Garnett Genuis

[Ethics, December 11th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I am speaking tonight about the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal. We need to be very clear about what indigenous leaders have repeatedly told us at the various committees that have been studying this: that abuses of indigenous procurement under the Liberal government have become systemic. The Assembly of First Nations said “the majority” of those who benefit from these procurement set-asides are actually not indigenous. Liberals have trumpeted a 5% target, but Chief Joanna Bernard from the AFN has said it is closer to 1%.

We have repeatedly heard from indigenous witnesses, and every indigenous group has said there are serious, major problems in this program. Sometimes it is people like the member for Edmonton Centre, outright pretending to be indigenous for personal advantage. In some cases, they are shell companies or shady joint ventures that are set up to exploit these programs with all the benefit going to non-indigenous actors.

This week, we had another example revealed of this, a very significant example. This was a non-indigenous company, a Canadian health care agency, that was supposedly in joint venture with an indigenous company. The reality was that, according to the evidence we heard, the indigenous side of the partnership was exploited. All of the benefit and all of the work went to the Canadian health care agency. This was years ago.

At the time, the auditor himself came forward with the fact that he thought there was criminal activity, the invention of names of employees and fraud going on. People attempt to defraud the government, we know that, but in this case the auditor told the government about an instance of fraud, and he was told the government did not want to bring it to the RCMP. He recommended it be brought to the RCMP, and unbelievably, the government decided not to share this information with the RCMP.

We have the issue with the member for Edmonton Centre pretending to be indigenous and his company, Global Health Imports, misrepresenting itself as indigenous-owned to try to get these contracts. We have now this issue of a Canadian health care agency. More broadly, we have indigenous leaders saying that, systematically, there are abuses of this program. Then, the Liberal government is interested in championing claims that it has made progress in terms of its target, so it has an incentive to turn a blind eye when these abuses take place.

On the one hand, we have bad actors, non-indigenous companies, that have an incentive to misrepresent their identities, to pretend to be indigenous to get these contracts. On the other hand, we have a government that is more interested in virtue signalling than in actually achieving results. It is more interested in being able to make statements claiming it has realized its targets when it has not. Companies misrepresent themselves as indigenous to get these contracts and the government turns a blind eye to be able to say it has achieved targets that in reality it has not achieved.

We have seen over the months that Conservatives have been looking into this and bringing attention to this abuse that Liberals have tried to cover it up, tried to cast aspersions at us and make all kinds of claims to bury the reality. However, here is the reality: We know now that they had information brought to them about criminal activity, fraud, by those pretending to be indigenous in order to take contracts intended for indigenous people. The victims of this are the taxpayer and indigenous communities. This evidence was brought to the government, and the government, in fact, buried it. It did not bring it forward.

Why have the Liberals failed so badly and why have they not prioritized results?

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great question from my colleague. I do not think there is enough time in most of our lives, actually, to lay out all the waste that has happened.

However, I have the honour of serving on the government operations committee, and I will just highlight a few things that we have been able to identify there in terms of government waste. While the size of the public service has grown, there has also been a dramatic increase in spending on outside consultants. We would expect these things to go inversely; if there were a larger public service, there would be less need to contract out or vice versa. However, under the current government, there has been growth in the public service and it is contracting out more. The government is contracting to people who are then subcontracting. There is this whole class of professional contractors and subcontractors who receive contracts and then subcontract, companies like GC Strategies.

We have seen horrendous abuse of the indigenous procurement program, where non-indigenous elite insiders pretend to be indigenous or set up shell companies or abusive joint ventures and then use those arrangements to take contracts that should be benefiting indigenous communities. We are talking about the green slush fund today. There are abuses of the indigenous procurement program. There is outrageous spending on contracting out to friends of the government, like McKinsey and others. These are some of the obvious, significant examples.

I am very proud of the fact that when we have put forward proposals for cutting Canadians' taxes, like by taking the GST off new home construction, for example, we have, in every case, identified where the money is going to come from. That is our approach.

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from the NDP wishes to hold me accountable for decisions of the Mulroney government. I was born in 1987. Respectfully, I know he is a bit older than me and he has been in this place for a long time, but I do not know that I am necessarily well positioned to defend all the decisions of the Mulroney government at that time.

I will say that, over the course of almost 150 years of this country's history, up until 2015, our national debt was at a certain point. Over the Harper years, that debt-to-GDP ratio went down overall. We went through the global financial crisis and we balanced the budget coming out of that. We lowered the debt-to-GDP ratio. However, when we compare the entire accumulated debt of this country, from Confederation to 2015, with the nine years under the NDP-Liberal government, more debt has been run up by one Prime Minister in nine years than every single prime minister before that.

We can debate the particulars of the Mulroney government's record and of the Diefenbaker government's record. We can talk about R.B. Bennett at some point as well. The fact is that, in comparing all of those prime ministers of the past, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister has run up more debt than all of them combined.

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is very clear the difference between an across-the-board, permanent tax cut and the temporary tax trick proposed by the NDP-Liberal government. We permanently reduced the GST from 7% to 6% to 5%. We did so while balancing the budget. Of course, there were timely temporary deficits during the global financial crisis and we brought the country back to a balanced budget. It was a prudent fiscal approach and we were able to cut taxes permanently and across the board, cutting the GST.

This temporary tax trick says that we are going to change the list of goods that are tax-exempt for a period of two months, so there will be one list of tax-exempt goods now. That list is going to change for two months and then it is going to change back, which is just a nightmare from an administrative standpoint for small businesses that have to manage this. It is a trick because it will not cut people's taxes permanently. We favour permanent, across-the-board, effective tax cuts to make our system simpler and more effective and to provide Canadians the tax relief they deserve.

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, let us all have a bit of a chuckle about what just happened. The member said, ”I want an answer to this question, but spare me the answer that I expect you to give.” I might as well just sit down, but maybe I will just give him that answer again so that he understands. Maybe after a few times he will actually learn something.

This is common sense, so it is good for the member to hear it. To fix the budget, we will bring in a dollar-for-dollar rule. That means when a dollar is spent that dollar needs to come from somewhere. The government needs to identify when it is making spending decisions. If it is proposing to spend $100 million on something over here, it needs to be able to say where that $100 million will come from. The money has to come from somewhere to go to the spending item. That is common sense.

What the NDP-Liberal government has pursued is a radical policy in defiance of common sense, where it seems to believe that it can promise new spending without ever offering an account of where that money came from. The effect of that has been massive inflation, making life significantly less affordable for Canadians, more than doubling the national debt. It is a horrible record, a record worse than any previous Conservative or Liberal prime minister.

Canadians are going to be living with the debt caused by the NDP-Liberal government for a very long time. However, we are prepared to use common sense to clean up the atrocious mess that it has created and restore our common home.

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, we have seen the radical experiments of the government on crime, and that is why Conservatives are championing common-sense proposals to stop the crime. We will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. These common-sense principles respond to the radical experimentation of the government. I hope that is helpful for members of the government in understanding these principles of common sense.

The member highlighted the privilege issue. I have talked a bit about the privilege of the government and how it is so privileged that it has insulated itself from the impacts of its bad policies. In particular, in this privilege motion, we are talking about the fact that the government has refused to hand over documents ordered by the House of Commons. What I have been building up to is the reality that the government's approach to scandal and to the House of Commons demonstrates a lack of regard for the basic principles of common sense.

We are talking in this privilege motion about the rights of the House of Commons, fundamentally, to order the production of documents. We call it the House of Commons for a reason. It is because the House of Commons has always been the institution that represents the common people. I talked earlier in this speech about how the common people are necessarily in touch with common sense by the experience of their lives, whereas it is often the case that a privileged elite can become disconnected from common sense. We are in the House of Commons championing the common sense of the common people and the right of that House of Commons, on behalf of the common people, to order the production of documents that are relevant for the work of the House.

In the midst of its defence of power and privilege against the common people and the House of Commons, we have a government that is refusing to hand over documents that have been ordered. In the spirit of common sense, Conservatives are going to continue to demand that those documents be handed over. What are the documents? Aside from the principle of the right of the people's House to order the production of documents, what exactly are the documents the government is making its stand on in defence of power and privilege against the rights of the people to order these documents? It is about a corrupt green slush fund, where government insiders were able to, because of their privileged access, hand out money, and they did so often to companies that were owned by people on that very board. There was a group of insiders appointed by the government that was able to hand out $400 million to various companies, and it used that insider access, that power, to give money to its own companies.

This is obviously a violation of the basic principles of common sense. I think any reasonable person thinking about what makes sense and what is fair would understand that there should not be people with the power to allocate taxpayers' dollars to companies that they own. That is just common sense, but it was not common sense that penetrated the elite decision-making circles within the government. Both the process of this motion, the fact that the government is refusing to hand over documents, and the substance behind it, which is what happened with the green slush fund, underline the need to restore that common sense to the decision-making that takes place here in Parliament and in Ottawa, in general. The very fact that the government insiders thought that what they were doing was okay or that they could get away with it illustrates how broken things have become under the government.

I could go through the litany of scandals. Just this week, the government operations and estimates committee was doing ongoing work on the Liberals' indigenous procurement scandal, how elite non-indigenous insiders took money that was supposed to be benefiting indigenous companies. In fact, the AFN said that the vast majority of those who benefited from these set-asides were actually shell companies. We had an auditor before committee who said that he, years ago, came to the government with evidence of criminal activity by people pretending to be indigenous, saying that these allegations should be referred to the RCMP, and the government decided not to do that. It is unbelievable that an auditor would say there is criminal activity and that the government would decide not to hand the documents over.

It is time to restore the common sense of the common people united for our common home, and that is what we should be standing up for in this House of Commons.

[Privilege, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today, and always, to address the House.

I want to start by drilling down on the concept of common sense. Members in the House, and those who follow the debates elsewhere, will know that Conservatives speak a lot about the concept of common sense. We have been highlighting the importance of restoring common sense in government decision-making.

I have observed that our critics across the way, and some of their friends online, have responded by denigrating the use of the term “common sense”. Our critics say they do not really know what we mean by common sense. The fact that the government is claiming not to understand what is meant or implied by common sense actually, I think, demonstrates the problem in substantial measure. The concept of common sense has a history and a meaning that are worth reflecting on and that used to be well understood. The fact that the government, in particular, does not know what common sense is shows how far we have gone. However, for the government's benefit, I think it is worth delving a bit into this concept and why it is important to restore common-sense decision-making in this country.

Let me say first, at a general level, that we all know ideas have practical consequences. We can see over time whether an idea works when implemented. A critical test of an idea is the practical consequences it creates in the real world. When we consider, in our policy debates, the validity of an idea, we need to ask whether that idea will work in practice, whether it produces the effects it is intended to produce and whether it contributes to or undermines human flourishing.

Most people in their regular lives hold ideas that they also practise. As they practise the ideas they profess, their lives demonstrate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the ideas they profess and practise. I would see this happen a lot, by the way, thinking back, with friends I had in university. They would develop some idea about human behaviour, maybe through a class, a discussion or something they read, put that idea into practice, and then reap the consequences, thus becoming either an example or a cautionary tale as a result. More often than not, in my recollection, it was a cautionary tale. These were little, but profound, demonstrations of John Stuart Mill's theory on the value of experiments in living: that free people engage in experiments in living, which others can then observe, and the observation of experiments in living leads to the collective formation of norms that work and lead to greater human flourishing.

The things that most people learn and practise in order to live well-ordered, healthy, happy lives are what we have come to call common sense. There is no central repository of the information that we call common sense, but the concept still has profound meaning. It refers to the things most normal people have come to know by experience and perhaps by listening to elders in their lives who have shared from their experience. Experiments in living over time produce general insights that most people recognize as true, the things most people know by experience to be right and sensible.

If a person comes up with a new, novel theory, they might well posit that it is true, but they could not consider it common sense. New, novel theories often challenge common sense, and they are often wrong; not always, but the conservatism that we champion on this side of the House is the idea that we should at least be cautious and deferential when implementing changes in order to preserve the common-sense wisdom of the past. A lot of harm has been done through the capricious application of someone's idea of what would be a good and interesting experiment.

Let us consider one example of this in the policy space, so-called modern monetary theory. This is the theory that a government can spend as much as it wants without being constrained by revenue or worried about the consequences. Some way, somehow, modern monetary theory posits that a government can just run massive deficits in perpetuity. Needless to say, proponents of this radical theory would not consider this theory to be common sense. They would not even pretend it was common sense, because it is novel and radical. Even proponents, I think, would acknowledge it is both novel and radical.

I think we can say that, to a substantial extent, modern monetary theory has been tried in Canada by the government, which no longer believes that it ever needs to target the balancing of the budget and has more than doubled our national debt in the last nine years it has been in office.

This radical, novel theory has been tried and I think we can see now, or most people can see, that it has clearly failed. There are many other new and novel theories this government has tried that have failed as well. It tried experimenting with a carbon tax. It tried experimenting with very high levels of non-permanent immigration in the absence of a housing policy to make up for the need that was thus created. It tried experimenting with hard-drug decriminalization. This is just to name a few examples of radical, novel experiments that this government imposed on this great country.

These were experiments in policy and all of them failed. They were ideas that nine years ago might have sounded good to some people in theory, but we no longer need to simply debate these ideas as theory because we can see them in practice and we can see they have failed in practice.

They are also ideas that I think we can say violated common sense. They went against things we know and have known to be true for a long time about the kinds of policies that work and the kinds that do not. The government tried radical new ideas and these radical new ideas did not work. When Conservatives talk about restoring common sense, we mean, precisely, pushing back against these sorts of radical experiments and restoring an application of long-standing wisdom.

We would make decisions that are rooted in the common-sense experience of real people. We would replace the government's weak, weird, woke and wasteful policies with common-sense conservatism, with ideas rooted in the conclusive experience of history and the things normal people know from experience to be true.

I want to make one other observation about common sense, and that is that one of the biggest attacks we see on common sense is from privileged people who promote their luxury beliefs at the expense of everyone else. Luxury beliefs are ideas promoted by privileged people, often not actually practised by the people promoting them, that confer on the promoter a kind of social recognition and status.

Here are a few examples: rich and privileged people pushing calls to defund the police while themselves relying on private security or living in gated communities; politicians denouncing choice in education while finding workarounds for their own families; and leaders pushing for higher taxes on small businesses while ensuring they will never have to pay those higher taxes themselves. These are examples of luxury beliefs where the proponents of these radical ideas have the power and the privilege to protect themselves from the impacts of the weird experiments. They are running an experiment, but they are stepping out of the lab, so they are not affected. A normal person living in the real world cannot afford to ignore common sense for long, because a lack of common sense will catch up with them. It will have consequences for their life that they and others notice and that will lead to a course correction.

Well-functioning democracies, by protecting the voice of the common people in decision-making, maximize the chance that collective decisions will be informed by common sense. The common people are often most in touch with common sense, because the common people have to live with the consequences of collective decisions. However, a small, privileged elite can often continue, even for a long time, to hold, promote and govern on the basis of a narrow set of luxury beliefs that defy common sense, while protecting themselves from the impact of those decisions.

This fundamentally defines the record and practice of the current government: making decisions based on luxury beliefs that its members can insulate themselves from and that in reality have devastating impacts on the lives of everyday Canadians.

The Prime Minister is generally insulated from the impacts of his carbon tax. He will not even share information about the amount of greenhouse gases his own activities produce. We have sought that information before and have not received it. He has a taxpayer-funded home and has never struggled to afford a home because of inherited wealth. He has the privilege to protect himself from inflation and he does not have to live in communities devastated by his own dangerous drug decriminalization policies.

The Prime Minister persists in his own luxury beliefs because he does not see or experience those real-world consequences. Today, many Canadians, who once voted for him, can see the failure of his luxury beliefs and see the urgency of our call in response to these radical experiments. Our call is for a return to common sense, to axe the tax, to build the homes, to fix the budget and to stop the crime, to reverse these radical policies and replace them with clear common-sense priorities.

Conservatives' priorities notably correspond to these specific areas of NDP-Liberal failed experiments. They brought in a carbon tax, which was an experimental idea. It was the theory that if we increase the cost of everything, this will lead to less consumption in areas that produce carbon emissions. This failed because, as history has shown us, technological change leads to changes in behaviour. It was not through taxes on horses that we saw the transition to the automobile. It was through the invention of the automobile.

I remember seeing a post online of someone showing a picture of a street before the invention of the car and after the invention of the car, and it showed how quickly things can change. The point is that things changed because new alternatives become available that allow people to adapt. We would not have seen that change through a tax on horses. It just would have made taking a horse and buggy more expensive.

The carbon tax was a theory. It was tried. It has not worked. The government has not reached its targets at all. There are other countries that have pursued other policies that I think have been more effective than the actions of the government. The Conservatives' response is to reject the Liberals' radical experimentation and restore common sense in this area with our proposal to axe the tax.

When it comes to another area of experimentation, the Liberals brought in changes around housing and immigration. They were experimental changes. They radically increased non-permanent immigration to this country. They did not have any plans around home construction. In fact, fewer homes are being built today than were built in this country in the 1970s, despite the growth in population.

This experiment of not having enough homes to meet the needs of the population was a radical experiment. Individual members of the government are insulated from the impacts of the experiment, but it was an experiment that failed. In response to that, we want to champion a return to common sense, the common-sense proposal to build the homes.

Then, as I already talked about, the Liberals experimented with modern monetary theory. They wanted to try something new. They tried dramatically increasing spending and did not worry about, at any point, balancing the budget. It was a radical, novel idea. I think many people would say it would be nice if that was true. It would be nice if we could spend infinitely without needing to worry about where the money came from, but that is just not how the world works.

Disraeli famously said that the facts of life are conservative. What goes up must come down. There is a basic reality the experimentation defied. The Liberals acted on fiscal policy, and continue to act on fiscal policy, in defiance of basic common sense. The wisdom that people naturally gather over time by living normal lives, is that they realize that they cannot spend money they do not have, and if they spend money they do not have, eventually it is going to catch up to them. That is common sense.

The government tried to defy common sense. It did not work. In response to that failure, the Conservatives have a proposal to fix the budget. It is to institute a dollar-for-dollar rule, which restores common sense. If we are going to spend a dollar on something, that dollar has to come from somewhere. We cannot spend money we do not have, and if we have that money, it had to come from somewhere. It is simply asking government to discipline itself to that common-sense reality.

That is our plan to fix the budget: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and finally stop the crime. We have seen radical experiments from the Liberals on crime. When they took office, they made substantial changes to the bail system. We can see, if we look at the data on violent crime in this country, how violent crime was going down under Stephen Harper, and it started to go up when the Prime Minister took office. It is because the Liberals made specific policy changes—

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, December 11th, 2024]

With regard to Canada’s relationship with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): (a) what are the complete details of all development assistance spending intended to have an impact in the DRC over the last two years, including, for each spending item, the (i) amount spent, (ii) recipient and any additional delivery partners, (iii) allocation timeline, (iv) amount spent on each item; (b) what are the complete details of all development assistance spending intended to have an impact on Congolese refugees outside of the DRC over the last two years, including, for each item, the (i) amount spent, (ii) recipient and any additional delivery partners, (iii) allocation timeline, (iv) amount spent on each item; (c) what is the position of the government regarding the activities of the March 23 Movement (M23) rebels; (d) what is the position of the government regarding other nations supporting the M23 rebels; and (e) what is the position of the government regarding the end of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

[Petitions, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, on that same point of order, may I ask for consent to extend the time available by five minutes so more members could table their petitions?

[Petitions, December 11th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, by popular demand, I will limit myself to just one petition today.

This petition is from people in the Canadian Lebanese community who are very concerned about the impact of Hezbollah's actions on the people of Lebanon. They note how the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which was started by Hezbollah, has had terrible consequences for the Lebanese people. They note that Hezbollah is a terrorist Iranian regime proxy that acts to serve that regime's ideology against the wishes of the people of Lebanon.

Hezbollah has refused to abide by UN Security Council resolution 1701 by refusing to disarm and refusing to allow the Lebanese government, and the Lebanese armed forces, to take back control of Lebanese territory. The Lebanese people want an end to the colonial domination of their territory by the Iranian regime.

Therefore, residents call on the Government of Canada to seek the immediate disarmament of Hezbollah, the end of aid by the Iranian regime to Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, and the restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty with all Lebanese territory being governed by an elected, sovereign Lebanese government.