Debates of Dec. 3rd, 2024

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[An hon. member]

Two hundred.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

It was more than 200.

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives have risen 213 times, not splitting their time with anybody and consuming the entire 30-minute period. This is because Conservatives are not interested in sending this to PROC, where their own motion calls for it to go. They are interested in preventing the House from doing any work. Until this point, it would have been work on meaningful and important legislation that has a genuine impact on Canadians. Now, we need to deal with a really serious issue that this country is facing, but Conservatives are preventing us from talking about it. That issue is foreign interference.

In a question I asked just moments ago, and I am glad that the member tried to answer it, I asked the member for Battle River—Crowfoot about the serious issue we could be debating right now instead of this: foreign interference and the member for Calgary Nose Hill. I said that there are serious allegations by five people from the campaign that the member for Calgary Nose Hill co-chaired for Patrick Brown. They said she was contacted by Indian diplomats and pressured not to continue supporting Patrick Brown.

What did the member for Battle River—Crowfoot say in response to my question? He said the Leader of the Opposition won handily. I bet he did, especially with a bit of help, but that is not the question. Nor is the question whether the member for Calgary Nose Hill was coerced or ultimately made a decision based on the conversations that were had with her. The question is this: Did any foreign diplomat or foreign individual say anything to the member for Calgary Nose Hill? If they did, and if they were trying to influence the outcome of the campaign she was involved in, then that is considered foreign interference.

It does not matter who won. It does not matter whether she was influenced by it. What matters is whether the interference took place. Conservatives will try to cloud this and say that the member for Carleton won handily anyway; he took all of Alberta, and there is absolutely no issue. The member for Calgary Nose Hill will say that there was nobody and that she is a seasoned politician who knows how to handle herself. We would not know that by the way she ran away from the CBC yesterday. However, that is not the issue. The issue is whether she was contacted and somebody tried to influence her. That is foreign interference. Canadians have a right to know if she was approached. We have a right to know who those actors are so that we can properly deal with them and they do not continue that behaviour. That is in the public interest. That is in Canada's interest.

However, instead, everybody lines up behind the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Carleton, and recites his slogans ad nauseam.

[An hon. member]

Yes, it works.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

It works.

Mr. Speaker, what does it work for, as was reported earlier this week? It works for gold stars in caucus meetings, so members can be paraded around and celebrate how many times one member said a particular slogan. It works. I will pick up on that heckle. When the member says that it works, he is fully admitting that they are just throwing out slogans to try to persuade people. They do not care about policy or anything else; they are just throwing out stuff to try to fool Canadians. What response do I get when I say that? It is that it works. Conservatives are admitting that their plan to fool Canadians with their slogans is working. That is, ultimately, where we are.

Why is this so important, and how does it tie back to this particular motion? As I said earlier, Conservatives are absolutely only interested in their own political agenda. They are only interested in what they can possibly gain politically, and they have zero interest in what they could do to support Canadians. This is where we are. My friends in the Bloc and the NDP know how to work with us. We have done it before. There is no reason to continue allowing Conservatives to do this.

Conservatives have to accept the fact that 213 of their members getting up to speak for half an hour is enough. At some point, people are going to start asking why that is. People know there is really important legislation they thought the government would be debating this fall, but it is not being debated.

[An hon. member]

You're going to spend more money.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I hear Conservatives saying we have to spend more money.

Mr. Speaker, Canadians should be genuinely concerned about the amount of money that Conservatives have spent on this charade and everything that makes this place function. Millions of dollars have been spent supporting this filibuster exercise.

Conservatives will miss no opportunity to remind people that it is unacceptable to spend money recklessly on behalf of Canadians, but then they come in here and do it every single day, filibustering their own motion. One would think that they could at least stand up and explain to Canadians why they would filibuster their own motion. They put forward a motion asking for an issue to go to PROC. Usually, we would hear from the opposition, giving every reason it should not happen. Instead, we have Conservatives routinely getting up and speaking ad nauseam.

I genuinely hope that we have come close to the end of this. I hope that it is an opportunity for my friends in the Bloc and the NDP to realize that Canadians really want us to get back to business so that we can do what is important for Canadians and do the work on their behalf.

This charade that has been going on for so long needs to come to an end. People have things that need to be taken care of, and that is our job. It is not the job of the Conservatives to hijack Parliament. It is their job to hold the government accountable, and they have failed in doing that. The only thing they are looking out for is their political interests.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Mr. Speaker, there was a time, a couple of years ago, when the Liberal government decided it did not want to do any work. As far as I am aware, it is the only government in the world that did not function as a government during COVID. Suddenly, we were simply a committee of the whole, and nothing was done. How long did that last?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member voted in favour of it. Those were unanimous consent motions. I sat in here until 5:30 in the morning while they were worked out, debated and negotiated among the parties.

For every Conservative who gets up and decides to be critical of the measures that the government took during COVID, I would remind them that they voted in favour of them. We unanimously voted in favour of those measures, including the member who just asked the question.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague the following question. Is he not embarrassed at all by the current situation? Does his government not want to be transparent about Sustainable Development Technology Canada? I see this as an important issue because it has to do with this government's credibility in the eyes of Parliament.

It is also a matter of credibility in the eyes of our SMEs, particularly businesses that need investments to make the energy transition. We are also in a context where this government is choosing to invest billions of dollars at the end of the investment chain. It is going to make companies like Honda, Stellantis and Volkswagen dependent on lithium from China, rather than creating processing opportunities here, close to where those resources are mined, particularly in Quebec's regions.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as it relates to this issue, if members want to be credible, they have to be responsible too. On this particular issue, the reality is that the responsible thing is to send this matter to PROC so that PROC can look at it.

The Conservatives continually demand that documents should be released for everybody to see. When it comes to these documents, we have heard from the Auditor General and the commissioner of the RCMP. They say that this is not the right way to distribute information. They do not need Parliament to get in the way and tell them what evidence they need. They have the ability, the authority and, if necessary, the courts to obtain that information.

Yes, it is very important to be responsible, and responsibility is incredibly necessary if members want to be credible. Unfortunately, the Bloc and the NDP have found themselves in a weird predicament. They supported this last spring, but they are now probably starting to have second thoughts, thinking that perhaps they should not have acted the way they did.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, no, I am not having second thoughts. I sat at the industry committee, which actually had the SDTC file. They could actually see what they wanted.

The member mentioned the RCMP. One thing I would like to get to is his opinion about the CBSA officers right now. Under the Conservatives, they laid off and fired 1,100 officers, who have not been restored by the Liberal government. Second to that, the proposal is actually to give CBSA officers back the powers they lost in 1932. I want to make sure the member understands that these are things we can control and do right now. While the House may be bogged down, there is no reason we could not increase staffing and enforcement powers for CBSA officers, who have been left on their own.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is true that when Stephen Harper was the prime minister, CBSA officers were laid off in droves. As somebody from a riding very close to a border, I am very familiar with this. This government has continued to invest significant resources in our borders. With the most recent comments made by the President-elect of the United States, we have also committed to working with him to ensure our border with the United States can remain safe.

For the NDP member to suggest we have not done any of that is just completely false. The reality is that we have been investing in our borders and we will continue to do that to ensure they stay safe and secure.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member represents many young people in his community. I wonder if perhaps he can highlight some of the things we are unable to move forward on, because of this privilege motion, that young people are counting on us to achieve. We have done so much, but perhaps he can let the House know.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is true there are a lot of young people in my community, but there are a lot of young people throughout the entire country who are waiting on this Parliament to adopt important legislation that will positively affect them.

The reality is that we know it can happen, because it happened just a few days ago. The NDP was willing to set things aside to allow us to debate one thing for one day. When NDP members found a motion or an issue that was important enough to them, they allowed us to set aside the games that Conservatives have been playing in order to bring forward legislation that actually impacted all Canadians, not just young Canadians.

NDP members now need to come to terms with what is important enough to them. There is a lot of legislation out there right now that we would love to debate. Is the NDP basically saying, “Well, the GST was important, but other issues that other people care about are not important”?

It is time for the NDP to come to terms with the fact that this has gone on long enough, after 213 Conservative speakers speaking for 30 minutes, and now is the time to put this to rest so we can get back to working on behalf of Canadians.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I was wondering about the net-zero accelerator, an $8-billion fund, basically, for the heaviest emitters in Canada that was supposed to reduce emissions. However, the independent environment commissioner found that over 70% of the contracts made no commitment to reduce emissions.

Flash forward to the environment committee demanding to see the documents on why these contracts were not transparent. The Prime Minister ended up putting a gag order on all of us, and upon review of the contracts, we found that over 360 pages of these contracts had been ripped out. Does the member know why those 360 pages were ripped out on the $8-billion fund?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, does the member know that if he lets this issue go to committee, he might get answers to the questions he wants? The irony is that Conservatives are going to stand in here and just lecture all day long, but in letting this get to committee, the member might start to get answers.

By the way, I thought this whole issue was about getting the documents for the RCMP. That is what they kept talking about, and now, suddenly, they are trying to suggest it is something else.

The reality is that Conservatives are hell-bent on ensuring this issue jams this place so they can keep talking about it. The member does not really want an answer to that question. He wants to keep asking hypothetical questions that can make people go “oh yeah” and draw conspiracy theories and go down rabbit holes. That is what that line of questioning is all about. It is not about getting to the truth, because if it was, he would let this motion pass and go to committee.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Mr. Speaker, members know the old adage “where there is smoke, there is fire,” and there is clearly something smouldering across the House.

The Leader of the Opposition, for months now, has refused to get his security clearance. In my riding, more and more people are asking, “What is up with the Leader of the Opposition?” Then we hear about the foreign interference. The member for Calgary Nose Hill was apparently approached by foreign actors who instructed her to back away from Patrick Brown.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. There is something smouldering over there. I would ask the member to give his comments on that.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, tonight it was reported that five people close to and tied to the Patrick Brown campaign were aware of the member for Calgary Nose Hill's being approached by Indian diplomats. The member needs to come forward and tell the truth about what happened. I am not suggesting that she was influenced, that she was coerced or that it was of her own volition. If she says so, for her reasons for leaving the campaign, I will accept them.

However, that is not what is important. What is important here is whether people, Indian diplomats in particular, approached her, because that is considered foreign interference and that is what Canadians deserve to get an answer to.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the outstanding constituents of Oshawa and to speak to the question of privilege. I just want to take the opportunity as well to wish members of the House and my constituents in Oshawa a very Merry Christmas. I do not know whether I will have an opportunity to rise in the House again before the break, but certainly we need some more Christmas spirit around here. I think the best Christmas gift we could get the people of Oshawa would be a carbon tax election, because the government is not worth the cost or the corruption.

My speech this evening is going to be more or less about censorship, disinformation and misinformation. The Liberal government is moving down a spiral of authoritarianism. It is a very deceptive government that is definitely not about transparency as it originally promised it would be. It is a government using every single legislative tool to censor and to control.

Around the world, government censorship is constantly being used to silence opposing opinions, suppress transparency and accountability, and consolidate power. We see this form of government censorship in several countries: Russia, China, North Korea and, yes, Canada. After nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, we are witnessing a new level of government censorship more than ever before in Canada. The issue today is about contempt of Parliament and about fraud.

The government's censorship threatens the very foundations of our democracy. Without the ability to demand production of documents, speak our mind, express our views and challenge the status quo, we are left with nothing but the hollow illusion of freedom. The government censorship we are witnessing here today is not about protecting Canadians from harm or ensuring public safety. Instead it is about silencing dissent, shutting down debate and consolidating power. It is about covering up corruption and fraud.

With respect to the question of privilege, we are addressing government censorship regarding the failure to produce documents ordered by the House on the scandal involving Sustainable Development Technology Canada, otherwise known as the Liberal billion-dollar green slush fund. However, while the power of the House is supposed to be supreme, the Prime Minister's personal department, the Privy Council Office, decided to execute the order by telling departments to send in documents and censor them through redaction to cover up corruption and to cover up fraud.

This form of government censorship completely breaches a member's privilege because the order from the House did not say to redact. The government has opted to defy the House and to censor information in the SDTC documents at every single step of the way, as it does not want Canadians to know that through the green slush fund, $400 million has gone to Liberal insiders. It may be twice that amount because the Auditor General could not complete the full audit.

The scandal as well, it is really important to recognize, compromises two current cabinet ministers and one former cabinet minister. I would like to say that it is a surprise that the government would behave in this manner, but based on the government's track record, government censorship and fraud are nothing but the expected. In other words, for the government, it is business as usual.

Perhaps this is a very good time for my colleagues to talk a little bit about a history lesson. Remember the Liberal sponsorship scandal? The last time the Liberals were in power, they funnelled $40 million to their friends and orchestrated a sophisticated kickback scheme. Then they got caught at fraud, corruption and cover-ups.

The best predictor of future behaviour, I would suggest, is past behaviour. Is the SDTC scandal part of the latest Liberal kickback scandal? Where did the money go? This one scandal is at least 10 times greater than the sponsorship scandal. It is another in a long list of scandals that the Liberals are trying to cover up through censorship.

I should probably define what I mean by censorship. Censorship is “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” I would suggest “politically unacceptable” is why the Liberal-NDP government champions censorship. I should probably define a few other terms. Misinformation is “the inadvertent spread of false information without intent to harm”. Disinformation is “false information designed to mislead others and is deliberately spread with the intent to confuse fact and fiction.”

Another word is a controversial new term, malinformation, used to describe the NDP-Liberal government, a “term for information which is based on fact, but removed from its original context in order to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, malinformation is “true but inconvenient” for the government and its narrative.

Under the guise of combatting disinformation and hate speech, the government has implemented policies that give it the power to silence voices, censor information and withhold documents that do not conform to its own woke ideological agenda. This censorship is spreading across Canada, through our institutions, not just here in the House of Commons.

We saw this last week when independent journalist Ezra Levant was arrested for simply filming and reporting on a pro-Hamas rally occurring in his own neighbourhood. Instead of arresting provocative pro-Hamas supporters who spewed hate, celebrating genocide while chanting “from the river to the sea”, an independent member of the press was arrested for simply doing his job, arrested by the very police who have sworn to protect his charter rights.

We wonder why Canadians are questioning whether this is the country they grew up in. When a Jewish man gets arrested by Toronto police in his own neighbourhood while supporting a vigil for families whose loved ones were massacred and kidnapped on October 7, while members of the hateful mob are allowed to continue their mockery of the victims' suffering, we have to ask ourselves why the government condones this hateful behaviour, censors first-hand accounts of cruel anti-Semitism and supports police who discriminate. When governments and our institutions condone this behaviour, it is as if they give a stamp of approval, and that definitely is not okay.

What about the government's history of pushing through authoritative legislation? Let us take a look at that. Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, according to the NDP-Liberals, aims to modernize the Broadcasting Act. However, it harms Canadian digital creators by limiting their services and ability to reach global audiences. It also allows the government boundless powers to regulate digital content and gives it the authority to control what Canadians can and cannot access online.

This is a direct assault on the freedoms of expression and access to information that have flourished in this digital age. Instead of letting Canadians choose for themselves what to watch and listen to, the government seeks to impose its own narrative, prioritizing state-approved content over independent voices and diverse viewpoints. Our young, bright Canadian content creators are being stifled. If other jurisdictions also decide to put forward legislation like this, it will mean Canadian content will be a lower priority for the rest of the world and that could damage our entertainment exports.

The government's censorship does not stop there. Bill C-18, the Online News Act, also allows the government to get in the way of what people can see and share online. This bill requires Internet companies to distribute royalties to newspapers whose content is shared on a site. It demonstrates the government choosing to side with large corporate media while shutting down small, local and independent news, as well as giving far too much power to the government to regulate without limitation. As a result, local and independent media outlets that might challenge the government's narrative are left vulnerable, and those that conform are rewarded.

Common-sense Conservatives believe we need to find a solution in which Canadians can continue to freely access news content online, in addition to fairly compensating Canadian news outlets. However, when we offered amendments to the bill that would address these several issues, the NDP and the Liberals voted them down.

Bill C-63 is another testament to this government's continuous commitment to censorship. The online harms act would create costly censorship bureaucracy that would not make it easier for people experiencing legitimate online harassment to access justice. Instead, it would act as a regulatory process that would not start for years and would happen behind closed doors where big-tech lobbyists could pull the strings.

The common-sense Conservative alternative to the online harms act is Bill C-412, proposed by my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill. It would keep Canadians safe online without infringing on their civil liberties. It would give Canadians more protections online through existing regulators and the justice system, and would outline a duty of care for online operators to keep kids safe online while prohibiting a digital ID and giving parents more tools.

For another outrageous example of withholding documents and censoring information, let us not forget the cover-up at the Winnipeg lab. The Liberals allowed scientists loyal to the Chinese Communist Party to work at our most secure lab. The Liberals gave them a Canadian taxpayer-funded salary and allowed them to send dangerous pathogens back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they work on gain-of-function research. When exposed, the Liberals, whom we know admire the basic dictatorship of China, let these scientists escape the country without proper investigation. When Parliament asked for these documents, the Liberals actually took their own Liberal Speaker to court and then censored our ability to disclose those documents by calling an early election. We still have not found out what happened there.

On top of censoring Parliament, let us not forget about the NDP-Liberal government's track record of censoring individual expression. We have seen countless individuals, physicians, scientists and organizations being punished for simply speaking out against the current government's policies. The government froze bank accounts. People were labelled as promoting hate speech and disinformation, or as conspiracy theorists, racists and misogynists, by their own Prime Minister.

We were warned that this could happen. In one of his final interviews, esteemed scientist Carl Sagan noted, “We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces.”

Who is running science and technology in a democracy if the people do not know anything about it? We have seen this technocracy weaponized by governments during the COVID pandemic through various unjustifiable mandates and government censorship surrounding medical research. Now, the new head of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, Marty Makary, has said on the record that the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic was the United States government, and it is the same here in Canada.

The weaponization of medical research is not just an American issue. Dr. Regina Watteel, a Ph.D. in statistics, has written, an excellent exposé on the rise of Canadian hate science. Her books expose how the Liberal government, through repeated grants from CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, hired Dr. David Fisman, a researcher for hire from the University of Toronto medical school, to manipulate COVID statistics to support a failing government policy.

He was touted as an expert, but his only expertise was manipulating statistics to support government overreach. His sham studies were used to justify some of the most draconian COVID policies in the world and were quoted extensively by the Liberal-friendly media. Any criticism of Fisman's fraudulent statistical analysis has been shut down and censored. Again, this is a Canadian example of a result that Carl Sagan warned us about decades ago: the fall into technocracy, where government-sanctioned expert opinion trumps hard scientific data.

Sadly, the government's censorship has now extended to our judicial systems and other institutions, including the Parole Board of Canada.

While the Liberal justice minister brags about appointing 800 judges out of the 957 positions, we can see the soft-on-crime consequences of his woke ideological agenda. We saw an outrageous example of this last week when the French and Mahaffy families desired to participate in the parole hearing of their daughters' brutal murderer. Locally, Lisa Freeman, a constituent in Oshawa and the inspiration behind my private member's bill, Bill C-320, was recently informed by the Parole Board of Canada that the axe murderer who brutally murdered her father while on parole at the time will be subject to a closed-door review.

In the past, Ms. Freeman has been denied her rights as a registered victim and, as a result, has been continually revictimized, only this time by the very institutions that should be putting her mental health and safety and the safety of victims first. Attending and meaningfully participating in an in-person hearing to deliver a victim statement is not only fair and reasonable, but well within Ms. Freeman's rights, as per the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights under the right of participation. It is crucial that Ms. Freeman be able to express the emotional pain and turmoil the murder of her father caused and continues to cause. She also deserves to be able to gauge for herself the accountability of the offender. This is something she has previously been unable to ascertain.

The brutal murder of her father has not only vastly impacted her life and the lives of her loved ones, but also continues to cause post-traumatic stress, which is exacerbated by the complete lack of care by the Parole Board of Canada for her rights as a victim. It is completely unacceptable that Ms. Freeman is once again being censored by the Parole Board of Canada as they plan to make a closed-door decision regarding the offender's continuation of day parole and full parole without holding a hearing.

It is shameful that the NDP-Liberal government seems to care more about censoring victims than keeping repeat offenders off the streets. What they do not understand is that government censorship does not fulfill the requirement of protecting people from harm in society. Instead, government censorship is the harm to society. It threatens our fundamental democratic values, which we should be championing. To quote the famous author, George Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The Marxist communist Vladimir Lenin once said, “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

More and more we are seeing these quotes and Marxist ideas implemented under the NDP-Liberal government. We must stand up for the idea that truth is not something that can be determined by the state. We must insist that Canadian citizens, not censoring politicians, should be the ones who decide what information they believe, what opinions and values they hold and with what content they engage. We must continue to reject the government's idea that censorship is the solution to every problem, though it may be the solution to their problems, and instead embrace the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of conscience are part of the solution of a more free and prosperous Canadian society.

Justice Potter Stewart said, “Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritative regime”. That is what we see with the tired, divisive, Liberal government of today. Canadians have indeed lost confidence in the weak Prime Minister and the corrupt Liberal Party. If we allow government to censor the rights of the people's elected representatives and the Internet; squash individuality, opinions and expression; and curtail our freedom of movement, then indeed the Marxists have won the ideological war.

In closing, Canada is not the greatest country in the world simply because I say it is. Canada is the greatest country in the world because we care and fight for our fundamental, democratic values. We have a history of that people from around the world in other countries would love to have, so these values must not be taken for granted. When we, in Oshawa, sing our national anthem, we take “The True North strong and free” to heart.

The current SDTC scandal, with the refusal of the NDP-Liberal government to release the requested unredacted documents to the people's representatives, threatens the very essence of our democracy, which generations of Canadians died to protect and must be respected and fought for. At our cenotaphs, service clubs and in the sacred House of Commons, the people's voices will be heard.

Canadians are listening today, and they have a core identity. We are proud Canadians. We are not the first post-national state. When people ask us which country we admire the most, we do not say that we admire the basic dictatorship of China. We say we admire Canada.

Hopefully, like most things that criticize the government, such as this speech, the Liberal-NDPs do not decide to censor it. Let us see what they have to say.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources]

Madam Speaker, where I wanted to pick up is exactly where that speech ended. I am sure all the members in this place are well aware that we just heard a long speech, which was highly critical of this government, that will not be censored. In fact, that is exactly what happens in this country: We allow for freedom of expression. It is in our charter.

I just wanted to pick up on the beginning of the speech, where I believe the member opposite said that we were akin to North Korea. I was hoping perhaps he could elaborate on that, because that certainly does not seem to be the experience of most Canadians. I would like to know how he sees us as being akin to North Korea.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Madam Speaker, what I said was about the rise of censorship around the world, and what I did was I included Canada and the government in that. The reason I did that is that the evidence is very clear. If we look at the last time the Liberals pulled this stunt, a very similar stunt, it was with the Winnipeg lab, when they refused to give the House documents. What were they hiding? This is what Canadians really want to know.

We have heard the Liberals throughout this entire debate not want to actually talk about the essence of what we are talking about here today, which is the right of Parliament, the supremacy of Parliament, to be able to order these documents and see them as the people's representatives. Instead of releasing them, the Liberals are making this debate go on and on. Each time they get up, instead of actually debating us on it, they bring up another issue. When I am talking about censorship and comparing us to other countries that are perhaps much more authoritarian, it is a warning because we are heading in that direction and Canadians do not want us going in that direction.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Madam Speaker, it was a crazy speech, just wacky. My first point being, of course, that it was because of NDP MPs that we got to the bottom of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and to the bottom of the SDTC scandal and WE Charity as well. In each case, the NDP played a key role.

However, we do know when authoritarian tendencies took place in this country, and that member was in the House during the dismal nightmare years of the Harper regime, where Parliament was shut down and padlocked by Harper and his cronies so that we could not get to the bottom of any of the scandals. I can mention them because he is well aware of them. The G8 scandal was a billion dollars. The ETS scandal was $400 million. The Phoenix pay scandal was $2.2 billion. I could go on and on. There were the Senate scandals. There was a scandal every single day, and every single day the Harper regime and his cronies in the House of Commons shut down any sort of debate, shut down any sort of parliamentary inquiry and shut down committees. It was a nightmare.

The nightmare ended in 2015 when we finally got rid of the Harper regime and the corruption, the scandals, the cronyism and the refusal to allow Parliament to do its job.

Does the member have any sense of shame for his participation in all of those events?

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Madam Speaker, we see again the NDP standing up in the House and instead of actually debating me about what I was talking about, which is censorship, taking the action of I guess the person they really respect and look up to. I am going to read a quote from one of the NDP's favourite authors, whose name is Vladimir Lenin. He said, “It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than attempt to relate [or] to explain”. This is—

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The appalling ignorance of this member is really—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

That is not a point of order. It is a matter of debate.

I am going to let the hon. member for Oshawa attempt to answer the question.