Pierre Poilievre

[The Budget, April 4th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, we have the five conditions that the former attorney general set.

There are two that have been met. One is that the disgraced principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has resigned. The other is that the disgraced Privy Council clerk, Michael Wernick, has resigned.

However, there remain three conditions that have not been met: one, senior adviser Mathieu Bouchard remains and has not left, which was one of the purported conditions; two, apparently she does not yet have any commitment from the Prime Minister that the new Attorney General will not interfere and provide a deferred prosecution agreement to SNC-Lavalin; and three, the Prime Minister has not taken responsibility for his actions in this affair.

Let us go through those conditions and analyze further what remains and why they remain conditions in the current government.

We will start with Mathieu Bouchard. His role in this has been little noticed, but it is one of great importance.

We are all aware that Gerry Butts inappropriately pressured the former attorney general. We all have the audio recordings of Michael Wernick doing the same. What we do not have and have not discussed here is the relentless drive of the Prime Minister's senior policy adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, to try to tamper with the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

Let me read from the former attorney general's testimony before the committee. She stated:

My chief of staff had a phone call with Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques from the Prime Minister's Office. They wanted to discuss SNC. They told her that SNC had made further submissions to the Crown and that “there is some softening, but not much”. They said that they understand that the individual Crown prosecutor wants to negotiate an agreement, but the director does not.

This is very important information. How is it that a senior policy adviser to the current Liberal Prime Minister would be aware of any disagreement between an individual Crown prosecutor and the director of public prosecutions? Under the Federal Accountability Act, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is made separate and self-contained. It is apolitical and out of reach of political interference by the Prime Minister and even the Attorney General. Its decisions are made in total isolation from the political process, with the sole exception that an attorney general may issue a written directive. However, that directive would have to be published for all eyes to see in the Canada Gazette, which is like a news magazine telling the Canadian people the regulatory and administrative decisions of the government. In other words, it would be absolutely inappropriate for the senior adviser to the Prime Minister to have intimate knowledge about the disagreements and conversations within the office of the director of public prosecutions.

This is precisely why we need the senior adviser to come before the ethics committee when it begins its investigation into this matter next Tuesday. We have asked for him to appear. I have said very clearly that if this senior prime ministerial adviser, along with other witnesses alleged to have interfered in this criminal prosecution, are called before the committee, I will end my marathon speech immediately. I await a member of government rising to his or her feet to tell me that, at which point I will take the government's word and end my remarks so it can speak on other matters before this House.

She goes on in this intervention:

They also mention the Quebec election. They asked my chief if someone had suggested the outside advice idea to the PPSC and asked whether we are open to this suggestion. They wanted to know if my deputy could do it.

She went on to state:

In response, my chief of staff stressed to them prosecutorial independence and potential concerns about the interference in the independence of the prosecutorial functions. Mr. Bouchard and Mr. Marques

—two senior advisers to the Prime Minister—

kept telling her that they didn't want to cross any lines, but they asked my chief of staff to follow up with me directly on this matter.

She goes on to state:

Later that day, my chief of staff had a phone call with Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard from the Prime Minister's Office. They wanted an update on what was going on regarding the DPAs since “we don't have a ton of time”. She relayed my summary of the meeting with the Clerk and the Prime Minister.

Two senior prime ministerial advisers, Mathieu and Elder, also raised the idea of an informal outreach to the director of public prosecutions. Why not? Why not just have someone in the Attorney General's office or the PMO informally reach out to maybe have a beer and talk about how this criminal prosecution could be squashed? That is how our legal system is supposed to work—informal outreach, which in reality means backroom dealings.

The former attorney general goes on to state:

My chief of staff said that she knew I was not comfortable with that, as it looked like and probably did constitute political interference. They asked whether that was true if it wasn't the Attorney General herself, but if it was her staff or the deputy minister. My chief of staff said “yes”, it would, and offered a call with me directly.

These are the early interventions of Mr. Bouchard, senior PMO adviser, in mid-September.

She then goes on to state:

At this point, after September 20, there was an apparent pause in communicating with myself or my chief of staff on the SNC matter. We did not hear from anyone again until October 18 when Mathieu Bouchard called my chief of staff and asked that we—I—look at the option of my seeking an external legal opinion on the DPP's decision not to extend an invitation to negotiate a DPA.

Of course, that would not have been necessary, because the former attorney general had already made her decision clear: She was not going to intervene and overturn the decision of the prosecutor, regardless of some outside opinion the Prime Minister cooked up with a friendly lawyer. This call constituted further and unnecessary political interference.

The former attorney general went on to state:

...on October 26, 2018, when my chief of staff spoke to [PMO adviser] Mathieu Bouchard and communicated to him that, given that SNC had now filed in Federal Court seeking to review the DPP's decision, surely we had moved past the idea of the Attorney General intervening or getting an opinion on the same question. Mathieu replied that he was still interested in an external legal opinion idea. Could she not get an external legal opinion on whether the DPP had exercised their discretion properly, and then on the application itself, the Attorney General could intervene and seek to stay the proceedings, given that she was awaiting a legal opinion?

In other words, Mr. Bouchard, operating on behalf of the Prime Minister, suggested that the former attorney general slam the brakes on the trial itself by seeking a stay. A stay means that the Attorney General would go to the court and ask if the whole trial could be put on hold, that the PMO has hooked the AG up with a legal opinion from a Liberal legal mind who would offer an opinion shortly about whether the company should get a settlement instead of a criminal trial. In the meantime, the court would just hit the pause button and delay justice. That is absolutely inappropriate.

The former attorney general wrote further:

My chief of staff said that this would obviously be perceived as interference and her boss questioning the DPP's decision. Mathieu

—again, one of the top PMO advisers—

said that if six months from the election SNC announces they're moving their headquarters out of Canada, that is bad. He said, “We can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected.”

That does not sound political at all, does it?

There are two things here that we need to address.

First, Monsieur Bouchard was stating a patent falsehood. He was saying here that SNC could move its office within six months. We know that is impossible. This intervention, by the way, was made in October. There was November, December, January, February, March and we are now in April, which is six months, and so far there is no announcement of the headquarters move, and we know why: SNC has already signed a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan that requires its headquarters to stay in Canada. It has just signed a 20-year lease on its Montreal headquarters. It announced a multi-million-dollar renovation of that headquarters to accommodate its employees. All of this is publicly available if someone consults with Mr. Google.

Despite this publicly available evidence to the contrary, this senior PMO adviser was stating that the former attorney general had to immediately find a way to shelve the criminal prosecution of this company or the headquarters would move.

It is one thing to interfere in a criminal prosecution. It is another thing, and even more significant, to lie in order to shelve a criminal prosecution. Section 139 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for anyone to attempt to defeat, pervert or obstruct the course of justice. If the course of justice was for SNC-Lavalin to face its fraud and bribery charges in court, then lying to interrupt that process would certainly have constituted an attempt to defeat, pervert or obstruct the course of justice. As a result, I hope the RCMP will investigate whether this lie constituted a criminal offence.

The second part I will focus on is this. It is hard to believe that in one sentence we have two things that are so spectacularly inappropriate, the first being the aforementioned lie and the second being the overt politicization of the prosecutorial and criminal process in saying, “We can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected.” Excuse me? Is this how the Prime Minister's Office treats criminal trials? We literally have a top adviser who is still on the payroll in the PMO who called up the attorney general's office, spoke to the chief of staff and said that she had to interfere in the criminal prosecution of a massive Liberal-linked corporation because they need—I am quoting—to get re-elected. This is astonishing. It is absolutely astonishing that this guy is still on the payroll.

The fact that the Prime Minister has had this information, as we all have now, for over a month since the former attorney general appeared and testified, and has not fired this man, is astonishing. What is worse—

[The Budget, April 4th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that the entire SNC-Lavalin affair that has engulfed the government began with alleged bribes to the Gadhafi family and that now the government, which has become embroiled in that scandal by trying to protect the company from criminal prosecution and interfering in prosecutorial independence, is now so cynical and so sinister that it believes it can bribe Canadians with $41 billion of their own money in this budget.

Unfortunately for the government, Canadians are too smart and too moral to be distracted with billions of dollars of their own money. They understand that the Prime Minister is attempting to bury his unethical behaviour under that $41 billion of irresponsible spending, but they are not buying it.

We have new developments in this scandal just in the last 24 hours and let me begin by highlighting perhaps the most important of those developments. The Prime Minister stood before Canadians, 37 million of his own citizens, in a press conference on February 15 designed to distract from the scandal and there he said, “If anyone, including the former attorney general, had issues with anything they might have experienced in this government or didn't feel that we were living up to the high standards we set for itself, it was her responsibility to come forward. It was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.”

He said that to 37 million Canadians, that no one came forward to raise any concerns. However, the former attorney general testified before the justice committee:

My response—and I vividly remember this as well—was to ask the Prime Minister a direct question, while looking him in the eye. I asked, “Are you politically interfering with my role/my decision as the Attorney General? I would strongly advise against it.”

That sounds to me like somebody came forward to him personally. In fairness, prior to yesterday, we did not have independent confirmation that she had said those words to the Prime Minister. We had her word, which I had accepted, but beyond her word we did not have documented proof or audio recordings of that exchange.

Yesterday, I rose in the House of Commons and said:

Mr. Speaker, at that September meeting, the former attorney general reports that she looked the Prime Minister in the eye and said, “Are you politically interfering with my role...as the Attorney General? I would strongly advise against it.”

Does the Prime Minister remember her saying any such thing?

The Prime Minister rose and replied, “Mr. Speaker, once she said that, I responded 'No'". The first clause in his response is the most important one. It is an admission and I am going to quote him again. He said, “once she said that”. In other words, he confirms that she looked him in the eye and said, “Are you politically interfering with my role/my decision as the Attorney General? I would strongly advise against it.” The fact that he admits that she raised his political interference to his face in September proves he was stating a blatant falsehood when, in February, he said that no one came forward.

The one final defence on which the Prime Minister could justify his February 15 statement would be that he did not remember when his former attorney general looked him in the eye and asked him if he was politically interfering in her role. However, his admission yesterday that he did remember it proves the memory loss defence is invalid.

Yesterday the Prime Minister remembered it. Therefore, we can conclude that on February 15 he remembered it. We can finally conclude that when he was looking Canadians in the eyes and claiming no one had come forward, he was stating something he knew was false. There is a word for that, a word that would require I violate the Standing Orders to utter. Therefore, I will not do that in this place. However, I will be ever careful and ever cautious that a growing and longer nose from across the floor does not swing around and poke me in the eye as I give these remarks.

That intervention proves that the Prime Minister has not been telling the truth to Canadians. While he was simultaneously sending out the hounds to tear apart his two former cabinet ministers, whistle-blowers who had spoken against him, he was also prepared to state patent falsehoods about them.

The whole narrative he was trying to create in stating those falsehoods was that somehow the former attorney general had testified against him at the justice committee out of political opportunism. She had never raised any concern about this SNC-Lavalin affair and was completely fine with everything he was doing. When she was shuffled out of what Gerry Butts called her “dream job”, only then had she come up with this big story about how the Prime Minister was mucking around in a criminal trial. In order to sell that narrative, he had to state the falsehood that she had never once raised any concern. We now know not only that it was false, but that he knew it was false and said it anyway.

We further know that the Prime Minister stood by and watched as his best friend and principal secretary went before a parliamentary committee and testified that no one had come forward and raised any concerns. If what they were doing was so wrong, Gerald Butts said, then why were they not having that conversation in September, in October, in November, in December?

Why were they not having the conversation? We now have 41 pages of documentary evidence showing that conversation was seemingly never-ending in September, in October, in November, in December. Gerald Butts sat in that committee and looked members of this House in the eyes, as well as the millions of Canadians who were watching live, and stated a patent falsehood. It was a patent falsehood he knew was wrong because much of the documentary evidence shows that he participated in the very conversations he later claimed never happened.

That members of the government are prepared to go before parliamentary committees and state things they know are absolutely false sheds light on why Liberals at the justice committee did not want any of the witnesses to swear an oath before they began their testimony. It is clear that Gerald Butts did not want to swear an oath that he would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He wanted to be able to tell things other than the truth.

That sentence about why they were not having that conversation during the four months, September to December, was one such example. He knew he wanted to say something that was totally false. Therefore, he had his Liberal members on the committee ensure that he would not have to swear an oath that might render him susceptible to allegations of contempt, though we are not ruling out the possibility that he may well have been in contempt for having stated such patent and now disproved falsehoods.

The first new development that we have had in less than 24 hours is that the Prime Minister has admitted that the former attorney general did come forward to him in September, months before, almost half a year before, the scandal became public. However, he said exactly the opposite in a press conference.

The second new development is actually a big one. I am not sure if people realize the enormity of it. A CBC article that was published yesterday, April 3, at 8 p.m., noted, “Weeks of tense negotiations preceded the PM's highly controversial decision to eject two high-profile MPs.”

While the Prime Minister was trying to put a public face on this scandal, we now know that behind the scenes he was trying to transact a secret deal in order to keep the former attorney general and the former Treasury Board president from leaving caucus altogether. He was trying to make offers to them in order to have them stay so that he could grasp onto the last shreds of the phony feminist and idealistic self-image that he had worked so hard over so many years to create. He wanted to find a way to get them to replace their condemnations and whistle-blowing with yet more praise. Behind the scenes, the whole time the scandal was raging, he was sending emissaries to make offers to them in order to get them to do that.

According to the article, the former attorney general sought five different conditions in order to bring an end to the public controversy. I will note before going into them that as I examined the five conditions she allegedly sought in order to end this public controversy or at least to stop speaking about it, none of them involved any benefit to her. I am going to list them off.

First, she wanted to see the removal of Gerald Butts, the now-disgraced former principal secretary to the Prime Minister.

Second, she wanted to see the removal of the Clerk of the Privy Council, who we have now heard pressured her relentlessly in a 17-minute conversation in which he attempted to change her mind on the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin through veiled threats.

Third, she wanted to see the removal of Mathieu Bouchard, to whom we will return later and at length.

Fourth, she also wanted a commitment that the new Attorney General would not overrule the director of public prosecutions, Kathleen Roussel, and would not direct her to give SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.

Fifth and finally, which should have been a no-brainer, she wanted the Prime Minister to admit publicly or to caucus alone, as the CBC article notes, “that his office acted inappropriately in its attempts to convince her to consider granting SNC-Lavalin a [deferred prosecution agreement].” In other words, the Prime Minister was asked to just own up to his own behaviour, take responsibility for it, admit it was wrong and commit to never doing it again.

It is not clear which of the remaining conditions were not met, but we do know which ones were. I will list them very quickly.

The former attorney general's demands, according to the article, that Butts and Wernick be removed have been met. These two are gone. Of the five conditions, the disgraced principal secretary is out and the disgraced Clerk of the Privy Council is out.

Now we are down to three remaining conditions. They are that Mathieu Bouchard, the senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister be removed; that the new Attorney General prevent the—

[The Budget, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I had just finished telling the House that the Prime Minister admitted today that in fact the former attorney general did raise concerns about political interference in the SNC-Lavalin affair to his face in September, which contradicted his claim in February that she had never once raised any such concern.

Now I will move on to another instance in which she also rang the alarm bell about the government's political interference in her role as Attorney General in the SNC-Lavalin criminal prosecution. In her testimony, she said, “Still on September 19, I spoke to [the Minister of Finance] on this matter when we were in the House...and I told him that engagements from his office to mine on SNC had to stop, that they were inappropriate.”

The Prime Minister and the government might try to deny that this conversation occurred. However, unfortunately for them, the former attorney general has now released text messages from the finance minister's chief of staff in which he confirms that the minister told him about the former attorney general's concerns. He relayed news of that conversation to Jessica Prince, the chief of staff to the former attorney general.

In other words, we know for a fact, based on the admission of the finance minister's chief of staff, that the former attorney general did raise concerns about inappropriate engagements from his office to hers on SNC, and that those engagements “had to stop”. That further contradicts the Prime Minister's claim from February, when he said, “It was her responsibility to come forward, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did”.

Then, on October 26, there was a conversation between Jessica Prince, who was the former attorney general's chief of staff, and Mathieu Bouchard, senior adviser to the Prime Minister. The former attorney general noted in her testimony:

However, on October 26, 2018, when my chief of staff spoke to Mathieu Bouchard, [the Prime Minister's senior adviser], and communicated to him that, given that SNC had now filed in Federal Court seeking to review the DPP's decision, surely we had moved past the idea of the Attorney General intervening or getting an opinion on the same question, Mathieu replied that he was still interested in an external legal opinion idea. Could she not get an external legal opinion on whether the DPP had exercised their discretion properly, and then on the application itself, the Attorney General could intervene and seek to stay the proceedings, given that she was awaiting a legal opinion?

The former attorney general then noted, “My chief of staff said that this would obviously be perceived as interference and her boss questioning the DPP's decision.”

This is another incident in which the chief of staff to the former attorney general told senior staff members in the Prime Minister's Office that what they were asking for would constitute, or at least be perceived as, interference. That further contradicts the Prime Minister's claim that “It was her responsibility to come forward, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.”

Then, of course, we have the meeting on November 22 between the former attorney general and two senior staff members from the Prime Minister's Office, about which the former attorney general testified:

In mid-November, the PMO requested that I meet with Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques to discuss the matter, which I did on November 22. This meeting was quite long; I would say about an hour and a half. I was irritated by having to have this meeting, as I had already told the Prime Minister, etc., that a DPA on SNC was not going to happen, that I was not going to issue a directive. Mathieu, in this meeting, did most of the talking. He was trying to tell me that there were options and that I needed to find a solution. I took them through the DPP Act, section 15 and section 10, and talked about the prosecutorial independence as a constitutional principle, and that they were interfering. I talked about the section 13 note, which they said they had never received, but I reminded them that we sent it to them in September.

She went on:

Mathieu and Elder continued to plead their case, talking about if I'm not sure in my decision, that we could hire an eminent person to advise me. They were kicking the tires. I said no. My mind had been made up and they needed to stop. This was enough.

Yet again she had warned the Prime Minister's staff that their involvement in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin needed to stop, that this was enough.

This is another piece of evidence, I believe backed up by journal entries and perhaps even text messages that followed, that demonstrates that the former attorney general did warn the Prime Minister and his team that they were acting inappropriately, in contradiction to the Prime Minister's public statement later on, wherein he stated, “it was her responsibility to come forward, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.” Of course she did.

Then, on December 5, the former attorney general came forward yet again, in a meeting between herself and Gerald Butts, the Prime Minister's most senior adviser. This is from her testimony. She stated:

On December 5, 2018, I met with Gerry Butts. We had both sought out this meeting. I wanted to speak about a number of things, including bringing up SNC and the barrage of people hounding me and my staff. Towards the end of our meeting, which was in the Château Laurier, I raised how I needed everybody to stop talking to me about SNC, as I had made up my mind and the engagements were inappropriate.

Again we have the former attorney general specifically and clearly complaining about inappropriate engagements and that “everybody”, meaning the Prime Minister's team, needed to “stop talking to me about SNC”. However, knowing this, the Prime Minister went in front of 37 million Canadians at a press conference and claimed the former attorney general had never come forward with any of her complaints about his and his team's conduct in the SNC-Lavalin corruption prosecution.

Then again on December 18, in a meeting between the former attorney general's chief of staff and the Prime Minister's two top assistants, Gerry Butts and Katie Telford, she stated:

On December 18, 2018, my chief of staff was urgently summoned to a meeting with Gerry Butts and Katie Telford to discuss SNC.

She recounts the text messages she received from her chief of staff about that meeting—text messages, I might add, that she has now released to the public and to Parliament. One message said:

Basically, they want a solution. Nothing new. They want external counsel retained to give you an opinion on whether you can review the DPP's decision here and whether you should in this case.... I told them that would be interference. Gerry said, 'Jess, there is no solution here that does not involve some interference.'

Once again, a senior staff member in the former attorney general's office said to the top staff in the Prime Minister's office that what they were doing would constitute “interference”, yet the Prime Minister—and I know I am repeating myself on this particular quote—despite this fact, went on national television and looked 37 million Canadians in the eye and claimed that if the former attorney general had any complaints or concerns about his involvement in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, “it was her responsibility to come forward, it was their responsibility to come forward, and non one did.”

Then, on December 19, she did come forward again. She did this in her telephone call with Michael Wernick, the Prime Minister's top public servant. I am going to read a few excerpts.

She said this of the Prime Minister's conduct and the conduct of people around him, “It is entirely inappropriate and it is political interference.”

She said as well:

So we are treading on dangerous ground here—and I am going to issue my stern warning, because I cannot act in a manner and the prosecution cannot act in a manner that is not objective, that isn’t independent. I cannot act in a partisan way. I cannot be politically motivated. All of this screams of that.”

She said, “This is going to look like nothing but political interference by the Prime Minister, by you, by everybody else that has been involved in this politically pressuring me to do this.”

She said, “Does [the Prime Minister] understand the gravity of what this potentially could mean? This is not about saving jobs. This is about interfering with one of our fundamental institutions. This is about breaching the constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence.”

This is what she said of having to report back to the Prime Minister: “I hope that you do, because I do not think anybody respects this. This conversation that Gerry and Katie had with my chief of staff and I have it, like she wrote down what was said. Saying that they do not want to hear any more about the legalities but want to talk about jobs is entirely inappropriate.”

In fact, in that now infamous telephone conversation that has been recorded and made available for all ears to hear, the former attorney general said the term “interference” no less than nine times. The Clerk of the Privy Council responded by saying, “All right. Well, I'm going to have to report back before [the Prime Minister] leaves.”

In other words, the Clerk of the Privy Council said that he was going to report back to the Prime Minister on the contents of his conversation with the former attorney general, a conversation that the Prime Minister has used weasel words to avoid admitting he ever knew about it.

It is funny that after this audio recording came out, the Prime Minister swiftly said that he had not been briefed on the full contents of the conversation until the recording came out. Well, nobody is asking if he was briefed on the full contents of the conversation. People are never briefed on the full contents of any conversation. The question was whether he knew about the call before, during, or after it.

Today the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister precisely that question over and over again, and not once did the Prime Minister answer it.

This is important, because it once again speaks to the credibility of the Prime Minister's claim in February at that famous press conference, where he denied that the former attorney general had ever raised any concerns about his political interference in the SNC-Lavalin criminal prosecution. We now know that the former attorney general again and again raised these concerns.

We know she did so because text messages, journal entries and audio recordings prove it. They include documents, recordings, text messages from September 16, September 17, September 19, October 26, November 22, December 5, December 18, December 19.

Would the Prime Minister have us believe that he did not know about any of the warnings that she and her staff made to his top personnel and ultimately to him on these more than half a dozen occasions? It is entirely unbelievable that he did know that she had spoken out when he went before the Canadian people and claimed that she had not spoken out.

Let me reiterate what I have just gone through here. It is the number of times the former attorney general did come forward.

I will explain why I am going to give this list. It is because the Prime Minister said that if anyone thought he had done something wrong on SNC, “it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.”

Well, she did on all of these occasions: September 16, 2018, in a phone conversation with the PMO staff in which she raised the problem; September 17, 2018, in a meeting with the Prime Minister and the clerk; September 19, in a phone conversation between the PMO top staff and the former attorney general's top staff; September 19, again, in conversations between the former attorney general and the finance minister; October 26, in conversations between the chief of staff to the former attorney general, Jessica Prince, and the senior adviser to the Prime Minister; November 22, in a meeting between the former attorney general and two top advisers to the Prime Minister; December 5, in meetings between the former attorney general and Gerald Butts at the Chateau Laurier; December 18, in meetings between Jessica Prince, Gerald Butts and the Prime Minister's chief of staff; and, of course, December 19 in that famous and recorded phone call.

In all of those cases, she came forward and spoke up about the Prime Minister's personal and political interference in the SNC-Lavalin corruption trial. Despite all of those times when she sounded the alarm bell, the Prime Minister stood before all Canadians and said she had never once raised a concern about this matter while she was attorney general. It was a patent falsehood. He looked Canadians straight in the eye and told them something he knew or ought to have known was completely false. He did so in an attempt to discredit his former attorney general because she, of course, had demonstrated that he had personally and politically interfered in a manner inappropriate with the criminal prosecution of a Liberal-linked corporation accused of fraud and bribery.

This raises a number of important questions. Can we trust anything the Prime Minister says when he stands before Canadians and says anything at all?

The answer comes from the fact that he contradicts his own words on matters of national importance. These are not minor mistakes. He made the false statements that I have just discredited, at a press conference on a massive national controversy where he knew everybody would be watching him. We have to wonder the degree of mendacity that must consume this man that he would be capable of doing that, and the degree of incompetence that must reside in him given that the former attorney general made clear that she had documentary evidence backing up her claims. The Prime Minister ought to have known at the time he stood forward and made that comment to Canadians that the former attorney general would want to step forward and validate her claims using the text messages and other personal notes that she had kept throughout the four-month campaign when he and his team were pressuring her.

I have just spent 25 minutes thoroughly disproving the Prime Minister's February 15 press conference statement and showing that he made statements that he knew were false in respect of the former attorney general's earlier complaints about his role in the SNC affair. Let me move on to another falsehood that has been exposed.

In February when the Prime Minister was first accused of politically pressuring his former attorney general, in a Globe and Mail article by Bob Fife and Steve Chase, he immediately came out and said the story was false and there was nothing more to it. We now know through 41 pages of evidence, some of which I have relayed in the House of Commons, that his denial was false. In fact, the pressure existed and it was real. Now members on the front bench of the Liberal government no longer even deny that the former attorney general was pressured. They have now moved the goalposts and just claim that the pressure was not illegal, but that in itself is a very big change in their position.

The PMO issued statements in the 48 hours following the Fife-Chase story, in which it flatly denied pressuring the former attorney general. It denied it altogether. Now Liberals tacitly admit that they did so and do not even contest the former attorney general's validated claims that they contacted her at least 20 times, directly or through her staff, in order to get her to change her position on the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin in its fraud and bribery case. That is a second contradiction.

Let me move now to a third contradiction. In that famous September 17 meeting the Prime Minister had with the former attorney general, he twice told her that she had to immediately act to signal a willingness to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin or the company would announce within weeks that its headquarters would leave Montreal. He and the Clerk of the Privy Council, along with others in the top levels of the Prime Minister's inner circle, made it clear that she had mere days to do this or the headquarters move would be announced. They even said that it would be announced before the Quebec election. That election was only days away.

We know a number of things about that claim. One is that the company has not since announced it will move its headquarters absent a deferred prosecution agreement. In fact, the headquarters remains in Montreal and no public announcement to the contrary has been made. Two is that the company cannot move its headquarters out of Montreal because it has a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan requiring that it remain in that city until the year 2024.

Three is that it just signed a 20-year lease on its building in Montreal and announced a multi-million dollar renovation to the headquarters to accommodate its thousands of Montreal-area employees. A company does not do purpose renovations for its employees and then get up and move. It is a waste of money.

Four is that moving the SNC-Lavalin headquarters out of Montreal would not in any way limit the company's criminal liability in the charges of fraud and bribery. Those charges would go ahead no matter whether the headquarters of SNC-Lavalin were located in London; Washington; Sydney, Australia; or Kalamazoo. At the end of the day, the trial would happen no less. It is not like an individual bank-robbing fugitive, who skips the country and vanishes into the Bermuda Triangle, never to be prosecuted. The company is facing prosecution no matter where its headquarters is. Therefore, the Prime Minister's claim that it would move was never sensible at all.

Five is that the CEO of SNC-Lavalin has said, in an interview on the Business News Network, that he never threatened that the headquarters of the company would leave if the prosecution proceeded. Finally, we know that any damage to the company's reputation as a result of a conviction would be similarly severe if the company signed on to a deferred prosecution agreement, because signing said agreement would require SNC to admit to egregious criminal acts of fraud and bribery. Doing so through a criminal conviction or doing so through an admission in such an agreement would have an equally large impact on the company's reputation. Therefore, signing an agreement would not in any way, shape or form protect the company's headquarters in Montreal, as the Prime Minister falsely claimed.

It is interesting that when I asked the Prime Minister in the House of Commons whether he had told the former attorney general that the headquarters would move, he denied having said so. The problem with that denial, and here we have yet another falsehood, is that he had repeated the false claim that SNC would move out of Montreal and Canada altogether at his famous February 15 press conference. In other words, he is making this false claim not just to her face but to all Canadians and, therefore, cannot deny having made it at all. That is yet another false statement that the Prime Minister and his office have made in this entire affair.

I just listed three falsehoods that the Prime Minister has uttered in respect of his involvement in trying to halt the charges against SNC-Lavalin for fraud and corruption. That does not even take into consideration the falsehoods his staff members have stated. Gerald Butts came before the justice committee and said that if they were doing anything wrong why were they not having this conversation in September, October, November and December. However, all of the documentary evidence shows they were having exactly that conversation in September, October, November and December. Text messages show that they were having that conversation in September, October, November and December. By his own admission, he had that conversation with the former attorney general at the Château Laurier lounge in December.

The Prime Minister has admitted that he attended meetings with the former attorney general where she raised her objections, in September. We have text messages showing that the conversation was happening in the two middle months of October and November. In other words, Gerald Butts' statement that they were not having that conversation in those four months was just patently false, and proven false now by evidence. It is not hearsay, but evidence such as text messages, journal entries and of course we now have heard the audio of the conversation in December with the Clerk of the Privy Council.

The fact that Gerald Butts felt no compunction about going before a parliamentary committee and stating such a patent falsehood just speaks to how liberally the government and its most senior members are prepared to dispense with the truth in order to defend themselves in this corruption scandal.

If a prime minister and members of his inner sanctum are prepared to contradict themselves and state easily disprovable falsehoods over and over again, is that really the behaviour of someone who has nothing to hide?

If it is, if they in fact have nothing to hide, then why will they not let us conduct a full investigation? Why do we not take all the names of the people who appear in those text messages, which are now in the possession of the House of Commons, and bring them before a parliamentary committee to question them on their alleged interference in the SNC-Lavalin corruption trial?

If the Prime Minister is so confident that he and his team did nothing wrong or illegal, why would he not let the sunshine in? After all, during the campaign, he said that sunshine was the best disinfectant, or as he called it, plagiarizing Laurier, “Sunny ways, my friends. Sunny ways.”

Let us open up the curtains in the ethics committee and let the sunshine and the warm glow pour in, and let us see what we find when all the dark corners are lit up. So far, the Prime Minister has refused to allow the sunshine in. He shut down the justice committee and he shut down the ethics committee, so we have a justice committee with no justice and an ethics committee with no ethics.

That being said, I have some hope that this investigation may well resume, and I base that on the comments of two Liberal MPs who are members of the ethics committee. Two members have stated that the reason they were initially against having an ethics committee investigation into the SNC-Lavalin affair was that it would be premature. We needed to see all the documentary evidence. At that time, it had not been tabled with the House of Commons.

Well, now it has. The documents came to all of us on Friday evening. We have now had an opportunity to read through the plethora of text messages, journal entries and written accounts, and of course we have all listened to the famous audio tape. Now that we have seen all the evidence that is available so far, those two Liberal MPs who claimed that the investigation was premature can put their minds at ease and allow that investigation to go ahead.

What more could we find if we did such an investigation? One, we could find out why the Prime Minister stated falsely that the former attorney general had never raised any concerns about his interference in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Two, we could find out if someone lied to the former attorney general in order to try to get her to shelve the criminal prosecution, itself potentially a crime under section 139 of the Criminal Code. Three, we could find out if the shuffle of the former attorney general out of her position was specifically designed to allow for SNC-Lavalin to get a deferred prosecution agreement. I will pause on this point for a moment.

Let us examine the state of play in SNC-Lavalin's quest to have its corruption charges shelved. Under the former attorney general, its quest had failed. She had considered whether or not it would be appropriate to overturn the top prosecutor and instruct that a deal with SNC-Lavalin go ahead to shelve the trial, and she had decided that it was not appropriate.

Her mind was made up, something we see in the conversations that were recorded, the text messages that were sent and the other written evidence that has since been provided. In other words, under the former attorney general, SNC-Lavalin's request to have the charges shelved was denied.

The current Attorney General, the person who replaced the outgoing justice minister, has now said he is open to the idea of granting a deferred prosecution agreement.

The cabinet shuffle caused a material change in the state of play. With respect to SNC's desire to have a deal shelving charges, we have gone from a “no” under the former attorney general to a “maybe” under the current Attorney General.

Whether or not the Prime Minister wants to deny that was his intention, it is the result of the shuffle. There is absolutely no doubt that the status of a possible deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin has changed as a result of the cabinet shuffle. The door was slammed shut under the former attorney general. The door is now open under the current Attorney General.

We need to know if the current Attorney General received any instructions on this matter before he got the appointment. Did the Prime Minister, or more likely a member of his staff or inner circle, communicate to the incoming Attorney General or those around him that his role as the top law officer of the Crown would involve extending a settlement to SNC-Lavalin?

If the answer is yes, then we would know that the purpose of the shuffle was precisely to get a special deal for this powerful Liberal-linked corporation. That was the theory that the outgoing attorney general had in her mind. She has since written in her letter to the justice committee that she was planning to resign as veterans affairs minister if the incoming attorney general decided to impose a settlement to shelve the charges against SNC-Lavalin. She believed, as she said numerous times to the Prime Minister's inner circle at the time of the shuffle, that she knew why she was being moved. The reason was that she believed the Prime Minister was determined to see this Liberal-linked company get out of a trial, and she was not prepared to do it.

If she is right, then the corollary of that fact is likely that the incoming Attorney General was willing to grant a settlement to the company. Canadians need to know that.

Here is the real and serious risk to the rule of law going forward. Even if we forget about the abuses that might have happened in the past, it is highly possible and maybe even probable that the Prime Minister plans to use his new and more malleable Attorney General to issue a settlement, shelving the SNC-Lavalin fraud and bribery charges right after the next election.

If the Prime Minister plans once again to interfere politically and have his Attorney General issue a written directive to the top prosecutor, instructing her to shelve the charges and sign a deal with this company, then Canadians should know about it before they go to the polls.

I am prepared to make an announcement, if I can be so bold, about the approach Conservatives would take in this matter. I can state confidently that if the current Conservative leader is made prime minister in October, he will not direct his attorney general, whomever he or she may be, to interfere and shelve the criminal charges that SNC-Lavalin faces. Canadians can know that. He has stated very clearly that he will not politically and personally interfere to extend a deal to SNC-Lavalin.

They do not know that about the current Prime Minister. He and his current Attorney General are leaving open the possibility, amazingly so, that they may still politically interfere in this trial. That is the astonishing thing. Let us just behold that for a moment.

After the two months that the Prime Minister has had, one would think the approach he would take to putting this to rest would be to say definitively to Canadians that he is out of this, that he is not going to get involved ever again in a criminal prosecution. To the contrary, he is saying exactly the opposite. He is saying that his current Attorney General may still interfere in the trial, that he may write a letter to the top prosecutor requiring that the prosecutor extend a settlement to the company. That would be a gross miscarriage of justice. Let us think about that.

If a homeless person is charged with stealing a loaf of bread, that person does not have the ability to knock on the door of the Prime Minister's Office and ask, “Can you make the judge go light on me? Could you ask the Crown prosecutor to drop the charges and sign a deal where I just apologize and give back the stolen bread?” If it does not work that way for a homeless man, why should it work that way for a powerful, multi-billion dollar, Liberal-linked corporation?

If we live in a country where corporations have the ability to buy justice with wads of cash paid to lobbyists, those lobbyists can swarm all over Parliament Hill like flies on honey and influence the Prime Minister to step in and let the corporation off. If that is really the way the Prime Minister wants to administer the justice system in this country, we should know about it before the election, so that Canadians can consider it in their vote.

In other words, this is not just about holding the government accountable for what it has already done. This is about giving Canadians all of the information about what the government might yet do.

If the Prime Minister thinks he can defend the possibility of having his Attorney General get this company off trial, then he should go on the campaign trail and say so. He should go from one end of the country to the other and tell people that. He should go to Montreal and talk to the people who have been robbed by this company and its executives in the bribery affair at the Jacques Cartier Bridge, or at the McGill University Health Centre, another instance of bribery.

More than that, the next time he is in Africa, he should go to Libya and go into the streets of the ghettos where the people live in squalor. He should tell the people there that he has no problem granting special deals to the company that is alleged to have stolen $130 million of their money, because that is the allegation before us here. Some have tried to trivialize it by saying that it was just Gadhafi getting yachts and prostitutes from this Canadian corporation. They say it was just a victimless crime, and therefore it is better to settle the matter and avoid a messy trial. That is the argument we hear from proponents of a so-called deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin. However, it was not a victimless crime. It was wretched, parasitical corruption that robbed the people of Libya of $130 million. These are among the poorest people in the world. They do not have $130 million to spare. If that kind of wretched corruption is not deserving of prosecution in a criminal court, then I do not know what is.

Furthermore, this is not a case of a few bad apples making a small mistake and the company finding out and reporting that mistake. Rather, the company had to be caught. It was only when Swiss authorities found out about some of the corruption and prosecuted one of SNC's perpetrators that the RCMP got wind of the matter and began its own investigation, which resulted in the charges roughly four years ago.

It was not that the company was so honest and so pure in trying to expel from its midst these bad apples that it came forward and fessed up and tried to make it right. No, it had to be caught, just like it had to be caught in the bribery case of Jacques Cartier Bridge, the bribery case of Montreal, and criminal allegations that have surfaced with respect to the company in Mexico, in Panama, in Switzerland, in Libya, and God knows where else. This is a company with a track record of systemic corruption at the highest levels. The former CEO has pleaded guilty to bribery. We are not just talking about a few small bad apples who played junior roles in faraway lands. It is a problem of systemic corruption, top to bottom, through and through.

This is going to be on the ballot in the next election. Canadians will have to decide whether they think it is appropriate for a prime minister to personally and politically interfere to shelve criminal charges of fraud and bribery against a powerful party-linked company like this one. That is one of the reasons we need the ethics committee to get all the facts now, before Canadians vote. If the Prime Minister's intention is to let the company off after the election, when he no longer needs voters, he should say so now. He should look people in the eye and say that he believes that the Attorney General in his cabinet would be completely justified in writing a directive to the prosecutor saying, “Settle this matter, make it go away, sweep it under the rug, let them pay a fine, say sorry and move on.”

I can tell members that this will not be the position of the Conservative Party. The Conservative position will be very simple and very clear: The prosecutor and the prosecutor alone should decide how to proceed with these criminal charges.

So far, the prosecutor, the DPP, has shown that she understands the law, and she has acted in a manner that is correct in this case. We expect that she should be allowed to continue to do so. A Conservative government will make sure that she or anyone who replaces her, with time, has that independent role.

That is exactly what the Director of Public Prosecutions Act foresaw when it became law in 2006 with the passage of the Federal Accountability Act. It foresaw an independent prosecutor, completely free of politics, someone who had so much leeway that she could not even be fired by the Prime Minister or any member of the government unless all of the House of Commons voted to validate such a firing. The purpose of that was to keep the prosecutorial function of our legal system out of the reach of politicians, yet the Prime Minister extended his reach as far as he could to try to interfere with that in this case.

What is perhaps even more insulting is that the Prime Minister thought he could distract Canadians from the resulting scandal by spraying $41 billion of cash at them in his recent cover-up budget. He thought Canadians would completely forget that his former attorney general had accused him of interfering in a criminal prosecution if he pulled out a fire hose filled with dollar signs and sprayed it all over the country. Frankly, what has happened is not that the budget has distracted from his scandal; his scandal has distracted from his budget. It does not seem to matter how much money he sprays around. Canadians are determined to protect the independence of our prosecution and our rule of law in this country.

Here is the bad consequence that comes from that kind of pre-election political spending. It comes with a cost. I call it the Liberal three steps: massive scandal before the election, massive deficit spending to distract from it, and then of course, massive tax increases to pay for it all after the election is over.

Money is not free. The government does not actually have any money. All it spends comes from the people who earned it in the first place. It cannot give people anything without first taking it away, and the Prime Minister likes to take it away. He has already raised taxes on the average Canadian family by $800. He took away tax credits for kids' sports, children's art, students' textbooks and some of their tuition fees. He took away the transit tax credit from passengers on buses. He took away numerous other tax breaks, like income splitting, which helped bring fairness to families where one spouse earns more than another. He brought in new tax penalties for small business, including those who share their work and earnings with family members or who save within their company for retirement, maternity leave or a rainy day. He has increased CPP payroll taxes for both small businesses and workers. That does not even include the carbon tax, which kicked in on Monday, punishing commuters and seniors on fixed incomes who are trying to heat their homes.

That is the Prime Minister's record of tax increases so far, but the worst is yet to come. We know that, because he has tried to raise taxes even more. He attempted to tax health and dental benefits provided by companies to their employees. He backed off after those companies and those employees rose up against him. He tried to impose a 73% tax on the passive income of small businesses. He tried to double the tax paid by farmers and small business owners when they pass their companies down to the next generation within their families. He even tried to take away the disability tax credit from diabetics.

Finally, the tax increase that was perhaps the most disgusting, and from which he was forced to back down, was when he tried to tax employee discounts, like when a waitress gets a free chicken salad sandwich at two in the morning when she is on her 15-minute break. The Prime Minister wanted the restaurant owner to add the value of that sandwich to the waitress's T4 slip so that she could pay tax on that at the end of the year. It was just petty. His desire to extract more money from the pockets of the people who earn it so he can spend it for them is insatiable, and it is just getting started. He put all those tax increases on hold, but they will all be back after the next election when he no longer needs voters but still needs their money.

Then there is the truth about the carbon tax. The Prime Minister claims that an Ontario family will pay only about $600 in higher gas, heat, groceries and other inflation costs. However, we are asked to take his word for it. I filed access to information requests to get all the supporting documents that led to that calculation, and guess what I received? I received a big pile of documents with black ink all over the numbers. In other words, they gave me the costing, they just did not let me see the numbers. Why? If the tax costs what the government claims, would it not want to produce all the numbers so that Canadians could confirm that fact? The government did not, because this tax will cost much more than the government admits.

The cost is hard to calculate, unlike income taxes, which we can calculate at the end of the year when tax returns are filed or by simply looking at the payroll deductions, and unlike sales taxes, which we can add up simply by looking at the receipts for things we buy.

Carbon taxes are insidious. They are embedded in every single good and service we buy. Sometimes they are embedded and compounded multiple times in the same product. For example, when one buys a piece of farm equipment, one will pay for the transportation of the farm equipment to the local John Deere outlet but also pay a tax on the energy used in the manufacturing outlet that assembled it. There is lots of steel in John Deere tractors, so one will pay for the carbon tax that was embedded in the cost of shaping and moulding that steel at the steel mill.

Did I mention that the government is charging HST on the carbon tax? It is a tax on a tax. The Prime Minister's estimate of the cost of the carbon tax does not include the compounding effect of the HST on the carbon tax.

If despite everything I have just told members they still believe that the Prime Minister's carbon tax will only cost what he says, that does not account for his plan to increase the rate after the next election. According to government documents from both environment and finance, after 2022, just three years from now, the tax will have to increase in “severity”. That means the rate will actually go up, but by how much?

According to an Environment Canada document, the rate would have to go up to between $100 and $300 a tonne of carbon. Right now, the rate is only $20. If it did go up to $300, it would be 15 times higher than it is right now. Based on the government's own numbers, that would equal $5,000 for a family of 2.5 people in Saskatchewan, or $3,000 for a similar family in Ontario.

If someone has a big family fortune, an extra $5,000 in higher gas, heat and grocery costs would not be such a big deal. However, unlike the Prime Minister, most Canadians do not inherit tax-preferred trust funds, and therefore, they cannot absorb the cost of a $3,000 or $5,000 carbon tax, as may be the case if he is re-elected.

The Prime Minister has no empathy whatsoever for people who are struggling with the cost of living. In fact, he was in Vancouver and was asked about the $1.60 a litre people were paying for gas not long ago in that city. He said that is exactly what we want. He wants high gas prices, because he thinks they will make people behave better. I am not exactly sure what behaviour he is referring to. Does the Prime Minister believe that people should stop driving to work or stop heating their homes? Are those bad behaviours, according to the Prime Minister?

We know he has no concern whatsoever about increasing the cost of living by imposing higher taxes. He has done it already. All the evidence, from the carbon tax cover-up to his attempted tax increases elsewhere, suggest that he will do much more after the election, when he no longer needs voters but still needs their money.

That was the Kathleen Wynne-Dalton McGuinty technique for 14 years. Who was the architect of that agenda? It was Gerald Butts, the outgoing PMO puppet master, who recently resigned in disgrace because of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. We know that he is still the Prime Minister's intellectual architect, the man who is calling all the shots and will be running the Liberal campaign. His modus operandi is to rack up massive spending and pay for it by piling taxes on the working class. That is why Ontario had the highest poverty rates and the lowest middle-class income growth of any province in Canada during the McGuinty-Wynne reign. We do not need to see that disaster exacted on Canadians.

The next reason we know the current Prime Minister will raise taxes is that he is running out of money. His deficits are growing. They are $20 billion this year, the year in which he promised a balanced budget. Remember his famous words, “the budget will balance itself”? That sure has not happened in the appointed time schedule he claimed it would during the last election. That debt will always metastasize into higher taxes, because somebody has to pay those rich bondholders. They do not lend us money out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect to get more back from Canadians than they lend, and they will if the Prime Minister keeps adding debt at unsustainable rates.

That is the record so far. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that we are not broke yet. The bad news is that we will be if the current Prime Minister is re-elected.

Families who are running out of money but are not yet broke sit down at the kitchen table and discuss what to do about the situation. The responsible decision is to right the course, get back on track and start to balance the family budget before the repo man comes knocking on the door five or six years down the road. They do not go on a vacation to some fancy island in a faraway place, blow even more money and say they will worry about the repo man when he arrives at their home and they will cross that bridge when they get to it. No, they make responsible decisions in the present and modest adjustments to get on track so that they can be financially sustainable into the future.

That is exactly what Canadian households expect of their politicians. They expect that we, like them, live within our means, spend only what we have and leave more in the pockets of Canadians. They know, because they have had to make household payments, that the basic rules of life are that we cannot borrow our way out of debt, budgets do not balance themselves and we cannot make other people pay for our mistakes.

These are lessons the Prime Minister would do well to learn. I suspect he will not, but that is okay. In October Canadians will have another choice, the son of a working-class family who understands the basic rules of life that we have to live within our means, leave more in people's pockets and let them get ahead.

[The Budget, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to address the cover-up budget.

The Prime Minister attempted to cover up his SNC-Lavalin corruption by introducing $41 billion of new cash spending to paper over the wrongdoing that his former attorney general brought to light in her very courageous whistle-blowing over the last several months.

Today I rise to address one specific element of that cover-up, and that is the Prime Minister's repeated false statements to the Canadian people wherein he suggested that former attorney general had never brought any of her concerns to his attention prior to being moved out of the role of attorney general. His implication was that she was making the allegations against him out of sour grapes, that he really had done nothing wrong in interfering with SNC-Lavalin's criminal prosecution, but that the former attorney general had suddenly concocted a story about him after he moved her out of her dream job, and therefore she should not be believed.

Allow me to quote what the Prime Minister said to the Canadian people at a press conference on February 15. He said, “If anyone”, including the former attorney general, had issues with anything they might have experienced in the government, or did not feel that the government was living up to the high standards it set for itself, “it was her responsibility to come forward”, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did. Text messages, journal entries and audio recordings now prove the former attorney general did come forward, literally dozens of times, to the Prime Minister and his inner circle.

Let me go through the chronology of her whistle-blowing.

On September 16, 2018, there was a phone conversation between the Prime Minister's staff members, Mathieu Bouchard, Elder Marques, and the former attorney general's chief of staff, Jessica Prince. This is from the testimony of the former attorney general:

My chief of staff had a phone call with Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques from the Prime Minister's Office.

They said that they understand that there are limits on what can be done, and that they can't direct, but that they hear that our deputy of justice thinks we can get the PPSC to say “we think we should get some outside advice on this.”

In response, my chief of staff stressed to them prosecutorial independence and potential concerns about the interference in the independence of the prosecutorial functions.

In other words, at that moment, in early September, the minister's staff did communicate to the Prime Minister's staff that what they were asking for would constitute “interference in the independence of the prosecutorial function.”

That is the first piece of evidence I introduce, disproving the Prime Minister's claim when he said that it was her responsibility to come forward, that it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.

The next day, on September 17, 2018, the former attorney general came forward in person to the Prime Minister and to the Clerk of the Privy Council. From her testimony, we have:

This same day, September 17, I had my one-on-one meeting with the Prime Minister that I requested a couple of weeks earlier. When I walked in, the Clerk of the Privy Council was in attendance as well. While the meeting was not about the issue of SNC and DPAs, the Prime Minister raised the issue immediately.

She goes on to state:

I further stated that I was very clear on my role as the Attorney General, and that I am not prepared to issue a directive in this case, that it would not be appropriate.... At that point, the Prime Minister jumped in, stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “and I am an MP in Quebec—the member for Papineau.”

She went on:

I was quite taken aback. My response—and I vividly remember this as well—was to ask the Prime Minister a direct question, while looking him in the eye. I asked, “Are you politically interfering with my role/my decision as the Attorney General? I would strongly advise against it.”

I have heard members across the way yell out that it is mere hearsay. In fact, today we learned it was not hearsay. In direct questioning of the Prime Minister, I asked him if this exchange occurred, and he confirmed that it did. In other words, he says, now, today, that back on September 17, the former attorney general did raise concerns about him “politically interfering with her role as attorney general” and that she also “strongly advised against it”. He admits now that she said that to him in September.

How is it then that he stood before 37 million Canadians in February and said that no one came forward with any concerns whatsoever? That is what he said. It was her responsibility to come forward. It was their responsibility to come forward and no one did.

She did and he now admits it, so it is no longer he-said-she-said. She said it and he now confirmed it. It is impossible to reconcile the Prime Minister's admission today that the former attorney general spoke those words to him in September with his public statement in February that she had never once raised any problem with him. Here we have it clear as day that she did, and he now admits that she did.

On September 19, there were conversations between the former attorney general and the current finance minister. She said in her testimony:

Still on September 19, I spoke to [the finance minister] on this matter when we were in the House [of Commons]...and I told him that engagements from his office—

[Justice, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, now the Prime Minister has effectively admitted that when he looked 37 million Canadians in the eye on February 15 and told them that the former attorney general had never spoken a word about her concerns, he was stating a patent falsehood. There is a word for that kind of falsehood that I cannot utter on the floor of the House of Commons.

Will the Prime Minister, having now caught himself in his own trap of contradiction and deception, apologize to the Canadian people for stating that falsehood on February 15?

[Justice, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, now the Prime Minister has caught himself in a trap of his own making. He came out on February 15 and said that no one had come forward to raise any concerns about his conduct. Now he admits on the floor of the House of Commons that way before, in September, his own attorney general asked him to his face if he was interfering.

Why is the Prime Minister having so much difficulty remembering his story? Is it because it is simply not true?

[Justice, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, at that September meeting, the former attorney general reports that she looked the Prime Minister in the eye and said, “Are you politically interfering with my role...as the Attorney General? I would strongly advise against it.”

Does the Prime Minister remember her saying any such thing?

[Justice, April 3rd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister told Canadians that if anyone thought he had done anything wrong on SNC, then it was their responsibility to come forward, but no one did. However, text messages, journal entries and audio recordings prove the former attorney general did come forward and complain to him and his top staff on September 16, 17 and 19, October 26, November 22, and December 5, 18 and 19.

Does he really claim he knew absolutely nothing about the complaints she brought forward in more than half a dozen meetings?

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, allow me to use that 30 seconds to make an announcement to the House.

As you know, I have been speaking non-stop for hours now. I will terminate that speech as soon as the government announces it will agree to co-operate with the ethics committee investigations so that all Canadians can get to the truth on the cover-up and bring justice to this scandal.

I have two more days for my speech. While I have been invited by numerous members to provide such speeches, I am prepared to put aside those words in the interest of having a full-scale investigation if the government announces it will agree to just that.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, in the same spirit as my colleague, I would like to point the attention of the House to a very important article written in the National Post just yesterday. The author is Kelly McParland. It is entitled, “Here's what Liberals are asking you to believe about the SNC-Lavalin saga.” It states:

In order to believe [the Prime Minister’s] version of his dispute with his former attorney general, you have to accept that an astonishing series of missteps, misunderstandings and lost opportunities were entirely innocent.

You have to believe that when [the former attorney general] told [the Prime Minister] in September that she had made up her mind and would not interfere with the decision to proceed with a prosecution against SNC-Lavalin, he either didn’t grasp what she was saying, or didn’t accept how serious she was.

You have to trust that none of the numerous complaints she made over the ensuing weeks, warning that the pressure being exerted was inappropriate and had to stop, made it through to [the Prime Minister].

You have to consider it wholly believable that Gerald Butts, the political whizz-kid and guru considered the brains behind the throne, likewise missed or misinterpreted the signals, and didn’t alert his boss that they had a real problem.

You have to find nothing odd in the fact none of the supposedly highly-skilled and politically adept people surrounding [the Prime Minister] appreciated the severity of the warning [the former attorney general] was making: that if [the Prime Minister] used his office to muscle a subordinate to interfere in the independence of the public prosecutor, he was racing headlong towards a cliff and was taking his government with him.

Even though [the former attorney general] says she has “documented evidence” to the contrary, you have to believe that the Prime Minister’s Office never received the formal explanation — known as a Section 13 — outlining the reasoning for going ahead with the Lavalin prosecution, and that, in all the months of back-and-forth among ministers, their staff and the PMO, no one took the time to acquaint [the Prime Minister] with the contents of that report.

If you want to agree with complaints that the whole affair has been overblown, you need to accept at face value the apparent inability of Michael Wernick, supposedly among the top minds in the civil service, to understand why [the former attorney general] refused to use the “tools” she had at her disposal to halt the prosecution of SNC, even after she made crystal clear in their 17-minute phone conversation that using those tools would inevitably explode in the face of the government. And you need to take seriously Wernick’s claim that he didn’t pass on the message to [the Prime Minister], despite specifically telling [the former attorney general] he had to “report back,” because everyone left town the next day on a holiday.

This is the same Wernick, remember, who opened the conversation by warning that time was of the essence, that [the Prime Minister] was eager to find a solution, and had earlier testified that if she had concerns, the minister could have contacted [the Prime Minister] any time, at any hour, because he was always available.

It’s a lot to accept. But there’s even more to digest. For instance, how is it that neither Butts nor [the Prime Minister] realized something was badly amiss when [the former Treasury Board president] told them [the former attorney general] might feel that shuffling her out of her job was punishment for refusing to cave to [the Prime Minister's] demands? And how could they be shocked when [the former attorney general] demurred from accepting a transfer to Indigenous Services, a post she’d made known she could never accept.

McParland goes on to ask, “Is it really feasible that no one in the Liberal hierarchy foresaw that imposing limits on [the former attorney general]’s ability to testify before the Justice committee would strike a negative chord with Canadians, or that letting Liberal MPs peremptorily shut down the committee in the wake of her testimony would only make things worse?”

McParland further writes:

There are Liberals out there who insist they can buy the whole package, that accept [the Prime Minister]'s bland assurances over the minister’s detailed evidence. Somehow they can listen to the Wernick phone call and not see what’s going on: a minister being strong-armed by a powerful messenger armed with warnings that the boss is “going to find a way to get it done, one way or another.” They argue that [the Prime Minister] would never act in such a threatening manner, that it’s out of character.

But the truth is, it’s entirely in character, and the proof has been there all along, in multiple examples of [the Prime Minister]’s response to situations that try his patience. Such as when he elbowed his way across the Commons to berate a member of the opposition. Or the moment in Edmonton when he sarcastically suggested a woman use the term “peoplekind” rather than “mankind.” Or his determination to block students from summer jobs unless organizations employing them signed a statement attesting to support Liberal values.

Or his snarky response just last week to an inconvenient intruder at a Liberal fundraiser who tried to draw attention to the ongoing health problems at Grassy Narrows, a First Nations community long troubled by mercury poisoning.

Over more than three years of working closely with [the Prime Minister], [the former attorney general] has had plenty of time to learn what lies beneath the pleasant image the prime minister works so hard to project. “I am not under any illusion how the prime minister…gets things that he wants,” she tells Wernick in their recorded phone call.

“I am having…thoughts of the Saturday Night Massacre here, Michael,” she confesses, alluding to Richard Nixon’s desperate effort to save himself from Watergate by taking a buzz saw to his justice department. “I am waiting for the…other shoe to drop.”

The shoe dropped a few weeks later, when she was ousted from her job, then resigned to make clear her differences with [the Prime Minister]. The prime minister’s version of her departure is that it resulted from an “erosion of trust” of which he was entirely unaware, in spite of the events of the previous three months, the warnings she issued, the stark alert issued to Wernick and the concerns raised by [the former Treasury Board president].

Maybe it’s possible that the prime minister really was caught off guard, that his aides and advisers failed to bring the danger to his attention. But if that’s the case, you have to ask yourself whether a government that could make so many errors in judgment, could miss so many signs of trouble, could press ahead with a bad idea even when one of its senior members is waving her arms and shouting “stop!” — you have to ask yourself whether a government so clumsy, myopic and accident prone has any business running the country.

I was just quoting directly from the opinion piece of Mr. Kelly McParland, published April 1, 2019. All of the words in it are to be attributed to him. Though they are very well authored, I do not want to indirectly attempt to take ownership of his words.

Therefore, at the end, I will be seeking unanimous consent to table his op-ed so that the formal record will show that the words I just uttered were his and not mine, although I endorse them.

Having analyzed what Mr. McParland wrote, I believe he has captured very well the incredible story the Prime Minister is asking Canadians to digest, which is that all along, in this four-month campaign of relentless pressure, wherein members of the Prime Minister's inner circle, including the Prime Minister himself, interfered 20 times with the attorney general's role, it was all a big misunderstanding, that he just did not get the message, that she just was not clear enough, that he failed to communicate and that his only mistake was that he ought to have picked up the phone and called her a few more times.

The irony is that this is exactly the wrong answer. The problem was that he was calling her too much. He had asked his team to descend on her. It was relentlessly “hounding” her with “veiled threats”, inappropriate “pressure” and “interference”. These are all words from current members of the Liberal caucus. He wants us all to believe that this was just a big misunderstanding, that nothing inappropriate happened of which he was contemporaneously aware, and that this is just a learning experience, like a high school kid who forgot to study for a mid-term math exam or something and therefore got a bad mark.

We all accept that prime ministers of all colours will learn on the job. It is a very difficult one. However, the problem here was not one of inexperience. It was one of character, one driven by a Prime Minister determined to get whatever he wanted, no matter the price, even at the expense of our rule of law. It was a Prime Minister who progressed in doing these things even when his own attorney general, the top law officer of the Crown, had pleaded with him to please stop, in the name of God, and let her independently administer her portfolio. It was a Prime Minister who was acting in the narrow interests of a Liberal-linked corporation, with a mile-long rap sheet of corruption, including the conviction of its most senior executives. That is what the Prime Minister undertook between September and December of 2018, followed up by a great crescendo of a cabinet shuffle that would move a qualified attorney general out of her job and replace her with someone more malleable, someone willing to do the Prime Minister's bidding.

If members do not believe me, then let us ask the Prime Minister this one simple question. He wants us to digest this incredible story that these events were all a big misunderstanding. If that is true, will he invite all the players to come before the ethics committee as part of a full and open investigation so that Canadians can get to the truth? The justice committee has shut down its inquiry. All the evidence it will receive it has received. Now it is time for the ethics committee to do its work and complete the investigation.

A week from today, that committee will convene. Numerous members of that committee, including Liberal members, have indicated an openness to an investigation. Yes, they voted down an investigation once before, but they said the reason they did so was that it was “premature”. They said they needed to see the final submission of evidence and the file closed at the justice committee in order for the ethics committee to begin doing its work. Now that has been done, so the two Liberal members who used the term “premature” will be invited to follow their words with action and vote with members of the opposition a week from today to resume the investigation, call all the witnesses, hear all the testimony, gather all the evidence, scrutinize all the claims and report all the findings to the Canadian people.