Madam Speaker, I think it is worth recalling that on March 1, 2018, the Minister of Employment told this House, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” He actually said that in the House of Commons. That is what is going on here. The minister from Edmonton did not want to let the truth get in the way of what he thought would be a good political story.
Why exactly were these claims made? Why did the Liberal Minister of Employment falsely claim to be indigenous? Perhaps this is another Liberal example of the Maryam Monsef method of selectively claiming to be unaware of key personal facts in order to help develop a more elaborate origin story.
Once upon a time, there were three brothers, Remus, Romulus and Randy, born of a union between the god Mars and a mortal, nursed in the woods by a wolf. After the brothers grew up, a lethal struggle for dominance ensued, and one of the brothers founded the great city of Rome. After founding Rome, he travelled halfway around the world to join the Liberal cabinet.
In other myths, he is identified as the son of Janus, the Roman god with two faces, although as more comes out, two faces may actually not be enough. He is the man, the myth, the minister: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
However, efforts at exaggerated personal myth-making may not be all there is to this. At present we are prosecuting the Liberals' indigenous contracting scandal, a scandal in which many companies made false or misleading claims about indigenous identity or developed creative arrangements to position themselves as technically indigenous without actually providing substantive economic benefit or opportunity to indigenous people.
For those who have not been following, the scandal is that Liberals established a 5% target and set-aside. Five per cent of government contracts had to go to indigenous companies, so what necessarily flows from having this kind of target is the need to define what is an indigenous company. This kind of work defining indigenous companies is going on elsewhere, because it is not just governments that are looking to include indigenous businesses with procurement opportunities. Many private sector companies, especially in the energy sector, are looking to procure more from indigenous businesses and include indigenous businesses in their supply chains.
Private sector companies are not looking to just check a legal box. They are doing this voluntarily because it is good business and because it gives impacted communities a greater stake in the success of projects. Private sector proponents, though not perfect, have sought ways to define in an authentic way what are indigenous businesses and the extent to which there are real positive economic impacts in the communities they want to work with.
There are currently various organizations, such as the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business, that work with the private sector to help identify and support indigenous businesses. I have also met with the Indigenous Chamber of Commerce in Winnipeg, which has a rigorous process of assessing whether a business is truly indigenous-owned before it is admitted to its membership roles.
However, bizarrely, the Liberal government chose not to work with existing organizations to draw on the various lists that have been created for indigenous businesses. Instead, it developed its own list, which suspiciously appears to include a number of actors as indigenous businesses that are not on anyone else's list. While many in the private sector want to do this for real, the Liberal government has sought to inflate the number of contracts going to indigenous businesses by including businesses on its list that are not actually indigenous and are not on anyone else's indigenous business list.
The Assembly of First Nations has said that a majority of those getting the 5% set-aside are shell companies. There is abuse of joint ventures and shell companies and outright pretending. In one example in the news recently, a company called the Canadian Health Care Agency, a large non-indigenous company, went into joint venture with one person who was also its employee. The Canadian Health Care Agency was able to get many contracts. It got all of the benefit associated with these so-called joint ventures as a non-indigenous company and was able to deceptively position itself as an indigenous company.
We have been prosecuting this scandal for a while, and the AFN and other indigenous leaders have been so clear that this is a grave problem, an abuse of this policy that the Liberals have turned a blind eye to. However, we did not know until recently that the employment minister's company was actually falsely trying to position itself as indigenous.
With this in mind, as we need to get to the bottom of what's happening, I move that the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: “the second report of the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs—”
