Madam Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay and the New Democratic Party on the ethics file. However, I am not proud that we have come to this point, because we are talking about a fundamental crisis that has occurred in our country, because the veil has been pulled back, thanks to the courage of the former attorney general, to show us how corrupt the culture of insiders is in Ottawa.
I want to preface this by saying there are two betrayals we are dealing with. One is the attempt to undermine the rule of law. I refer to a former Liberal attorney general, Michael Bryant, who said, we are dealing with “a constitutional crisis far worse than what I envisioned” and “a bald attempt by the Prime Minister to exercise his cabinet-making power over [the] quasi-judicial authority” of the Attorney General. He went on to say that he has never seen it used in such a “brazen, reckless fashion.”
That is the subject of why we are here tonight. However, for people who are watching there is an equally great betrayal. The Prime Minister gave people hope. He made people believe that politics could be different in Ottawa. We ran against him and we ran against his party, but I have to admit that I came in 2015 thinking that maybe he was serious about open government, maybe he was serious about reconciliation, and just maybe he was serious about the middle class he always spoke about. Many people and I know many of my friends in the Liberal Party share those values, and they are hurting tonight.
However, there is another Liberal Party, the old Liberal Party of corruption, insiders and cronies, and the Prime Minister had not even set up shop when the lobbyists began moving into town. What we have seen here is the power of the rich to call into the Prime Minister's Office and get things moved.
For example, KPMG established an illegal offshore tax fraud system for billionaires. When it was found out, suddenly, miraculously, there were no criminal penalties. We all wondered how that could happen, but the fog on the Liberal side was that they did not know. An agreement was made. Then the Prime Minister appointed a KPMG executive as the treasurer for the Liberal Party, because that way of doing business is something he is comfortable with.
We never got to see the raw exercise of power until yesterday, when the former attorney general spoke truth to power. She said that she experienced “a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General”. What she experienced were the powerful men and women around the Prime Minister's Office trying to intimidate her and to threaten her.
That was an amazing moment when she talked about the Clerk of the Privy Council, who has completely betrayed his obligation to the Canadian people to be the non-partisan voice of principle. He was the one used to be the thug. I asked her, “Did he threaten you?” She said he not only threatened her once but three times in that meeting. During that meeting she was concerned that the “other shoe” was going to drop. We will get to that other shoe in a moment.
I want to talk about the very first meeting, when she met with the Prime Minister about this, when the director of public prosecutions had made the determination that SNC-Lavalin was not eligible for this deferred prosecution agreement, a deferred prosecution law that was written specifically for SNC. SNC-Lavalin was so bad it could not even meet the criteria of a law that had been handwritten for it and stuffed into an omnibus bill.
What did the Prime Minister say? He was with the clerk and the clerk said there was going to be a board meeting on Thursday. How were they making those connections? They were talking about the shareholders they were meeting and they had to have that decision. The Prime Minister jumped in and said he was an MP from Quebec, the member for Papineau. The Prime Minister established that his main priority was saving his own political rear end. That is why this began.
Then we see the interference by the finance minister and his staff. She told him that it was unacceptable, and they continued.
I want to get to Gerry Butts and Katie Telford, who then met with her. Gerry Butts said he did not like the law. He called it a Harper law.
I do not like very many things Stephen Harper ever did. In fact, I do not know if I can count one or two. However, the rule of law is the rule of law. Liberals do not get to say, “Oh, that was a Conservative law so we are going to ignore it.” She told him, “It is the law of the land.” It was a good law to hold political corruption accountable internationally. That is what Gerry Butts did not like.
Then he said that there was going to be no solution that did not involve interference. For any member on that side to stand up and claim that this was just the normal activities, it may be the normal activities of the corrupt old Liberal Party, but this is not the normal activities of how the judicial system works, that it cannot be done without interference.
Then Katie Telford said that she was not interested in legalities. This woman still has her job. If there is a person in the Prime Minister's Office who does not give a tinker's darn about the rule of law, they have no business being there. What did Katie say? Katie said, “Hey, if you have any problems with it, we'll just get some prominent, important Liberal people to write some op-eds to cover it off.” That is the corrupt old Liberal way of doing business.
However, they were standing up against an attorney general who said no, and who said that she was “waiting for that other shoe to drop”, which I spoke of before. She knew it was coming, and it did come. They told her she was being replaced.
The most damning testimony of all was that the Clerk of the Privy Council told her staff that the first order of business of the new Attorney General would be to put that SNC-Lavalin deal through. That is unconscionable.
I want to say personally that I have never made a secret of some of the major battles I have had with the former attorney general. The role of the justice department lawyers in suppressing evidence in the case of the St. Anne's Indian Residential School has shaken me in my political life. I have never felt confidence in the judicial system for indigenous people because of the role of the justice department in suppressing that evidence.
I went to the Minister of Indigenous Affairs who landed the campaign against the St. Anne's survivors, and I begged him to stop. I begged him to stop this attack on people who had suffered so much. I approached the Attorney General, but she was the solicitor of the client, Indian Affairs. I make no apologies for my anger about her failings then.
However, I learn now, thanks to the former attorney general, that what was going on behind the scenes was that she had come to Ottawa to deal with reconciliation, but what was she getting stuck with? She was getting stuck with looking after the rich friends of the Liberal Party.
We were very frustrated that the former attorney general was not moving on the indigenous framework. Then we find out, through this testimony, that she was not given the indigenous framework. The Liberal government was not interested in her doing the indigenous framework. It wanted her to cut a deal for their rich insider friends.
Last night, when I sat at that committee, I watched integrity. I watched someone who put her political career on the line, and maybe has finished her political career, but she was not going to be intimidated and she was not going to be silenced.
I urge my friends in the Liberal Party who are as sickened in their core as I am, and I know many of them are, do not go into the smear campaign, do not continue this attack on her, do not say it was her father pulling her strings, do not say that she could not take the stress, and do not, and I am calling on my colleagues over there, do not do the next step that the Liberal government is going to do, which is starting the attack on her credibility.
It is one woman who stood up to this Prime Minister, one woman who said what he was doing was unconscionable. This Prime Minister needs to be accountable. He needs to come to committee. He needs to stop hiding. He needs to show Canadians that he can explain why the people around him were involved in such a corrupt interference and obstruction of the work of the Attorney General on a matter of corruption. Until he does that, he has lost his fundamental moral compass and the Liberal Party is adrift.
