Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about here today is something that should be seizing the House of Commons, and it has been for some time. On the bottom of the screen, when we speak, it simply says, “Privilege—Subamendment”. That sounds pretty boring or dry until we get into the reason we are debating this issue today.
We are talking about a breach of the privileges of the House of Commons. On the face of it, on a prima facie case, the Speaker has determined that the collective privileges of members of Parliament have been violated, and that is a serious matter. It is so serious that all other business that would normally be before the House is suspended until such time as this matter is dealt with. I think that Canadians need to be reminded of that and of some of the privileges the House of Commons has and its collective members have, and that if we don't protect them, the current government and future governments will continue to roll over them, and continue to ignore the will of elected members of Parliament.
It comes right down to what our role is, as members of Parliament. Our role is to hold the government to account. This is true not just for members of the opposition or of opposition parties. It is supposed to be true for every member of Parliament who is not a member of the government. I think there is a lack of knowledge, or over time, every member who is, in this case, a Liberal, believes that they are a member of the government. However, they are most certainly not. The cabinet is the government of Canada, and the rest of us have an obligation to hold the government to account. That certainly used to be the way it was, when it did not matter what party a member was. What mattered was their position in the House. If a member was not in the cabinet, they held the government to account.
Now we have Liberal members of Parliament, who are not members of the government, who nonetheless believe that it is the role of the House of Commons to support the government. In this case, a vote was held in the House where members of Parliament exercised our rights to demand the production of papers, where it is a key privilege of members of Parliament to demand the production of papers. We exercised that right. We held a vote in the House of Commons, and the majority of the members of the House of Commons demanded that papers be produced, that the government provide papers on the Sustainable Development Technology Canada slush fund and that those papers be given to the RCMP and the Auditor General so that they could do with them what they would. It does not compel them to conduct an investigation or take any particular action, but it does compel the government to obey the order to produce the papers, as was demanded by the House of Commons.
Why is this so important? It is because, if the government is allowed to ignore a key privilege of the House of Commons, there is no accountability. There is no ability for members of Parliament to hold the government to account if there is an ability to ignore democratic votes in the House of Commons.
We know that the government has no problem doing that. We saw it when the House of Commons voted to list the IRGC as a terrorist entity. It took the government years, and the only reason the Liberals actually did it was that they hoped it would help them save their failing candidate in a Toronto by-election. The narrator would say, “It did not work.” They still lost that by-election, even though they tried at the last minute to finally list the IRGC, as Parliament had demanded many years previously.
Now we are seeing it again with the government denying a request. They believe they know better. We have requested that unredacted documents be sent to the RCMP and the Auditor General, and the government has said no.
The Liberals have redacted those documents. They have determined, in their infinite wisdom, that they know better than the majority of the members of the House of Commons. Even though it is a core privilege for members of Parliament to be able to demand the production of papers, the Government of Canada, the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister's Office have said they know better than the elected representatives of this House of Commons who have exercised their rights in a democratic vote.
That is why we are here today. It is because the government refuses to accept that Parliament is supreme, that Parliament, not the government, has the right, in this case, to demand the production of these documents and demand that they be turned over unredacted, without any edits and without parts blacked out. It all needs to go to the RCMP and the Auditor General for their use as they see fit. This is a complete and total Liberal scandal. It is another example of why the Liberals are not worth the corruption.
There was $400 million in SDTC funds given out under questionable circumstances. There was $58 million for 10 ineligible projects altogether. There were over 180 conflicts of interest where members of the board of directors were able to vote on whether funds should go to companies that they were affiliated with. It is almost unbelievable if we were not talking about the Liberal government and its record. We have 186 cases where the board members held a conflict of interest.
The worst part of all this is that the then-minister of industry, Navdeep Bains, was told that this would be the result of him appointing a partisan board chair. SDTC had operated at arm's length from government, without conflicts of interest, right up until the Liberal government took over, and then decided to stack it with Liberals who had conflicts of interest and who took advantage of government money to line the pockets of companies they were engaged with. The minister was told this would happen and he ignored the advice that he received. This is not new for the Liberal government, but it certainly was something that he was warned about and ignored.
The Liberals have wasted 400 million tax dollars at a time when two million Canadians a month are lining up at food banks. They are just frittering away $400 million while two million Canadians are lining up at food banks, many for the first time and a quarter of them children.
I heard a question from a Liberal member just prior to my speech. Basically, his question was about how Canadians have never had it so good and he asked why that was not agreed with. It is so outrageous and out of touch, when we have two million Canadians a month at food banks, when people's rents have doubled, mortgage payments have doubled, and the cost of housing has doubled, to have Liberal members asking why others are not praising the government for its amazing work. I can say that no one who lines up at the food bank for the first time is praising the government or thinks that things are going well.
People are losing their homes or at risk of homelessness. We do not have to go very far in Ottawa to see that. In my neck of the woods in Chilliwack, over the last number of years, my hometown has had numerous permanent homelessness encampments and they move around from time to time. This is in spite of record investments from the city in housing solutions and trying to help people. We have a very generous community. However, the highway rest areas between Chilliwack and Langley are full of people in mostly dilapidated RVs because that is where they live now. So, the idea that things are great and talking about the IMF at a time when people are living in a broken-down RV or lining up at the food bank is just completely out of touch.
We know that the government has continued to drive up the cost of living. Whether it is on home heating, groceries or the price of gas, the Liberals continue to jack up the carbon tax. This makes it even harder for Canadians to make ends meet. They have no problem raising the cost for Canadians, but they will not raise the ethical bar on something such as SDTC; there, they can hand out money willy-nilly to their friends, to the tune of $400 million.
The government cannot manage a budget. It already has a higher deficit by $8 billion than what the Liberals predicted just in the last budget alone. It now spends more on interest payments than it does on health care transfers to the provinces, which is an outrageous scandal in and of itself. The Liberal government gives more money away in interest payments than it spends on the necessary health care funding that we so desperately need.
We have seen, in my province, that the B.C. NDP has managed our health care system into the ground. It is at the point where, every weekend now, numerous emergency rooms are closed because of the mismanagement of the B.C. NDP. It could definitely use some of the funding that the government in Ottawa is spending on interest. I am not convinced that the B.C. NDP could actually manage it any better, but we have certainly seen, in our province, how our health care system has been mismanaged and is in need of an injection of funds. It would be nice if the government in Ottawa were not running up the deficit to such an extent that the interest payments were more than the health care payments in this country.
However, it is a priority of the government to not only continue to withhold documents that the House of Commons has demanded but also to continue to support SDTC and its mismanagement. That is a very difficult thing. We have now been speaking about this for many days, many weeks, and the government continues to dig in its heels and hold the House up by refusing to address this issue, refusing to give the documents to the RCMP and to the Auditor General that have been demanded. If the Liberals did that, we would be back to such things as important business from private members and important work that could be done here. However, the Liberals are holding the House under their thumb because they refuse to respect the ruling of the Speaker and the vote in the House of Commons.
Once again, we get back to whom the Liberals think they serve. Do they believe they serve their constituents, or do they serve the Prime Minister's Office? We know that many of them had the most inept coup in the history of democracy. I believe it was 24 at the latest count. They meekly sent a letter to the Prime Minister, who promptly shredded it, ignored it and told them what he thought of it the very next day. However, even in the Liberal caucus, there are those who no longer wish to take their marching orders from the current Prime Minister and from his PMO.
Certainly, in the Conservative Party, we will not allow the PMO and the Prime Minister to run roughshod over the will of the House of Commons. This was expressed in a vote that demanded the production of these papers. Again, we can dress it up any way we want, but this is a matter that goes to the core of what we do here.
For too long, for a government that was supposed to be the most transparent government in history, and sunlight was going to be the best disinfectant, all of that boilerplate nonsense, it did not believe any of it. The government has proven that time and time again.
We have this situation here where the House of Commons has acted within its bounds, within its authority, to demand the production of papers. Again, if we look at the documents that outline how we govern ourselves, that is listed as a core privilege. It is not a nice-to-have. If we do not protect this, we do not have the ability to exercise our rights as members of Parliament in the chamber.
That is why Conservatives will continue to stand up and fight for that right and for our privilege. It is not because we feel privileged as individuals; it is because we need to stand up and defend our democratic institutions. This is an attack on our democratic institutions. When members do not respect the authority of Parliament, or when members believe the Prime Minister's Office, the Prime Minister or the cabinet can override the will of the House of Commons, they are undermining the democratic process. There are no two ways about it.
We have seen the Liberals do this before. We saw it with the Winnipeg lab documents issue, where there was another vote in the House of Commons. The Liberal government took the outrageous step of taking the Speaker to court. Their own Speaker, a Liberal Speaker, was taken to court because the House of Commons dared to use its authority to demand the production of papers and to demand information on what had happened at the Winnipeg labs with the breach of security there.
We have seen that the government has no problem kicking the slats out from under Parliament, taking it as a bit of advice that it will take or ignore, when in fact it is an order. That is exactly what we, as Conservatives, are standing up against. It is something if the government can take a Speaker to court and can ignore votes of the House of Commons when it comes to privilege. This is not an opposition motion where members pontificate on a policy issue.
We are aware that the government has some latitude to determine whether or not it will implement that. However, when we are talking about a core right, the production of papers being one of them, we have to stand up for ourselves. We have to encourage members to be aware, again, of their core function, which is to serve their constituents and to hold the government to account, no matter which side of the House they are on. It is not to simply act as mouthpieces for an unelected Prime Minister's Office or the Prime Minister himself.
The Prime Minister is supposed to be a servant of the House, not its master. As long as we allow the government to flout the rules, to deny the production of papers, as has been demanded by the House, we will be voluntarily giving up our privileges and voluntarily undermining a democratic institution.
Conservatives will not stand for it. Conservatives will continue to stand up for the House of Commons being supreme, for our votes to be respected, and for the government, when we demand the production of papers, no longer treating that as a suggestion.