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NDP MP for Timmins—James Bay (Ontario)

Won his last election, in 2021, with 35% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Business of Supply April 26th, 2018

Madam Speaker, I have great respect for my hon. colleague. We have served on the indigenous affairs committee together. That question is really important.

I had the honour to be at the investiture of Pope Benedict. He talked about the growing deserts of injustice and how we are all called to fight back against the desertification of injustice. When he met with Phil Fontaine and the AFN, he gave a heartfelt expression of his sorrow for what happened, and that was very powerful. What is different about it is that he gave his personal expression of sorrow but did not speak of the systemic role. As my colleague points out, today we are asking the church to talk about the systemic role. It is not about the individuals. These were not a few bad actors. This was a system that was established to destroy Indian identity. That is why what we are calling for today is different. It is not to diminish in any way the words that Pope Benedict spoke on this. It is about closing this chapter once and for all.

Business of Supply April 26th, 2018

Madam Speaker, I often have a very combative relationship with my hon. colleague in the House, but I want to thank him for his work representing his party. Today, we are all called as parliamentarians for something bigger than any of us individually, bigger than our individual parties.

We have a reckoning with history today, and that reckoning began when former prime minister Stephen Harper stood in the House and made that apology. That was the proudest day of my life as a parliamentarian, to hear that. Out of that, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was signed by then prime minister Stephen Harper, which set us on this road. Part of that was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Senator Sinclair and the commissioners did such a powerful job of gathering what was really hard testimony. So many people came forward, and when the findings came out, people I know wept, indigenous and non-indigenous. They told me they wept for days because to hear it spoken, to see it put in print, was a moment. Part of that call was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calling on us to do what we are doing today, which is to reach out to the Pope. We are doing the work of Parliament, which was given the mandate through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is our job, to finish the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and we can do that today.

Business of Supply April 26th, 2018

moved:

That, in responding to the call of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to move our nation on a path of true healing for the crimes of the residential school era, the House:

(a) invite Pope Francis to participate in this journey with Canadians by responding to Call to Action 58 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report and issue a formal papal apology for the role of the Canadian Catholic Church in the establishment, operations, and abuses of the residential schools;

(b) call upon the Canadian Catholic Church to live up to their moral obligation and the spirit of the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement and resume best efforts to raise the full amount of the agreed upon funds; and

(c) call on the Catholic entities that were involved in the running of the residential schools to make a consistent and sustained effort to turn over relevant documents when called upon by survivors of residential schools, their families, and scholars working to understand the full scope of the horrors of the residential school system in the interest of truth and reconciliation.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to stand in this House representing the people of Timmins—James Bay, and today particularly, with my colleague from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, to also be speaking with the support of the survivors, who are watching this Parliament do the right thing.

Today is a historic moment for the Parliament of Canada. It was the Parliament of Canada that created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine the evidence, the documents, and the testimony concerning the residential schools era. In the course of its investigation, the commission found that the policies of the Government of Canada and the Catholic Church at the time constituted a genocide.

The word “genocide” is very specific and very important. Why did the commission declare the residential school system a genocide? Based on the definition of “genocide”, it is clear that the policy of taking women and children away from their families in order to erase their identity constitutes a genocide. It is therefore crucial for the Parliament of Canada to respond to the commission, specifically by inviting Pope Francis to take part in our reconciliation process.

Today we are very confident that the Pope is capable of understanding the importance of this motion, because he has a vision of reconciliation and justice for all. The Pope must play a positive and proactive role with the Parliament of Canada and indigenous communities by issuing a formal apology.

In beginning this morning, I want to say that I never talk about faith or my own personal faith in the House. I do not believe it is appropriate. I feel that politicians often cheapen faith when they use it. However, I want to say how thrilled I was when Pope Francis was appointed, because he was a Jesuit.

I have had the great honour in my life of being influenced by and knowing Jesuits: the great Jim Webb, who worked in the co-operative movement in Cape Breton and worked in the third world and the inner cities of Toronto; Father Martin Royackers, murdered by gangs in Jamaica when standing up for the homeless; and Father Michael Czerny, who married my wife and I, who went into El Salvador in the face of the death squads to defend the poor.

What I learned from the Jesuits is that as Christians, faith is not good enough to be charity. It has to be systemic. It is about changing the systems that keep people down.

I am very confident that Pope Francis, who has spoken up on justice around the world, will hear the call of the Parliament of Canada and the cry of indigenous people to do the right thing now and close this dark, horrific chapter.

I want to say that I have been appalled by the line I heard from the Canadian bishops. They have tried to evade their role in working with us on reconciliation. We will talk today about the collusion of the federal government and the church. They have followed a pattern time and time again of defending, covering up, and hiding for each other. It all comes back to liability. It all comes back to money.

Does anyone think the survivors are here for money? When we talk with the survivors of St. Anne's residential school, who suffered such depravity, such horrors, and we see their dignity, they are not here for money.

As one man said to me last night, he came 12 hours to hear three words. This is about that. They have shown more reconciliation in the face of legal obstructions, challenges, and horrific crimes.

As another person said this to me. Imagine the worst horror story ever made and put children in it and that would not begin to cover what happened at St. Anne's Residential School. That was done through the deliberate policy and collusion. It is not just about St. Anne's, but I am speaking about it because I know the survivors and it is is in my region.

The Hill Times said:

...Pope Francis, who has worked to make compassion and justice the guiding light of his pontificate, would be more at home with the St. Anne residential survivors than he might be with some of the Canadian bishops who...to care more about its wallet than the Gospel.

Let us talk about how this started. We learned that policy was established to destroy the Indian people in our country. That was the finding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Duncan Campbell Scott articulated the policy:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem....That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department...

Government officials worked hard to achieve that policy. In 1892, they issued the order in council on funding. They established what was the bare minimum that could be spent to keep a child alive. Then they ensured that the money they gave the church was at least 25% lower than that. The results were horrific death rates.

Peter Henderson Bryce was a civil servant who saw the death rates in western Canada, and was appalled. He articulated a 24% death rate, which was higher than the death rates of Canadian soldiers going into the trenches in Flanders.

At the File Hills Indian Residential School there was a 69% death rate among children, overall a 40% death rate. These were death camps. However, Peter Henderson Bryce began to expose it and because he did, it forced the government to make changes.

He was not the only one speaking out. Church leaders spoke up. I think of Samuel H. Blake of the Missionary Society of the Church of England who was horrified by the treatment of the children. He wrote to Archdeacon Tims who ran the Old Sun Industrial School in Calgary. He said:

How...can you be satisfied with statistics which show that...900 to 1,000 children which pass through our Indian schools 300 of them pass out...to the grave within...twevle years I cannot conceive except upon this hypothesis that we grow callous amidst such a frightful death rate.

In 1945, an American writer, who was analyzing Canada's Indian policy, said simply that the government's policy was the extinction of Indian as Indians.

That is why we are here. For the Catholic Church to state, in 2018, that as a whole it was not involved in the running of the residential schools veers dangerously into the road of historical revisionism. The bishops promoted the policy. The bishops oversaw it. The bishops worked hand-in-hand with the federal government and covered up at every step of the way.

The documents were seized in the St. Anne's investigation. I want to thank the Ontario Provincial Police for the incredible work it did standing up and insisting that the documents be received. It took those documents from the orders and found documents that went all the way to the Curia Generalis in Rome about the crimes at St. Anne's. The Vatican was involved. The Church of Canada was involved. The bishops were involved.

They had a practice called “bleeding the children” to feed the mother house. The minimum monies that were given by the federal government to the residential schools, the orders took a tax so they could pay for their amenities in the mother house of the church. They think they are worried about liability. They got off scot-free. Woe to those who put such burdens when they had the obligation to do right.

Today the Catholic church is involved very deeply. It is cold comfort for the survivors of St. Anne's residential school to know that the church has access to all the documents. The church has access to the names of all the survivors who have been so brave to come forward. The church gets to oversee that as the defendant.

Therefore, for the church to be surprised that we are here is not good enough. What we are doing today is the call from Isaiah. We are called to be the repairer of those broken streets and city walls to restore communities to dwell. Edmund Metatawabin said that they were not here for reconciliation, that they were here for reclamation, to rebuild their communities, to rebuild their children and their grandchildren so they could move forward. They are not here for the money; they are here for someone to do right.

In the time I have left, it is important we talk about the role of complicity. I want to speak today of 14-year-old John Kioke and 12-year-old Michel Matinas from Attawapiskat, and 12-year-old Michel Sutherland from Weenusk, who never came home. Many children never came home from St. Anne's.

When I went into those communities, they asked me what happened to their uncles and to their cousins. We found out that these boys were so desperate to escape the criminal abuse that was happening that they took their lives in their hands in April 1941, when the James Bay rivers are overflowing, and tried to find their way home. They never got there. Father Paul Langlois told the children to keep their mouths shut about what had happened at the school.

I mention this because it was a year later when the federal government found out about the deaths of these children. It did not call the school; it called Bishop Belleau and asked why he had covered it up. He said that the boys were deserters. Therefore, the bishops oversaw this.

I want to read from a letter of 1968 from teachers who were hired at St. Anne's residential school, because there were good teachers, good brothers and good nuns. However, they were always pushed out because they were not cruel enough or sick enough to stay in those institutions. Six teachers went to St. Anne's and were fired. They wrote to Jean Chrétien and said that they were told by the Department of Indian Affairs that it was easier to replace the teachers than to deal with what was happening at St. Anne's.

In a teacher's handwritten letter, she said, “although we may have not understood the implications of working at a mission school...we were employed by the Department of Indian Affairs.” She begged Jean Chrétien. She said, “if there is anything I can do to help these Indian people...and help“ the helpless children, “I will happily do it.” She continued, it “was not possible to give up basic beliefs about human rights and dignity and still face the children who are forced to live in such a sterile, rigid, unloving atmosphere.” Why do I mention that? Because the children had no voice. They had no one to go to. The Government of Canada was not going to help them. Imagine if the government had. Some of the most brutal crimes and abuses were happening then.

I refer the House to an Ontario Provincial Police document from that time, when the children of St. Anne's approached Bishop Laguerrier at a big event to tell him about the sexual abuse. They had no one else to go to other than him. They sat with him and told him what was happening, and the bishop told them that it was the fatherly way. What we know now of course is that Bishop Jules Laguerrier was one of the most prolific predators.

When the federal government was told to turn over the documents for the IAP for the St. Anne's survivors, the government turned over a person of interest report on Reverend Father Jules Laguerrier that was one page long. It was his biographical information saying when he was at St. Anne's. It was not until the survivors starting demanding answers that it turned out the government was sitting on a person of interest report referring to this bishop, a report 3,191 pages long describing the crimes he committed.

The same happened with the person of interest report for Reverend Father Raymond-Marie Lavoie, which had a two-page report supplied to the independent assessment process. It included brief notes, but it not include the fact that the federal government and the church both had the documents, 2,472 pages long, on Father Lavoie that listed his crimes. Sister Anna Wesley's person of interest report was 6,804 pages long.

The children had no one to go to. They were in the hands of these sadists. That is why we are here to do the right thing, to say that this was a policy and not accidental. The fact is that these people were protected, they got away with it, and they are still getting away with it even beyond the grave. The survivors of St. Anne's Residential School had their cases thrown own because these documents were not supplied. They are asking for closure.

We can talk about the financial indemnifications. All the Christian orders have been involved in the formal apologies. All the Christian orders paid their share. We could use the legal weasel words to say that certain dioceses were not involved. However, the greatest amount of money that came from the Anglican Church came through the diocese of Toronto, which did not have residential schools there. The Anglican people of Toronto knew they had an obligation to do the right thing.

The Catholic Church was ordered to pay its share, and most of it was supposed to be “monies in kind”. Really, after all that. We do not really have any clue of how much of that monies in kind was ever paid. However, we do know that the church was obligated to pay a $25 million payment, but walked away from it on a legal loophole. I am not blaming the Conservative or Liberal government on this. There was a legal loophole and the church walked on it.

We have no legal power over the church in Parliament to tell it to pay, but, my God, it is a moral obligation for the church to pay what it owes, because it got off scot-free for the crimes that were committed, and not just at Ste. Anne's but around the country. It is about doing the right thing.

These documents, these letters, this proof that validates what these survivors went through and survived mean something. It is why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on each of the orders in each of the Christian faiths to turn over those documents and photos. Children were taken away and never came home, and there is not even a record of them.

I was in Marten Falls on the 100th anniversary of the signing of Treaty 9. We went up the river. Duncan Campbell Scott came in his canoe to sign it with the people of Ogoki Post. On that 100th anniversary, a man stepped forward and started to speak in Oji-Cree. He apologized that he did not speak English. He said that he had never learned to speak it because they came and took his sister away and never brought her home. Nobody ever told him what happened. The next year when the white man came, his parents hid him in bush. They hid him year after year, every time the white man came to take the children.

I think of that man's family and the faith I grew up with where my aunts were nuns, powerful women of justice. I think of the mercy that was shown to me. I think of the fact that nobody even came to tell him and his family that they took their daughter, that she had died and was in some unmarked grave someplace. Nobody had the decency. Those are the crimes for that have to be atoned for.

Today is a good day. It is a hopeful day. It is a day that we come to terms with what was done through the collusion of the church and the state working hand-in-hand to try to destroy the Indian identity. However, that identity has not been destroyed. That identity is stronger than ever. Those people are watching like a jury over this Parliament, telling us to do the right thing, admit the wrong, and then they can move on.

Meegwetch

Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1 April 23rd, 2018

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest when my colleague talked about regional economic development. My own riding is bigger than the United Kingdom. Northern Ontario is on the other side of the map, and most people in southern Ontario in political life do not even know we exist.

When the Liberals talk about superclusters, it shows the Liberals' lack of vision. They throw supercluster here, supercluster there, as though we get three or four great winners and we are going to build a national economy. I am so pleased they are making that investment in Waterloo. However, our region is a vast region of resource-based, agricultural-based small communities, and the only supercluster we see in regional economic development is the supercluster that is forming in the office of the minister from Mississauga as he shuts down the regional voices and conglomerates them all under his watch.

We look at the Liberals' vision for FedNor, which they have atrophied year after year, and the loss of staff at FedNor. The fact is that the Liberals do not even mention FedNor any more when they do consultations. For example, on broadband, the Liberals cancelled the FedNor broadband projects, and we lost two years.

I would invite my colleague to get outside of the Liberal supercluster and come to rural and resource-based Canada. We are wonderful people. We will not bite. We will show him around. We will invite him to understand what a national economy looks like.

Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1 April 23rd, 2018

Madam Speaker, I was hearing a lot of hyperbole and fiction and I was going to give my hon. colleague a pass because it is Monday, but then he started to talk about pensions. I mean, really? The Liberal government walked away on Sears workers. The finance minister came into the House to promote the interests of his family business, Morneau Shepell, and told investors that they needed legislation to take down defined pensions. Bill C-27 was the first pension bill the finance minister brought in; his family's company dealt with the Sears pensioners, and we expect the Liberal government to stand up for pensioners? This is ridiculous. The Liberals have a lot of gall to come into the House and pretend that they will do anything for pensioners.

Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1 April 23rd, 2018

Madam Speaker, Canada has a number of key infrastructure issues with respect to keeping our economy going, and one of them is our highway system. If we travel across the country and travel on the Trans-Canada, we will be on four-lane highways. Then, when we get to northern Ontario, we get to two lanes, Highway 17 and Highway 11, which twist and turn through rugged rock country. This is the main truck transportation for the country. All the goods of the country travel on those roads. Year after year, we see them getting more dangerous. We see, with the privatization of truck maintenance by the Wynne government, the number of deaths we have had on the road.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the disregard we have from the present government toward the people of Ontario on issues of infrastructure that are literally life and death, that are issues about our economy, and the lack of involvement of the federal government in working with the province to establish a credible system of transportation that ensures the safe passage of goods but also the security of people who travel on these roads.

Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1 April 23rd, 2018

Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. Two weeks ago I was in a cab in Toronto, and the cab driver was a retired aeronautical engineer. He was 74 years old, and he was driving a cab because his wife had kidney failure and they could not afford the medications. I think there is something fundamentally wrong in our country when people have worked their whole lives and they have to go out and drive a cab at age 74 because our medical system cannot help loved ones who are senior citizens.

Previous to that I met a 68-year-old man who told me that he had to go back underground to work on the drills in a mine because his pension was insufficient for him and his wife to be able to pay their hydro bills.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the sense of priority we see from the government, which seems to think that issues facing senior citizens are maybe not cool enough, not sexy enough, or not hip enough. These are issues facing seniors who are falling through the cracks. They have worked hard, have paid their taxes, and have done everything right their whole life. They are being left behind.

I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that.

Petitions April 23rd, 2018

Mr. Speaker, I want to present a petition signed by thousands of people electronically.

Whereas the Minister of Finance until recently owned millions of dollars worth of shares in Morneau Shepell, a firm he was an executive of until elected and a firm with which the federal government does millions of dollars worth of business; that the passage of government bills introduced by the minister, such as Bill C-27, which targets pensions and would make retirement savings less secure and enrich the shareholders of Morneau Shepell, including, until recently, the finance minister himself; that the changes to the tax code proposed by the finance minister will incentivize businesses to move away from pension plans and help shareholders and firms like Morneau Shepell; that Morneau Shepell is handling the close-out of the Sears pension fund, and after emergency debate in the House on the subject of the company's bankruptcy, the government refused to take action, which will benefit the shareholders in Morneau Shepell, and until recently, the Minister of Finance; and that the pattern of the Minister of Finance's non-disclosure and retention of assets could be seen reasonably to be a conflict of interest that has caused Canadians to lose confidence; the undersigned call upon the Government of Canada to immediately withdraw Bill C-27, to disqualify Morneau Shepell from any government contract work, and to remove the finance minister from his position as finance minister.

Department of Industry Act April 19th, 2018

Mr. Speaker, as always, I am honoured to rise in the House to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay and to participate in debate on Bill C-396, an act to amend the Department of Industry Act with respect to loans that are given out, and to address the issue of transparency and accountability with respect to loans.

What I have learned in my many years of representing northern Ontario is that the government has an important role to play in working as a partner and ensuring that we can build a strong economic base across this country. Part of the role the government plays as a partner is making sure that if loans are being made, they are of net benefit to our regions and our country.

The issue that has been brought forward by my colleague about more transparency with respect to these loans is certainly something we should be looking at, because after a number of recent scandals, Canadians have asked themselves how these decisions could have been made.

For example, Export Development Canada loaned $41 million to the notorious Gupta brothers to buy a jet, who then absconded with the jet and defaulted on the payments. People back home ask themselves how it could possibly be in the interests of Canada and the hard-working taxpayers of our country to loan $41 million to a couple of brothers who were involved in all kinds of accusations of corruption in another continent to buy themselves the ultimate lifestyle trinket, that being a private jet. They would also wonder why Canadians would be surprised that they absconded with the jet.

That kind of transparency is worth having.

I would like to challenge my Conservative colleague. I do not think we have ever agreed on anything, other than the fact that this issue of transparency is important. However, under the previous Conservative government, when it came to the issue of net benefit to the Canadian people in deals with industry, it was very secretive. We saw that with the takeover of American Steel and Stelco. We saw it with the supposed net benefit to Canada when two of the greatest mining companies in the world, Falconbridge and Inco, were allowed to be taken over by the corporate bandits Xstrata and Vale. We were told that this was to be to be of net benefit to Canadians, yet when we asked what the terms of the agreements were that they had to live by, we were told it was a secret.

How is it possible that we can sell off major Canadian industries with a supposed investment agreement and then, when we ask if the terms of the agreement are being lived up to, we are told it is a secret? That is not in the best interests of the Canadian taxpayer.

What my hon. colleague is putting forward with respect to the obligation for industry is vital at this time, because we see a government that talks about moving forward with “clusters”. That is its big vision: to find a supercluster or a megacluster. I do not know what it will call it in the next budget—the “super-duper oodle cluster”?

The idea that it can find three or four places in the country and turn an economy around is a ridiculous notion, because an economy is like a strong ecosystem, in that there have to be values at every level that are actually sustainable. Contrary to the Liberals' vision of the supercluster, I think one of the important roles of government investment is in regional economic development, to make sure that we have solid local economies across this country. That is done by being a partner, and traditionally we have done it through the various economic development agencies.

There have been a lot of allegations over the years of pork-barrel politics and problems with that. This is why accountability and transparency are important. It is extremely important in my region of northern Ontario, which is a resource-based economy. The principle of resource-based economies, where there are non-renewable resources, is that the revenues should benefit the region. In the case of Alberta, the revenues go back to Alberta. In the case of Newfoundland, they go back to Newfoundland. However, in the case of Ontario, the entire resource-based region sends its money to Queen's Park in southern Ontario, and then we have to go down like beggars, cap in hand, and beg for what they consider to be gifts, loans, and charity to us poor northern communities when we do not have the benefit of our resources.

One of the agreements that was to offset this huge disparity in the economic system which exists in Ontario with a very powerful urban core and very isolated communities was to create a regional economic development agency, and that was FedNor. FedNor's job was to reinvest money in the regions working with local partners. However, what we have seen over the last number of years is that FedNor has been atrophied. It has been cut. We have lost 30% of the staff at FedNor. FedNor had a $1.76-million annual budget and it is down to about half that now.

In the latest budget, the government did not even mention FedNor. The Liberals talk about maybe moving it all into the minister's office. This is another concern because the minister, who is from Mississauga, is now taking the role of the regional development voice for every part of the country. That does not make sense, because regions of the country are dramatically different. I cannot believe that the minister from Mississauga understands the issues that people face in La Sarre and Abitibi, or understands the differences in having a local economy when there are communities that are sometimes five and six hours away from each other. That is the role of FedNor. FedNor gets this.

When the federal Liberals came into government in 2015, they shut all the broadband projects in northern Ontario that were under FedNor because they had a super-duper cluster plan, which took another two years to roll out. We lost two years of broadband development in a region that is isolated and where it is badly needed. The federal Liberals then decided they were going to have a consultation process. Another thing is that the Liberals love to talk. They had a national consultation process on rural broadband, and they found that northern Ontario had serious shortfalls in broadband. Why is this important? How do they attract business and how do they get start-up businesses if they do not have broadband?

The consultation process went on for two years and they consulted everybody. They consulted municipalities. They consulted NGOs. They consulted businesses. I am surprised they did not go door to door with surveys. They consulted everybody except the economic agency of the region, which is there for the federal government. Not only that, what is more surprising is that they consulted with the provincial economic development agency, but they ignored FedNor.

It tells me that this is the view of a government that does not understand the value of our regions and the importance of the distinct differences between rural, between northern, and between resource-based economies. They have to understand that if they are going to make economic transformations. The Liberals are now talking about their superclusters and their mega-clusters. They are now saying that they want to do regional development like that. That is not how it works. When we have communities that are spread out over such a vast region, they have to understand that they have to do it at the grassroots. They have to involve the people who know about it. We have some amazing people who do this work.

This year at the Prospectors & Developers Association convention, FedNor's booth was probably the largest single booth there—the European Union booth looked like penny ante stuff compared to FedNor—because the economic potential of the mining sector rebirth in northern Ontario is gathering international investors. FedNor is there, but FedNor's budget is so underfunded that 70% of its funds are spent before the year begins.

Imagine what we could do if we had a strong mandate for regional development, if we had the government investing in regional development, if it actually understood the importance of sectors like the mineral sector in the north and the potential for creating spinoff industries. That is how to build a sustainable economy for the long term.

We get back to the issue of transparency. The government is going to be giving out massive loans to companies like Bombardier. I have nothing against Bombardier, but holy smokes, it lost $900 million, borrowed $1 billion from the taxpayer, and of the $100 million, took a $30-million cut for its CEOs. That to me is not credible. We should claw back every dime from those CEO bonuses because it is taxpayer money. Bombardier can play such an important role. In Thunder Bay, Bombardier has the plant for the subways and the streetcars for most of Canada. That is important work, and yet Bombardier ships 80% of the jobs to Mexico. I have a problem giving a company $1 billion if it is going to ship 80% of the work to Mexico.

My belief is if a company gets money from the Canadian taxpayer, it invests in Canada. If it gets bonuses through the Canadian taxpayer, they go back to the Canadian taxpayer.

Our deal has to be that if a company is getting Canadian money, then it is not buying jets for corrupt businessmen in South Africa, or shipping the money to Mexico. It is going to create a sustainable, profitable economy for our region. That is why we need issues of accountability and transparency.

Department of Industry Act April 19th, 2018

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague raised the question of Bombardier. I am firm believer in making investments in Canadian businesses to ensure we create Canadian jobs to build a strong Canadian economy. However, on the question of Bombardier, it lost $900 million, got $1 billion from the taxpayers, and then because its CEOs seemed to have felt they did such a good job, they paid themselves some $30 million in bonuses.

I know my friend is a hard-core fundamentalist capitalist, but would he not agree that the bonuses these CEOs were paid was taxpayer money and that, as taxpayers, we should have some right to at least claw that back or to ensure, if the company gets this kind of money, that we get the full benefit, including accountability and transparency?