Madam Speaker, in the last Parliament, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Documents were to be presented to Parliament, but the Liberals said, “No, we cannot have transparency”. The Speaker made a judgment, and he ordered documents to be produced unredacted. It sounds like it is a repeat. The Prime Minister and all those who were surrounding him decided to take that Speaker to court to sue him or to throw away the keys and forget about him. I am not sure.
I would like to read excepts from an article from The Globe and Mail from June 23, 2021, by Robert Fife and Steven Chase:
The Liberal government is taking the House of Commons Speaker to court, in an unprecedented move to prevent the release of uncensored documents to members of Parliament that offer insight into the firing of two scientists from Canada’s top infectious-disease laboratory.
The government said in a court filing that the disclosure of this information could not only jeopardize national security but also, possibly, Canada’s international relations. ...
The legal challenge against a ruling of the House stunned opposition MPs.... An order of the House backed by a majority of MPs....called on the Public Health Agency to produce records it has been withholding from a Commons committee for months.
[The Speaker] called the court action an “urgent matter” and vowed to vigorously fight the government, saying House of Commons law clerk Philippe Dufresne will prepare a legal defence.
“The Speaker’s Office will defend the rights of the House. That is something I take very seriously,”.... “The legal system does not have any jurisdiction over the operations of the House. We are our own jurisdiction. That is something we will fight tooth and nail to protect and we will continue to do that.” ....
Mr. Dufresne told MPs before a Commons committee...that “to his knowledge” the Canadian government has never before gone to court to try to elude an order of the House to produce documents.
That sounds like today, when it could have jeopardized the Liberals' political fortunes.
Now, Canada is 157 years old. This was about three years ago, so it was 154 years old. It had never been ordered to produce documents. The article continues:
He said the House “has exclusive authority” when it comes to matters that fall under parliamentary privilege. ...
For months, opposition MPs have been seeking unredacted records from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), that explain why Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were fired from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The two scientists lost their security clearances, and the RCMP was called into investigate, in July, 2019. They were dismissed in January [the following year].
More than 250 pages of records have been withheld in their entirety and hundreds of others have been partly censored before being provided to MPs.
We had the same thing here. In 2024, the Liberals said that they produced the documents. However, they used up all the ink in the printer, because they blacked out most of it. They have actually mocked Parliament.
The documents also relate to the March 2019 transfer of deadly virus samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was overseen by Dr. Qiu. It is interesting. Does Wuhan remind members of any place? It should, as it is where the COVID virus began, and it was closed down. MPs put in safeguards that required the House of Commons law clerk to review the documents or redact information that would cause national security questions or criminal investigation before making them public. The former House of Commons law clerk, Rob Walsh, said that the Federal Court should deny the Liberal government's request.
Here is what happened. The Liberals did not want scrutiny into this lab scandal. These were Chinese spies. It showed the connection of Canada, China, the Wuhan lab and the world-wide pandemic. Now, that would really not be good for the Liberals' political fortune, because they had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on COVID. We are going to see how much of that was lining their own pockets and the pockets of those who were close to them. It was just a total disaster. Canada's debt doubled during that time. Just as much debt had been added during a short period of time, in the past few years, under the Liberals, than has been added throughout Canadian history. It is a shame.
The thing is, giving out all this money, with very little accountability, would all go to naught. There were some things we Conservatives supported, but in many respects it was poorly managed, and it was politically driven, which is my interpretation. The Liberals said it was for COVID supports, but now the Auditor General has just announced that the Prime Minister's CEBA program was just another billion-dollar disaster during the COVID period. There was $3.5 billion in taxpayers' money paid to almost 80,000 recipients who did not meet eligibility requirements. I know the Liberals wanted to hurry and get it out, but it was just a disaster.
The Auditor General found that the Liberal Minister of Finance did not provide effective oversight for the CEBA program. Billions of dollars was given out to people who had lost their unemployment, to people who were incarcerated, to high school students and to addicts on social assistance, and this actually exacerbated the addiction crisis.
What did the Liberals do in 2021? They did not want this information coming out, because it showed too much of a connection with the COVID virus coming from Wuhan to Canada. It did not look very good, but their polling numbers were looking good. They had said that they would not take advantage of a national emergency like COVID to call an election. However, what did they do? Well, they called an election in 2021, and that kind of closed the books on the procurement of documents.
There are “philosophical razors”, a term I was not familiar with until I looked it up this morning. In philosophy, a “razor”, is not something one shaves with but a principle that allows one to eliminate or shave off unlikely expectations for an occurrence. I believe someone quoted here today during question period Hanlon's razor. Robert J. Hanlon said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Let us just say that the Liberal's fiscal management is not a strong suit for them. I would like to quote a couple of economic razors from our Prime Minister and the Liberals. Here is one, which we could take to the bank, or not: “the budget will balance itself.”
That is the way that the Liberals have run this country. This is a quote from the Prime Minister saying that budgets just balance themselves. They do not just balance themselves. It takes a lot of work, sacrifice and attention. That is something that we see from the Liberals, supported by the NDP, inattention and fiscal imprudence, which are dragging our nation down.
Here is one that the Prime Minister said a week or two ago: “We're focused on Canadians. Let the bankers worry about the economy.” When we make stupid economic decisions, when there is no fiscal restraint, things spiral out of control. Who pays the price? Canadians pay the price, with higher interest rates, increased mortgage payments and the higher cost of living. That is what we are seeing and what is being felt on the streets and in homes across Canada.
We have also seen that the per capita income in Canada has been stagnant since they have been in power, beginning 2015. The New York Times, at the time it was quoted, said, Canada has the “world's richest” middle class. This was in 2015. I wonder who was in power at that time. It was the Conservatives under Harper.
That is not the case now. We are declining, year after year, in our standard of living in comparison to much of the world. We were one of the top six for many years, for decades. We are now, I do not know, maybe approaching number 30.
That is after the Prime Minister has lost control of spending. A few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that the deficit will be $7 billion higher than the Liberal government's own $40-billion spending cap for this year alone. Liberals cannot control one year. It is just not in them. They just do not know how, it seems. That is serious, but it is an unserious government.
The Liberals inherited a surplus budget under the Conservatives. I will say, also, that the Conservatives inherited a surplus budget under the previous prime minister, Paul Martin, of the Liberals. That was a different party.
I was going door to door on the weekend in Fort Langley and Cloverdale for a by-election. I was talking to people, people who had voted for Liberals. They are just shaking their heads now. They said that under Martin, under others, they supported them, but with these guys, it is a clown show. It is not just a clown show. It is a disaster.
It is a disaster and they are being supported. They would not be here if it were not for the NDP. It rests on the NDP.
The Liberals promised in 2015 that there would be a $10-billion deficit and we would be okay after that. That has not been the case at all, for any of those years. We then have a quote from the finance minister. They are two peas in a pod. She called Canada's current state a “vibecession”. That sounds like the disco days. No, this is economics. She said, “Canadians just aren't feeling that good”, which has caused them to slow down their spending, thereby causing vibecession. That is basically what she is saying. It is an insult. She is insulting Canadians, saying that it is all in our heads, that it is not real, that Canadians do not know or understand reality.
It is the finance minister. It is the Prime Minister. It is the Liberal government, backed by the NDP. It just shows how clearly ignorant they are on where Canadians are at and where their policies have dragged our nation to.
I had much more I wanted to talk about on this topic. I will say we would not even have this opportunity to debate if the NDP had voted along with the Liberals. The thing is, the New Democrats, which is a bit surprising, have to show a bit of a separation from the Liberals. If anybody looks at polling from the past year and a half, or even sneaks a peek, it is not going great for the Liberals. I know it is only a snapshot, but there have been lots of snapshots. It has been more like a movie for the past year and a half.
The NDP members say they are not supporting the Liberals, but they vote with them every time, but not here. They have to show a bit of separation: “We are different from the Liberals. Look, we are allowing this debate to continue.” I will say they have missed 35 speaking spots. They have put six speakers up. This is an opportunity to share what is in their hearts and there is a lot of flexibility.
As far as Conservatives go, we do not agree with the agenda of the Liberals. We are quite happy to discuss this. We would much rather have a carbon tax election today.
