Mr. Speaker, as I rise today, I follow a great speech by my colleague from Aldergrove, British Columbia. The member is a lawyer who has had a great deal of sophisticated input into the debate we have been having in the House over the last number of weeks. I am very appreciative of what he brings to the table as far as his legal input goes.
We have to make sure that we follow the rules of Parliament. My party and some members of other parties in the House have tried to hold the government to account for weeks so that it performs the role it is required to for Parliament. This is the executive. We are Parliament. Parliament has responsibilities, and we are here to fulfill our roles as parliamentarians. The government is trying not to fulfill its role and is trying to make Parliament as dumbed down as possible.
The problem with that, of course, is that Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and we have a sacred trust to uphold the House's rules for Canadians. They elect representatives from across this country and make sure they bring perspectives from our various ridings to the House of Commons, where we discuss issues with our peers and share perspectives.
We have rules here about how we make the government act, and the government is responsible to the House at the end of the day. I appreciate the ruling the Speaker came to that the government cannot avoid disclosing facts about the $400-million scam at SDTC, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and has to provide information to the House of Commons that the Auditor General exposed as money misspent through that program. We have called for those documents. There was a vote in the House, and the majority said it wanted those documents tabled, as is the rule in the House.
Let us get back to the core of this discussion and look at the amendments. Right now, we want to extend the time, through a subamendment, to make sure we get those documents, because time is obviously being ignored by the government. We want those documents. Parliament is due those documents by its very rules. To ignore those rules at this point in time is tantamount to saying that Parliament does not matter. That is where the government is trying to get us to at some point in time, as if this is just a place we get to walk over, a hurdle we have to get through as the executive branch of government. It is not a hurdle. It is the Parliament of Canada.
We are coming up on Remembrance Day next week, of course. How many people have stood for Canada to make sure we have democratic values and have the ability to elect people to the House of Commons so we can pass laws and represent the people? Democracy is sacred. If we lose it, we will miss it in its entirety, and it will be very difficult to get back at the end of the day.
Every sovereign nation around the world is envious of the democratic countries around the world. The democratic countries are the most prosperous. We are the ones that involve our citizens. We are the ones that impact the world the most in what we do. What the government is trying to do is turn us into less of a democracy through this measure and half measure by half measure.
This has been happening, as my colleague pointed out, for four years now. Ever since the pandemic happened, the government has thought it is not accountable. It started with the pandemic. I was elected in 2019, and 2020 came along very quickly. The government then decided that it wanted all this money control, called special warrants, and for us to authorize a whole bunch of money so that we would not even have to sit in the House of Commons and it could do whatever it wanted.
One of the main roles of the House is to make sure that we oversee the spending of the government. It brings back estimates and brings its plans to us, and we have to approve them. We have to make sure we hold onto that and hold the government to account so it is accountable for that spending.
When I was elected, it was a great honour to sit in the House. There are 338 of us from across this country, and it is a great honour to come here and meet with people across the aisle to see how we can make this country better at the end of the day. That is not happening right now. The first step to making that happen is to follow the rules of this place. One cannot tear down the rules of this place and expect us to function as a legitimate parliamentary democracy. We have to respect that we have rules on how to interact together and how the government, which is in the front bench, responds to what the House demands of it. We have demanded many things in the House, and the government has ignored a lot of them.
I recall the government held up one of the requirements we asked of it some time ago. Members will recall that the House demanded the IRGC in the Middle East be deemed a terrorist group. That was passed by Parliament years ago, and the government decided to ignore it until it was opportune not to, doing it just four months ago during a by-election in Toronto. Suddenly this was an issue and it had to obey the House of Commons' vote, and the government acquiesced, finally. Parliament was demanding this of the government and the government ignored it.
Now Parliament is demanding documents, and those documents are about a $400-million scam. It is one of the many slush funds the government has. We are not the ones who initially started questioning what this was. It was the Auditor General who examined the books and said that a whole bunch of things were amiss. Think about that: $400 million and hundreds of conflicts of interest where members of a board were giving money to their own companies and were not supposed to be doing so. That is the definition of conflict of interest.
This $400 million was put into projects that were supposedly part of what we call the green shift or the energy transition, but the Auditor General said that most of these projects did not even qualify. This was money going out the door to projects that did not even meet the requirements of a program that was vaunted. This was the government's way of getting through the new transition that was going to happen. It turns out, as the Auditor General has pointed out, and we want the documents that show this clearly, that most of those projects did not even meet the requirements of the program as they were written on paper. It was just a whole bunch of Liberal-appointed insiders paying money to their own firms.
That is not something Canadians will tolerate. It is not something the House should tolerate. Show us the documents, and at that point in time we and the RCMP will determine if there are charges to be laid in this respect. We are not the police. Turn these documents over so we can see what charges can be laid and what should be done in this case. It is pretty clear that a lot went amiss in this distribution of $400 million of taxpayer funds. That is on top of many other programs.
When I look at all these things, I see that each minister in the front bench has gone out of their way to create for themselves some fund where they can write cheques. There is the SIF from the Minister of Industry, and the finance minister got a new fund this past year, the Canada growth fund. Of course, there is the Canada Infrastructure Bank, as well as a whole bunch of other funds. We are just pushing money through the economy.
Some of the stuff the government is pushing money into is just a bunch of money for its friends. It is business that should have happened anyway, but because the government has a Liberal insider friend, that friend puts an extra few million dollars in their back pocket. Even though the projects should have made sense without government input, government friends take the money.
We need to get back to projects that make sense for the taxpayers of this country and get the government out of this slush fund business for its friends. There are many of these examples, and we need to expose each and every one of them. This is the first one, and the Auditor General has already exposed it for what it is: an absolute scam, a $400-million scam.
What I am looking for is what follows after that. When we take a look at how much money the government has spent in the last four years, it has overspent. Some of it was spent on the pandemic. Less than half of the money dispensed over the two pandemic years went toward dealing with the pandemic. Hundreds of billions of dollars went toward some kind of shift that did not happen.
Our greenhouse gas emissions are down only a slight bit, and much of that can be attributed to the offshoring of work that used to happen in Canada. It is a ridiculous equation at the end of the day. We have accomplished nothing for the world's environment. All we have accomplished is making sure we do not have any economic activity of note in Canada.
I will speak about misinformation by my colleague from Winnipeg North, which he provides over and over again. He stands up and challenges us, and when he speaks from the Liberal notes of the day, sometimes I cringe. I cringe because we are here representing something of a higher purpose: what is good for this country. What is good for this country is, of course, making sure we arrive at good decisions. Those decisions only arrive if we do the right thing and speak to truth all the way through.
The misinformation is the notion that if we get the documents we are entitled to as Parliament, it will contravene the Charter of Rights. I will challenge anybody here to say that in 1982, when the Charter of Rights was legitimized as part of the Canadian Constitution, the drafters anticipated that some documents would not be provided to parliamentarians because some lawyer with an opinion that might be trashed said this would contravene somebody's charter rights. This is the Parliament of Canada. It is supreme. We are demanding documents and we are due those documents. Those documents should arrive, and we are standing here upholding democracy, making sure they do arrive. Nothing further has to occur. This resolves itself when the documents get delivered in their entirety, and then we investigate what happened from there. Step one is to get those documents to the table.
There is more misinformation going on, and I heard a lot of it again today in the House of Commons. Earlier this week, I had to put up with two ministers announcing an emissions cap in the oil and gas industry. How does an emissions cap work? An emissions cap works by shutting down production in Canada. That is the only way to do it. We have been shown many times by industry and by all the scientists involved that if we shut down a million barrels a day of Canadian oil production, it will be quickly replaced by other suppliers around the world, end of story. Everybody knows that.
In Canada, right now we are producing some of the most environmentally beneficial barrels of oil for the world economy, particularly for our partners south of the border. The Liberals want to penalize one industry at this point in time by using a vanity approach to what they think they are doing for the environment, but are accomplishing nothing but offshoring. That has to be challenged to its utmost, and I will stand up for people who are adding value throughout the energy supply chain in Canada, but also for the amount of technology being developed that deals with Canadian energy production to make the most efficient and environmentally friendly oil in the world. That advancement has happened significantly.
I also need to raise this, because I am not sure everybody remembers it: Canada is not a cheap place to produce oil. The reason we produce oil in North America, but in Canada in particular, is the security involved in making sure our energy sources are provided here. Otherwise, those energy sources would be supplied by other places around the world where oil is much less expensive and much less environmentally friendly, believe it or not. This energy molecule is still the most important in the world, and we continue to move it along so that we have other sources, because putting all our apples in one basket is not a good strategy.
Ensuring we have energy from many sources, like oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and geothermal, is part of our future, but we are not going to end one without punishing Canadians and the environment, because we cannot push a transition faster than it moves. That is all there is to it at the end of day. I have addressed that very clearly.
There is other misinformation we have talked about. I saw the Prime Minister stand up in the House during Question Period today and say he is standing up for Alberta oil workers, and I have never heard such nonsense. The Prime Minister, the government and the front bench are doing everything they can to punish the sector and make it seem like it is the sector that is responsible for the emissions around the world.
Yes, CO2 comes from burning hydrocarbons, but CO2 comes from every human activity. We need to try to mitigate CO2. We are doing our best, but shutting down Canada is not the solution to accomplish that.
I also speak to my colleague across the way from Winnipeg North because he has said a lot on this and it is always a speaking line off of the Liberal talking sheet of the day. The member talks about the contempt of my party's leader in the House. My leader is not showing contempt; he is doing his job, his role, as the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition. As opposed to the government's mouthpiece, he is actually sitting there holding the government to account.
We have talked about this many times, the whole notion that the Leader of the Opposition needs to have a security clearance in order to get this information. That is the government's job. The opposition leader's job is to hold the government to account on what it is actually supposed to provide here. He cannot usurp that role or he is defying his main role as the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition.
I am going to move on to a few things the members will appreciate. I have some issues around what this country is going to look like going forward, because this country is being torn apart by the government. We need to fix this budget; it is out of control. This country is $1.3 trillion in debt, with another $50 billion going into debt this year. How much debt can Canadians assume from the current public government? It has doubled since the government came into power, and it is not turning around. This notion that government debt can continue to accumulate, and Canadians can continue to bear the burden of that, only kicks the can down the road until programs do not get delivered to Canadians who are going to need those funds going forward.
Debt-to-GDP ratio is a ridiculous notion, frankly. How much money are we spending on servicing that debt? It is $50 billion plus per year, which is about $3,000 plus per Canadian household. Therefore, 3,000 dollars' worth of government services does not arrive because we are servicing a debt that is far out of control. We need to address that. We need to make sure we fix this budget and stop spending money willy-nilly, including on a $400-million slush fund that went to a bunch of insiders, to bring that back home.
We also have a $1.3-trillion deficit, which is about $100,000 per household. We can tell that to every household in Canada: “The federal debt adds an extra $100,000 to your actual debt, and you are paying the interest on that debt all the time and there is nothing you can do about it. Do not worry, everything is free in Canada. We will get you some more free programs. Do not worry about it. Nobody is going to worry about that debt. Well, your kids are going to worry about it, because somebody is going to have to deal with this.”
Kicking the can down the road is no way to address what we need to deliver to Canadians. Dealing with debt is something we have to focus this government on, because it thinks it just has to continue spending more, and it is going to make facts up as it goes along.
I did not mention the emissions cap the Liberals talked about. It ties in with the debt situation. The emissions cap is going to harm a sector that provided $45 billion to Canadians in 2022 through taxes that supply services, like health care, education and social services, across this country. I am asking how the government is going to replace that $45 billion as it does its utmost to try to shut in an industry and an asset that is the envy of the world. The government seems bent on destroying that industry. We do not know what we have until we have thrown it away; this is something we have to try to hang on to.