Daniel Blaikie

[Amendments to the Standing Orders, October 23rd, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all the members who participated in the debate on this motion, not just today but in the previous hour of debate as well. I do think that it has been an important occasion to reflect on one of the most important tenets of our parliamentary system, including some of the ways it does not serve Canadians well. We have heard, among the arguments on this particular motion, that it is a significant change. I would agree and say that a change of little significance is usually no change at all. I make no apologies for the fact that I am trying to fix something that I think is broken.

The member for Perth—Wellington in particular talked about what it means to unilaterally change the Standing Orders. I want to offer him some reassurance that, in fact, in a minority Parliament, there is no possibility of unilateral changes to the Standing Orders because one cannot pass a change to the Standing Orders without having at least two parties agree. Maybe he meant that changes to the Standing Orders have to be unanimous, but, of course, there is precedent for not having unanimous changes to the Standing Orders. I think that it is important that they not be unilateral. In this case, they would not be. With the Bloc supportive of this motion, all it would take would be for the Conservatives to vote for it. We would have three recognized parties in the House together forming a majority, making what I think is an important change to the Standing Orders.

If we take Conservatives at their word, what they are saying is that they do not want to put any constraints on the prime minister's power without the prime minister's first agreeing, and I think that puts the cart before the horse. As the opposition, we hold the government to account all the time and seek to limit the possibility of abuse of power by the government. We do not ask the government's permission. I find it strange that the Conservative leader is now suddenly saying that he needs the prime minister's permission and agreement before he can do anything to limit his power over this place.

This is the leader of the Conservative Party who just last week challenged the Speaker's authority to make a statement because question period might start late, and who made an appeal to the sanctity of this place. However, he is happy to have the Prime Minister and any future prime minister shut this place down without so much as a wink of parliamentary accountability. Spare me the platitudes about the importance of Parliament, because actions speak louder than words. When we have a vote on this particular measure, it will be an opportunity for Canadians to evaluate the seriousness of the Conservative leader, both when he talks about holding the Prime Minister to account and when he talks about how seriously he takes Parliament and the House of Commons.

Of note is that when the Conservative leader decides to stand up for Parliament, he usually likes to talk not about anything that has happened in recent decades but about the Magna Carta, a document that is about a thousand years old. It is also, incidentally, a document that, when it was signed, democracy was not for the working people whom the Conservative leader pretends to stand up for. It was a bunch of aristocrats getting together to protect their own right to keep the taxes they levied on the backs of working people, on land that belonged to them.

I do not think it is a coincidence that when the Conservative leader stands up for democracy, he stands up for an aristocratic version that serves his own interests very well. He does this even as he protects the gatekeeping power of the prime minister, to keep the seat warm until he thinks he will get an opportunity to take it so he can abuse those powers in a similar fashion, just as his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, did when that guy sat at the cabinet table. Give us a break on the sanctimony of Parliament as we watch this particular Conservative leader stamp on it when it does not suit his interests and then pretend to care a lot about it suddenly when it does serve his interests. That, fundamentally, is what this is about.

We heard also that it is a political decision, not a decision for the Speaker, on confidence. This does not make it a decision of the Speaker. What it does is make it a decision of the House, whether the House has confidence in the government, instead of leaving it to the prime minister to decide whether the House has confidence in him or not. That is not his decision. It is a decision for this place and it is why, if this motion passes, prime ministers would not be able to prorogue Parliament without having to face a confidence vote either before or after. That is the point. The point is that it is a political decision. It should be a political decision of the House of Commons, as it has always been in the past, not a political decision of the prime minister.

Let us change it. Let us have the Conservatives get behind actually doing something to stop gatekeeping power instead of just ranting against it and hoping it will still be there for them when they get the chance.

[Amendments to the Standing Orders, October 23rd, 2023]

I do so consent, Mr. Speaker.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, what we are talking about, given the amendment, is a very serious allegation, which is that a government department was not forthcoming to an officer of Parliament, the Auditor General, whose job it was to investigate a specific program.

It reminds me of when the Harper Conservatives were in power and they denied information to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who was looking at that time to satisfy a request to look into the effect of cuts to government services that were being planned at the time. The PBO had to take that government to court, which found that in fact that information should be handed over. At that time, the Liberals were very interested in that issue and the accountability of government to parliamentary officers.

Why the sudden change of heart?

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Kingston and the Islands for demonstrating, however accidentally, how great a tool concurrence motions can be to bring to the attention of members of the government issues that heretofore they had no idea about and recommendations from committees they had not heard anything about. I think that is an important tool for members of this House to use to bring to the attention of members of Parliament, and indeed the government, things they have been working on at committee. Therefore, I am loath to disparage concurrence motions. I think they have an important role to play here.

However we got here, and whatever is going to happen at the end of the debate, the fact is that we are spending the next bit of time talking about this, including an amendment that raises the question of a department having hid from the Auditor General, an officer of Parliament, a criminal investigation into the very thing she was investigating. I wonder, given that we are spending the time anyway, if the member might take this brief opportunity to say something meaningful about the substance of that allegation.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, the Auditor General is an officer of Parliament, and the allegation that a department withheld vital information from the Auditor General during the course of an investigation is a very serious allegation indeed for this place. I think it behooves Parliament to hold the government to account and to try to get to the bottom of what went on.

I know that the member for Winnipeg North has taken exception to the idea of doing that through a concurrence debate. I also know that he has far more experience in opposition than he does in government. If the member were on the opposition benches, what method would he recommend that parliamentarians use to hold the government to account in light of this serious allegation?

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, folks in the whip's office may be concerned that the member did not quite get his speaking notes right, because Conservative MPs for a long time now have been saying it has been an NDP-Liberal government for eight years, which is palpably untrue. It speaks to the fact that the Conservatives are not interested in getting to the truth; they are interested in getting into office, and they are prepared to say whatever it takes to get them there. Beware, Canada, because when they get there, it is not going to be what they are saying it is going to be.

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I think Canadians should be suspicious anytime they see a motion that talks generally about government spending without anyone having done the homework to identify the real waste.

There is sometimes waste in government spending. We have seen our fair share of that with the ArriveCAN app and the tens of billions of dollars that have been shunted out the door to big consulting companies to do the work that properly belongs in the civil service, padding the pockets of KPMG and others.

There is waste in government, but a motion like the one before us should be singling it out. I think also of the massive investments in child care that I ran on in 2015 and that the New Democrats supported for a long time. They are actually helping to make room in Canadians' household budgets. There is more than one way to tackle inflation, and in the NDP we believe the best way is to work collectively to lower the cost of things Canadians cannot do without rather than simply cutting taxes when we know grocery stores and oil companies will gladly raise their prices to eat up the extra disposable income.

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, what it says is that when someone is making accusations of Orwellianism, Canadians cannot just take it at face value. They have to do their homework.

I remember when the leader of the Conservative Party was at the cabinet table and was the author of the so-called Fair Elections Act. There is nothing more Orwellian than that. That was a bill designed to disenfranchise whole swaths of Canadians, and they called it the Fair Elections Act.

I think it is an act of psychological and political projection that the Conservative leader runs around talking about how other people are engaging in Orwellian language all the time. He read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a bloody guide book, so he imputes to everyone else that they are doing the same, but not everyone has done that. The Fair Elections Act is just one example. I would say my Motion No. 79 is another, where the leader of the Conservatives has the opportunity to go after the Prime Minister's gatekeeping power and has refused to do it.

We do have to be wary of the use of Orwellian language in politics, but we cannot take it at face value from the Conservative leader when he accuses others of it. He should be looking in the mirror.

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for his question. I would say that there have been two phases of significant federal disengagement from housing.

In the 1990s, the Liberals cancelled the Canadian housing strategy. Later, the Harper Conservatives made the decision not to renew operating funding for affordable housing mortgages once those mortgages matured. Since these buildings could longer offer affordable rents, large corporations began buying them up and raising rents.

It would be really helpful to have an acquisition fund for non-profit organizations, to make sure that it is not just big business that has the resources to buy these buildings. Other organizations that are committed to offering affordable rental housing need to be able to access these buildings and take over the work that the previous owners were no longer able to do.

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, when we look at the national housing strategy, there is a lot of fanfare. Some big numbers were announced. One of the really important things to note is that at the beginning of the housing strategy, the big number announced was actually a multiplier that took for granted a bunch of provincial funding that had not been committed. The Liberals were taking credit for money that had not even been announced, except unilaterally by the federal government on behalf of the provinces, which is something it had no right to do.

The national housing strategy has been a bit of a smokescreen from go. Yes, some units have been built along the way, but they pale in comparison to what we need. One of the compelling proof points of that is from Steve Pomeroy, who is a housing expert in Canada. He has said that for every one affordable unit we are building in Canada today we are losing 15. How do we make up the ground that has to be made up in order to get people out of tent cities and back into homes if we are losing 15 units of affordable housing for every one being built? We cannot do it. We are not even treading water in Canada today.