Madam Speaker, I cannot believe that I am back here today to speak about this motion. I think I spoke to this motion maybe three-plus weeks ago. It could have been four weeks ago. All of this could end if the government simply released the documents. It has stubbornly refused to do so. I can only come up with one reason. in my background as a lawyer, there is only one reason to hide something. The reason we are going to hide something is because it is so bad and so damning that clogging up the House of Commons so that no other work gets done is actually the preferable option.
We have to think about that for a minute. Liberals could have released the documents three and a half or four weeks ago and gotten on with their so-called agenda. I think it is a terrible agenda, and I think it has brought us to where we are as a country, where rent has doubled, housing prices have doubled, one in four Canadian parents are skipping meals for their children and two million people are going to food banks. We think it is a terrible agenda, as do most Canadians.
The NDP-Liberals are in a coalition. They are not. I cannot keep track. The NDP keeps voting confidence in them, so I guess they are still in an agreement, but maybe they are not, because the NDP leader ripped up the agreement but keeps voting support, so I do not know. I digress.
The NDP-Liberal government has an agenda that it thinks is working. Objectively, it is not but it thinks it is. The Liberals' decision has been that they are not going to bring forward their agenda at all because they will not release these documents. Any reasonable person has to ask themselves this very simple question. Why are they working so hard to hide these documents? A reasonable person, any person, would have to come to the same conclusion that we have, that these documents are so damning, that they are such an indictment of the government and the minister in charge, they will move heaven and earth not to release the documents. It is legitimately the only thing we can be left with. This is a scandal-plagued government. We know that. We have had a minister recently resign for a raft of scandals. He took off out of here under a cloud of scandal. Let me say that this will be worse.
It is across the entire breadth and scope of the government. We just heard today, from the Auditor General, about the CEBA business loans. There was $3.5 billion to 77,000 recipients who were not eligible. There might be some NDP-Liberals over there asking what that has to do with this. It is because this is exactly what happened at SDTC. A whole bunch of Liberal insiders got money with a process that was not the normal process. It was just a printing press for Liberal insiders. We have now looked at the CEBA business loans and we are finding the same thing. Again, this is why they try to cover up everything, because they know the truth is so damning to their incompetence and their corruption.
What is even worse, what the Auditor General revealed today is that the whole CEBA loan process was administered by Accenture in a non-competitive process. The government just gave it the contract. It gave it $313 million out of the $342-million worth of contracts awarded. Guess what? Most of the work it did was done in Brazil. It did not even benefit Canadians. We would think a Canadian program that is being managed by a Canadian company would actually be administered by Canadians. It makes little sense to me. It does not make sense to these guys because literally nothing they do makes sense.
As far as these kinds of scandals are concerned, it is kind of a strange place that we are in right now here in Canada. Every week, there is a new scandal that should bring down a government.
It has become so commonplace for the Liberals to be caught with their fingers in the cookie jar that it is hard to shock people, but Canadians should be shocked with how they have behaved with respect to these contracts. Just to reiterate, the Auditor General found in the green slush fund that 82% of the contracts were awarded inappropriately. Now that is an A-. When I was in school, if I got an A- I would be pretty excited. The Liberals have an A- in corruption. I suspect that if they keep working hard at it like they are, they could get that grade up to an A or an A+ before the next election, something they should be really proud of. That is probably what they are working hard on, going forward.
Why are we pressing so hard for these documents? It is because we know these documents are going to be so bad for the government that we have said we will keep debating this issue until it produces them. I am going to read a quote from a whistle-blower on this case so that Canadians who are watching can understand exactly why we are working so hard to get these documents produced. One of the whistle-blowers said that, “The true failure of the situation stands at the feet of our current government”. That is the NDP-Liberal government, the people over there, “whose decision to protect wrongdoers and cover up...over the last 12 months is a serious indictment of how our democratic systems and institutions are being corrupted by political interference.” Let us think about that for a second. That was from a brave whistle-blower who took a risk to expose the corruption. The words used are incredibly powerful and damning. The person went on to say that, “It should never have taken two years for the issues to reach this point. What should have been a straightforward process turned into a bureaucratic nightmare that allowed SDTC to continue wasting millions of dollars and abusing countless employees over the last year.”
If we had a government that was not corrupt, someone would have been held accountable. I remember a time when there was this thing called ministerial accountability. Ministers who were found to have engaged in egregious conduct had the honour of resigning. What has happened here? The absolute opposite has happened. What has happened at SDTC is an ongoing, unfolding scandal. A scandal, according to one whistle-blower, that is an indictment of our democratic systems, and our “institutions are being corrupted by political influence”, all to award juicy, big, fat contracts from Liberal insiders to Liberal businesses from a program that was supposed to be monitored by a Liberal minister.
There are two things that could have happened. First, the minister is absolutely incompetent. Okay, so fire that incompetent minister, right? A minister who allowed this to take place is de facto incompetent. It is their department; they are responsible. There is this thing called ministerial responsibility. If somebody is an incompetent minister and they allow a raft of corruption to take place, corruption so much that it threatens our democratic systems and our institutions, that minister is incompetent and should have resigned. If the minister did not have the honour to resign, they should have been fired. That is scenario number one. Scenario number two, which is a little bit darker, is that the minister actually knew the corruption was taking place, and decided to do nothing.
We must ask ourselves this question. We are four weeks into demanding the release of the documents. The Liberals' entire political agenda has ground to a halt as a result of this. Let us think about the two options that I just presented. Was it that the minister was incompetent, so they are trying to protect incompetence? I do not think so.
Scenario two is the real scenario, that there was widespread corruption that the minister had to have been aware of and turned a blind eye to, just like the whistle-blower said, which is why the Liberals will fight tooth and nail not to release the documents, because they will show how systematic and systemic the corruption in this program was, and that it reached the highest levels of this government. Therefore, they will not release these documents under any circumstances, which is the sad but accurate state of affairs with this NDP-Liberal government.
These NDP-Liberals keep saying is, “Oh, there's no criminality; the Auditor General didn't find any criminality”, and that is true; it is one of the very few accurate statements we get. However, here is what a whistle-blower said about this: “Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.” The whistle-blower is saying that they are confident that the RCMP will find criminal wrongdoing.
Let us go back to the scenarios I was just talking about before. We have two possible scenarios here on why the Liberals are not releasing the documents. Scenario one, as I said, is that we have a completely incompetent minister who allowed a whole bunch of bad apples to run rampant through this program, doling out cash and making it rain for all of their Liberal insiders and buddies. Scenario two is that we have widespread corruption. Do members remember the sponsorship scandal that brought the end to the previous Liberal government, with people stuffing money in little bags going around the place? The Liberals tried to deny that as well, if I recall. They said, “Oh, there's nothing to see here.” Well, there was a lot to see. So, the second scenario, again, with what this whistle-blower is saying, is that there was criminality.
If there was criminality, why do the Liberals want to hide the documents? We have to keep asking this question. This whistle-blower is saying that they are equally confident that there will be criminality found. Why would this person say that? It is because they obviously witnessed the criminality. Now, the criminality could have been from the people at the department, which may well very have been the case, but if that was the case, why would the Liberals not just release the documents, because they do not have absolute control over the people who work there? The only reason they would be hiding documents that likely would have criminality involved is because the criminality just keeps moving up the food chain to people who knew, and that is the reason why they are refusing to release these documents, and why they have paralyzed this Parliament for the last four weeks in their absolute obstinance to release the documents.
They are so desperate to cover this up that they might have this go on for the next 15 months. Why? They know that the documents will bring an end to their government; they are that damning. It is the only explanation that I can see. Again, the Liberals said that there was no criminality, which is one of their defences in this. Then they said that there was no criminal intent, which is the other one. Well, it is interesting because there was a whistle-blower who talked about criminal intent; imagine that. The whistle-blower said, “I know that the federal government, like the minister, has continued saying that there was no criminal intent and nothing was found, but I think the committee would agree that they're not to be trusted on this situation.”
Sometimes we get real pearls of wisdom from people who come forward and make statements on this. I think the committee would agree that the Liberals are not to be trusted on this situation. However, what this Liberal government is asking Canadians to do is to trust it on these documents. We have produced documents and we have redacted 80%, or whatever it is, of the documents: “Just trust us. There is nothing damning in these redactions. It's just standard procedure.” I think what we have learned from these NDP-Liberals is that they absolutely cannot be trusted with these kinds of documents.
We heard way back in the day with respect to Jody Wilson-Raybould that the story in The Globe and Mail was false. Do members remember that was what the Prime Minister said? Then, remarkably, the story was actually true.
When we look at whether the Liberals should be trusted on this, I think there is no one who still wants to trust them. There might be a few hard-core Liberal supporters in downtown Toronto, but anywhere else in the country, the trust in these guys is at zero, as it should be.
The whistle-blower, Witness 1, goes on to say, “I would happily agree to whatever the findings are by the RCMP, but I...wouldn't trust that there isn't any criminality unless the RCMP is given full authority to investigate.”
Again, the whistle-blower is saying that they cannot trust them, that they think there is criminality here and that the RCMP should investigate for criminality. We go back to asking ourselves why they will not release the documents. I have said this several times, but it is really important that this point hits home: They will not release the documents, despite four-plus weeks of not getting their agenda through Parliament, because they just know the degree of criminality that is going to be found in these documents and how damning it will be for their government.
I will phrase this in a way that everyone can understand. The government has been mired in scandals for the past two years. It is not new to scandal; it is not something new or shocking. One would think that, at a certain point, the Liberals would say that another scandal is no big deal. They would just get those documents out and say it would blow over in a couple of weeks.
However, they do not. The Liberals are still obstructing Parliament and not producing the documents. It goes back to the fact that this is not an everyday, run-of-the-mill scandal. It is actually really sad when we have to say that phrase, “not an everyday, run-of-the-mill scandal” by a government. It is because of how many scandals and how corrupt the government has been proven to be that we get to use that phrase.
It is not a run-of-the-mill scandal, however, or the Liberals would just release the documents. They would do what they normally do: a Friday evening document dump. We all know it. That is when the government takes out the trash. It puts something out at 5 p.m. on a Friday, usually on a long weekend, such as Thanksgiving or the August long weekend, because the Liberals know Canadians are not paying attention.
However, the government did not even do a document dump on this. Again, it is because the Liberals know that what is in these documents will bring about the end of the government. We know there is going to be an end. When we have a carbon tax election, which is coming, that will be the end for the Liberals. They just want to desperately hold on as long as they can.
The NDP wants to hold on as long as it can because the leader needs his pension. That is why the NDP keeps propping up the Liberals at every opportunity. The New Democrats say they ripped up the agreement, but they prop the Liberals up. Unfortunately, the government is going to keep going. If it released these documents, it would actually be the end. Even the NDP would not be able to prop the Liberals up anymore, because the documents are so bad. That is why they are not releasing the documents. It is why we are where we are today. It brings me no joy to be here speaking about this another time. The Liberals have made this choice.
The conflicts that go on in this program are really unbelievable. We now have another minister mired in scandal. First, we have the minister who was responsible for SDTC; we have come to the conclusion that he is either incompetent or involved in this scheme. We now also have the Minister of Environment, who was a strategic adviser for Cycle Capital Management, which got a whole bunch of money from the green slush fund. I wonder how that happened. Given that point, I wonder why the Liberals do not want to release the documents. There are at least two ministers who we know will be very badly exposed by the documents.
I will end with this: This has gone on long enough. It is very simple. All the Liberals have to do is release the unredacted documents, and we can get back to the business of the House.
