Mr. Speaker, every time I get a chance to speak in the House, I never want to forget the fact that all of us who are here were elected because of the people in our ridings, so I never want to take that for granted. For the opportunity I have to serve them to the best of my ability, I just want to say thanks again to the residents of Niagara West.
My thought process really is on what is going on with the Liberal Party and whether its members are competent managers. We are talking about a question of privilege right now, but my biggest concern in the next election is who is the most competent to run this country. I can assure the House that the least competent government in the history of this country is the present Liberal government under its current leader, who loves his photo-ops and loves making promises he has no intention of delivering on whatsoever. The two billion trees was a great one. How many trees have we actually planted? We cannot get the information because the Liberals are not very transparent. Another promise, in 2015, was to be the most transparent government. We missed that one pretty quickly; it fell off the bandwagon almost right away.
When I listen to what the Liberals are talking about, one of the challenges is that I do not believe a word that is coming out of their mouths. They are not competent. They are not great managers. At the end of the day, they will say anything to get elected, and for the most part they have a lack of follow-through and are not prepared to actually do the hard work or get things done.
I just want to work through a couple things as we talk about that, and I heard my colleague from Provencher talk about a few things that I was going to add. The member for Kingston and the Islands said we had people in the basement writing speeches. I can assure him that is not the case, and they are certainly not PMO talking points. I will give him that as well, but there are so many scandals that when the member for Provencher started talking about them, I thought, “Oh my goodness; I forgot about all those scandals.” There are just so many to remember.
I wrote down a number of them that I want to talk about. We are talking about transparency. We are talking about trying to get information. When we request information, it comes back redacted. For those people who may not have been listening to the debate, “redacted” means that big black sharpie or magic marker that goes over all the answers and gives probably less information than what we were trying to get.
I look at what has gone on, and it would seem this is not the first time the government has not offered up a number of things. The member for Provencher talked about the Winnipeg labs. That is something that troubles me greatly when I look at what went on there. We asked for documentation, and we absolutely got stonewalled to the point where we actually brought someone to the bar, but not a member of Parliament. That is something that had not been done in over a century, and they still refused to give us the information.
Then we found out that the scientists were working for the Communist Party of China. Give me a break, in terms of being able to vet people. I am sure that it has never happened before. The current government is always good at vetting people. I feel as if, at the end of the day, not only were they not vetted but they were also actually taking the information out of the lab and sending it back to China. They were probably sending it via Canada Post, as a matter of fact, trying to make sure it got there. This is unbelievable.
I hear all the time about the fact that we are looking at things that are going on and that we are the party of big business. I do remember, from not so long ago, the $12 million the government gave to Loblaw for freezers. Not long after, Loblaw got charged in a half-a-billion-dollar price-fixing case over bread.
Not only did a company like Loblaw not need the money, because it is doing very well, but after the government gave it money, this large, Canadian corporation agreed to pay a fine of $500 million. Think about that. How much bread was it price-fixing if it was prepared to pay a fine like that?
Someone mentioned Jasper, and I think we do need to raise Jasper as an issue. It is absolutely tragic. As more information comes out as to what was going on there and the fact that the government neglected any type of advice from experts, or neglected anything, it is absolutely devastating. I feel for the people of Jasper. Many times it had been said that we needed to do something around fire management and what was going on with all the dry brush. We also read stories about how volunteer firefighters showed up and were turned away.
I wonder to myself whether the government is one we actually want to trust as it continues to lead. Is nine years not enough for the Liberals, in terms of moving forward?
Frank Baylis was also mentioned. I cannot help but re-emphasize that one. There were $237 million in contracts he got two months after he left office. Talk about hitting the payday. At the end of the day, I do not know whether one could have worked here for 10 or 20 years and be able to get the kind of contract to the tune of what he got. We know what happened with all the ventilators; they were scrapped and never used.
We are talking about some of the inside connections, and that is what this is about. We are talking about almost $400 million in contracts from SDTC, Sustainable Development Technology Canada. We are talking about that and about the insiders who got money.
We see this happening over and over again, and that is the challenge that I see. The government loves taking care of itself and its buddies, and quite frankly I am not sure whether we can trust it. Let us go back to some of the promises it has made in terms of what it was prepared to do. The two billion trees was a good one, but I also love the fact that it wants to build almost four million homes, in about the same period of time.
If we look at the math, we realize that we probably need to build almost half a million homes a year. Currently we are building fewer than 250,000. It is pretty easy to make commitments just so people will be happy to hear what someone has to say, when they actually have no idea how they are going to fulfill the contracts, how they are actually going to get the houses built, and how they are actually going to get some of the obligations met. That is one of the things that are absolutely troubling.
Small businesses got crushed during Covid. They got absolutely destroyed. The government also promised it would be looking at a carbon tax rebate. I have not talked to one owner of a small business yet that has received a carbon tax rebate, and I would certainly love to hear from the government about when that is going to be, because a number of businesses have gone under and have struggled in such a way that the carbon tax rebate is probably not even going to help them at this point. However, it would be something that would be nice if we could move forward on it.
I also want to look at some of the other things we have been talking about in the House. I find it interesting that the committee continues to look at which Randy got government contracts. Why are we asking the government all these questions and we continue to get zero response whatsoever in terms of being able to find out the kind of information we want? The Liberals give us a hard time, saying we should not be asking for all that information because they are not prepared to give it up at this point in time.
It has been said lots, and I will only touch on it, but one of the reasons we are here is the conflicts of interest when it came to the green slush fund. We have talked about over 186 conflicts. That is obviously very concerning. I am always amazed, when we start going through all these things, that there are actually so many different challenges, misappropriating of funds, things that could have been done better or things that could have been more efficient, that it goes back to my original premise: The government is incompetent. The government does not have the ability to get things done in a timely and efficient way.
I think of the ArriveCAN app that cost just under $60 million and could have been done for a little over $80,000. I think of the testimony we have heard. Documentation from the Auditor General includes government officials' lying in an attempt to silence whistle-blowers. In this culture of openness and transparency, government is suppressing whistle-blowers and trying to suspend people without pay for telling the truth at committee. Consultants were making millions and millions of dollars while not adding any value to work, and while there were inappropriate relationships and friendships between government officials in charge of awarding multi-million-dollar contracts and the people receiving some of those contracts.
Part of being a government is being accountable for what it does, and not only being accountable but also making sure taxpayers receive value for the money. One of the challenges people tell me about all the time is that they are struggling right now with the cost of living, with the carbon tax and with the fact that everything costs more. It costs more to heat their homes, to buy food, to pay rent and to pay for a number of other things.
When Canadians see that their money is not being spent appropriately by the government, in a way that makes some sense, is transparent and makes sure that people get value for money, they ask why we are not taking better care of their taxpayer dollars. Those are the things Conservatives continue to question and should be allowed to question. It was mentioned earlier that it is the opposition's job to question what is going on in government and to hold it to account.
We have been talking about SDTC and a number of other things, but I think we almost forgot about all the consulting contracts that went to McKinsey. Do members remember that? It received over $209 million in contracts, and 90% of the contracts the Liberal government awarded to McKinsey were given without proper guidelines. At the end of the day, money was being handed out without following any type of process.
In many cases it was a little unclear what the purpose of the contracts was; the government did not know what they were for or the outcome that was supposed to be achieved. In one case, the Canada Border Services Agency saw that McKinsey did not qualify for contracts, so it revised the statement of work so it could qualify. Let us think about that for a second: The CBSA put out a contract for work that was not defined, so it reworked the contract so McKinsey could get the work.
If we look at the sole-source contracts, we see that there was never any type of justification for them. Over 70% of all contracts awarded to McKinsey were non-competitive, and in 13 out of 17 contracts given to McKinsey, security clearances should have been necessary but the Liberal government allowed McKinsey to operate without them. It is not a surprise that the Prime Minister gave McKinsey hundreds of millions of dollars, because at that time, McKinsey was led by Dominic Barton, a close friend of the Prime Minister and the finance minister. We talk about Liberal-connected friends getting contracts and money as a result of that.
We know that Dominic Barton was a key figure in the Liberals' advisory council on economic growth and on their Indo-Pacific advisory committee. It was Barton's idea to create the failed scandal-plagued Canada Infrastructure Bank, and it was Barton and McKinsey who had to pay nearly $600 million in damages in the opioid crisis.
Looking at a number of these things, we realize that when it comes to competence or the ability to get things done, there needs to be accountability. That is why we, members of the opposition, are asking questions. That is why we are demanding that we get a chance to see the documents unredacted and that they can move on to the appropriate authorities.
The appropriate authorities will do what they need to do. We are not indicating what should happen. We are saying that in order for the RCMP to do its work, it needs to see the documents. We asked for these things and did not receive anything at all. That is why we are here debating. This could all be over right away; if the Liberals would provide the documentation, we would move on to something else.
That is obviously an issue. Part of the challenge that we have had is we realized that, through the contracting system, the RCMP revealed earlier this year that it had charged a scamster who received $250,000 through the Prime Minister's broken contracting system. The Liberal-NDP coalition blocked questions to the officials responsible for the government.
We saw the RCMP previously testify that it had multiple investigations of federal contracting, in addition to its active investigation in the Prime Minister's $60-million arrive scam app, which was supposed to cost the taxpayers $80,000.
We go over a number of these things, and we realize, at the end of the day, that the people who are doing well are Liberal insiders and those who are connected. We look at what happened with our trade minister, dealing with public relations, pomp and circumstance, conflict of interest and contracts awarded for communication services. In 2019-20, the Ethics Commissioner said there was no excuse for contracting with a friend's company. The commissioner went on to say that the minister twice failed to recognize the potential conflict of interest involving a friend, an oversight of her obligations under the Conflict of Interest Act.
This sounds familiar because, as I just mentioned, of the terms of the contracts with the two Randys that we are trying to get to the bottom of and how some of these contracts were awarded during COVID.
Then, of course, as has been raised before and it does not hurt to mention it again, there is the whole issue of the Prime Minister's ethics convictions, dealing with the Aga Khan and the Paradise Island vacation. He was charged with an ethics violation after spending time on the Bahamas island. The investigators believed that there was reasonable grounds to think fraud may have been committed.
Ultimately, the RCMP did not lay charges because of the lack of clarity in the federal rules that applied to accepting gifts. However, the Ethics Commissioner found that the Prime Minister was guilty of breaking laws that violated section 5, 11, 12 and 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act.
The Ethics Commissioner questioned the Prime Minister's friendship with the Aga Khan. The Prime Minister used the words “close family friend” to refer to the Aga Khan, but the Ethics Commissioner found that this was not the case. The Prime Minister took the trip to Paradise Island and was brought in on a private helicopter. The Prime Minister thinks he is above the law. Canadians are well aware of that.
What Canadians are finding right now is that they believe there is so much hypocrisy that their tax dollars are not being taken care of in a responsible way.
We have SNC-Lavalin, which was mentioned here. The Ethics Commissioner found that the Prime Minister violated section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act by attempting to influence then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec-based engineering firm.
The ruling stated that the Prime Minister improperly used his position of authority to attempt to further the private interests of SNC-Lavalin by seeking to pressure Wilson-Raybould to offer a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have allowed the company to avoid a criminal charge and corruption charges. The Prime Minister was found guilty of breaking Canada's ethics laws through the efforts to protect a corrupt, politically connected company by firing his first indigenous attorney general, who would not bend to the Prime Minister's orchestrated campaign of political pressure.
The former ethics commissioner's report indicated that witnesses said they had relevant evidence to offer but were constrained by the limitations put in place by the Liberal Prime Minister. The exact same tactics blocked the RCMP from probing the possibility of criminal charges related to the Prime Minister's orchestrated and systematic campaign to pressure then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to overrule the independent Public Prosecution Service and offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.
Last year, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition censored the RCMP by shutting down the commissioner's testimony in committee. They did whatever it took to protect the Prime Minister from potential criminal charges. Common-sense Conservatives would continue to hold the Liberal-NDP government and its Bloc allies accountable. Canadians certainly deserve transparency and the right to know.
I know I only have a minute left, but I need more time if I am going to go through all the scandals. We talked about the WE Charity. These things happened early on, but I think what people fail to understand is that this creates distrust when it comes constituents, taxpayers and voters.
The job of the official opposition is to hold the government to account. That is what we are attempting to do as we move forward with this question of privilege, and we are trying to make sure that the proper documents go to the people who need to have a look at them. We have a responsibility as members of Parliament to do the best job that we can for our constituents and we need to be responsible for taxpayer dollars. That is what this opposition is going to continue to do to the government. We will continue to hold it accountable on issues that are matters of the public purse and affect our constituents. We will continue to pressure the government and its supporters for answers to all these questions.
