Madam Speaker, I am always pleased to rise in the House on behalf of the great people of Sturgeon River—Parkland to talk about their priorities in Parliament.
After nine years, the evidence is clear that the NDP-Liberal government has proven too costly in terms of crime, taxes, corruption and just plain incompetence. I am proud to rise in the House once again to hold the Liberal government to account for its corruption and incompetence before Parliament, for our democracy and for all Canadians. In Parliament today, we are speaking about a ruling the Speaker made that the Liberal government violated an order of the House of Commons by refusing to submit full, unredacted evidence for a criminal investigation into a $400-million green slush fund scandal. This ruling, combined with the government's actions, has paralyzed Parliament, which is preventing us from focusing on issues, such as the skyrocketing cost of housing, Liberal inflation's effect on food prices and the rising rate of crime.
Today, we are dealing with an issue of the Liberal government's incompetence and negligence in the form of $400 million of inappropriately diverted money at Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It was funnelled into the hands of directors who had a conflict of interest. They had a financial interest in the companies they were sending taxpayer money to. The directors were appointed by the Liberal government; they were accountable to the Liberal government and the Minister of Industry, yet the government refused to act while $400 million in taxpayer money was misappropriated for personal gain.
Until the Prime Minister meets our demands to release the full, unredacted documents to the RCMP, Parliament will be forced to continue with this very important privilege debate. Until then, Liberals will find no rest. Conservatives will continue to fight tooth and nail to stand up for the rights of Parliament in the House, stand up to the government's corruption and ensure that taxpayers get every single stolen dollar back.
We are talking about parliamentary privilege. For those Canadians who are tuning in and may not understand what parliamentary privilege means, it means that members of the House of Commons have rights. This is a sacred principle we inherited from the mother of parliaments, Westminster. The Liberal government has violated the rights of Parliament by refusing to release documents that Parliament demanded. These powers to call for documents are rooted in the very Constitution of this country, from 1867, and in the Parliament of Canada Act. This issue is so significant that the Speaker had to rule on it. We have been debating it for weeks in the House, to the exclusion of all other issues, because the government continues to paralyze Parliament and refuses to hand over the documents Parliament requested.
If the Liberals think they have a mandate from Canadians to refuse to hand over documents Parliament has demanded, they must take it to a higher power, the people of Canada, to get a mandate to withhold these documents. They do not have that mandate; they do not have the courage to call an election, so we are here today with a paralyzed Parliament.
The Liberals have claimed that they cannot release these documents because that would infringe on charter rights. This is a very novel argument. It is an appeal to ignorance, one would say. They say that releasing the documents might infringe on rights, so they must withhold them, but they do not offer any clear or concrete evidence to back up this claim. I say that the charter was created to protect Canadians from the excesses and evils of government, not to protect government from accountability, Canadians or Canada's Parliament.
The documents that were provided were heavily redacted, censored and blacked out. This level of secrecy in a country such as Canada, or anywhere across the world, is wrong. It is preventing us from holding the government to account for the way it spends our money. Parliament has the authority to spend taxpayers' money. These are hard-won privileges; they were fought for in the 1600s and 1700s in the British Parliament, and we inherited them here in Canada's Parliament. There were literal wars fought over the rights of Parliament to raise and spend money and to hold government to account. In fact, a king was killed because he refused to submit to the will of Parliament. That is how serious a precedent this is, and it is why the Speaker had to make a ruling that Parliament's rights were violated.
Before this matter can go to committee, we have to insist that the RCMP and Parliament have full access to the information we have called for. This issue deserves to be handled with the utmost seriousness, and it needs to be made a priority for Parliament. All opposition parties agree that this demand must be met, except for the Liberals. They do not have a majority, and they do not have the right or the votes to defy the will of the House.
If they want a mandate to defy the will of the House, they need to take it to the Canadian people. That is something they refuse to do, because they know exactly what is going to happen if they ask Canadians whether they support their move to withhold these documents. It is not going to look pretty for them. This is a scandal that reflects on all the Liberal scandals we have seen over the nine years of the NDP-Liberal government.
Why is the government working so hard to hide these documents? When we are talking about $400 million, it is not chump change. As Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis across this country, it is more important than ever to ensure that every single taxpayer dollar is spent rightly and efficiently and has the best possible result for Canadians. Canadians need to hold the government to account in the next election, but as the government refuses to call an election, it is up to Parliament to hold it to account. While the ballot box might be the ultimate judge, the government refuses to let us go to the ballot box, so we are going to keep fighting tooth and nail until it gives Canadians the documents they deserve.
We are in an affordability crisis, and the Liberals are acting in exactly the opposite way that Canadians would expect a government to act, especially a government they only gave a minority and expect to work with other parties in the House, not defy the will of Parliament. Instead of finding ways to serve Canadians, we have to sit here and discuss the government's negligence, its incompetence and its ongoing corruption and refusal to be transparent and hand over documents about its mismanagement.
According to the 2024 HungerCount report, food banks have recorded over two million visits this past March, and more than a quarter of those visits were by children. We are discussing these things today because the government has paralyzed Parliament. It is removing our ability to discuss how to bring results for Canadians. While the government holds Parliament hostage by preventing these documents from going forward, we cannot deal with the very important issues Canadians want to deal with.
Getting back to the issue of SDTC, the industry minister is the main perpetrator of this scandal. He violated a House order. I want to go back to a document the Prime Minister released back in 2015 when the Liberals first formed government. In 2015, the Prime Minister sent each cabinet minister a letter entitled “Open and Accountable Government”. It outlined their responsibilities. I want to quote from the document today:
To be worthy of Canadians’ trust, we must always act with integrity. This is not merely a matter of adopting the right rules, or of ensuring technical compliance with those rules. As Ministers, you and your staff must uphold the highest standards of honesty and impartiality, and both the performance of your official duties and the arrangement of your private affairs should bear the closest public scrutiny. This is an obligation that is not fully discharged by simply acting within the law.
Another section reads, “The trust of Canadians will also rest on the accountability of our government. In our system, the highest manifestation of democratic accountability is the forum of Parliament.” That does not sound like the government of today. It does not think the forum of Parliament is the authority in this country.
The document continues:
You are accountable to Parliament for the exercise of the powers, duties and functions with which you have been entrusted. This requires you to be present in Parliament to answer honestly and accurately about your areas of responsibility, to take corrective action as appropriate to address problems that may arise in your portfolios, to correct any inadvertent errors in answering to Parliament at the earliest opportunity, and to work with parliamentary colleagues of all political persuasions in a respectful and constructive manner.
We have come a long way since 2015. I doubt the government would put out a letter like this to cabinet ministers today with a straight face, because that is not the NDP-Liberal government we have been seeing over the past nine years.
The document further says that ministers must answer Parliament's questions on how “public monies were spent, as well as to account for that use. Whether a Minister has discharged responsibilities appropriately is a matter of political judgment by Parliament. The Prime Minister has the prerogative to reaffirm support for that Minister or to ask for his or her resignation.”
The government is refusing to hand over documents about how $400 million of taxpayer money in the industry minister's portfolio was misdirected to insiders. Some of the insiders are very close to the Liberal government, including the Liberal environment minister, who still holds shares in one of the companies that received at least $10 million through this program. Before he became the environment minister, he was a very effective lobbyist for it. This is an insider thing. This is Liberal cronies at the trough with taxpayer dollars.
“Open and Accountable Government” says, “The Prime Minister has the prerogative to reaffirm support for that Minister or to ask for his or her resignation.” I just want to think about the past history of Liberal ministers who have resigned in the government. It seems like the only ministers whose resignation the Prime Minister has ever asked for or ministers whom he has forced to resign have been the ministers who have stood up to him.
Why is it that only the ministers who stand up to the Prime Minister are asked to resign? It is not the ministers who misplaced $400 million of taxpayer money because they were not holding their board of directors accountable under conflict of interest rules that the ministers fully knew were being violated. In fact, members of the board even raised the conflict of interest rules to the industry minister at the time and were ignored. They knew full well that there were conflicts of interest going on, and they did nothing to prevent it from happening. Now $400 million has been misspent.
Why is the Minister of Industry not being held to account for the mismanagement? It just does not appear that mismanagement or negligence is really a cause for firing in the Liberal government. The only thing that is a cause for that is standing up to the boss.
Parliament is all about standing up to the powerful. It is all about standing up against the sort of obscurity and the sort of opaque government that refuses to hand over documents and be fully truthful and honest about how things went down, who got rich and how they were connected. If one can cover up those things, they can be in cabinet.
If we stand up, let us say if there is a scandal related to a company that is facing prosecution and we are facing pressure from a prime minister and a PMO that are calling for us to intervene in an active investigation by asking a special prosecutor to give a deferred prosecution agreement, that is not allowed. We are out of cabinet. However, if we allow $400 million of taxpayer money to be misspent, there are no consequences.
Has the government met its own standards of integrity and accountability? As outlined in the 2015 document, I think it is very clear to all Canadians that they have not. Canadians do not expect perfection. They know that governments are going to fail and that mistakes are going to be made, but they do expect accountability. They expect openness, honesty and transparency, and they expect that the trust they put in the House and in the government is going to be respected.
I know there are many Liberal MPs in their caucus who agree. I encourage them to have the courage, like the ministers the Prime Minister fired for standing up to him, to stand up to the Prime Minister and to the government for their mismanagement. Unless more members of the House stand up to the Liberal government's mismanagement, its negligence and its corruption, we are not going to get any results until we have an election.
The debate today brings up another issue from the past: the sponsorship scandal, which involved over $40 million and led to the collapse of the Liberal government at the time. The green slush fund is a $400-million scandal. I know inflation is bad under the Liberals but it certainly has not gone up 1000%. The cost of Liberal corruption inflation appears to be about 1000%. It was $40 million in the 90s and 2000s. It is now $400 million today. That is inflation. The Auditor General found that the green slush fund violated conflict of interest laws 186 times.
The Liberals also showed massive indifference during the arrive scam scandal of $56 million and change. Developers who came forward said that they could have done the app for a fraction of the cost, less than a million dollars, yet we had sole-source, backdoor contracts going toward a company that was not actually even making the app. It was all being fed to subcontractors.
This is what we have seen after nine years of the Liberal government: We are not able to do the kind of things that we used to be able to do in this country; we have to contract them out to somebody else, and they cannot even do it. They are a middleman and have to subcontract it to the people who actually do the things.
When there are multiple levels of contracting and subcontracting, the costs keep going up. People know that the Liberal government is not watching the cash register. It does not care how much money is going out. Very quickly, something that should have cost less than a million dollars is costing $56 million. That is the cost of Liberal inflation, Liberal negligence and Liberal mismanagement.
The Prime Minister does not seem to think the rules apply to him. We saw this when he travelled to a private island, despite conflict of interest rules and ethics rules showing that taking private planes and going to islands owned by private interests was wrong. In fact some very interesting revelations have been made years later about how people in the Prime Minister's Office did not even know that the Prime Minister was going to be going. When they did find out, they begged him not to go, but nobody was going to convince the Prime Minister not to go on that bleep trip. I am not going to say their exact words in the House.
That is the Prime Minister's arrogance. He was not going to be dissuaded from something he wanted. People look at leadership and ask what our leader is doing. When they see what the Prime Minister of Canada is doing, it gives them an opportunity, the licence, to do the same.
Therefore it is no surprise that under the Liberal government there have been cabinet ministers who, when they were in the private sector between elections, allegedly claimed that they had indigenous heritage in order to try to score lucrative government contracts. Ministers appointed their friends to boards where they would be in a massive conflict of interest. In the case of SDTC, hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money were being misdirected to companies where there were conflicts of interest. It is because of the Prime Minister's leadership, and it has filtered down into his cabinet.
The fact is that the Prime Minister has set a precedent. He has made it very clear that if someone does what he says; if they cover up; if they deny, deny, deny; and if they keep pushing forward and do whatever he says, they will be protected and will still be in cabinet. However, if someone stands up to what the Prime Minister is doing and says he is wrong, they are out of cabinet. That is what happened with Jody Wilson-Raybould and with Jane Philpott. They stood up to the Prime Minister and suffered the consequences.
The message has been heard loud and clear in the Liberal Party. It is why its members have to ask permission to even stand up at the microphone and speak in their caucus meetings. It is why they have to beg for the opportunity to have a secret ballot in this country. A secret ballot is a fundamental part of our modern democracy, and someone is not even allowed to have it inside the Liberal caucus.
A whistle-blower testified, saying, “I think the current government is more interested in protecting themselves [and letting the public nightmare continue]. They would rather protect wrongdoers and financial mismanagement than have to deal with a situation like SDTC in the public sphere.” They also said, “It's one thing to say nothing has been found as of yet, but that obfuscates the fact that nothing was looked into, for that matter.”
Conservatives, unlike the Liberals, applaud the whistle-blowers who stand up for Canadians. It should be the Liberals going to the department, asking the questions, finding the truth, and saying that this is what happened, here is who is responsible, here is how we are holding them accountable and this is what we are going to do to make sure it never happens again. However, the Liberals are preventing us from doing that. They are withholding the documents and they say that the RCMP says it does not want them.
Even if the RCMP does not want the documents, the Liberals can send them and the RCMP can do whatever it wants with them. It can use the documents or it cannot use them. The fact that the government seems so eager to defy the will of Parliament to prevent the documents from seeing the light of day is really suspicious. Why are the Liberals burning weeks of parliamentary time on the privilege debate, all to prevent the documents from seeing the light of day? The Liberals say the RCMP says it might or might not use them—
