documents, because we, the people here in the chamber seats, are elected by the people who want accountability from the government. If the government believed in the institutions that it purports to protect, it would trust the RCMP to redact whatever it needed to redact to keep the privacy of those who made no trouble at all, and to make sure that those who need to be accountable to the people actually face justice for potential criminality.

That is why we are here today. That is why we are going to continue to be here on behalf of Canadians: to get accountability. The Liberals should turn over the documents to the police so we can get back to work.

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

Mr. Speaker, we are here because Navdeep Bains appointed someone who had been an adviser to Stephen Harper, to Brian Mulroney and to Jim Flaherty, all Conservatives, if the member is not aware, to a position which is arm's-length. A short time thereafter, issues were raised, and when they became known to the minister, the board was replaced, there was a freeze on new funding, and there were two independent internal reviews.

The Auditor General has been looking at this, and there is the issue in regard to the RCMP's looking into the matter. The reason we are actually here right now is that we did provide information to the committee. Yes, it was redacted, just like Stephen Harper redacted information on numerous occasions. The Conservatives say that this is not good enough and that they want the information, but not for members of Parliament. They want to get the information and give it directly to the RCMP. The Auditor General and the RCMP have disagreed with the tactic that the Conservative Party is raising today.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the only person who is stonewalling Parliament is the Prime Minister in his refusal to hand over these documents. Let me correct some of the misinformation we continue to hear from this member over the course of this debate. First of all, SDTC received a clean bill of health in 2017, and it was only after hand-picked Liberal board members ended up on the board that we are even having this conversation. SDTC is not arm's-length. The minister recommends board appointments. The Liberals recommend other Liberals, who funnel money into their Liberal companies. That is what we want to get to the bottom of, and I am not sure why the stonewalling. The member can go to the Prime Minister and say, “Let's just give those documents to Parliament, like the Speaker asked us to.”

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her fine speech.

My question is simple. I do not understand why the government does not simply produce the documents. Why is it dragging its feet like this? The order from members was clear. The government needs to comply with that order, but it is not doing so. It seems as though the government is not really bothered by the fact that it has lost control of the legislative agenda of the House.

What does my colleague think is the reason for that?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there must be something really bad in those documents if the Liberals are refusing to turn them over to the House, as per an order from the House. We have seen this story play out before. I mentioned it throughout my remarks. The stonewalling of this party's members to withhold information from Canadians only suggests there is wrongdoing. If they had nothing to hide, then they would hand over those documents.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Mr. Speaker, congratulations to the hon. member for Thornhill for such a precise and detailed speech about an important issue. There are so many scandals that people have stopped counting, and it is still going on day after day. There is never a week without a new scandal coming up, and the size of the scandals is getting bigger and bigger. We are now talking about $400 million. My fear is that corruption under the government's watch is becoming a culture in Canada. Will the hon. member tell us what it means for corruption to become a culture and how much of a threat it is to our democratic system and to the way we do business in the government?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I disagree with my hon. colleague. I do not think corruption is a culture in Canada. I think corruption is a culture in the Liberal Party. Soon Canadians will have the opportunity to go to a carbon tax election and send each and every one packing, to axe the tax, to build the homes, to fix the budget and to stop the crime.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, notice the member continues to stick to a script that is misleading Canadians. The RCMP and the Auditor General of Canada have made it very clear what the Conservatives are asking the Government of Canada to do, through the legislature, is get information unredacted and sent directly to the RCMP. Both of those independent institutions have made it very clear we should not be doing what the Conservative Party is suggesting. Canadians have rights, and Conservatives might not care about those rights, but we in the Liberal benches do.

Why does the Conservative Party continue to ignore the advice of the RCMP and Canada's Auditor General?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians do have rights, and they have the right to get accountability for the money the government spent, their money. This place reigns supreme. On the documents that the government should give to the police, if it had nothing to hide then it would not be afraid of doing that. To say that this is a violation of charter rights is insane. It is not there to protect the government, it is there to protect Canadians.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague said that corruption is not a feature of this place generally but of the Liberal Party. I was in the house when the Harper government, the Conservative government, was found in contempt twice for exactly the type of issue that is before the House being debated, which is refusing to produce documents it had been ordered to produce by the House. It concerned Afghan detainees and it also related to the price of crime bills.

Can the member tell me, was it corruption in the Conservative Party that led to the finding of contempt in this Parliament when the Conservatives refused to hand over documents, or is that just ancient history that does not have anything to do with today?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was not in the House at the time, but I was in the lobby at the very time when the NDP used to be an opposition party in this country. I remember that really clearly. It was before they married the Liberals and joined their culture of corruption.

If they are not going to stand up against corruption, then we are finally going to elect a government in this country that gets accountability for people and stands against the culture of corruption in the Liberal Party.

[Dave Epp, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

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—”

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order that I am sure you can anticipate. The member knows full well we are not supposed to be using members' names.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Chris d'Entremont]

The hon. member can retract and restart that.

The hon. member for Chatham-Kent—Leamington has the floor.

[Dave Epp, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do so retract.

As The Economic Times reported at the time, “[So-and-so's] time in India was criticised for its lack of official business, not to mention the excessive photo-ops and insensitive overuse of Indian clothing.” Canadians were once again on the hook for what appeared to be more of a lavish family vacation than a diplomatic bilateral meeting. The fiasco included having his own celebrity chef flown in from Vancouver.

However, all of this pales in comparison to the Prime Minister inviting convicted terrorist Jaspal Atwal to dinner. Mr. Atwal was convicted of attempted murder in Canada in 1987 after he tried to assassinate a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister. It turned out that Atwal was a long-time Liberal supporter and activist, a former donor to the party and a former Liberal board member for the electoral district of Surrey, British Columbia.

There has not been accountability for the India fiasco, and Canada was left red-faced with embarrassment and $1.66 million in debt. There are simply too many Liberal breaches of ethics violations to name them all here today. I have not touched upon the Julie Payette fiasco, nor the Minister of National Defence's interference in the Nova Scotia shooting tragedy. Members will recall that he pressured the then-police commissioner Brenda Lucki to publicly release information about specific firearms used in the shooting to advance the federal government's gun control legislation.

Following the resignation of the former ethics commissioner, Mario Dion, who I believe resigned due to overwork, the Liberal government decided to appoint Martine Richard, the sister-in-law of the current public safety minister, to replace him. Again, is that not a conflict of interest to anyone? Where is the accountability?

This is why common-sense Conservatives have raised this question of privilege. This is why we are here today, why we were here yesterday and the day before, and why we will be here tomorrow and in the coming weeks, if necessary. This is why we call on the government, SDTC and the Auditor General to hand over all documents, unredacted, related to the Prime Minister's green slush fund to the RCMP.

The argument has been made that handing over these documents breaches the constitutional rights of individuals. It is time. The government recognizes that the Constitution was designed to protect individuals from the government, not the government from individuals. It is time for the government to come clean with Canadians. We have had enough with the cover-ups and enough with them gorging themselves, their families and their friends at the public trough.

The Liberals need to hand over the documents. We want to get back to the work of the people in this chamber. It is not Conservatives obstructing this work. All it would take would be for the Prime Minister to hand over the documents. We want accountability.

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

Mr. Speaker, in listening to my colleague across the way, the first thing that comes across my mind during the character assassination of a number of individuals is that there is a very long list of Conservatives as well. If I had a bit of time, my list could be longer than the member's list.

An example of that would be Stephen Harper going to India. Maybe he figured they did not have cars in India. He actually put a car on a plane so he would have a car in India. What was the cost? It was $1 million for a car. Is that a scandal? What about the anti-terrorism scandal, the Phoenix scandal, the G8 spending scandal, the ETS scandal, the F-35 scandal, the Senate scandal, and the multitude of election scandals? All of them were Conservatives.

My question is related to the question the New Democratic member posed about the member's colleague. Stephen Harper did the very same thing in not wanting to provide documents that were not redacted. Our argument is a whole lot stronger than what Stephen Harper's was, yet the Conservatives will not even say that was a problem. We know it was, in fact, a scandal.

Would the member not agree that the Conservatives, including his leader, who was a good friend of Stephen Harper's and a member of his cabinet, were wrong in denying access to that information, or does that principle not apply when they are in government?

[Dave Epp, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was not complete and I acknowledge that. I forgot Frank Baylis and the respirators. My colleague mentioned carbon tax Carney. I also did not mention carbon tax Carney.

I must give my hon. colleague credit. For a week, he has been responding with the same arguments that have been disproven over and over again. He mentioned former prime minister Stephen Harper and the Senate scandal, the biggest scandal, where the Conservatives got caught trying to pay back $60,000, money that ended up being appropriate, although the optics were terrible, which is why they did what they did, which was to pay back to the public treasury $60,000. The taxpayers were paid back.

The rules were changed, actually, to be far more proper, but in the end it was found that it was legally taken. The optics were bad. I acknowledge that. That is the biggest scandal from the previous government. That was a small one. We were getting caught paying money back to the taxpayer. I did not take the time in my 20 minutes to add up the millions upon millions upon millions of dollars that I articulated, let alone the scandals that I did not have time to get to.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, the member might want to Google search “ETS scandal”. That was $400 million.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Chris d'Entremont]

Maybe the day is getting long. We are talking about who has the bigger scandal. Maybe we should all rethink this. I also want to bring to everyone's attention that we are taking a lot of time asking questions and we are taking a lot of time answering them. I know that people want to participate in the debate.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques.