Mr. Speaker, I rise to follow up on a question that I posed to the government in May relating to the Prime Minister's financial holdings, potential conflicts of interest and his total lack of transparency concerning these matters.
At the time, the Prime Minister was hiding behind an ethics loophole in Canada's ethics laws by hiding his assets from public disclosure. Finally, in July, the Prime Minister's ethics disclosure was quietly released. Canadians deserve to have the assurance that policy decisions made by the Prime Minister in no way further his private interests. From that standpoint, the Prime Minister's ethics disclosure is completely inadequate insofar as it provides a vague outline of the Prime Minister's financial interests, but not the full and complete picture.
More specifically, the Prime Minister continues to hide the full extent of his financial interests in the trillion-dollar investment firm Brookfield Asset Management, for which he served not only as board chair but also as head of transition investing. The National Post reported that, during the time the Prime Minister served as Brookfield's head of transition investing, he coled efforts to raise capital for two very large clean energy funds: the global transition fund and the second global transition fund. He was also involved in raising funds for a third Brookfield investment fund shortly before he ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party to become the Prime Minister of Canada.
Why does that matter? Very simply, it is because, according to the Prime Minister's ethics disclosure, he is entitled to carried interest payments from these funds, which are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. To be clear, carried interest payments are essentially bonus pay based upon the performance of these investment funds. What is completely lacking from the Prime Minister's ethics disclosures is which companies the Prime Minister's performance pay is tied to.
The Prime Minister will say there is nothing to see and everything is on the up and up because he has set up a blind trust, but I ask what good a blind trust is when the Prime Minister knows the companies that these funds are invested in and, therefore, knows which public policy decisions may impact upon their profitability, which, in turn, is tied directly to the value of the Prime Minister's future performance pay. When the Prime Minister talks about a blind trust, it is not the Prime Minister who is blind. It is Canadians who are blind. It is Canadians who are left in the dark in respect of a multitude of potential conflicts of interest involving the Prime Minister in such public policy areas as transport, finance, energy and infrastructure.
Canadians deserve transparency. The Prime Minister needs to come clean and disclose the full extent of his financial interests in Brookfield Asset Management, including the many companies to which tens of millions of dollars of his future performance pay—