Madam Speaker, it is always a privilege to stand here on behalf of the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
Before I begin, I would like to remind the House why privilege is important. Privilege goes to the very core of how we as elected officials do our job and hold the government to account. It encompasses both the rights and the immunities that every member of the House requires to fulfill our duties as parliamentarians.
In a democracy, it is the people, not the Prime Minister and not his increasingly insular office, who must prevail. If powerful unelected individuals can prevent us from doing our job, the people become powerless. Let us never forget that in Canadian democracy, it is Canadians who elected their representatives to be their voice in this place.
The current debate has become lengthy, but I can summarize it effectively. The Prime Minister's Office claims, “There is nothing to see here.” The Liberals accuse the opposition of holding Parliament hostage, and they blame us entirely.
Let us recap the facts. The Liberal government appointed the people who ran the SDTC program. They had full control and knowledge of what was happening, and yet it was whistle-blowers, not the government, who exposed the truth.
The Auditor General has since confirmed the disturbing extent of fiscal corruption. Consider the audacity of being entrusted with scarce public dollars and then funnelling them into their own company. What kind of culture enabled such corruption? To every member on the government side, I say that if they believe this conduct is acceptable, then they should think again.
Consider the audacity of being entrusted with scarce dollars funnelling into their own companies. I just want to impress upon members that we would never allow this in a private corporation or a not-for-profit organization that we were part of. Why would we allow it in a case like this? As Lord Acton famously observed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men”.
Once exposed, the Liberal government ended the program, and now it wants to sweep everything under the rug. “Nothing to see here”, it says; “trust us.” Well, Canadians remember when the Prime Minister looked them in the eye and declared that the allegations in the Globe and Mail story that morning were false. Later those allegations proved to be true and accurate. The only accountability in that sort of affair was the punishment of former minister Jody Wilson-Raybould for refusing to believe in the Prime Minister's Office and its corruption.
So many times when a scandal erupts, we hear the usual excuses from the Prime Minister's Office and from ministers. First comes denial, then comes leaked truth, and then the ministers did not know, because ministers, particularly Liberal ministers, never seem to know, do they? When powerful Prime Minister's Office insiders or ministers appear at committee hearings, their standard response to tough questions is “I do not recall.” It is not a denial, but it is convenient should the truth emerge. Is this fulfilling the public trust?
Let us return to the privilege motion frankly. The Prime Minister's Office controls which documents are released and redacted, and yet it has the audacity to say, “Trust us.” Why would anyone trust the Prime Minister or his PMO, given their track record of deception? How do we break the impasse? Fortunately, we have parliamentary privilege or a production order, a tool that allows us to demand all documents, unredacted.
If there is truly nothing to hide, an innocent government should welcome the opportunity to prove it. Who would not, unless there is something to hide, something the Prime Minister's Office does not want Canadians to know? Would the PMO openly admit it is hiding something? No, of course it would not. It needs an excuse, which is precisely why it has invented the creative fiction of hiding behind the charter.
The Prime Minister and his office have lived in their bubble for so long, isolated in an echo chamber, that they have lost touch with reality. To many Canadians, the charter argument suggests that powerful Liberal insiders have a constitutionally protected right to misuse taxpayer money. Why else would the Liberals continue stonewalling?
Before the government benches raise their predictable objections, let us ask this question: Is there a better way? As the Prime Minister once said, “better is always possible”. Let us discuss how the process could work better.
Some of my colleagues were here during the issue of former senator Mike Duffy. The opposition then, as now, wanted facts and accountability. That is after all one of our core duties, except for the NDP opposition, which seems to blindly support the Liberal government at every turn.
Regarding Senator Duffy, former prime minister Harper faced two choices. He could have hidden behind privacy laws, solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidence, exactly as today's Prime Minister's Office does, to withhold unredacted documents. Instead, having nothing to hide, he did what an honourable prime minister would do; he waived all privileges and instructed his office to share every document. That is what an accountable, transparent and honest government looks like.
Interestingly enough, while the current Prime Minister has mentioned his predecessor's name nearly 300 times in the House, he has never once mentioned this example of integrity. To my friends on all sides of the chamber, this shows that better is always possible and shows how the Liberal government could improve. It should choose transparency and accountability, but we know that the Prime Minister and his PMO will not take that path. They will not even consider it. Why is that?
Imagine that, if by some miracle, the Prime Minister releases all documents unredacted, as the order states, and gives them to the law clerk, who transfers them to the RCMP. If there is truly nothing to hide, we resume business. However, if there is something hidden, someone might face accountability somewhere. In the dark world of Liberal back rooms, who that someone might be makes all the difference. I do not believe, and I doubt many government members truly believe, these things happen by accident with nobody's knowledge. Someone knew, and that someone is being protected.
Meanwhile, Parliament's work stalls, and one of our most important tools, the production order, is being trampled on. This is not the first time the government has tried to usurp a production order. Remember how it attempted to take the Winnipeg lab production order to the courts, in a case that became moot when the Prime Minister used his COVID-era powers in summer 2021 to dissolve Parliament, all in the pursuit of a majority.
What we have here is that instead of resorting to the courts as it did in 2021, the government has chosen to stonewall the House. Is protecting potentially guilty parties worth defying and ultimately sacrificing an honoured ancient tool of Parliament? Some on the government side apparently think so, or we would not be here today.
Consider this. If we in the opposition did as the Liberal government asks, simply trust it and move on, nobody would face accountability. Taxpayer dollars would vanish, wealthy insiders would have profited without any consequence, and the people responsible would escape judgment. That is exactly what the government proposes in order to avoid exposing its program mismanagement.
Does anyone believe this represents good governance? Did the people on the Liberals' side seek office to protect the people who abuse public trust and profit from taxpayers? I would like to believe that none of them did. Certainly no one on this side did.
As we approach what the Liberal government calls the holiday tax break, or what the Toronto Star calls the “shameless giveaway plan” that is “incoherent, unnecessary, and frankly embarrassing,” my inbox fills with concerns from small businesses about lack of consultation and information. Like so many Liberal government initiatives, it emerged seemingly from nowhere. The messaging is almost comical. Are expensive gaming consoles really essentials? Promoting more consoles means parents face pressure for costlier Wi-Fi plans. This is great for Canada's wireless cartel, but terrible for struggling families.
I have one final thought. In my riding, constituents accidentally overpaid the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, CERB, and had every dollar clawed back by the CRA. Others deemed ineligible faced the same, yet what about the people who received SDTC funding through conflicts of interest or whose projects were totally ineligible to receive the money in the first place? Will these people who obtained millions of dollars face similar clawbacks, or do the Liberals believe that these individuals and their companies deserve impunity?
Why does the Prime Minister maintain double standards? Why do his expectations for others not apply to him and to other Liberal insiders? Consider his message: millions of dollars in tax dollars for friends who wrongly benefit, while the average Canadian gets $250 of their own money back. That is an attempt to distract from what has happened.
Canadians deserve accountability and transparency. Whatever happened to the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant, or, as I said earlier, to “better is always possible”? Those were supposed to be core principles; “open by default”, he said. Instead we get scandals, corruption, stonewalling and efforts to hide truth from Canadians. This is wrong. Deep down, every member knows it is wrong. We must send the Prime Minister and his PMO a clear message: enough. The people responsible for the SDTC program's failures must face accountability, full stop.
I call on all members to stand united against corruption and concealment of the truth from Canadians. We should protect our privilege, in this case the tool of a production order. The government should square up to the fact that, whether Liberals likes it not or not, a vote was held, a division was made, a decision was cast by each member here, and the majority demanded an ancient right, something that the government cannot ignore.
A government is not separate from its people. A government is not somehow above the fray of Parliament. In our Westminster system, the government is fused with the legislative assembly. Those people are here and are meant to be accountable to us, those of us who do not sit in cabinet.
The rest of the members in this place have a duty and an obligation to hold the government to account. I do not care whether members do so in the open, like I am doing right now. I do not care whether it is done at a caucus meeting with other people inside the same party. However, my goodness, we owe this country and this institution better than what they are getting right now.
It is easy I guess for me to get on my high horse and say that all of us should be like white knights coming to the rescue. However, if we do not, who will? If the government does not learn the lesson that it is chained to this place, that when a production order is made it must respect it. If we do not defend that as members of Parliament if the government does not agree with it, then the solution is to either hold the line or vote the government out. When I talk about a carbon tax election, many of my constituents have said that to me, and some of them were former Liberal supporters. They get the sense that nothing can be changed in this place unless we change the government.
Therefore the government has a tough question to answer its own members of the Liberal caucus: Do they respect the institution and bring forward the production order in its entirety, whether or not they agree with it, or do they simply say no and let their names in their communities get dragged through such that people believe that they are not there to do what they asked?
I am not asking everyone to agree with me all the time. I am just saying that on this one we have to have a line in the sand that we and others who have come before us have drawn, and not allow the issue to go any further. I ask all hon. members to hold the line with me and with other members to make this place a place that governments respect, or they will find that this place will be diminished, and it will be because of their inaction. Again, this is about something bigger than us.
Members may suggest we are wasting money by talking about what has made this institution great, but we can never put a price tag on democracy. They say we are wasting money by talking something that does not matter, but it does matter. This place has a foundation. If a person sees the foundation of their home start to crumble and they do nothing, that is an act of omission. If they do as the government is doing and bring a sledgehammer to that foundation, that is an act of commission. Both are wrong because eventually the house falls and everyone suffers.
I am more than happy to be accountable to my constituents. I am happy to answer questions on why I made these statements. I believe my constituents are firmly behind me on this one, as I have asked them multiple times if we should continue to hold the line. I will warn members in the governing party that people are starting to say the only way this ends is by an election and a new government.
The members can get to their microphones tomorrow, talk to the Prime Minister and tell him to stop this sledgehammering of an institution we all care about.