Madam Speaker, it is always a wonderful opportunity and a true privilege to stand in the House of Commons and represent my amazing riding of Peterborough—Kawartha.
Here we are, and what are we doing today in the House of Commons? I often think the folks at home watching must feel like they are just watching an episode of The Young and the Restless. In the three years since I have been elected, they could turn on ParlVU or CPAC, turn it off for a couple of months or a year even, turn it back on, and here we are, still talking about incompetence and corruption, a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency and division in our country that has never reached this level in my lifetime of 45 years.
What has happened here in the House of Commons is that Parliament has basically been brought to a halt, because the Liberals are refusing to turn over documents, and the Conservatives are demanding they do. What are these documents and what are we talking about? It is called the green slush fund. It is based on Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC.
This is a green slush fund, and it is supposed to be for companies to apply to. It is a billion-dollar fund to invest in green technologies or green businesses. What does that mean? A whistle-blower came before committee, and I think this is a really important piece of this discussion. Many bureaucrats and many people have to go to work, and maybe they are privy to some very important information there. At the end of the day, and our job is really no different, people have to put their head down on the pillow and be comfortable, by their moral compass, with what they are actually doing.
The bureaucrats working under this fund, and under the Prime Minister, could not do that any longer, so they came forward to committee. They are what are called whistle-blowers. They said serious corruption was happening. I am going to read some of the testimony that was put forward:
I think the Auditor General's investigation was more of a cursory review. I don't think the goal and mandate of the Auditor General's office is to actually look into criminality, so I'm not surprised by the fact that they haven't found anything criminal. They're not looking at intent. If their investigation was focused on intent, of course they would find the criminality....
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. I would happily agree to whatever the findings are by the RCMP, but I would say that I wouldn't trust that there isn't any criminality unless the RCMP is given full authority to investigate....
Again, if you bring in the RCMP and they do their investigation and they find something or they don't, I think the public would be happy with that. I don't think we should leave it to the current federal government or the ruling party to make those decisions. Let the public see what's there.
Here is another quote: “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.”
We are demanding that documents be handed over. The Speaker has ruled in favour of this. The opposition parties alongside us, everyone except the Liberals, have agreed with what we have asked for. These are documents that outline what corruption has happened. This is critical because it is the money of the people watching at home.
The government does not have its own money. It has taxpayers' money, and there should be a pretty strong understanding and agreement that whoever is in government is not abusing that money, wasting that money or giving it to their friends and family for them to get rich and not actually do any work.
It is a very simple ask. I want to read a couple of things into the record here, but first there is something I would ask people at home to really think about. This is a lot of procedural conversation about parliamentary privilege and this and that, but the question they need to ask themselves is, why do these documents exist in the first place? Why do we have a government in power that would not just misuse money but also give taxpayer money to its friends and family? Why are we even having this discussion? That is the biggest question I would have.
If the Liberals were innocent, if they were truly here to represent people, elected to ensure transparency and accountability, they would hand unredacted documents over to ensure accountability and transparency. Why do these documents exist in the first place? What are the Liberals hiding? How did we get here? How did we get to a level of corruption where we have hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that has not gone to improving our lives and, in fact, has made it significantly worse? That is the question that needs to be asked today.
The Auditor General of Canada found that the Prime Minister turned the Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. In this report specifically, the Auditor General found that $59 million was awarded to 10 ineligible projects that, on occasions, could not demonstrate an environmental benefit or development of green technology. That amount, $59 million, sounds a lot like the arrive scam app number.
There was $334 million sent to over 186 projects in which the board members had a conflict of interest. The Auditor General did not even do all 400 cases. Can people imagine how many more there are? Let us not imagine. Let us get the documents and let us see. The Auditor General made it clear that the blame for this scandal falls on the Prime Minister's Minister of Industry, who did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were given to the Liberal insiders. This is obviously very serious.
I think it is important to go back to how we even got here. I want to read a quote into the record. I want people at home to guess who said this:
Political leadership is about raising the bar on openness and transparency....
As a Member of Parliament, as a Leadership Candidate, and now as Leader of my Party, I have taken every opportunity to raise the bar when it comes to openness and accountability...As Leader of my Party, I made raising the bar on transparency and openness my first major policy announcement, so that Canadians can better hold their leaders accountable.
For me, transparency isn’t a slogan or a tactic; it’s a way of doing business. I trust Canadians. I value their opinions. And now that I’ve heard them, I’m going to act.
That was from June 2013. Are there any guesses as to who said that? It was the Prime Minister. Oh, how the tides have turned.
I want to read another one because they are just so good. Get some popcorn, folks, because we are here for a while. He said, “I think we're going to have to embark on a completely different style of government”. We could interpret that a lot of ways. He said:
A government that both accepts its responsibilities to be open and transparent, but also a population that doesn't mind lifting the veil to see how sausages are made. That there is a dual responsibility, in changing towards more open and transparent functioning, that really will go to a deep shift in how government operates.
Are there any guesses as to who said that? It was the same guy, the Prime Minister, in April 2015. I have another quote from April 2015: “Once I look at the trend lines in democracy, the empowering of citizens and activists, I know that the government of the future is going to be very, very different than governments of the past”. It sure is different. Since I have been here, it has been another day and another scandal. I have never seen the country in the state it is now in.
People ask me why Conservatives have to be so hard on the Prime Minister. It is because the opposition's role is to ensure that the government is doing the best for the people of Canada. It is to bring balance to this place. The Prime Minister has shown that he is incapable of balance. He has shown that it is rules for thee, but not for me.
I want to go through the list of scandals. Again, people should grab some popcorn because there are a lot of them. There is the McKinsey scandal. The Auditor General of Canada report criticizes the Prime Minister and the government for awarding $200 million in contracts to McKinsey without proper guidelines; 90% of contracts were awarded without clear justification, with many lacking defined purposes or outcomes. In some cases, the Canada Border Services Agency altered requirements to allow McKinsey to qualify; 70% of contracts were sole-sourced, with no explanation for bypassing competitive processes. McKinsey operated without necessary security clearances in 13 out of 17 contracts. The firm's past failures include involvement in the Canada Infrastructure Bank and contributing to the opioid crisis, which has killed 42,000 Canadians since 2015. The Liberals paid $600 million in damages for this.
Then we have the trip to Jamaica; the Prime Minister's $84,000 holiday vacation was a gift from family friends. Again, we have rules for thee, but not for me. Then he went to Montana for $228,000, not including the salaries of the RCMP officers. I am not done yet. There was another trip to Jamaica in April. That one was $162,000. Who can forget arrive scam? I know my friend from Brantford—Brant sure does not forget that one. We had to bring forward a government agency, GC Strategies. Does anybody know what “GC Strategies” stands for? It stands for “Government of Canada Strategies”. There was $60 million that went to a company that does not even exist and that two guys were able to build in a weekend for under $250,000 of taxpayer money. Does anyone want to know why the cost of living is out of control? We do not have a revenue problem in this country. We have a Prime Minister with a spending and corruption problem.
Let us not forget about the $6,000-a-night hotel room, where the Prime Minister burst into song at the Queen's funeral. Who could ever forget the WE Charity? The Prime Minister announced that the WE Charity would manage the $912-million Canada student service grant, and the Ethics Commissioner initiated an investigation into that decision on July 3, 2020.
Probably my favourite scandal that stands today is SNC-Lavalin; it really speaks to the character of what we are dealing with and the sort of rot we have seen in this country. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Mario Dion, investigated allegations that the Prime Minister's Office pressured former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould regarding SNC-Lavalin. Raybould resigned from cabinet and principal secretary Gerald Butts denied the claims before resigning. Jane Philpott also resigned in protest.
In August 2019, the commissioner found that the Prime Minister and his officials had breached ethics rules by attempting to undermine the federal prosecutor's decisions. SNC-Lavalin has been charged with fraud and corruption in connection with payments of nearly $48 million to public officials in Libya under Moammar Gadhafi's government and allegations that it defrauded a Libyan organization of an estimated $130 million. Two Liberal ministers took the fall for that one; they were female, I might add. That is another one of these classic things. I cannot wait to see who is going to take the fall for these documents. They will be turned over because we are not going to stop. Let us have that on this conversation.
To put this into context, can we imagine if somebody from CRA phoned and said, “We think you have violated the tax law and we need you to hand over documents”, and we said no? What would happen? Would the official just leave and say it was no problem? Let us say someone handed over documents but had blacked out everything important that CRA wanted to know. Would CRA be okay with that? The general public has to follow every single rule that the government imposes on them while it taxes them into poverty, but the government and the Prime Minister say, “No, not us; we are not responsible for following any rules”.
This mentality bleeds down into the entire front rows and benches, and not just that but into society. We have a societal blister in this country of a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency. It bleeds into our public safety when criminals have no consequences and crime is rampant; it is all over the place. Then, there is the erosion of trust in institutions. When we erode trust, we create chaos because there is no relationship. It is the most detrimental thing we can do, and the people do not trust the government, nor should they. I am not even done reading half the scandals, and the Prime Minister has only been in power for nine years.
The other important piece to talk about in this is the green slush fund and, in itself, what it truly is. As we found out today, the PBO has now said that the carbon tax is just this big scam. Conservatives have been saying this from day one. It is driving up the cost of everything. Canadians are paying more out than they are getting back, and the PBO confirmed this yet again. Truckers testified in committee that they are paying $20,000 in carbon tax. What do they think is going to happen to the cost of food? Why has housing doubled under the current Prime Minister? That is what I would like to know. The green, environmentally friendly initiative that the Liberals stand on all the time is a facade. They tout themselves as the most environmentally conscious party, but this is pandering. That carbon tax is not an environmental plan; it is a tax plan.
We literally had the Minister of Mental Health stand up in the House and say that we wanted the planet to burn. Later, we found out that the Minister of Environment prevented 50 firefighters and 20 fire trucks from fighting the fire in Jasper while it burned. That is the gist of what we are talking about.
I want to end with this: The undercurrent of all of this is that the government wastes money. I used to worry about how we were going to make this money work. Well, I just found $400 million. The Conservatives would make life more affordable for Canadians. We would restore hope, and we would make housing, food and groceries affordable again.
