Charlie Angus

[Justice, March 19th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, it was just a few days ago that the Prime Minister's Office promised the anti-bribery unit of the OECD that the Liberals would hold “robust” hearings into the allegations of the former attorney general, and today they shut those hearings down to keep the former attorney general from speaking.

To change the channel, the Prime Minister is bringing back Sheila Copps' old seatmate from the sponsorship scandal, Anne McLellan, who is presently raising money for the Liberal Party.

They cannot appoint someone who is raising cash for the Liberals to reassure Canadians that Liberals are not breaking the law. Does the Prime Minister not understand this? Who is giving him advice these days?

[An Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis Children, Youth and Families, March 19th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, we have waited many years for this legislation and I am encouraged. However, it must be said that Canada has not earned the right to be trusted by indigenous people. The government has not earned the right to be trusted. It spent over $1 million fighting Cindy Blackstock in hearings, while children were dying. In the five non-compliance orders, we saw the government being called out again and again on putting its financial interest of saving money over the need to save children. It was found culpable in the deaths of Chantel Fox and Jolynn Winter in Wapekeka.

Therefore, I ask my hon. colleague this. If we are going to move forward, we need statutory guarantees of equity. We need to have the Jordan's principle rights put into law. Otherwise, we are carrying on with 150 years of nice talks from governments about how they are going to make things better with indigenous people. Without the statutory obligations, nothing changes.

I will end by quoting the Yellowhead Institute, which stated, “While Canada is presenting Indigenous jurisdiction as the main selling feature of this Bill, without adequate funding, this will simply be jurisdiction to legislate over our own poverty.”

We will work with the minister. We will do whatever it takes to get this passed before Parliament rises. Will the minister commit to those statutory obligations to guarantee the bill works?

[Committees of the House, March 19th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member knows the rules. There actually has to be some relevance. I have not heard the member mention the motion once. What he is talking about is not relevant to what is being discussed here this morning.

[Committees of the House, March 19th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, everyone knows I am a shrinking violet, and I am very pleased that you stood up to defend my right to speak in this House.

The question we are dealing with is that the OECD anti-bribery unit has put the Liberal government on notice. One of the things it said it would watch very closely is the work of the justice committee. The Prime Minister's Office promised a robust investigation, and now the Liberals have shut it down.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the credibility of a Prime Minister who has burned through his reconciliation agenda, his feminist agenda, his open and accountable government and now his international agenda to continue to pursue this deferred prosecution for his friends at SNC-Lavalin.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague what he thinks this Prime Minister is willing to do to burn the credibility of the Liberal members to get this deal done.

[Committees of the House, March 19th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I am deeply concerned, because the OECD anti-bribery unit said that it—

[Committees of the House, March 18th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I had been listening with great interest to my hon. colleague, and I was pretty sure he was over the line. However, in deference to my incredible respect for the Speaker, I will recognize the fact that even though the goal light had sounded, even though he should not have been able to even get close to the net with that shot, the New Democrats will certainly take under advisement the wise counsel you give the House.

[Committees of the House, March 18th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, if we listen to Gerry Butts, this is all like an episode of Friends. If he had only been a bit more sensitive before she slammed the door, we never would have had to deal with this.

When she talked about the political interference in the independence of the public prosecution, she said people kept telling her that they did not like her answer and that they would find someone who could tell her, someone who is smarter. Then Katie Telford said she would find some people to write some editorials, and they did. Once the former attorney general spoke up, the Liberals went to Sheila Copps.

The Liberals have to do better than this. Gerry Butts cannot come to committee and claim that he did not know, until she gave testimony, that a decision had been made. It shows us what Liberals think of independent, strong women in their own cabinet who say to back off when they have made a decision, and do so month after month, trying to push back. We still see today that the Liberals want to find someone else to agree with them so that they will be able to intervene and undermine the rule of law by changing the director of public prosecution's role and telling her to back off. That is not acceptable.

[Committees of the House, March 18th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I do not even know where to begin. Let us put aside the fact that the Ethics Commissioner is on long-term sick leave and is unable to finish what is a very narrow inquiry.

Let us talk about the notion that the Liberals care about jobs. Oh, my God. When Sears workers were having their pensions ripped off, the Liberals did not care about them because the Liberals were looking after the family business, Morneau Shepell. That is who they looked after.

We never heard once in the testimony that they were talking about jobs; they were talking about share prices. They were talking about the CEOs' meeting. They were talking about where the headquarters were going to be. That is what they were talking about.

There is the fact that the President of the Treasury Board has resigned because she has lost confidence over the ethics of the Prime Minister. There is the fact that the former attorney general is being silenced, the fact that the Clerk of the Privy Council has resigned, the fact that OECD is investigating Canada for breaches of its anti-bribery convention and the fact that five former attorneys general are asking for an RCMP investigation. The Liberals think this is okay. To them, it is business as usual, because they are helping their friends. That is why they were thrown out under the sponsorship scandal, and if they continue, they are going to be going down that road again.

[Committees of the House, March 18th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I am honoured, as always, to rise to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Victoria, British Columbia, which is a beautiful community somewhere west of Thunder Bay, I am told.

I want to begin with the fact that we are dealing with an ongoing crisis created by the Prime Minister through interference by his office to help some very powerful corporate interests through the use of lobbyists and the use of very powerful people like Kevin Lynch, who could call the Clerk of the Privy Council from his role as chair at SNC-Lavalin and say, “We want the public prosecution to back off.”

That is not how the rule of law is supposed to be exercised in Canada. That is the fundamental issue. We have come full circle, back to the worst of the cronyism of the Chrétien-Martin days, to “who you know in the PMO”. This crisis is from interfering in a bribery corruption scandal in Libya with SNC-Lavalin, which had been barred by the World Bank for 10 years for numerous consistent violations of the law in countries like Cambodia, with allegations in Algeria, allegations in country after country. The company was barred by the World Bank. It is a company that we are told used to make sure that their bribes were recorded so that it could get tax deductions in Canada. It is a company that is very tied to the Prime Minister.

The issue before us today is the question of the interference by the Prime Minister's Office in the work of the director of public prosecutions, and that undermines the rule of law. What has that meant? It has meant that we have had five former attorneys general from across Canada call on the RCMP for an investigation into what they call a constitutional crisis. Former Liberal attorney general Michael Bryant said that he had never seen interference as brazen and reckless as the Liberal government's interference that created this constitutional crisis.

We have lost the former attorney general from cabinet. We have seen the resignation of the former president of the Treasury Board, who spoke about her constitutional obligations to the people of Canada and that she had to step down because she had lost confidence in the Prime Minister.

Today, we saw the resignation of the Clerk of the Privy Council. This is unprecedented in the history of Canada. The Clerk of the Privy Council has had to resign because what we saw from his testimony was that he had become a clear political actor, working at the behest of the Prime Minister to interfere with the work of the director of public prosecutions.

The first day of testimony by the former attorney general was very shocking to many Canadians, because we never get to see how decisions are made behind the scenes. She said that the reasons they were trying to interfere with the SNC-Lavalin prosecution was, number one, there was a Quebec election coming; number two, it was going to affect share prices; and number three, there was a board meeting and they had to get back to the chair of the board as quickly as possibly to reassure him. None of these are reasons for a public prosecution in a credible company to be stopped and backed off.

We also saw the really shocking testimony from the former attorney general that the Prime Minister said that he needed action because he was “the MP for Papineau”. He was putting his own personal electoral interests ahead of the law of Canada. She said that the director of public prosecutions had determined that SNC-Lavalin was not eligible for the deferred public prosecution agreement, which had been handwritten for SNC-Lavalin and slipped into an omnibus bill. Even though it had been handwritten for SNC-Lavalin, it still was not eligible for it.

Then we had the Clerk of the Privy Council, Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques reach out to her to say they wanted to do an informal reach-around to talk to the director of public prosecutions. That is interference and obstruction in the rule of law. That was done from the Prime Minister's Office, with the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Gerry Butts, telling the former attorney general, when she was warning him about interference, that they would not get through this without interference.

He did not like the law because it was a Stephen Harper law. I have been on the record many times saying that I do not like very much that Stephen Harper did. However, when a law is the law and one does not like the law, one repeals it. One does not go around behind the scenes because one is trying to help Liberal friends. That is undermining the rule of law.

Then we have Katie Telford, who is still in the Prime Minister's Office and who told the former attorney general's staff that the PMO was not interested in legalities. How can someone run a government when the key people around the Prime Minister do not give a darn about the rule of law?

The former attorney general talked about meeting with Michael Wernick. Michael Wernick resigned today, and I think it was good for the people of Canada that Mr. Wernick resigned, because he had become a political actor and compromised his role.

I had asked the former attorney general if he had threatened her in that December 19 meeting. She responded that he did not threaten her once but threatened her three times.

I asked Mr. Wernick about the nature of those threats, and he said that he could not remember; he was not wearing a wire. We are talking about the Government of Canada, not a Sopranos episode.

This is all swirling around the Prime Minister's Office. A belief I still see from the people in that office today is that they do not understand why people are upset. It is as though helping Liberal friends is how they do business, and if the law has to be broken, well, that is how it is done. They do not seem to understand that they have damaged their credibility even to the point that the OECD anti-bribery unit is now investigating Canada. It is not just a black mark for the Prime Minister's credibility but a black mark for Canada. A company can be charged internationally with bribery, corruption, paying for prostitutes for Gadhafi's son, building prisons and being involved in that whole torture regime, but then all these people have to do is come back and call in to the Prime Minister's Office and it will make it go away.

No wonder the OECD said that all the alarm bells are sounding. We should say that all the alarm bells are sounding for Canadians. We have to do justice better than this in this country. We have to respect the independent role of the Public Prosecution Service.

We still see the Prime Minister's Office attempting to get around this. The new Attorney General was put in and the former attorney general said that his first order of business was going to be SNC-Lavalin. The PMO is still talking about supposed new evidence that allows it to cut a deal and help its friends at SNC-Lavalin despite the fact that this has completely damaged the Prime Minister's credibility on reconciliation and completely damaged his credibility as a so-called feminist prime minister and completely damaged his reputation on accountability, but he still has to deliver for the friends of the Liberal Party.

That is the toxic, corrosive power of the 1%, and it is what is driving the Prime Minister's agenda into the ground.

Today the Prime Minister announced a solution to this crisis. He has ignored calls for an independent inquiry. What the Prime Minister sees an independent inquiry is to find a Liberal out doing the hustings and raising cash for the Liberal Party, a Liberal who was involved in Adscam in the worst days of sponsorship, and bring someone back from the sponsorship scandal who is doing fundraising for the Liberal Party to look at whether Liberals broke the law on the independence of the Public Prosecution Service in order to help Liberal friends. That is so politically toxic.

I almost feel we should call Gerry Butts back just to try to help the Prime Minister, the MP for Papineau, get out of this hole that he keeps digging. Liberals do not seem to understand that if they keep going back to that toxic partisan Liberal well, keep going back to the rum-bottle politics with which they have run business on the banks of the Rideau for the last 150 years, keep going back to that toxic relationship of insider friends, it is going to continue to burn the Prime Minister.

I urge the Prime Minister to do the right thing and let the former attorney general speak. I urge him to remove all the hand puppets on the justice committee who are interfering, to stop hiding and come clean with Canadians and tell us just how far he is willing to go in order to help his friends at SNC-Lavalin, even if it means undermining the rule of law in Canada.

[Committees of the House, March 18th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, that entire speech gave us a very good example of everything that is wrong with the Liberal defence. It is as if they think if they continue to talk about how great the deferred public prosecution is, we will understand why the former attorney general was not good enough at her job.

The former attorney general told the government that this was a matter of law, that once the independent director of public prosecutions determined that SNC-Lavalin was not eligible for a deferred prosecution agreement, that is when the interference began. They are continuing this process today. They are continuing to tell Canadians that it was perfectly acceptable because they had a law. The problem is that the director of public prosecutions decided that the law did not apply to SNC-Lavalin. That is the fundamental question.

My hon. colleague said that no laws have been broken. Not yet, but the former attorney general said that she understood she was being removed because she would not go along with the deferred public prosecution. She said the first order of business for the new Attorney General was the deferred public prosecution agreement. He has promoted it and the Liberals continue to promote it.

I would ask my hon. colleague if the government is now still attempting to go with the deferred public prosecution agreement, after the director has decided that SNC-Lavalin is not eligible. That would be the clear reason why the government removed the former attorney general. If the government is going to push for the deferred public prosecution agreement, it would certainly draw the attention of the OECD and probably the RCMP for interference in the independence of the Public Prosecution Service.