Mr. Speaker, I have the honour of rising in Canada's Parliament to join in the debate about the privilege question relating to the Liberal government's latest scandal: the green slush fund.
Before I do that, I just want to take a moment to mark this historic day and congratulate our neighbours to the south for a very decisive election. I congratulate Mr. Trump for regaining the White House. Canada and the U.S. have so many ties. They are not just economic, which is going to become very relevant for us, but also social and family ties. For me, it is my daughter, Kristi, her husband, Brad, and their four children, my grandchildren. They are all proud Americans living in the state of Washington.
What are the future relations of Canada and the U.S. going to look like? We do not have to look any further than a speech that President Kennedy gave here when he was first elected in 1961. He said, “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” That is as true today as it was 60 years ago.
It is often said that the success of a Canadian prime minister depends largely on how well they get along with the U.S. president. Politics is about relationships, after all. How is that going to look in the next little while? We do not have to look very far. History tells us that we should probably be having an election very soon.
This is now the fourth week we have been debating the Liberal government's refusal to produce documents relating to SDTC, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, also called the green slush fund lately. Parliament ordered the government and SDTC to produce documents in June.
Why are the Prime Minister, his cabinet and his government refusing to deliver those documents? We do not know, but the longer they delay, the more suspicious we become. Are some of the cabinet ministers involved? Are they involved in the graft related to the green slush fund? I think that they need to come out and tell us what is going on.
The Liberals have raised specious arguments about why they can ignore this order and why they do not have to comply with it. It is something about contravening the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. What are the arguments? We do not know because they have not stated them very clearly. Besides, who are the Liberals to judge? They are one of the litigants in this whole litigation. They are not the judge.
What the Liberals are conveniently ignoring is that the rights of Parliament are spelled out in our Constitution. We can look at sections 3, 4 and 5 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but we can also look at the preamble of the Constitution Act, 1867, which says Canada shall have a Constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom. That goes back 157 years in our history.
Section 18 of the Constitution Act also defines parliamentary privilege for the House of Commons and all its members as those “enjoyed, and exercised by the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain”. Those are the privileges as they existed the day that Canada became a nation on July 1, 1867.
That latter point is very important because with that comes 650 years of parliamentary tradition and history coming out of the mother of all parliaments in Westminster. One of those traditions is, of course, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. It is that Parliament can make or unmake any law that it deems just and appropriate.
Another one of these age-old traditions is the concept of responsible government, where the government, the Prime Minister and his cabinet, must always retain the confidence of the House and must answer questions from the opposition during a daily question period relating to the business of government. A third way that the House of Commons keeps the government accountable is through motions directing the government to do certain things.
An early example of that, at least early in my career, was a Conservative opposition motion in December 2019, just a few months after I was elected, to create a special, all-party committee of parliamentarians on China-Canada relations. That motion passed with the support of the Bloc Québécois and the NDP members of Parliament. Only the Liberals voted against it.
Someone had pointed out at the time that this was the first time the Liberal government, under the current Prime Minister, had lost a significant vote. Of course, four years earlier, the Liberals had been elected as a majority government, so they could put through any legislation that they wanted or stop any legislation or motions they did not like. This was a whole new dynamic now, a minority government, and the Liberals had not yet figured out how to play nice with the opposition parties for a minority government and a minority Parliament to be successful.
I want to point out the Liberals did comply with that motion and we created a special committee on Canada-China relations. However, things deteriorated pretty quickly after that. We have seen time and again where the Liberals, under the current Prime Minister, have held Parliament in contempt. I am going to raise three examples of when that happened. Of course, just to anticipate the end of my speech, the third example is going to be the green slush fund, which is the subject of the day.
The first example was a pandemic power grab. I remember that day very well. It was March 13, 2020. The World Health Organization had called this virus a worldwide pandemic. The parties consulted and we agreed that we would suspend Parliament for five weeks, hoping that perhaps the worst of things would be over by then. Then the Liberals tried to pull a fast one on us. Just a couple of weeks later, they put forward a proposal that Parliament would be suspended for a long period of time and that they would be given all the power they wanted to tax and spend as they pleased without parliamentary oversight, which we found just unbelievable. Parliament has worked very effectively during other times of crisis, so what was so different this time? We put a quick stop to this insanity and the Liberals had to back down.
The second example of the government holding Parliament in contempt was with the Winnipeg lab affair. The special committee on Canada-China relations, which we know the Liberals did not like very much, was investigating rumours that two employees of the Public Health Agency of Canada, PHAC, had been fired because of their direct ties to the Beijing Communist regime. The committee ordered the production of documents, similar to what we are doing with the green slush fund, and on June 2 Parliament voted to confirm that order. The Liberals voted no, of course. PHAC did not comply with this order. Therefore, on June 17, 2022, the House declared the agency to be in contempt of Parliament and ordered that the president appear in the House of Commons to be reprimanded in public and ordered to produce the documents. The Speaker of the day, Mr. Anthony Rota, supported the majority of the House, of course. He was doing his job—