Mr. Speaker, I am happy to finish the second half of my speech concerning Motion No. 9.
As I mentioned earlier, the Liberals view the House not as a House of Parliament, it seems, but more as a theatre for themselves, where they tolerate no criticism and all they expect from people in the House are gratitude and cheers for their empty, performative politics. They very much live by Jean Chrétien's attitude of “It's called question period, not answer period.”
There is a former Liberal MP from the House named John Stewart, who actually went on to the other place to be a senator. This is not the Jon Stewart whom the current Prime Minister loves so much. Senator Stewart stated about proceedings in the House, “slipping things through the house may seem smart in the short run. In the long run it works to discredit both the government and parliament.” I could not agree more, and Motion No. 9 discredits both Parliament and the government.
I am going to go over a couple of examples of how oversight has exposed some of the corruption, some of the issues, with the current government.
In the 42nd Parliament, when I was first elected, Liberals, when they had a majority with the current government House leader as their lead on the operations committee, brought through what was called the “vote 40 slush fund”. This was a $15‑billion slush fund set by the government, which presented it with no backing of what the money would be spent on.
Again, I go back to King Edward when he formed the Model Parliament in 1295 and said, “what touches all should be approved by all”. The government seems to think that what touches all should be just approved by the Liberal government. The slush fund was $15 billion. When we asked one of the Liberal officials what the money was for, he said that it was presumptuous that the government would explain to Parliament what that $15 billion was for before we approved the spending.
Vote 10 of the Treasury Board is normally about $200 million or $300 million. In the 42nd Parliament, under a majority, the government ran that up to $1 billion a year. For decades, it had been in the low ten millions, 20 millions or 30 millions of dollars. The government moved it up to $1 billion a year. It rammed it through because it had a majority. What happened in 2019 when the Liberals lost the majority? They backed away from the vote 40 slush fund, and it has not raised its ugly head again.
In the operations committee, we were able to expose the ArriveCan scam that the government desperately tried to cover up. People remember that the Liberals tried to say that it was a life-saving measure and that it cost only a few million dollars, but of course, it cost well above $60 million.
There was the GC Strategies scandal, in which two people working out of the basement of a house racked up $15 million, $20 million or $30 million in billing to taxpayers. With McKinsey & Company, another one, $120 million from the government was paying off its friends and insiders. We were able to expose that because we had an ability to keep the committee going and not be shut down by the government. Billions of dollars was spent by the government on management consultants at the same time as the Privy Council came to us and said that actually there were people within the government who could do the work, but it was still going out to McKinsey and other management companies to spread Canadian taxes around.
Of course, there was the millions of dollars spent on the New York consul general's apartment on Billionaire's Row. The government desperately tried to shut that down. We were able to expose the spending because we had the ability, and they did not have the Liberal numbers to shut it down.
In the public accounts committee, on which I sat, there was the issue of green slush fund, which of course had been approved by the then industry minister, who is now the finance minister. There was the Trudeau Foundation scandal. We were able to force ministers to actually show up. Of course in ethics, there was the WE scandal and there was showing the current Prime Minister and his conflicts. There was also the “other Randy” issue.
I want to finish with a couple of quotes from Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker. Pearson said he recognized that the health of Parliament has to rely on the opposition's “right to oppose, attack and criticize”. Diefenbaker said, “freedom always dies when criticism ends.” That is what Motion No. 9 is about: ending the criticism of the government. Again, the Liberals want solely an audience, not an opposition to stand up for taxpayers.