Madam Speaker, I said a few weeks ago that the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal was the biggest scandal we have seen yet, and I think Canadians saw why today. A senior Liberal cabinet minister from Alberta with multiple different areas of responsibility, the member for Edmonton Centre, left cabinet because of the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal. Now members across the way think this is funny. It is not funny.
The Assembly of First Nations has told committee that a majority of the contracts that are supposed to be going to indigenous entrepreneurs, supporting economic development in indigenous communities, are going to shell companies. Indigenous leaders have been repeatedly testifying at committee that there is rampant abuse in a program that is supposed to benefit indigenous entrepreneurs and communities. People are pretending to be indigenous. There are shell companies and there are abuses of joint ventures, where virtually all of the benefit goes to a non-indigenous company. This is the abuse that has been happening, and we have been talking about it for months.
However, it has just recently come out that a company owned by the former minister of employment, who just resigned, was pretending to be indigenous in order to try to get government contracts. Therefore not only is there rampant abuse of the program by people who are not indigenous but are pretending to be indigenous or trying to take advantage of the program in other ways, but also there is a former member of the Liberal caucus who owns a company that pretended to be indigenous-owned when it was owned by a minister of the Crown who is not Indigenous.
The former minister repeatedly misrepresented himself. The Liberal Party, in its public statements, identified him as indigenous and said that he was part of the Liberal's indigenous caucus. Every other member of the caucus still identifies as indigenous, but he acknowledges that he is not, even though he was a member of it. In various situations, he falsely represented himself as being indigenous; this was part of a political story he wanted to tell, but it was also the basis on which the company he owned pretended to be an indigenous-owned company and tried to get contracts on that basis.
The former minister's company is not the only instance of abuse. Again, the AFN is saying that it happens with the majority of companies getting the contracts. There are companies like Dalian Enterprise and a Canadian health care agency, which got over $100 million each and where there were very clearly abuses of joint ventures. These are companies that were taken off the indigenous business list but nonetheless profited significantly while they were on it. This is absolutely disgusting.
Indigenous peoples in this country are experiencing unacceptable levels of poverty. The government came in with high words about reconciliation, yet here we are today. The Liberals came in promising reconciliation, and nine years later a minister of the government is leaving cabinet because he pretended to be indigenous and used that pretense to try to advance the commercial interests of his own private company by getting contracts from the government. The government defended him for far too long. He remains a member of the government caucus, and his company remains eligible for government contracts.
Will the Liberals show some contrition tonight and recognize how badly they failed on reconciliation—