Mr. Speaker, I have the greatest respect for the member for Nipissing—Timiskaming, who is a former Speaker of the House. He supported us, of course. He was doing his job. That is what the Speaker is supposed to do.
Now we know the Liberals did not like the special committee on China-Canada relations right from the start. We know that they did not like the makeup of the 43rd Parliament, a divided House, and we knew that they would not like this order for the production of documents because they wanted to keep all this ugly business that was going on in the Winnipeg labs and the relationship with the Wuhan lab in China under cover, but what we did not know was the degree of contempt that this Liberal Party held for Parliament. We found that out when the former Attorney General, the Liberal Attorney General, sued the former Speaker of the House, who was a member of the Liberal Party. There was a big showdown in court of the Attorney General's lawyers versus the Speaker's lawyers, all at the expense of taxpayers because we were paying for all the lawyers. We knew that this was a loser case right from the very start. We knew that no one was going to come out the winner, except for the lawyers maybe, who were charging their full hourly rate.
In the end, the whole case fizzled out when the Prime Minister made his trip to the Governor General's mansion and asked her to dissolve Parliament and to drop the writ for a new election. In the end, the 43rd Parliament lasted only a mere 23 months. We thought that the Prime Minister would do the responsible thing and wait until the pandemic was behind us, but, no, right in the middle of a pandemic, he thought that perhaps Canadians would affirm what he and the Liberals had been doing, and that they would return a majority government for the Liberals. We all know how that ended. The 44th Parliament, the one that we are in right now, looks very much like the 43rd Parliament. There was $600 million spent in expenses to run that election campaign and the House looks almost exactly as it did before with roughly the same number of Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Québécois. We lost some of our colleagues, we gained a few others; the same with the other parties. In the end, the Liberals, even though they lost the popular vote, had the most seats, so they got to form government. Conservatives were the official opposition while the Bloc Québécois and the NDP looked pretty much like they did before.
This brings me to the issue of the day, the green slush fund, which is the third example of the Liberal government holding Parliament in contempt. The scandal started with some whistle-blowers who worked at Sustainable Development Technology Canada who smelled a rat and called in the Auditor General. As a little bit of background, SDTC is a federally owned and created company with a mandate to promote public and private investment in green technology. That is a laudable goal, I would say. If the Prime Minister had just left things alone, SDTC today would still be functioning and fulfilling its mandate, but he could not resist putting his fingerprints all over that company. He fired the then board chair, Mr. Jim Balsillie, who was very capable at his job, but had some disagreements with the Prime Minister, so the Prime Minister put in all his own people, who were friends of the Liberal Party.
We know all of that from the Independent Auditor's Report, which was tabled with Parliament on June 4. I am not going to list everything from the report because many other speakers have already done so, but, for example, $390 million was misallocated to insiders, board members who the Prime Minister had appointed. They had non-qualifying projects that did not even meet the criteria. As well, there were 186 instances of conflicts of interest as board directors had voted money for their own companies. “Hey, I'm going to step out of the room. Please vote for my application of a couple of million dollars and then I'll return the favour to you when it's your turn to step out.” It was just friends distributing taxpayer money amongst themselves. This is what one of the whistle-blowers said after the auditor's report came out:
Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.
These are very serious words. This was not just mismanagement, but criminal activity, so the official opposition did what we are supposed to do, which is to hold the government to account. We put forward a motion for the production of documents. The NDP and the Bloc Québécois voted with us, doing their jobs. As fellow opposition members, it is also their job to hold the government to account. That motion passed on June 10, six days after the Auditor General's report came out.
The Liberals, of course, were not happy that the motion passed, but this is the reality of a minority House, where they need to get the support of at least one of the other parties to get their way. They failed. They did not do that. The order was made. Parliament is supreme. Parliament has the authority to do this. It is definitely within our jurisdiction to do so, but the Liberals just refused. They think that they have some arguments to say that they do not have to comply with the order, and they did not. They ignored it.
As such, we came back here to Ottawa, to Parliament, in September, and things got ugly. We appealed to the Speaker and asked him to rule on the question of privilege. We argued, based on the age-old rules, that Parliament has the right to and the privilege of demanding the production of documents when it sees fit to do so. The Speaker ruled in our favour. I will read one sentence from the Speaker's ruling: “The Chair cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established.”
One would think that that would be the end of the story. It was pretty clear, but we know what these Liberals think about Speakers who make rulings that they disagree with. They sue them, hoping maybe to find a judge who would turn a blind eye to the centuries-old traditions of parliamentary proceedings and parliamentary privilege.
The Liberals did it before. Will they do it again, or will they just keep dodging and weaving as they have for the last four weeks, or actually since June, saying that nothing gets done around here? It is because of this contemptuous behaviour on the part of the Liberal government that things have ground to a halt here in Canada's Parliament.
We know the Liberals do not like an aggressive opposition. I get it. They think that we should all play nice. “Hey, we are all in this together”, they like to say, but we are just doing our job as the official opposition, holding this government to account as prescribed by Canada's Constitution. Now the Liberals need to do their job and comply with the order so that we can all get back to work. That is what we want to do. We have important work to do here, but the Liberals' refusal to act is causing us to have ground to a halt here.
Now, the Liberals have not formally lost the confidence of the House because the New Democrats, despite all their bluff and blunder, continue to support this corrupt and incompetent regime, but the Liberals have lost the confidence of the people of Canada. I know that. This is what my colleagues and I are hearing at home, in our ridings, when we are out knocking on doors and when we are at events in our communities. It is what we heard in the two recent by-elections, where the Liberals' base supporters are even saying, “Enough is enough. It is time for a change”.
Here is an idea for the Prime Minister: Do not comply with the order about the green slush fund. Do not even bother taking the Speaker to court. The Liberals would lose. He should take a walk to the Governor General's mansion and ask her to dissolve the 44th Parliament and call an election because that is what Canadians want. They are ready for a government that would stop the corruption, fix what the Liberals have broken and offer common-sense solutions to the problems facing ordinary Canadians, the people whom we listen to. Canadians deserve a government that would axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Canadians deserve a government that does not play favourites, but creates an environment where non-insiders can work hard and get ahead. Canadians deserve a Canada that delivers on its promise to all who call it home, which is that hard work earns a powerful paycheque for pensioners and for workers that buys an affordable home on a safe street in a country where everyone from anywhere can do anything, as long as they work hard. All of this is achievable, but first we need an election. There needs to be a call for a carbon tax election.