Mr. Speaker, “cornucopia” is another good one.
I asked where the accountability is. Indeed, the witnesses should be compelled to come before the committee to provide Canadians with the documents and the answers they seek. Since my first intervention, I have not gotten a satisfactory response to the question I asked: Where is the accountability? I will therefore continue along in the similar line of questioning.
In the case of the green slush fund, $400 million was paid out to Liberal insiders. The bigger mind-boggling number to me is that it was through 186 cases of conflicts of interest, a number that came from a sampling by the Auditor General. I wonder how many Canadian families could be fed with $400 million. It is hard to wrap one's head around a number so big, and around so much corruption.
According to another member's intervention in this place, $400 million is equivalent to the annual tax filings of 22,000 Canadian families, all to go to fund Liberal insider corruption. According to a recent RBC study, the average Canadian family of four now spends $1,227 a month on food, just under $15,000 a year. The math would suggest that $400 million would feed over 27,000 families per year, which is about 108,843 Canadians. Please do not misunderstand me. The role of government is to create the fiscal and societal climate where powerful paycheques allow Canadians to feed themselves; it should not have to be the role of government to directly feed Canadians.
Members get my point. I am trying to make the big numbers, which are so hard for many of us to wrap our heads around, relatable in order to indicate exactly the size of the issue we are dealing with and the amount of the gross misuse of taxpayer money. It is simply not acceptable. Where is the accountability?
In speaking for 20 minutes two weeks ago, I did not have enough time to go through the full list of scandals, corruptions and conflicts of interest. I will continue in that vein today.
I did comment last time on the Prime Minister's removal of the only indigenous woman ever to serve as a justice minister and Attorney General for Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould. She was removed because she would not be pressured by him to thwart the rule of law in Canada to help the PM's friends at SNC-Lavalin. The former minister lost her job because she stood up for what her oath of office required her to do. She was accountable, which is the principle that everyone is subject to the law, regardless of their relationship with the Prime Minister of Canada.
I also spoke about one of several Bill Morneau scandals, including Bill C-27. When the bill was tabled in the House of Commons, the value of Morneau Shepell shares increased dramatically. Coincidentally, Minister Morneau held 21 million dollars' worth of shares.
I also mentioned the David Lametti scandal, yet another case of Liberal disregard for the rule of law in Canada. The former attorney general cancelled the verdict of first-degree murder against Jacques Delisle, a former judge, even though all the legal experts were against this decision.
Who can forget the then minister of public works, whose husband sat on LifeLabs board as a director while the company was awarded COVID testing contracts totalling $68.2 million? What is the value of that in today's groceries? It could feed 18,470 plus people. Again I ask, where is the accountability?
I mentioned Scott Brison's attempt to benefit from his and his husband's ties to Irving Shipbuilding by trying to block a shipyard contract in favour of Irving away from Davie. In the process, the Liberals and Mr. Brison tried to frame multi-decorated Vice-Admiral Mark Norman and charge him with breach of trust. He was exonerated of all those charges, but not before his military career was destroyed. The whole sordid affair was unconscionable. Where is the accountability?
Former minister Navdeep Bains was also mentioned in my previous speech with his telecom windfall. As the former minister of innovation, science and industry, he pledged to deliver government support and that they would demand the big three telecoms, which are Bell, Rogers and Telus, to lower their prices by 25%. Now, Mr. Bains sits as the chief corporate affairs officer at Rogers and is receiving a six-figure salary. Again, there is no accountability, and for Canadians, there are higher cell phone bills. In many cases, Canadians' mobile data plans cost 200 times more than the cheapest ones in other countries, according to a recent Toronto Star report. I do not know about other members' cell phone bills, but mine has not gone down.
Of course, no scandal chronicle would be complete without mention of the WE Charity scandal and the Trudeau family bonanza paydays totalling $482,000. Doing the math, that amount would buy 128 Canadians groceries for a year. I guess that is okay because I am sure Margaret, Sacha and Sophie needed the money for groceries.
I would have been negligent in my previous intervention if I had not touched upon the notorious arrive scam and GC Strategies incident. That was the Liberal-friendly company that charged $60 million for an app that could have cost $80,000. Again, there is not much accountability. If my calculator is correct, that would be the equivalent of groceries for 16,300 Canadians for an entire year.
What about the Prime Minister's Christmas vacation on the Aga Khan's island and the subsequent $50 million of federal funding that flowed to that foundation, which is what it has received since 2016?
The Prime Minister also invited a convicted terrorist, Jaspal Atwal to dinner when he was in India with his family, and he ensured the feast was prepared by his own celebrity chef, who was flown in from Vancouver. He embarrassingly played Mr. Dressup with an insensitive overuse of Indian clothing. That scandal cost Canadians another $1.66 million, or the equivalent of the annual food bill for 451 Canadians. There was no accountability for that fiasco. Once again, Canadians were left embarrassed and angry, or perhaps hangry.
The Ethics Commissioner found that the Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development also broke ethics rules when she doled out just under $17,000 in a contract to a friend. That is about one family's worth of annual groceries. I am sure we all know of families that could use that money.
Now on to the scandals that I did not get to last time. I did not have time to describe the Julie Payette fiasco. The Prime Minister ignored the independent process put in place by the previous government to vet potential Governors General, as he thought he was smarter and could do it better himself. He picked his own. We know how that turned out, which was a disgrace to both the Governor General's staff and to the institution.
What about the Minister of National Defence's interference in the Nova Scotia shooting tragedy? He pressured RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki to publicly release information about the specific firearms used in the shooting in order to advance the federal government's misguided gun control legislation.
These are ones I did not get to last time. I am just getting to them now. That is not to mention, following the resignation of the then ethics commissioner Mario Dion, due to overwork, I believe, the Liberal government decided to appoint Martine Richard, the sister-in-law of the current public safety minister, to replace him. Does this sound like nepotism to anyone? Again, where is the accountability?
Under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, the sponsorship scandal may have been the spark that ignited the grand-scale Liberal penchant for lining their own pockets and those of their friends. Unfortunately, it was not the last. The Liberals and their buddies have discovered that their corruption is inflation-proof when it comes to padding their own personal fortunes. Therefore, here we are today.
After the documents for the SDTC scandal, the green slush fund, are finally handed over, Conservatives will raise concerns over the member from Edmonton Centre's company receiving over $120 million in government grants and contracts, including when he was minister. Although the minister has denied any wrongdoing, he went so far as to say text messages referring to a “Randy” uncovered during the committee hearing last summer, was not him, but, indeed, “another Randy”. The evidence tells a different story.
New text messages indicate that the member in question was in cabinet at the time and, at one point, the texts between the business partner and his client referred to a “Randy” being in Vancouver on September 6, 2022. We know that the member for Edmonton Centre was attending the Liberal government's cabinet retreat in the same city. Furthermore, Global News reported that the minister's former business partner was texting a “Randy” about deals involving a half-million dollar payment. Subsequently, that same business partner admitted that he had lied to Global News about the identity of the “other Randy”, confirming that it was, indeed, the member for Edmonton Centre who he was referring to in those now infamous text messages. However, the minister had the audacity to testify that the “Randy” referenced in those texts is not him, but another Randy, who just happened to work at the company he had a 50% ownership stake in.
At the committee hearing, his business partner did come clean and testified that, indeed, there is only one Randy who ever worked at the company, and it was the minister himself. I guess he thought better than to stand by his original statement when he learned that section 132 of the Criminal Code of Canada states, “Every one who commits perjury is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.” Where is the accountability for the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages? Where is the ministerial accountability? Where is ministerial integrity?
Who can forget the Frank Baylis scandal? Frank Baylis left politics after only one term as an MP and was part of a consortium of companies that received $237 million to provide 10,000 ventilators in the spring of 2020. It sounds eerily similar to the situation of Navdeep Bains. When will Canadians find accountability restored again in their government? I can tell members: It will be when they elect a common-sense Conservative government. That is when.
Now questions are arising about whether taxpayers are going to be funding one of the companies that Mark Carney works for days after he was announced as an adviser to the Prime Minister. As a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, on paper, he seems to be the perfect fit as a financial adviser to the PM. Unfortunately, it appears that he is cut from the same cloth when it comes to financial ethics, or lack thereof. What should come as no surprise, a potential conflict of interest has come in for Mr. Carney and his company, Brookfield, which could involve billions of taxpayer dollars.
I am moving on from millions of dollars now to talk about billions of taxpayer dollars. The Globe and Mail reported that the proposal floating around Bay Street and the halls of Parliament would see Brookfield Asset Management create a $50-billion investment vehicle, with $10 billion of that to be paid for by Canadian taxpayers, and members guessed it, Mark Carney is the chair of the board for Brookfield. He holds the title head of transition investing at Brookfield.
How much is $10 billion? How do we wrap our heads around understanding how much $10 billion is? It is the equivalent of 689,163 Canadian families' groceries for a year. Even that is a number too big, and I cannot fully fathom how it would impact Canadians if this were to come about. It is simply unacceptable that carbon tax Carney has been given the power by the Prime Minister to offer him advice on a company in which he holds $1 million in stock options. Why is there no conflict of interest screen being applied?
If the Prime Minister were to grant Brookfield's request, does that not beg the question of how much money Mark Carney would stand to personally profit. The Financial Post reported that Brookfield immediately began lobbying the government for this money after the Deputy Prime Minister created a task force in last spring's budget to redirect Canadian pension fund investments. This was of course led by the former governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz.
What we do not know is if Mark Carney personally put efforts into pushing this through, as he refused to register as a lobbyist. The Prime Minister protected carbon tax Carney by appointing him to a position in which he does not have to declare his conflicts of interest. Every day, more and new questions emerge.
As mentioned last September, Carney's close friend, who serves as the CEO of Telesat, Daniel Goldberg, received $2.1 billion in taxpayer loans to build a broadband network that other firms could have delivered at a fraction of the cost to taxpayers. Despite Carney's glaring conflict of interest, both the NDP and the Liberals decided to protect him from answering questions at the House of Commons committee.
I ask my colleagues down the way why it is that NDP members have sold their souls to their Liberal partners and then ripped up the deal, and now they are saying they will sell them on a case-by-case basis. have they been caught protecting their own again? I do not know. Why can we not have transparency? The injustice never ends. The only way it would end would be after the next election, when Canadians would be able to take back their paycheques from the corrupt government.
To summarize, I have spoken to about 17 scandals that show the Prime Minister of Canada views the government and the government's treasury as his own personal slush fund, and that of his cabinet and their close friends, all to be used to improve their personal fortunes.
The lack of accountability starts with the Prime Minister, and this disease and corruption seems to pervade this cabinet. The member for Edmonton Centre followed the lead of the Prime Minister and his colleagues by stepping up to gorge himself at the illicit Liberal banquet table. Will the real Randy please step up and take responsibility?
We need change and accountability, and we need the kind of leadership that shows Canadian people that the government serves them and not the other way around. We need the kind of leadership offered by the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition and a country where its citizens can both heat and eat. That government will only be found in one place, and that is with common-sense Conservatives, who presently sit on this side of the House. We will turn the Liberal hurt into the hope that Canadians need by bringing home a country where hard work pays off members's homes, my home and our homes. Let us bring it home.
