Madam Speaker, before I begin my comments about the Sustainable Development Technology Canada scandal, knowing that we are coming into Remembrance Week, I want to share with the House a poem. It is called We Remain, and it was written by T.S. Bedford:
We remain.
We stand between the living and the lost;
Between memory and tomorrow.
We give voice to the silent;
Presence to the missed.
We share yesterday with the parted
And today with the loved.
No one knows the shape of the future
Or where the path will lead.
But the lost will always walk with us;
So long as
We remain.
I have to say, at the start of this speech today, that I cannot believe we are still here. I cannot believe that we talked about this topic in September and for all of October, and that it is November and we are still talking about it. For those at home who do not know what this privilege motion is about, it all started with Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a fund that was supposed to support sustainable technology development. The fund was created in 2001 and worked fine under both Liberal and Conservative governments until the current corrupt Liberal government.
Basically, it appointed people to the committee that was going to decide who got the money, and all its members gave it to their own companies. The Auditor General found 186 conflicts of interest, a whistle-blower implied that there was criminality involved and Parliament voted to have the documents related to this scandal produced. Of course, the Liberals did what they always do: They delayed and then produced the documents all blacked out without anything useful. The Speaker has correctly ruled that they need to produce the documents unredacted and that no government business or private member's business is going to take place in the House until that happens. We have been waiting for five weeks for the Liberals to produce the documents.
Bills are not coming forward, but there are some bills that I am glad are not coming forward, like the online harms bill, Bill C-63, which would do absolutely nothing to help children being sexually exploited online. Everybody wants that to be dealt with, but it would create a parallel system with no criminal consequences, and that would not help anyone. It would also put a person in jail for life if someone thinks they might commit a hate crime in the future. That is a chill on freedom of speech in this country. I am also happy that we do not have Bill C-65 coming forward, the bill that would give all Liberal and NDP members who are going to lose their seat in the next election their pensions by moving the election date out a week.
One of the bills that I would like to see come forward is unfortunately not happening. As part of the federal redistribution process, my riding was renamed Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong. The new chief of Bkejwanong, which is Walpole Island, objects to the use of that name. As soon as I heard that he objected to it, I asked it to be part of a bill to alter riding names that need to be changed, which is done regularly in the House. I am very disappointed that this bill is not coming forward, because now I am not able to do what the chief asked me to do and what I said I would do, which is bring it forward here.
The reason we are here is that the Liberals continue to block us by not producing the documents. Let us talk about some of the arguments that have been made.
The Liberals are saying they do not want to give the documents to the RCMP because that would be a violation of people's charter rights. I want to be clear that the RCMP gets tips all the time, like from Crime Stoppers. It follows up on them. Nothing is a violation of anybody's charter rights with respect to that. What would happen is that RCMP members would look into the documents, especially if we give some indication of where they should be looking, and if they found evidence of criminality and wanted to pursue criminal charges, they would go to a judge and order those documents to be produced so they could be officially used in a criminal trial. That is where we are at today.
I just want to recap a bit of the history of how this fund went so wrong.