Andrew Scheer

[Situation in Lebanon and Israel, October 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, does Israel have the right, within the confines of international law, to destroy the terrorist organizations of Hamas and Hezbollah?

[Situation in Lebanon and Israel, October 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, the member just said that Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel was attacked by terrorist entities, Hamas and Hezbollah. Today, during question period, a very simple question was put to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister of Foreign Affairs refused to answer it during question period, so I would like to give my hon. colleague an opportunity to do so. It is a very simple question: Does Israel have a right to destroy the terrorist organizations that have attacked it? In other words, does Israel have a right, in the government's view, to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah?

[Points of Order, October 1st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, flowing from the rulings you just gave, where you indicated that you would not recognize members who refused to withdraw remarks, you ordered the Prime Minister to withdraw his libellous and baseless personal accusations, and he refused to do so. You gave him multiple opportunities. If you check Hansard for that day, you will see that he in fact did not withdraw the term or the phrase that you ordered him to, and he ignored your ruling.

We would expect that the same application would be made on the government as you have just made on the opposition. I hope that you will come back to the House with a ruling on the question, because it is a very similar situation as to what you have just ruled on. I would formally request that you look at Hansard from that day. I am sure you will see that the Prime Minister ignored your direction and did not withdraw his remarks. The same sanction should apply on both sides of the House.

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

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.

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

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.

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

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.

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

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

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

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.

[Business of the House, September 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it being Thursday, I was hoping that the government House leader could update the House as to the business for the rest of this week and into the following week. Perhaps she and her cabinet colleagues have finally seen the light and decided not to sit next week. Instead, they could give Canadians the carbon tax election they so desperately want. Canadians could then vote in a government that will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.

[Housing, September 23rd, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are cutting back as they see their paycheques devalued and prices skyrocket, but it is not just the carbon tax that the NDP and Liberals are hiking. The new tax hikes that the government is announcing today will hit the middle class hard. In the middle of a housing crisis, they are raising taxes on carpenters and roofers. In fact, the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations said this: “The capital gains increase will discourage the construction of new rental homes for Canadians.”

Why is the government's response to the housing crisis to punish the people who actually build the homes?