Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Thornhill, the deputy leader of our party, for her passionate statement today about what happened in Montreal on Friday night.
I recall that in the days after October 7, I went to the Am Shalom synagogue in south Barrie. I was there participating in a service that was directed by the rabbi, which involved many community members and community leaders. We could sense by their anguish over what happened on October 7 just how deeply and profoundly this terrorist attack by the terrorist organization Hamas had on the Jewish people I represent in Barrie—Innisfil. I remember making a speech to the congregation and telling them that as elected officials it was our responsibility to keep our community safe, not just the Jewish community but all communities across this country. There was concern about not just what happened but what potentially could happen in this country. For the better part of two years now, we have been seeing this play itself out on the streets.
I watched, like many Canadians did on Friday night, not necessarily on mainstream media, because there was not much coverage about what happened in Montreal on mainstream media, but on social media, this lawless mob trashing and destroying while intimidating Jewish Canadians. I, for one, as a member of Parliament and a Canadian citizen, was disgusted by what I saw in my hometown of Montreal. It was disgusting. Enough is enough. It is time for leadership. It is time for moral clarity. It is time to not have a leader who is feckless and timid in his approach, who says one thing to one group and says another thing to another group. I can tell my colleagues that many Canadians are feeling this way. They have seen what has gone on.
Lawless mobs have been pervading our streets for the last two years. That escalated on Friday night in Montreal. We also saw it over the weekend in Toronto, where terrorist sympathizers were going to Jewish communities and taunting them right near their homes. We cannot stand for that. We should not stand for that. We need to do something about it. It is unbelievable that this is going on in this country. It is not just partisans on the right and partisans on the left who are saying this. There are always going to be partisans. Normal people are saying this now. They are saying enough is enough. They want a return to normalcy and decency in this country. That takes leadership.
Canada used to be a place where we allowed those who were persecuted to come into our country. Those who were persecuted for faith-based reasons, for their sexual orientation, for being from the wrong tribe or whatever used to come to this country to flee persecution. Now we are allowing the persecutors into this country. Those very people the persecuted were fleeing from are the people who have been allowed by the government into this country to do what they are doing to it right now, to create chaos, to intimidate and to bring the grievances of other nations to our nation. Instead of standing under one flag, the Canadian flag, they are standing under the flags of the grievances they brought to this country. That is wrong.
We are Canadian. We stand for what is right. We have moral values. We protect those who are vulnerable and keep them free from intimidation. This is pervading our streets right now and it has to stop. It is only going to stop when solid leadership with some moral clarity is shown in this country and the rule of law is applied equally in this country. This is a shame.
I am hearing from my community of Barrie—Innisfil. I was out all weekend and heard what is going on. I heard the concern among many people, not just Jewish Canadians but people from other backgrounds and Canadians who were born here, saying enough is enough. They want a return to normalcy and decency in this country and a change of government. In many people's views right now, the only way we are going to return to a sense of normalcy and decency is if we have a change of government, because the government has proven time after time that it is not concerned about doing the right thing. It is not concerned about protecting those who are facing fear and intimidation in our communities right across the country. The government's only concern is in protecting itself politically and making sure it does whatever it has to do to stay in power, no matter what the cost or how it impacts communities across this country, whether Jewish or other communities. It has to stop, and it cannot stop soon enough.
A lot of European and eastern bloc people tell me the same thing. As much as I am hearing from those who fled persecution about how we are allowing the persecutors into this country, eastern bloc people come to me all the time, wave their finger and say, “This happened in my country. It is why I left my country. Do not let what happened to my country happen in this country.” What do they mean by that? It is a different perspective, but it is the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the incremental loss of rights and freedoms, and control of the media that many of these people fled to come to this country so they would never have to experience it again in their lives and, better yet, so their children would never have to experience it. However, we are seeing it time and time again.
The corruption, the cronyism, all the same things that people fled from in eastern bloc countries, are pervading our institutions here in Canada. Enough is enough. It is time to return to a sense of morality, decency and normalcy in this country because Canadians have had it. Normal people have had it, too. When I say “normal”, I mean people who do not pay much attention to politics. They go about their lives, trying to provide for their families, not just now but for future generations as well. They see everything that is going on. They see the lawless mobs on the street, the corruption, the debt and the deficit. They see the fact that their children, many of whom are 30 or 35, are unable to buy a house or afford rent and so still live in their basement. They see the cost of groceries. They see the cost of everything escalating, the necessities of life becoming unaffordable. Those normal people right now are saying something is not right. Something is wrong and they are feeling it.
Single moms are worried about mortgages that are due for renewal. There are a million mortgages due for renewal in this country in 2025, some as much as 30% to 40% more in renewal costs. How are people going to afford that? How are they going to afford to keep their homes? That is what is bothering single moms right now. That is what is bothering moms. If we start ripping that security blanket away from those families, we have a recipe for disaster in this country. Many of those normal people are rising up now and saying enough is enough.
They are looking at alternatives. They are looking at alternative governments that will make their lives more affordable, that will get homes built and fix the budget, the $1.34 trillion in debt we have right now. More importantly, they are looking to alternative governments in this country to stop the crime and chaos in our communities, where violent crime, gun crime and extortion have skyrocketed. It was not like this in 2015. We did not see the type of criminal activity and drug crime happening across the country that we are seeing right now.
I say that normal people are rising up and are saying something is broken and something is not right, and they are right, because we have the statistics to prove it. We do not even need statistics; just look at the news. Every day in Toronto, there are shootings. Extortion, car thefts and drug overdoses are happening right across the country. What people want is a government that is going to allow for safer communities to happen.
The bail system is broken in this country; police associations right across the country are talking about it right now. They are compiling statistics, and I know they are going to come out with them soon, about the fact that the bail system is so broken in this country. It is so broken that officers who are on the front line, whose lives are in danger as a result of the broken bail system, know that if they arrest somebody in the morning for a serious offence, in all likelihood they are going to be out in the afternoon, allowed to walk the streets freely. That is what is concerning normal people right now.
I was at a Nigerian event on Saturday night. Friends of mine in the Nigerian Barrie—Innisfil community, and I spoke to many of them when I was there, said that crime is the number one issue of concern within their community. They came to Canada to flee from the situations they are now facing in this country. In many cases, the people who were persecuting are the ones who are here; the people who were doing the crime in other countries are here now doing the exact same thing in this country. It has to stop. Enough is enough.
I want to talk about the issue at hand, which is the SDTC scandal. It is my third time rising on it. We have been dealing with it for two months. The Speaker's order was to have the government send the documents unredacted. We know, for example, that 11,000 documents still exist within the justice department. We know from the parliamentary law clerk that they have not been submitted to Parliament at this point.
What is in the documents? What is it that the government is hiding that it would seize Parliament on the issue of privilege for so many months? There has to be a hell of a lot of information in there that the government is worried about.
The government needs to just release the documents. The standoff can end tomorrow and we can get on with the business of the country. The Speaker ruled that the supremacy of Parliament was paramount and that the documents had to be turned over to Parliament, but they have not been up to this point.
This is not the first scandal there has been. SDTC is just the tip of the iceberg. If we go through a list of some of the scandals, there was the cash for access scandal. There was the SNC-Lavalin affair. I invite anybody to just search Google and pull up the Liberal scandals since 2015. There is a whole list of them.
There was the ArriveCAN scandal. There were the sole-source contracts; many sole-source contracts were issued throughout the course of the pandemic, and subsequently through the ArriveCAN app; we know there is $90 million on that one. It could be much greater than the figure that the Auditor General has discussed. There is the WE Charity scandal, with $900 million that was going to the Prime Minister's friends.
The former minister of international development gave a sole-source contract, breaching ethics violations and ethics contraventions, to her friend Amanda Alvaro. Also, the minister's sister-in-law was appointed as the interim ethics commissioner for just a few days. Of course, there have been other scandals, such as the Winnipeg lab scandal.
In each one of the scandals, the government has basically tied the hands of Parliament, and it has tried to cover up many of them, where many of the Liberals' insider-connected friends and cronies have enriched themselves as a result of sole-sourced contracts, other government contracts and the latest one, with $400 million to the SDTC board. Board members contravened conflict of interest guidelines 183 times and enriched themselves with 400 million dollars' worth of contracts.
It is absurd. It is almost laughable that the government is spending so much political capital trying to cover this up and trying not to give the information to Parliament that it rightly deserves. It is not laughable; it is actually sad that we are in this situation.
I want to go back to August 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when we started seeing a diminishment and decline in democracy. One of the first pieces of legislation that came out after the pandemic was to basically seize control of the spending power of this place, to give the Liberals, I think it was in Bill C-2, the opportunity to spend whatever they wanted on the pandemic without Parliament's approval.
Shortly after that, many sole-source contracts came in and were given to Liberal-connected insiders and cronies. In August 2020, I stood up and spoke about the situation going on. At that time, we had heard about Frank Baylis and the ventilator contract, which was $300 million of sole-source contracts, and there were others.
I remember quoting Warren Kinsella, who is a former Liberal strategist who was chief of staff to former prime minister Jean Chrétien. Kinsella used a word that is in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, about what the government was all about. In fact he wrote an article entitled “When You Become What You Came to Change”, in which he talked about the word “kleptocracy”.
Kleptocracy is when the leaders of a nation use the availability of resources they have, either through the treasury or by other means, to not just enrich themselves but also to enrich those who are within their close, inner circle. In his article he said, “It's in the dictionary.... The Merriam-Webster people define it as ‘government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.’”
It was important at that time, and I would argue that it is equally important at this time, because it is the reason why these types of scandals are so profoundly scandalous. The allegations are that insiders and connected insiders sought to enrich themselves during this very difficult period Canadians are going through: the cost of the necessities of life such as groceries, mortgages and all of the things Canadians are struggling with, not just cost of living but also housing attainability and affordability.
Nevertheless, well-connected insiders and cronies are using their relationships and their benefits to enrich themselves during these times. The problem, which Mr. Kinsella spoke about, and I would agree with him, is that the people who are governed are losing their home, their job and their future while the Prime Minister and his friends are taking off like bandits. They are enriching themselves.
I asked a question to the Commissioner of Lobbying at the ethics committee meeting just a couple of weeks ago. There has been an increase in lobbying and lobbyists, going from 7,000 early in the current government to now over 11,000 registered lobbyists, all of whom are coming to Ottawa with cap in hand, their hand out, trying to get as much money as they can for the people they represent, and many of them are very likely Liberal-connected.
Kinsella also said, “That is not merely wrong, it is...evil. It is beyond the pale. Beyond words.” He said that there is a name for what we now have, a government like the Prime Minister's, run by people who seek status and personal gain while the rest of us and the rest of Canadians suffer so greatly, not just economically but also socially, through the division that has been created by the government. Kinsella said it is a kleptocracy, where connected insiders benefit from their role in government at the expense of the people it governs. It is precisely what is going on; we have a kleptocracy.