Madam Speaker, what a tough act to follow, my colleague with those brilliant words about accountability for the government. It has been a month that the House of Commons remains at a standstill. The Prime Minister and these NDP-Liberals will stop at nothing to throw sand in the gears of Parliament in a blatant attempt to cover up their costly corruption.
These documents are still missing. The taxpayer money is still gone. The dirty deeds still go unpunished. It has been more than a month. When we look at the numbers, it is astounding: $400 million vanished, 186 conflicts of interest, one government in contempt of Parliament. It refuses to hand over the evidence to the RCMP and that is exactly why we are here. It does not want Canadians to know who got the money and how. It does not want Canadians to know how badly it mismanaged this boondoggle. It does not want the RCMP to start sniffing around on what is actually going on.
That just tells us whatever is in those documents must be really bad. It must be more than our usual garden-variety Liberal corruption. If they shut down Parliament for a month, there must be something brutal in those documents. I think Canadians have a right to know; that is why we are still here. Day in and day out, parties in the House are demanding the Liberals do their basic duty and provide transparency that Canadians deserve and, frankly, the Speaker demanded.
They stand up claiming the government is working in the best interest of Canadians, as that is what their objective is, but it is a bit rich from a party that has now stopped this place from operating for a month. The paper trail must be so long and lead all the way to the top. That is the only conclusion to draw from why they have stopped this place from working for a month.
Nearly 10 years ago, the Prime Minister pledged he would lead the most “transparent” and “open” government in the world. Those were his words. Ten years later, it is easy to see just how far they have fallen. His caucus is now forced to do the dirty work to cover up yet another scandal from the government. If stonewalling documents about corruption for months on end is the behaviour of the world's most transparent government, I would hate to see what happens in the world's least transparent government.
If the Prime Minister wanted to make the promise about transparency, maybe he should have said he would lead the most transparently corrupt and incompetent government. That would be a promise he could certainly brag about keeping. That would be one that would result in us not having to be here, certainly, for a month, arguing with them about their basic duty to turn over the documents to the cops.
Conservatives have a plan, and they have a plan on keeping a promise, too. Our promise is to hold the government accountable for every bad decision it makes, for every grifter who gets rich off Canadian tax dollars and for every ethical lapse in judgment from the Prime Minister and the cabal of Liberals who have been a problem in that respect, and every conflict of interest. That is the duty of the opposition, it is one that we take seriously, and it is one we will argue for here in this place for as long as it takes for these guys to actually be accountable to Canadians.
We will not let up until we make sure Canadians have the answer and this does not happen again. Now, it seems with the culture of corruption, with the Liberal and the NDP members, it has transferred over to another party. It seems like the Bloc wants in on the action too. It is offering the Prime Minister a secret deal to let him off the hook for this corruption and incompetence in order to serve the Bloc's narrow interest. It is a deal with the devil, so to speak, between them and the federal government, to see all the corruption swept under the rug until the next scandal. We know there will be another one, to get a firmer grip on power and play politics with the rights and the privileges and the obligations of this place.
When Canadians look at this Parliament, they see Liberals and Conservatives and NDP and Bloc and Green Party members, but now it is clear, while there are five parties that actually sit here, there are really only two parties: one mega-party that supports the Prime Minister and his agenda, blindly voting to declare continued unaccountability to the Canadian people, but more than that, unfettered confidence in his leadership; and only one party that is really standing up for Canadians.
However, after nine years of the Prime Minister, the most devoted Liberals are realizing that the Prime Minister's corruption and incompetence are just too much to handle. At least 24 of them, 24 that we know of, have finally seen the light. They are demanding a change because the writing is on the wall. They feel it in their own constituencies, with people who used to be excited to see them. They are fed up with everything that the Prime Minister has become and that he said he would not do. They see record-high inflation and home prices. They see out-of-control government spending. They just see how out of reach life has become in Canada. They, like all of us, like almost every Canadian, have lost confidence in the Prime Minister. Really, who can blame them?
It is now evident that the Liberals will do anything to stay in power; even a humiliating U-turn that we saw last week on immigration when they set these sky-high targets and then had to reverse themselves; even throwing around unfounded conspiratorial accusations, like we just heard from questioning right before me, about the Leader of the Opposition and foreign governments. The tinfoil hats over there must be real tight; even turning the trite and, frankly, ridiculous fearmongering about individual rights, things like abortion in this country, that every Canadian now sees through.
This is the same old strategy: divide and conquer; divide this country into smaller and smaller pieces so it is easier to keep a grip on power and make sure that everybody forgets how miserable the Prime Minister has made their life. Canadians are tired of this. They are tired of the division and they are tired of being labelled as some kind of “other”. They are tired of being told that north is south, up is down and wrong is right. Certainly, they are tired of a government that cares more about itself than Canadians. That is what this whole saga is about.
It is not just the Prime Minister who is not in it for Canadians. He is in it for himself and for his friends. As long as he has to cling to the job for a bit longer, to ship some more money off to Liberal insiders, he will do whatever it takes to stay in power. The Liberals will do whatever it takes to argue in this place, rather than do their duty and hand over the documents to the RCMP, like the Speaker ordered them to.
Look at everything happening outside of this place: violent crime is up 30%; crimes with firearms have doubled in this country since the Prime Minister came to power; there are illegal drugs on our streets; loved ones cannot get the help that they need; and car theft in my home region of York is up 300% in just three years. There are members of the Liberal caucus who are celebrating an hourly drop in auto theft patterns and they are patting themselves on the back for it. They do not need to celebrate a 20% decrease in auto theft when it has increased 300% under their watch. That is not success; it is a victory lap on failure. Yet, that is exactly what they are doing. The average home price in that same region is $1.3 million. There has been runaway deficit spending by a finance minister who still misses her targets. Canadians, who are already struggling to make ends meet and afford a place to live, are staring down the barrel of even more tax hikes and price increases. We have seen it day after day, month after month, year after year, for nine years of these guys.
We just found out that platforms like Spotify are raising subscription fees. The finance minister already told everybody in this House and every Canadian that she would cut Disney+, and I guess she is going to have to tell them to cut Spotify, too. That is the latest of the tone-deaf condescending suggestions from a finance minister who has somebody else pulling the strings in her own department. That is not to mention the serious allegation of election interference from foreign states and the Prime Minister's dangerous complicity in it, or the instability and the insanity happening on the other side of the world in the Middle East, or the out-of-control anti-Semitism on our streets.
We cannot talk about any of that in this place. We cannot fix any of those things because the government is focused on running out the clock while it tries to cover up for its own mismanagement, its own scandal-ridden government. That is what this debate is about. It is about making sure that we no longer let the Prime Minister use his office as a platform to enrich his friends and his own self-interest at the taxpayer's expense.
There is an easy fix to all of this, and it can happen in mere minutes: The government just needs to release the documents, give them all to the cops. That is all, and we can put the issue to bed today. Release the full documents to the RCMP, not at a committee and not in their redacted form. If the Liberals truly had nothing to hide, then they should not be scared of anything, certainly not of turning the documents over. There is no reason why the release cannot happen, except for the government's own obstinance in this place.
We can tell by the arguments they are making that the Liberals are desperate to avoid accountability. They are blathering on about their endless nonsense about the charter, which they have used to trample on the rights of Canadians when it suits them, and about committees so that the issue dies a slow death under the guise of transparency, and so on. The charter was created to protect Canadians from their government; it was not created to protect the government from Canadians and from accountability, from the people who actually voted them in here.
Equally, if there are allegations and there is wrongdoing, we do not call a committee; we call the RCMP, the institution with the power to prosecute the corruption and to get Canadian taxpayers their money back and get them accountability to see what their government is doing with their money. That is the least the government can do in this place after a month of arguing about the motion.
That is what has come after nine years of the Liberal government: We now need the Mounties to come in to sort things out because the Prime Minister is obviously not able to sort things out by himself, or more likely, because he is covering up something.
The Prime Minister is out of his depth in every single way. When it comes to representing Canada on the world stage, he allows the nation to be humiliated and embarrassed time and time again, whether it is with a stirring rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, allowing our country to become a playground for hostile foreign governments, or managing our economy. It is a shocker that the guy who says that the economy grows out from the heart believes that the budget will balance itself. He does not think of monetary policy and could not grow the economy, balance the budget, control inflation rates or interest rates in any way not just for this generation but for generations to come.
Even when it comes to doing basic things, the government could not even make a simple app work. It took months, and it sent 10,000 people inadvertently, unjustified, to a quarantine. The app should have never existed. We did not need it, and it could have been built in a weekend if we had needed it at all. Certainly there is also corruption in that case.
It is no wonder that the Prime Minister's caucus and his party are revolting against the Prime Minister, even in former fortresses like downtown Montreal and downtown Toronto, where people have just repudiated nine years of the Prime Minister by electing members from other parties.
One thing the Prime Minister excels at and we should give him some credit for is shipping off other people's money to line the pockets of Liberal insiders, as well as to fund pet projects and money to massive corporations, while Canadians go hungry and lose sight of the country we all once knew and loved. He has given $12 million to Loblaws,; $26 million to Costco; over $100 million to McKinsey; $107 million to GC Strategies, the two-person company run out of a basement in Ottawa; $900 million to the WE Charity; $50 million to Mastercard; and billions of dollars of bloated bureaucracy to Bombardier and, of course, to the CBC.
Additionally, no one can forgive or forget the $100 million that the government has shipped to UNRWA, an agency founded to employ terrorists, which participated in the October 7 massacre and is now trying to argue that it is legally immune from being responsible for doing so. Again, the money is being spent while Canadians go dumpster diving because they cannot afford the price of food.
The Conservatives will put an end to all of this. We will put an end to the corporate welfare that lines the pockets of Liberal insiders doing nothing to create jobs or prosperity in this country.
We will immediately stop funding UNRWA and start funding our own NATO allies instead. We will of course defund CBC, without question, and maybe CBC first. Simply put, we will give Canadians back control of their money, their wallets and their lives, which is something the government has refused to do time and time again. It is why we are here.
It has been almost a month of arguing over why the government will not turn over documents that you, Mr. Speaker, told it to turn over, and why the Liberals will cower from accountability for the people, the taxpayers, to know where their money went, who it enriched and what is in the documents. If the Liberals had nothing to hide, they would turn the documents over today and we could end this.
We can then get back to Parliament and fix the things the Liberals have broken in this country after nine years. We can cut taxes, build homes, fix the budget and stop crime. There are any number of issues that the Liberals have screwed up over nine years, and we can get back to business if they just turn over the documents to the RCMP, exactly like you, Mr. Speaker, told them to.