Debates of Sept. 26th, 2024

Opposition Motion—Confidence in the government

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the intervention from my colleague, the member for Beauport—Limoilou, and the question from my colleague, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.

I will just say that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not some buffet where people can pick and choose what to use and what to cast aside. However, that does not mean that we should not do everything we can to hold criminals responsible and keep our communities safe.

Those are exactly the types of things that we are doing through our programs. For instance, we are increasing funding for law enforcement and passing legislation that is actually going to keep our communities safe. We also have crime prevention and hate prevention programs. These are programs that—

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

It being 5:15 p.m., it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the business of supply.

The question is on the motion.

If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Madam Speaker, I request a recorded division, please.

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

Pursuant to Standing Order 45, the division stands deferred until Tuesday, October 1, at the expiry of time provided for Oral Questions.

Alleged Failure of Government to Produce Documents—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Greg Fergus]

Colleagues, I am now ready to rule on the question of privilege raised on September 16 by the House leader of the official opposition, concerning the alleged failure to produce documents pertaining to Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

In his intervention, the opposition House leader argued that several government departments and agencies failed to adhere to a House order for the production of documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which was adopted on June 10. His assertions were based on a series of letters provided to the Speaker by the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel and tabled in the House pursuant to that order.

The law clerk had been directed to report to the Speaker on whether the respondents had, in fact, fully complied with the House order, by the stipulated deadline of 30 days following the adoption of the order. The letters were tabled on July 17, August 21 and September 16. In some instances, only partial disclosures were made, owing either to redactions or the withholding of documents. In other instances, the House order was met with a complete refusal.

The opposition House leader argued that the House's powers to order the production of documents are absolute and, as a result, the government was in contempt of the House for its disregard of a binding House order. He therefore asked the Chair to find a prima facie question of privilege, enabling the House to consider a motion to reiterate the order with a new deadline and urging the Prime Minister to make it clear to departments that the House order ought to be complied with.

In response, the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons expressed concerns that the House order may trespass on certain charter rights, in particular relating to police investigations and privacy. She also argued that it was procedurally inadmissible on the grounds that the order exceeded the authority of the House by attempting to secure documents for the exclusive use of a third party, namely the RCMP, rather than for its own use.

She further suggested that the order constituted an attempt by the House to appropriate the role of another branch of Canada's system of government, namely, the judiciary, by authorizing the RCMP to obtain information outside the established and judicially based law enforcement processes. Indeed, she noted that the RCMP itself had raised concerns about accepting the documents, as it feared doing so may circumvent normal investigative processes and Charter protections.

The government House leader also indicated that the order was silent on whether the documents requested should be redacted. She suggested that, absent any other indication from the House, the government should follow its statutory responsibilities by redacting documents to protect sensitive information.

While the government House leader argued that the House may have exceeded its authority in adopting the order, if the Chair determines that the matter is a prima facie question of privilege, she contended that the appropriate course of action would be for the House to refer the matter to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to shed light on the contentious points.

The House leader of the official opposition returned a second time to rebut arguments advanced by the government House leader, namely those on the admissibility of the motion, the nature of the motion and the scope of the House's power to order the production of documents.

The member for Windsor West intervened to argue that the order for the production of documents should be respected. He added that it is up to the House to decide whether it is satisfied by the nature of the response. The member for La Prairie contended that the government may well have had reasons to not meet its obligations, but that the privileges of the House are well established and the order was clear. He endorsed a prima facie finding. While both members noted the order was unusual, both maintained this fact does not excuse non-compliance.

The House has been seized before with questions of privilege regarding orders for the production of documents. Neither the Standing Orders nor any statute delimits Parliament's authority to order the production of papers and records that it may need to carry out its duties. House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, confirms this procedural and constitutional understanding, stating at page 985:

No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers....

The House leader of the official opposition pointed to the partial production of documents provided to the law clerk. As we have been informed, there were many redactions and omissions, which were made by the various departments and agencies that produced the documents. The House order, indeed, did not explicitly require that the documents be provided in unredacted form, nor did it make provision for departments and agencies to pre-emptively omit or redact portions of documents or documents in their entirety. On this matter, only the House can judge if it is satisfied with the production of documents that it has received.

More generally, the understanding that it is for the House to determine how to exercise its power to order the production of documents is also set out in Joseph Maingot’s Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, second edition, at page 190, where he states: “The only limitations, which could only be self-imposed, would be that any inquiry should relate to a subject within the legislative competence of Parliament, particularly where witnesses and documents are required and the penal jurisdiction of Parliament is contemplated.”

The procedural precedents and authorities are abundantly clear. The House has the undoubted right to order the production of any and all documents from any entity or individual it deems necessary to carry out its duties. Moreover, these powers are a settled matter, at least as far as the House is concerned. They have been confirmed and reconfirmed by my immediate predecessors, as well as those more distantly removed.

To lend support to the absolute nature of the power to order the production of documents, the House leader of the official opposition relied on the ruling on a question of privilege of April 27, 2010, from Speaker Milliken, centring on the House's right to order documents. He stated in the Debates, at page 2043, the following: “procedural authorities are categorical in repeatedly asserting the powers of the House in ordering the production of documents. No exceptions are made for any category of government documents”.

The government House leader attempted to argue that this particular order for documents was different, insofar as the documents were not to assist members in carrying out their duties but instead to be transmitted to a third party. For this reason, she claimed that the order was beyond the authority of the House. The Chair would suggest, respectfully, that these concerns ought to have been raised prior to the motion’s adoption.

I would remind members that, if there are concerns about the procedural admissibility of any motion, they should be raised with the Chair before the motion is debated or, at the latest, before the House is called upon to vote on the matter. It would be difficult, perhaps even inappropriate, now for the Chair to retroactively comment on its admissibility.

As it stands, the motion was adopted. The House has clearly ordered the production of certain documents, and that order has clearly not been fully complied with. The Chair cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established. However, before inviting the House leader of the official opposition to proceed with the moving of a motion, I would like to make a few comments on the type of motion the Chair would consider to be appropriate in the circumstances.

The members who intervened on this question used words such as “unusual”, “novel” and “unprecedented” to describe this particular production order. The Chair agrees with those characterizations. It is indeed unusual, novel and unprecedented for the House to order documents not for its own purposes but for a third party. The Chair also notes that the intended recipient of the information, the RCMP, has expressed to our law clerk its serious reservations about receiving these documents, at least in their current form. Both the opposition House leader and the member for La Prairie argued that this is not the House’s concern and that the RCMP can simply refuse the information if it wishes. Before insisting on the production of documents, as the opposition House leader proposes to do, the Chair believes the House would benefit from having this matter studied further.

In his landmark ruling on documents relating to Afghan detainees on April 27, 2010, Speaker Milliken spoke eloquently of the need for reflection, collaboration and even accommodation in such matters. While asserting unequivocally that the House had the right to order the production of papers, he also recognized that the House generally understands that the government has responsibilities to protect certain information.

In that case, it was a matter of balancing national security concerns with the duty of elected representatives to hold the government accountable for its decisions. In the case before us, the government, the RCMP and even the Auditor General, an officer of Parliament, have expressed concerns about providing the documents in question to the RCMP. While it is ultimately for the House to decide how it wishes to proceed in the face of such objections, the Chair is of the view that it would be valuable to afford an opportunity for the concerns expressed by the RCMP, as well as by the Auditor General, to be addressed fully and, I would hope, for a mutually satisfactory solution to be arrived at.

I believe the best way for this to be achieved would be to follow the usual course for a prima facie question of privilege, that is, a referral to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Such a referral would allow for a more detailed consideration of what documents remain to be submitted, what has been withheld and why, and, most importantly, how the House can ensure the intended recipient, the RCMP, is in a position to act as the House would wish it to act.

The Chair acknowledges that, in recent years, other privilege motions have been brought forward, rather than the usual referral to a committee, although previous Speakers have on occasion insisted on a particular course of action.

My predecessor’s ruling of June 26, 2021, found at page 8550 of the Debates, stated that:

A review of the rare exceptions shows that there was a certain consensus on the procedure to follow and, thus, on the wording of the motion. As Speaker Milliken confirmed in a ruling on March 9, 2011, at page 8842, ‘The Chair is of course aware of exceptions to this practice, but in most if not all of these cases, circumstances were such that a deviation from the normal practice was deemed acceptable, or there was a unanimous desire on the part of the House to proceed in that fashion.’ There are also precedents that support censure. In short, given that the parameters for such motions are clear and that the practice is well established, the proposed motion should be a motion of censure or to refer the matter to the appropriate committee for study.

I would also refer the House to the same ruling made by Speaker Milliken on March 9, 2011, in which he found that the proper course of action in those circumstances was to refer the matter to committee. At page 8842 of the Debates, he stated:

I hasten to add that the powers of the Speaker in these matters are robust and well known. In 1966, Mr. Speaker Lamoureux, having come to a finding of prima facie privilege on a matter ruled a number of motions out of order. As House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, tells us at page 147, footnote 371, in doing so, Mr. Speaker Lamoureux “more than once pointed out that it was Canadian practice to refer such matters to committee for study and suggested that this should be the avenue pursued”.

The table officers and I are available to help the House leader of the official opposition craft an acceptable motion. The House will consider the matter as soon as the member is ready to move his motion in the appropriate form.

I thank all members for their attention.

Sitting Suspended

[The Speaker, Greg Fergus]

We will suspend the House for a couple of minutes to allow the House leader of the official opposition to approach the table to discuss putting this matter in the proper form.

(The sitting of the House was suspended at 5:32 p.m.)

(The House resumed at 5:37 p.m.)

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I did rather like my original motion, but out of respect for the Chair, I move:

That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

I would like to thank the Speaker for upholding one of the most important principles of parliamentary democracy, which is that those who are tasked with the awesome responsibility of making laws, passing taxation measures and spending money have all the information that they could possibly need to properly do their jobs. Here in the House, we vote on all different kinds of legislation. We vote on laws that touch on broadcasting, on agriculture and on food-labelling laws, and to do that, we need to make sure that we fully understand all the issues and all the possible ramifications of our decisions. To do that, at various stages along the legislative process, we rely on information, usually in the form of either testimony from witnesses or of documents and papers.

The same is true when we talk about taxation. Those who remember our political science lessons, either in high school or in university, know that there is one characteristic that separates government from every other institution and every other entity in our society. The one thing that truly makes government different from any other organization is its monopoly on the use of force. I can ignore what my local community association might want me to do. I might be involved in a volunteer group, and it might want members to conform to one thing or another. I have the choice as to whether I want to continue to be a part of that organization. However, none of us have the choice when it comes to government because, at the end of the day, government backs up all its decisions with that monopoly on the use of force. Citizens must comply. They must follow the law, or they will forcibly be punished for that refusal.

The same is true when it comes to taxation. At the end of the day, all the taxation measures that are passed here are built upon the bedrock that the government will send someone to arrest us if we do not pay our fair share of taxes. Therefore, when the government collects those tax dollars out of the pockets of the hard-working Canadians who earned it, the people who get up before the sun rises and come home after it has set, when the government reaches into their pockets after they have earned their pay through the toil, sweat and often blood that they expend to do their jobs, it had better have a darn good reason to take that money out of people's pockets. When the government takes all that money and collects it here in Ottawa and decides whom to give it to, it better darn well be for the reasons that were explained for taking the money in the first place.

What we uncovered with the SDTC green slush fund scandal was abhorrent. It violated the fundamental basic premise of responsible government, which is the idea that the dollar that is taxed should go to the program that it was allocated for, and for the reasons that were explained.

What we found out is that the government set up the fund and appointed the board of directors basically out of the ranks of Liberal supporters. The Liberal-friendly board of directors started to make decisions as to the allocation of that money to fund its own companies, to fund projects that the Auditor General found did not even have a single environmental benefit. The government went out and collected money from the hard-earned dollars of workers across the country. The officials said that they were going to take this money forcibly from us, but not to worry as they were going to spend it on all kinds of good things that would benefit the environment. However, instead, the officials were funnelling that cash to their friends, supporters and cronies. That is shameful.

It took a great deal of work. I want to take this opportunity to thank the hard-working members of the committee, who are my colleagues sitting right here, who came in after hours for meetings on break weeks and during recesses to pore through those accounts, to force testimony from those officials who made those decisions and some of the beneficiaries of that graft. We exposed this slush fund for what it was, which was a way for the government to funnel tax dollars into the pockets of its partisan supporters.

Do members remember when a certain someone said that sunlight was the best disinfectant? I am old enough to remember that. I remember that it was the mantra that the Prime Minister got elected on. However, like so many things about the Prime Minister, it was not quite as advertised, was it? It has taken the tremendous effort of a parliamentary committee, and now a production order from the House itself, for the government to hand over the simple documentation as to who got paid. That should be the simplest thing.

That should not even require a motion at committee; it should just be a normal matter that departments should follow of their own accord. They should proactively be disclosing this type of thing, or when a committee member asks for it, it should be provided, no questions asked. Only a government that had something to hide would go to such great lengths to keep it hidden.

Think about this: The government has forced the House to use precious time out of our legislative calendar to force the information from them. It could have resolved this right from day one. With the first hints that something was wrong, it could have immediately said that it was going to come clean, if it has nothing to hide, with all the documents, and save a bunch of committee time and House time. We could have gotten the documents, and we and all Canadians could have learned exactly what happened.

The very fact that to this day the government is still redacting pieces of paper and still refusing to hand over documents is so telling, and it is certainly not the action of someone who has nothing to hide.

I would like to quote for the House some interesting statements on the principle of disclosure, from a gentleman whose name is Paul MacKinnon and who I believe is related to the current Minister of Labour. He sent an advisement up the chain of command. On September 15, 2021, in preparation for the current Parliament, he said, “in the event that parliamentarians press for the release of confidential information, the appropriate minister or ministers should take responsibility for the decision to provide or withhold the information.” That has not happened.

He went on to say at a later date, “Consistent with the principles of responsible government, the ultimate accountability for deciding what information to withhold from or release to parliamentarians resides with the responsible minister. Public servants do not share in ministers' constitutional accountability to the Houses of Parliament”.

It is the ministers themselves who have the requirement, so the ministers responsible for the departments that refuse to hand over the documents are, in effect, in contempt of Parliament. That is why our original motion called for that fact to be recognized and gave the government a very reasonable one-week deadline to provide the documents they already have in their possession. It is not the case that they have to go scouring through emails.

I should mention at this point that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable.

I just want to reinforce the point that the documents exist. We know they exist, because they were the subject of the Auditor General's audit. All we are asking for is that the government simply take the documents and provide them to the law clerk. The law clerk can then provide them to the RCMP. If, as we suspect, crimes were committed, we owe that to the Canadian taxpayers who were robbed of their hard-earned money, because the money did not go to what the government said it was going to go to; it went to Liberal-friendly firms.

I think about a board of directors' making a decision to allocate money to a company that they had a financial interest in, that they themselves owned. They were using taxpayers' money and funnelled it right into the companies that they owned and profited from. That is an egregious abuse of taxpayers' money. That is why the production order was so important. That is why it is such a contempt of the House that the government ignored it, and that is why all members of Parliament, if they pretend to believe in any sense of parliamentary accountability, should support the motion.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, those were interesting comments, to say the very least, and nothing that really surprises me, but the question I have for the member is this: He made reference to the consumption of the House's time. I would like to take him up on that thought, because if he is really concerned about the time inside the House, would he not agree that it might be best then to deal with this issue in the next 30 minutes? There is a motion before us. Would he provide assurance that he would be comfortable in allowing it to ultimately go to committee, shortly before 6:30?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I have an even better idea that would save even more time: Produce the documents.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our House leader for outlining exactly the incident, but there is a pattern of behaviour. The Winnipeg documents were not produced, and there were extremes gone to in order to suppress those. The WE Charity scandal documents were the same. Time and again, the Liberal government obstructs transparency. If it had nothing to hide, as the member well pointed out, that would be fine. However, clearly it does have something to hide, and the more we find out, the more criminal it sounds.

Could the member comment on that pattern of behaviour?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, that is a great point. It is almost like some of us have seen this movie before. This is not the first production order that the House has had to adopt in order to get information. The Winnipeg lab's document is an excellent example where all kinds of concerns were raised about national security and what information the Government of Canada was allowing to be passed to the Communist regime in Beijing about a pandemic and lockdowns that had such a devastating effect on the Canadian people and on the economy. The government not only refused to release the documents, but actually took the Speaker's predecessor to court and sued the Speaker of the House of Commons to try to prevent those documents and that information from coming to light.

Again, the government is now a serial abuser of parliamentary privilege and a serial committer of the crime of suppressing important information that Canadians have a right to know.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, we have just seen the tip of the iceberg of who has money and which Liberal insiders are getting rich. The foreign affairs minister's husband got some contracts in other areas.

How deep does my colleague think this rot is and how long will it take to have this go through committee and actually find out how many taxpayer dollars have gone to Liberal insiders, friends and family?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, that is a great question. I think the hon. member knows that at the end of the day, Liberals get a Liberal. This is a part of their DNA. Looking back at every Liberal administration, there are examples where they used the power of their positions to reward and enrich their friends.

I believe many Canadians were fooled by the Prime Minister back in 2015, when he tried to cast himself as something different, but it did not take long for people to see that he was the same old kind of Liberal. They seek power, not to do what is best for Canadians, but to implement their own wacko, extreme ideological agenda and, most importantly, to enrich their friends who helped them get there in the first place.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Mr. Speaker, this is a vitally important issue which I have had the unfortunate pleasure of working on for now more than a year and a half.

The Privy Council Office, which ordered the government departments to redact the documents being sought by the House of Commons about the green slush fund, is the personal department of the Prime Minister. I would like the official opposition House leader to comment on why he thinks the Privy Council Office would make that order, and would they have been directed by someone else?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is very familiar with the inner workings of government, having had a long and celebrated career in public service in previous administrations, so he knows exactly how this works. There is no way that a production order that touched on all of those departments would not rise to the level of being on the Prime Minister 's desk. There is only one person responsible for refusing this production order from the House, and that is the Prime Minister himself.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we are here this evening because the Liberal government has once again refused, through its many tentacles, to comply with a direct order of this Parliament to obtain very important information.

Let us talk about the Liberal green fund, the Liberal government's slush fund. A lot of public money, Canadians' money, went into this $1‑billion green fund. Remember the sponsorship scandal? Next to this Liberal green fund, that other Liberal scandal from a few years back looks like small potatoes. We are dealing with a situation where people deliberately ignored ethics rules. They deliberately ignored regulations in order to benefit themselves and their own companies. The people I am referring to are the directors of this green fund, which we call the green slush fund.

I want to commend the exceptional work of my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets, who never gave up, who uncovered the scandal and who pushed past the initial refusals that we got in the beginning. First there were full-blown denials that there were any problems, and then the minister said that they had cleaned house and that everything was resolved. The matter might have ended there. Nothing would have been discovered. Case closed. If my colleague had not investigated further, we would not have had the devastating reports from the Auditor General and the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, who lifted the veil and brought this Liberal green fund scandal into the light of day. The Liberal government and this Prime Minister tried to hide the extent of the corruption from Canadians.

I want to present a few facts. By the way, the directors of the green fund were obviously appointed by this Liberal government, probably to benefit the friends of the Liberal Party. That is our biggest concern. How much did people profit from this appointment to get rich to the detriment of Canadians and at the expense of Canadians?

The Auditor General found that these Liberal-appointed officials were sending taxpayers' money to their own companies. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner found that the Prime Minister's hand-picked green slush fund chair had also broken the law. We thought she had broken it once or twice. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner recently appeared at a committee meeting that my colleague attended, where we learned that the former chair of the Liberal green fund had breached the ethics rules 24 times.

The Auditor General found that directors had awarded funding to projects that were not eligible. Proponents applied for funding for projects to improve our environment, but it turns out that these projects had absolutely nothing to do with the green fund's objectives. That did not stop the board of directors from voting to grant the money anyway.

According to the Auditor General, $123 million was awarded appropriately and $59 million was awarded to projects that should never have received money. That is not peanuts; that is hundreds of millions of dollars. The Auditor General found that over $330 million of taxpayers' money was paid out in more than 180 instances where there was a real or potential conflict of interest. Directors appointed by the Prime Minister paid money to companies that belonged to them.

These directors decided to give funding and subsidies to businesses that they themselves owned. Is it not the most basic rule of ethics for a board member to recuse themselves from a decision from which they stand to benefit? They did not feel it was necessary to recuse themselves. When someone like that stays at the table, the main problem is that they can make sure that funding goes to their own business. When a board member in that position does not recuse themselves, then no one can raise a conflict of interest like they could if that board member were absent. Those board members stayed at the table and happily gave themselves millions of dollars. I am not the one saying it. This comes from the Auditor General of Canada and the Ethics Commissioner.

How can we expect these directors to follow the rules? There is a simple, basic principle that everyone has to follow the rules. Unfortunately, the example set at the top emboldens people to stop worrying about the consequences of breaking the rules. This example comes fomr the Prime Minister himself, who was found guilty of violating ethics laws not once, but twice. Both times, he stood up in front of all the members of the House and said that he accepted responsibility for his actions and would suffer the consequences.

Can anyone tell me what consequences the Prime Minister suffered for breaking the ethics rules twice? There were no consequences. The Prime Minister said he accepted responsibility and the matter ended there. Thank goodness for Conservative members like my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets who are staying vigilant and making sure that no ethics violation or case of corruption goes ignored or unpunished.

Still, they pushed back hard. They refused to comply with the House's order to produce the documents that would enable us and the RCMP to determine whether, in addition to the ethical violations and conflicts of interest, any crimes had been committed. We would like all departments to hand over documents to the law clerk of the House so that we can determine whether crimes were committed in addition to all the other violations.

These documents have been provided only in part or not at all, or they have been redacted. Parliament has the right to receive these documents. Parliament has that authority. With the power to tax people comes the responsibility to ensure that the money is being well spent. That is why Parliament has the power to ask anyone it wants for documents and to get all the information. That way, Canadians can be sure that there is accountability for the money they agree to pay to their government.

This is not the first time this government has balked at submitting to an order from Parliament. It has happened several times in the past. The most blatant case was that of the Winnipeg laboratory, when the government went so far as to call an election in the middle of a pandemic to avoid submitting to an order from Parliament. In the interest of settling the matter quickly, I am asking the government to hand over all the documents immediately; otherwise, we will go to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

I would like to move an amendment to the motion moved by my colleague from Regina—Qu'Appelle.

I move:

That the motion be amended by adding the following:

“provided that it be an instruction to the committee:

(a) that the following witnesses be ordered to appear before the committee separately for two hours each:

(i) the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,

(ii) the Clerk of the Privy Council,

(iii) the Auditor General of Canada,

(iv) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,

(v) the Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Development,

(vi) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons,

(vii) the Acting President of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and

(viii) a panel consisting of the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada; and

(b) that it report back to the House no later than Friday, November 22, 2024.”

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader is rising on a point of order.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I would suggest you take the time in receiving the amendment because we believe it is not in order, given the comments the Speaker has put on the record, in terms of the framing of the actual motion. I would suggest taking the time to make that determination.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The hon. member for Laurentides—Labelle on a point of order.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we not only need to read it, but we also want to have it in both official languages.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

We will try to have it translated quickly. We hope that everyone has access to interpretation to understand the gist in French.

I will consult with the Table.

The amendment is in order.

The hon. government House leader.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my hon. colleague how he squares the circle that both the RCMP and the Auditor General feel incredibly uncomfortable with what the Conservatives have put forward and what the chamber has put forward, and how he squares the circle of trampling the rights of Canadians through the motion that he and the Conservatives have put forward.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to know how the government House leader can square the circle of the countless scandals that have been uncovered involving the Liberal green fund. I would like to know how the government House leader can square the circle of the chair of the Green Climate Fund being cited in 24 cases of conflict of interest. I would like to know how the government House leader can accept such carelessness with the money that Canadian taxpayers entrust to the government. These are questions she should answer.

If crimes were committed, I think that she, the RCMP, the people who worked on this file and especially Canadians deserve to see measures being taken and consequences being meted out.

This Liberal government does not seem to know the meaning of the word “consequence”.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Mr. Speaker, there is a reason we are here, besides the fact that the Privy Council Office defied an order of the House and decided to edit documents, or tell departments to edit documents, which is not what the House had asked for. I would ask the member a question about the SDTC act and the Conflict of Interest Act.

Both say government office holders and their family members cannot personally benefit from serving in that office. The Auditor General found that 82% of the transactions she audited were conflicted, totalling $390 million that went to Liberal appointees' own companies in a conflict and was spent outside of the contribution agreement.

Can the member comment about the criminality aspect of the breach of the Conflict of Interest Act and the SDTC act?