Mr. Speaker, the rules of the House do not allow us to say the name of a current member of Parliament, but they do allow us to say the name of a former member of Parliament, so I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself by using his name.
The time will come. The time is soon coming. They cannot put it off forever. As one former British parliamentarian said, “even these turkeys won’t be able to prevent Christmas.” We will have an election, and when we have an election, Canadians will have an opportunity to be heard on the record of the failing government.
I was referring to a quotation saying that even turkeys cannot keep Christmas from coming forever. Canadians will have affordable food, including turkey, once again. These are our priorities on this side of the House.
What are the priorities of the Liberals across the way? They are willing to paralyze Parliament to protect themselves from the proper investigation of their corruption scandals. Conservatives have put forward a motion, a motion that was adopted because all opposition parties voted in favour of it, to order the production of certain documents regarding the government's SDTC scandal.
Let us just break down what this scandal is. For Canadians who are less familiar, what is the green slush fund scandal? This is hard to believe, but we had a group of insiders, appointed by the Liberal government to a panel, and they were responsible for handing out money, taxpayers' money, to various companies. They decided to give those funds to their own companies.
It is like a group of us were sitting around the table saying, “We will first vote some money for my company, then we will vote some money for your company, and then we will vote some money for your company.” In some cases, the person, while their company was being voted on, would step out of the room, but in other cases, they did not. We have instances of people actually voting in favour of giving money to the company they owned. They said they were in favour of that.
This is the essence of the SDTC scandal. There was $400 million. We had people sitting around a table, who were appointed by these Liberals, charged with handing this money out, and deciding to give that money to themselves. It is outrageous.
In times past, this would have been the major decisive story. Today, there are so many scandals, it is almost like it is a strategy. These Liberals thought, if they were to be the cause of as many scandals as possible, maybe there could be dispersed attention on them. With this alone, this green slush fund scandal, it is incredible what these Liberals and their elite insider friends thought they could get away with.
It is part of a culture of corruption that we have seen under the NDP-Liberal government. The members think they can get away with anything. Having tried to buy off the media with subsidies, they think they can do anything and not be held accountable for it. However, Canadians are waking up. Canadians are hearing about these stories, and I know Canadians are demanding accountability and change because cost is up, crime is up, corruption is up and time is up. It is time for an election to throw out these carbon tax, conflict of interest Liberals and replace them with a common-sense Conservative government.
Let us talk about a few of the other scandals that are going on. I want to share a few comments about the indigenous procurement problem, the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal. This really is one of the biggest scandals we have seen yet from a Liberal government. We have a situation with government contracting and the policy in place that says there is a 5% target, meaning that 5% of government contracts should be going to indigenous companies.
The problem is that these Liberals have allowed many non-indigenous companies to take advantage of that program by pretending to be indigenous. We have various arrangements that have allowed this to happen. We have some some who are outright pretending to be indigenous. We also have instances of abuse of a joint venture, and then we have instances of shell companies. An example of abuse of a joint venture might be a company with 200 people in it, which is a fully non-indigenous company, and then that company being in a joint venture with a company that has one person, and that company is considered an indigenous company.
Therefore there is a joint venture in which the vast majority of the work, the benefit and the profit are going to the obviously much larger partner, but it is entering into a so-called joint venture, which allows it to officially be labelled as part of an indigenous joint venture even though virtually all of the work and the benefit are going to the non-indigenous part of the partnership. This is the abuse of joint ventures that we are seeing, which effectively allows non-indigenous companies to take advantage of the program.
There was an instance reported in The Globe and Mail with a private company called the Canadian Health Care Agency, which was in a so-called joint venture with an individual who was actually one of its employees, so the person was an employee at the larger company. By all indications, it was not a real joint venture. The employee was being taken advantage of by being identified as having a separate company in a joint venture, and that allowed the non-indigenous company to take contracts that were supposed to be part of the 5%.
There is also the use of shell companies. An example of a shell company would be having one company that has been identified as indigenous that is getting government contracts then subcontracting the work to non-indigenous companies. There is a rule that is supposed to prevent this; a subcontracting rule requires that one-third of the subcontract be to indigenous companies if it has been received as part of the indigenous procurement set-aside.
However, we have asked for documents on the verification of the subcontracting rule, and it is pretty clear that nobody is actually enforcing it. There is a bit of the Spider-Man meme going on, with the Minister of Public Services and Procurement and the Minister of Indigenous Services saying, respectively, “I am not doing this; this is indigenous” and “I am not doing this; this is procurement”. Then nobody seems to be enforcing the subcontracting rules.
There are various structures: abuse of joint ventures, outright pretending and shell companies. As a result, the AFN appeared before the government operations committee on the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal, and AFN representatives testified that most of the contracts within the indigenous procurement set-aside are actually going to shell companies. Therefore, before Liberals get up and say that it is just Conservatives saying this, I point out that indigenous leaders said it. It is not just the AFN; leaders from first nations, Inuit and Métis communities have repeatedly highlighted how non-indigenous, elite insiders are taking advantage of the program that is supposed to benefit indigenous businesses.
It is a crying shame, but it is typical of the Liberals. They did not care about the results for indigenous peoples; they cared only about being able to look like they were checking a box to say that they cared. They want to say to look at the number, at the target and at the box they are checking, but in reality, when the government operations committee started going into it and started inviting indigenous leaders to speak before the committee, we found that according to the testimony, most of what the Liberals are saying is part of the 5% target is not going to indigenous communities at all. It isn't even going to indigenous businesses.
In fact, when we challenged the Minister of Indigenous Services on the issue the first time, in March, she said that the purpose of the program is just to identify indigeneity. It is not about economic development, effectively. She completely changed her tune six months later. However, when the program is allowing shell companies, elite non-indigenous insiders, abusive joint ventures and outright pretenders to take advantage of the program, clearly the benefits are not going back to indigenous peoples, and the Liberals do not seem to care. They want to trumpet the box-checking exercise rather than answer clear, necessary questions about the impacts of the program on communities.
I speak to indigenous leaders across the country, and they talk very much about the importance of economic development, of autonomy, of giving back control over resources and over opportunities and of putting in place policies that allow indigenous communities to survive and prosper. One key piece of feedback we have heard is that there are various policies in procurement that actually make it very difficult for new entrants, including indigenous- and minority-owned businesses, to get contracts. The Liberals have so constrained the procurement system as to protect the privileged access of elite insiders.
We saw this with the arrive scam scandal as well. According to the Auditor General's report, we had an instance where GC Strategies sat down with people inside government to discuss the terms of the contract. According to the procurement ombudsman, there were overly restrictive requirements that said, for instance, one could only bid on a federal government contract if one had done a certain number of federal government contracts before. How does that make any sense? If one has a business that can do the work, maybe a new business or a business based somewhere else in the country, started by someone who does not have the same insider access or history with the federal government but can actually do the work, or maybe it has done work with other levels of government and has been successful in procurement processes across the country, but wants to bid on a project here in Ottawa, the government could say that it is sorry, but because it has not done business with the federal government it is out. It is an entrenched protection of privilege for elite Liberal-connected insiders.
These are huge amounts of money we are talking about. In the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal there are a number of players. Dalian Enterprises received over $100 million in contracts. The Canadian Health Care Agency received over $100 million in contracts. A majority of those who got contracts under this set-aside were shell companies according to the AFN. We are talking about massive amounts of money that the Liberals are finding ways to funnel to their friends and to other well-connected insiders.
That is the Liberals' priority, getting money to elite insider NDP-Liberal friends. Our priorities are restoring common sense, bringing it home, axing the tax, building the homes, fixing the budget and stopping the crime. When the carbon tax election comes, Canadians will be able to decide between our priorities and theirs.
