Kyle Seeback

[Innovation, Science and Industry, October 9th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, taxes are up, costs are up, crime is up, time is up and corruption is off the charts. A fish rots from the head down. Is it any wonder that Liberal cronies appointed to the green slush fund by a Prime Minister twice convicted of ethics violations engaged in corruption? This was not small corruption. It was $400 million.

Mr. Speaker, you ordered the production of these documents. Why will the Liberals not stop the cover-up and produce them?

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, again, I go back to my speech where I said, whenever they come up with this sort of thing over here, we know that the answer is they could just produce the documents. That is the simple answer.

The smoke and mirrors coming from the government is that it is a violation of this, this person is concerned, or this, that and the other thing. It is like when people are trying to solve a little riddle, and they take their pen and go through a maze to get somewhere. That is basically what the government's answer is. It is some complicated, hazy, mazy thing that no one quite understands. It is to try and distract.

Produce the documents, and everyone here will stop speaking.

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

I am trying to understand this, Mr. Speaker. The NDP's contribution to this is whether the Conservatives think about sex. This is how serious the NDP is. That is the member's question.

The New Democrats are talking about an invoice from a province and a provincial party. When we are talking about how the government is engaged in corruption and a cover-up and will not produce documents, we get that kind of a serious question from the NDP. It is really sad and pathetic. I am not going to talk about something that allegedly happened in a provincial party that has nothing to do with this issue.

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I analyze it this way. There is one way that this ends, which is that the deputy House leader or deputy whip, whatever his position is, could stand right now and say that the government will give us the documents unredacted. Then we all go home. It is literally that simple.

The challenge we have is this. The Liberals are going to try to say that we should just stop talking about it. In fact, the only reason we are talking about it is because they will not release the documents. That is the problem. We know they are not releasing them, because the documents are really bad. We hope the NDP will stand with us on this and ensure we can put pressure on the government to release the documents. That is what this debate is doing, putting pressure on the government to release the documents. We are going to keep that pressure up until it does, and we hope the NDP stands with us on this.

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased the NDP is going to vote in favour of this motion. When we do, we will be there as well, but there is a lot that needs to be litigated in the chamber.

Why does it have to go to the vote? A Liberal member is laughing because this is all funny to him, corruption is funny. All the Liberals have to do is release the documents.

I ask my NDP colleagues to use whatever influence they have left from their supply and confidence agreement and tell the Liberals to release the documents, and then this all ends.

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is an excellent question and one that the Liberals never want to answer. They will not answer why they are redacting the documents. They will not answer about how they could make it happen in a second. Instead, their questions are to my authenticity because they have nothing to say on this. They know the documents are going to be very bad for the Liberal government. That is why they are trying to hide them and cover them up. It is a very serious issue. They are defying the will of Parliament.

This is a very serious issue and the Liberals do not even care. They do not say they are really sorry that they are defying the will of Parliament, but they have a good reason. They do not care. They are defying the will of Parliament intentionally. Why? Because to release the documents would be bad for them. It is disgraceful conduct.

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I have had worse things said about me by much better people, so I am not really concerned about what the member has to say.

On the specifics, the real problem is that corruption seeps onto people. There are no claims this person had any problems when doing other things with other parties. A few years with the Liberals and the rot just spreads. Therefore, all this crony capitalism was engaged in, taking taxpayer money.

What does the member say when he speaks to a single mother in his riding about the government behaving like this? It let 82% of a billion dollars be given away to Liberal cronies by other Liberal cronies. What does he say to that single mother?

[Privilege, October 7th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the first thing to ask today is why we are here and why the House is seized with this matter. It is actually not very complicated. The House ordered documents to be produced that the government has not produced. That is it. I could sit down right now and everything would be done if the government just gave the documents.

There are all kinds of convoluted arguments, like the Conservatives are talking about this too much, but the people who have the answers are all sitting right over there on that side of the House. The Liberals could end this entire thing by producing the documents. These are not documents that the Conservatives have requested, let us make that very clear, but documents that the House of Commons has requested. The government is not doing it and that is why we are here.

It could be over in literally five seconds. A member of the government could stand up right now to say the government is going to produce all the documents that Parliament has requested and we would all resume our normal duties. However, they will not, so we have to ask ourselves why we are here. It is probably because the documents contain many things that the corrupt Liberal government does not want to be released. I do not use the term “corruption” lightly, but when we look at the specifics of this particular incident, we know there was corruption. It is unequivocal.

On June 10, Parliament adopted a motion compelling the production of documents about the green slush fund. Of course, that was supported by all parties other than the Liberal Party, the government, because it has something to hide. The government did produce some documents, that is true, and government members are going to stand up during questions and comments to say that they produces some documents. However, the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, redacted those documents. For those watching who do not know what “redacted” means, it means they took a big black marker and covered up all the juicy parts. For anything that could get the Liberals in trouble, they said, “We better not release that.” That is where we are.

The motion that Parliament adopted did not say that the Liberals could pick and choose which parts of the documents to disclose, nor that the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, could go through them and take out anything that might hurt the government's reputation. The government's reputation is not so good right now, so it must be really bad if they are afraid that the documents would hurt the reputation of the government.

Let us remember that the redactions done by, again, the Prime Minister's department, the PCO, were for a Prime Minister who has been convicted not once but twice of ethics violations. Also, when the PCO was redacting those documents, let us be clear that it was not redacting that fund members met, had a couple of coffees, decided a company was at arm's length and had no conflict of interests, and gave it some funding. That was not what was redacted. What has been clearly redacted are things the Liberals know will be damaging, which is why we are here.

Parliament is supreme, and Parliament does not take on these powers on a whim. As I said before, this was supported by all of the parties, so it is not about one party trying to gang up on another. This is by the will of Parliament. Parliament has said that it wants the documents produced and that it does not want them to be redacted, because that was not in the order of Parliament. Parliament said it wants all of the documents.

We had to fight to get here. It is not as though the Liberal government agreed that the fund did not operate well, that there were some problems and that we should get to the bottom of them, and then provided the documents. No. There was a long, painful process where we had to continuously push and push to get the government to where we are today. It is the Liberals' continuous refusal to produce the documents, whether at committee or any other time, that has led us to where we are today, with Parliament adopting a motion.

Parliament does not take this lightly. We do not do this all the time. It is a rare and exceptional circumstance when Parliament demands the production of documents, and when it does so, the government should respect Parliament to follow the order. The order was not for redacted documents that the Prime Minister's personal PCO chose to redact. It is a flagrant violation of the will of Parliament.

That is why we are here. That is why this is going on, and it could all end in five seconds. The Liberals could just produce the unredacted documents. Members have now been pushing this issue for three days in Parliament. At any time, they could have done that, but they are not, and we have to ask ourselves why. These documents must contain so much evidence of corruption by the Liberal crony-appointed board members who rewarded themselves and other Liberal insiders. These documents must be so bad that they are willing let this debate go on for days and days without producing them. We can get to no other conclusion.

Now that we know the summary of why we are here, let us talk about how we got here and why we are requesting the documents.

This stuff is stranger than fiction. If we tried to make up a scandal, we could not make this up. Way back in the day with the sponsorship scandal, which I am old enough to remember, a bunch of Liberals were handing out money in brown paper bags and $400 million of taxpayer money disappeared, most of it handled by Liberal insiders and given to Liberal insiders. That was nefarious and secret and we can maybe understand how it went on for a while without being detected. However, this is very different. This government program, which I will call the green slush fund because that is what it effectively became, gave away about a billion dollars of taxpayer money. When we talk about taxpayer money, we have to think about who is paying these taxes in a really difficult time in Canada. There are single mothers working two jobs just to make ends meet. Their taxes went into this green slush fund and were abused by Liberal insiders. Let us unpack that.

The Auditor General reviewed 50% of the contracts given out, and of that 50%, 82% had a conflict of interest. When I was in high school and university, I was really happy when I got 82% because that meant I did a heck of a job. This is corruption 82% of the time on half of the contracts. If we extrapolate that, we are looking at 82% of 100%, or pretty darn close, because I do not think it was just a strange coincidence that 82% of half of the contracts had conflicts of interest. Every dollar that this fund spent had to be approved by the board. Who was on the board? It was a whole bunch of Liberal government crony appointees. What did they do? The unequivocal truth of this is that they lined their pockets.

When we think about that, we can think about the million everyday Canadians in Ontario going to food banks and the tent cities we have everywhere because life has become so unaffordable under the NDP-Liberal government. What does that mean? It means that all of this money could have been used for far better purposes. If we told single mothers working two jobs and paying taxes that a bunch of crony capitalism went on worth a billion dollars, they would be absolutely outraged. They would tell us to get to the bottom of this, because this money could have made a difference in their lives and their friends' lives. It could have been used to build housing as opposed to tent cities.

However, this is what happens with Liberal governments. I mentioned the sponsorship scandal, so none of this is new. The sponsorship scandal was about Liberal cronies giving money to other Liberal cronies, all of this insider stuff. Some 400 million dollars' worth of taxpayer dollars evaporated, much of it handed around in shady meetings in brown paper bags. What the Liberals learned from it is that they did not have to hand money around in brown paper bags in shady meetings. They can just appoint a whole bunch of their friends to a board who can approve contracts for themselves and their buddies so that everyone gets rich and it is all legal.

Corrupt Liberal government members do not care about corruption. They told board members to do whatever they wanted while they were on the board, and there were no checks and balances. This went on for years and years. It was not until the hard work of Conservative members of Parliament that this corruption was discovered. Only then did the Liberals start to do a couple of things, but this is what has happened from the Prime Minister's Office appointing Liberal insiders to run a fund where members gave each other money.

Some people are getting an A+ in corruption. An example is Cycle Capital. One member of the board ran Cycle Capital, which got $250 million from the green slush fund. That is outrageous, and Canadians are rightly outraged by it. Imagine someone gets appointed to this board by a Liberal friend and decides they are going to give $250 million to their own company. Why not? The money has to go somewhere, so why should it not go to one of their companies? This is unbelievable.

Did the director declare a conflict of interest and recuse herself from the deliberations on these things? No, she was not going to do that, because then the money would not have gotten to her company. This was all under the watchful eye of the corrupt Liberal government. I use the term “watchful eye” with great derision. There was no watchful eye; the government just let it happen.

The Liberals had to know it was happening because they knew who they appointed. When someone gets appointed, the government looks into that person. The Liberals would have known the interests these people had in various companies. They would have seen the money going out to these companies, so they must have known and just did not care. We cannot draw any other conclusion from this.

Also, this was not a one-off. Let us talk about another incident of this, which involved the former chair of the board, Annette Verschuren, who resigned from the board in 2023 following the opening of the Ethics Commissioner investigation into the agency. Boy oh boy, we know how well companies affiliated with her did. They did exceptionally well. She did not recuse herself from decisions to award money to early-stage companies that were nominated by two institutions in which she was a member. The conflict of interest is unbelievable. During her time on the board, seven out of 25 companies invested in by the venture capital firm Cycle Capital, in which she had an interest, were funded by the green slush fund.

When we listen to this, we have to give our heads a shake. This cannot be possible. How is this happening in Canada? This is the kind of corruption we would see in countries where there are real problems with corruption. The only time we have real problems with corruption in Canada is when the Liberal Party is in government, as with the sponsorship scandal, when everybody was making it rain for Liberal insiders. Now, of course, we have the green slush fund, where, once again, Liberal insiders are getting rich.

Guy Ouimet was also on the board. He is a venture capitalist on the board of Lithion Technologies, which received almost $4 million from the green slush fund.

We can go on and on and talk about this, but the fact is that this is corruption on a massive scale. We have to get to the bottom of it. How do we get to the bottom of it? We get to the bottom of it by the Liberals producing the documents.

One thing I am concerned about is the question of where the NDP is going to be on this. I know the NDP. It talks about fighting crony capitalism all the time. We need the New Democrats to stand strong with us in the demand for these documents. Two days from now will they say that they think we should move on and give up on this? That would be a tragedy. That would be defying the will of Parliament and the Canadians who want to get to the bottom of this, and get to the bottom of it we will. We will get these unredacted documents. I just hope the NDP will choose to be on the right side of this, as opposed to going back into the unholy coalition with the Liberals.

What we will hear from the Liberals is a whole bunch of what I like to call gobbledygook. They are going to say that we are disrupting the normal course of Parliament because of this. When we hear that, automatically remember that this could end if they release the documents. Whenever they say that this is taking up too much time in the House of Commons, we just ask them to release the documents and it will be over. However, they will not, because they know how damaging those documents will be.

The Liberals also say that this will be some kind of charter rights violation and that we should not give the documents to the RCMP. This is also a bait and switch. They are trying to deflect from the fact that they do not want to produce the documents. They are coming up with this grandiose scheme, and we all know this. When we say that they need to do something and they start making up all these gigantic excuses, such as the dog ate our homework, we got caught in traffic, there was a massive pileup on the highway, we start realizing that they are just explaining why they are not going to do something, that they never had an intention of doing it.

We are going to see it in the questions they are going to ask me. They are going to try to make the claim that somehow what we are doing is a charter violation, that the RCMP should not get these documents or that the RCMP already has these documents. It is all smoke and mirrors. It is all just an attempt to deflect from the fact that the Liberals will not produce the documents. No matter how many little circular arguments they try to make, when they try to go through that maze and it goes through 17 different things, trying to explain why we should stop, just remember that if they produced the documents, all of this would stop.

The RCMP does have some documents, the redacted ones. It should get the unredacted ones. We all know why the documents were redacted. Let us think about it again for a second.

Why would the government fight so hard to not release the documents? If it has nothing to hide, the truth is very simple? The truth is very simple on this, and that is to release the unredacted documents. Everything else the Liberals have to say is smoke and mirrors. It is an attempt to deflect. It is an attempt to rationalize their absolutely unacceptable behaviour, their assault on Parliament and the supremacy of Parliament. This is what they are doing. They are going to try to justify it. We are going to hear it in just a couple of minutes. No, produce the unredacted documents. That is where this all finishes, no matter what they say.

The Liberals have been going on a barrage of this. They are all over social media saying that what we are trying to do is outrageous, as if we are in control. They are in control. They should release the documents and the truth shall set them free.

The truth actually feels good. They should just get it off their chest and then beg the forgiveness of Canadians. They should say that the people who they appointed to this board engaged in severe corruption, that they are ashamed of themselves, apologize to Canadians and resign. They will not do that. They should also promise to never to do it again, except they will. It is like the story of the scorpion and the frog swimming across the river. The frog asks, “Why did you sting me; now we're both going to die.” In reply, the scorpion says, “Because I am a scorpion; it's what I do.” Why do they keep doing these corrupt things? They are Liberals; they are corrupt.

[Carbon Pricing, October 2nd, 2024]

Madam Speaker, it is almost impossible to respond coherently to that answer.

The steel industry has made it very clear that if the carbon tax continues to go up, steel producers will be out of business. I know the investments they have made. They have produced the greenest steel in the world and should be rewarded for that. Instead what the government is doing is punishing them for that by promising to quadruple the carbon tax.

The fact is that the member can say what she wants if she thinks carbon pricing is great. However, the steel industry is on record saying that if the carbon tax goes up as planned, it will be completely out of business. Sixty-one per cent of the Canadian steel market is already taken up by cheap, dirty steel imports. The industry itself is saying, “This will be the end of us.”

How can the member stand here and say that it is working, when the industry says it is going to put them out of business?

[Carbon Pricing, October 2nd, 2024]

Madam Speaker, last week, I had the opportunity to question the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry about the effect of the carbon tax on steel. It was incredible to hear the answer the minister tried to pawn off on us, saying that the government has stood up for steelworkers.

I have met with steelworkers and the steel industry, and I am sure the minister has as well. What the steel industry has said unequivocally is that if the carbon tax goes up, as it is scheduled to, there will be no steel industry left in Canada. The government's plan to quadruple the carbon tax will effectively drive the entire steel industry in Canada out of business. If that is what standing up for steelworkers means to the government, I think it has the definition wrong.

What we have seen in the steel industry as a result of the carbon tax is that the carbon tax makes Canadian steel very expensive, far more expensive than that of all their competitors. We now see that 61% of steel in Canada comes from foreign countries, they are imports, and every year it gets worse. Why? Because the carbon tax makes Canadian steel far more expensive than any other steel in the world. In fact, the country is now being flooded with very cheap, dirty Chinese steel. Chinese steel is more than two times more polluting with carbon emissions than Canadian steel. The government is driving out the steel business in this country.

Steel accounts for about 120,000 direct and indirect jobs in this country. The carbon tax is going to effectively kill those jobs. We know that the carbon tax has done a whole bunch of things. We now have two million people going to food banks because the carbon tax has made food so expensive. We have tent cities all across the entire country, hundreds and hundreds of them, because housing has become so expensive under the Liberal government.

My question to the minister was that if he thinks the carbon tax is so great and so beneficial not only for Canadian steelworkers but for Canadians in general, why do the Liberals not just call a carbon tax election and let Canadians decide? I think Canadians will unequivocally and resoundingly say they have had enough of the carbon tax.

The carbon tax is driving jobs out of this country. It is making food more expensive. It is making Canadians line up at food banks because they cannot afford food. If the Liberals are so confident that carbon tax is working so well, will they call a carbon tax election and, if not, why not?