Pierre Poilievre

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Oshawa raised an interesting point, and in my opinion it is in order for us to talk about jobs in Oshawa. It might not be a point of order, but it is a point. I felt that he delivered it in a manner that is orderly, so I will address it in my remarks as well.

This Prime Minister has claimed, wrongly, that he was trying to save jobs by interfering in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. I invite members to look back at my earlier remarks. In them I deposited conclusive evidence that there were not 9,000 jobs at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair. That said, there are jobs at stake in other parts of the country for which the Prime Minister has done absolutely nothing to help mitigate the job losses.

Let us start with the auto sector.

The member for Oshawa is probably the greatest champion of the auto sector in the House of Commons. It is very hard to imagine anyone who has done more for that sector than that particular member. He has championed an end to regulatory red tape. He has fought for free trade. He has opposed excessive taxation. He has done all of this in order to make our auto makers as competitive as humanly possible so that our workers can earn a better living and our consumers can have access to even better products.

Now the Prime Minister stands by and witnesses as GM shuts down its operations and as Chrysler announces 1,500 additional job losses. While auto makers are adding jobs in other non-Canadian jurisdictions and the auto industry around the world is on the rise, here at home these companies are heading for the hills, and it is no surprise.

Let us go through the laundry list of all of the damaging policies that the current government has inflicted on our manufacturers.

The Liberals implemented a carbon tax that will make it more expensive for factories to operate here in Canada. It is a job-killing tax. They have added new red tape that contributes to the administrative cost of operating a manufacturing facility on this side of the border. They signed on to a trade agreement with Donald Trump that puts a cap on the future growth of Canada's auto exports to our biggest market—and by the way, they made that concession to Trump without getting anything in return that we did not already have. They have done all of these things, and then they have stood by and watched as these policies have led to their natural consequences: massive job losses in the automotive sector.

It is not just the automotive sector. It is also the energy sector, where tens of thousands of western oil and gas workers and thousands of additional refinery workers in the east have suffered for lack of a pipeline.

When the Prime Minister took office, three of the world's most respected pipeline companies were ready to put shovels in the ground and get building. Trans Canada had energy east, Enbridge had the northern gateway project, and of course Kinder Morgan had Trans Mountain. One by one, all three of those companies have now left. They are all gone. They were, up until the day the Prime Minister took office, ready to deploy billions of dollars in building pipelines with their own money, but not anymore.

Trans Canada backed out after the Prime Minister changed the approval process for that pipeline, adding endless delays and changing the criteria by which the pipeline's approval would be judged to include what is called upstream and downstream emissions. In other words, the pipeline would not only be judged based on the emissions its own operations would cause but by the emissions caused by the production and later consumption of all the oil that would travel through it. No other pipeline in our competitor jurisdictions faces that same kind of test.

Furthermore, the Prime Minister imposes no similar requirement on Saudi, Algerian or Venezuelan oil. When the tankers from those countries arrive at our shores, he does not say, “Wait, you can't come in unless I do an examination of the upstream and downstream emissions of all this oil.” No, he just says, “Come right in.” That oil is converted into gasoline and pumped into Canadian cars and other manufacturing outlets for other uses, even though it has not been subjected to the same strict examination that the Prime Minister was going to impose on the energy east pipeline.

Therefore, that pipeline, which would have brought a million barrels of oil a day from western Canada to eastern refineries, was cancelled.

Then we have the northern gateway pipeline, a project that had the support of 80% of the four first nations communities along the path of the pipeline. They had signed onto partnership agreements that would have rendered them entitled to jobs, training, income for schools and hospitals, and an opportunity to escape poverty once and for all.

Even though those communities had signed those agreements, the Prime Minister was happy to violate that decision and veto the northern gateway pipeline. It is funny. He claims to believe in consultation with indigenous people. How many of the communities along the pathway of the northern gateway pipeline did he consult when he vetoed their right to build that pipeline?

Do we only believe in consultation if that consultation leads to the answer, “No”? It is apparently so. That is why numerous first nations groups are now taking the Liberal government to court for its refusal to properly consult them before killing their pipeline projects. There are great new consortiums of aboriginal business leaders now fighting, tooth and nail, to get these resource projects approved, but the Prime Minister is ignoring his constitutional duty to consult with those first nations, because he does not like what they have to say.

Then, of course, we have the Kinder Morgan pipeline, or Trans Mountain, as it is called. That pipeline should be without any controversy. It does not require any new right of way. It simply twins an existing pipeline to increase the capacity from 300,000 to 900,000 barrels a day, giving Alberta and Saskatchewan producers the ability to meet the Asian market of billions of people.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister added so many delays and was so weak in responding to environmental extremists and foreign interest groups that the company finally said that it had had enough, it was not prepared to do business in Canada anymore and it was leaving.

In order to win the votes of the majority of Canadians who want pipelines, the Prime Minister engaged in a very costly and confusing public relations exercise. He said, “I know, we'll buy the existing pipeline.” It was $4.5 billion for a $2 billion, 60-year-old pipeline. Here is the thing: No one was looking for him to buy a pipeline. He did not need to buy the pipeline. We already had that pipeline. We want to build a pipeline.

Here is the difference between the Prime Minister's approach and ours. He bought a pipeline without building one. We will build one without buying it.

Just like we did in the Harper era where four major pipeline projects were built, including those that shipped oil to tidewater. Literally millions and millions of barrels of oil are currently shipped through pipelines built during the time when the Harper government was in office. We had also approved the northern gateway pipeline, which was about to begin construction when the Prime Minister took office and vetoed its construction altogether.

I want to go back to the Trans Mountain pipeline, a project for which the Prime Minister has now paid $4.5 billion and there is not a single shovel in the ground; not a single inch of pipeline has been built. Here is the irony. We have gone from the Texas company planning to invest $8 billion in Canada to build a pipeline here to the company taking 4.5 billion tax dollars out of Canada to build pipelines in Texas. I congratulate everyone. Our tax dollars are now being used to build pipelines in Texas.

TransCanada is moving more and more of its investment and operations to Texas. In fact, there are rumours it might take the word Canada out of its name altogether. All these companies are taking their operations, their dollars and their jobs and going to Texas. In other words, all our exes are in Texas, so the Prime Minister should hang his hat in Tennessee. I think he might enjoy Nashville.

Nevertheless, the fact is we need to defend our energy workers and their ability to ship their goods to market. They are not looking for welfare. They do not want a more generous government cheque in their mailbox. They do not want corporate welfare for the companies that employ them. They want the government to get out of the way and let them build pipelines. When the Conservative government takes office, it will clear the way for pipelines. The Conservative leader has laid out a very clear plan to make that happen.

First, the Conservatives will cancel Bill C-69, the “no new pipelines” bill. That bill extends further the hearing process to make it uneconomical and risky for proponents to put their money aside for projects in Canada. It requires that companies engage in ill-defined sociological debates about pipelines. For example, they would need to do a gender impact study. As far as I know, pipelines are genderless, but apparently the government believes that everything has to do with sociology and nothing has to do with economics. Liberals want a gender study on each natural resource project.

Most people were scratching their heads to try to understand what this meant, until the Prime Minister explained it to them. He was in South America and he explained that male construction workers bring negative gender impacts to rural communities. In the period after he made these bizarre comments, rural women from across the country started to share the gender impacts they had experienced from having construction workers in their communities. They shared that they bring jobs and pay taxes to fund local schools and hospitals. They support families.

By the way, Mr. Prime Minister should know that not all energy workers are men. There are highly skilled female energy workers whose jobs he has killed by blocking the construction of these key projects.

If he reads a gender impact study of a pipeline, why does he not actually go out to a natural gas or oil development project in western Canada and talk to real people on the ground instead of grandstanding at some fancy international conference in South America, showing off his spectacularly colourful and radiant socks as he lectures the world on the negative gender impacts of construction workers? These workers do important work for our economy and our country. There is dignity in what they do and they deserve our respect.

They will get our respect when the Conservative government forms office.

First, we will scrap Bill C-69, the no new pipelines bill.

Second, our Conservative leader has announced that he will invoke subsection 92(10) of the British North America Act to declare pipeline projects to be to the general advantage of Canada.

This a power that our founding fathers created in our Constitution for the federal government in the case of any interprovincial construction project. For example, if a rail project or a pipeline or any other project travels over provincial boundaries, then all of the approvals for that project can be uploaded to the federal government under subsection 92(10) of the Constitution. In this way the prime minister and his executive branch can set up the approval process that prevents parochial, not-in-my-backyard local politicians from blocking the construction of pipelines.

We understand that in a federation, it is impossible to have the free flow of goods, services and people if individual municipal or provincial decision-makers are able to block those projects anywhere along the line.

Imagine if we allowed just any municipality to say that it was going to ban the passage of a railway through its community and would not allow railways there. Well, I guarantee that not a single railway would traverse our country. It would be impossible. That is why the federal government is exclusively responsible for railways.

It should be the same with pipelines. All it takes is a prime minister who has the courage to make it so by invoking subsection 92(10) of the Constitution that our founding fathers provided to us when they brought about Confederation over a century and a half ago.

Third, we will place strict time limits on the hearings so that we will not have endless processes that go nowhere. We will signal to businesses from around the world that they have a particular and confined time period during which they will get either a yes or a no. Once they have that answer, they can proceed. No business is going to tie up $10 billion or $15 billion for five, six or seven years when they can go to jurisdictions almost anywhere else on the planet and build their projects within less than two years, or at least start them. Therefore, the Conservative leader will bring in strict time limits on the hearings.

Fourth, the Conservative leader has announced that his plan for pipelines will ban foreign money and foreign interests from the hearings on these projects.

We know why these groups want to block the construction of pipelines. It is in their naked self-interest to keep ripping off Canadians by banning us from building pipelines and getting our product to market. It is clear why Saudi, Algerian, Venezuelan and other interests would want to ban us from getting western oil to eastern refineries. That guarantees that they can continue to corner the market for our very large refineries in the eastern part of the country.

Furthermore, it is clear why American oil companies would like to see us fail to build pipelines. After all, absent pipelines to tidewater, Canada is forced to export 99% of its oil to the United States of America at massive discounts, which have equalled, in some cases, more than 50% below world prices. We sell them the product for $15, and they can resell it for $55 or $60. No wonder these American oil interests have funded phony environmental groups to obstruct and block the construction of Canadian pipelines here in Canada.

The Leader of the Opposition's plan is to ensure that only those who have either specific and unique expertise related to the project or who are resident on or near the project's construction itself will appear at hearings. People will not be able to just claim esoteric interest in pipelines and environmental policy and then burn up hours upon hours of hearing time before the National Energy Board under this proposed change. Instead, the studies will focus very specifically on the expertise of people who know what they are talking about with respect to the particular project and the people who live along the affected path. That is it.

All of this can and will be done while carrying out our moral and constitutional obligation to consult with first nations people, who are increasingly the most passionate proponents of resource development across the country. We will no longer allow the hard left in this country to stigmatize and stereotype first nations people as monolithically opposed to resource development.

In fact, the resources for which we propose to allow development are, in many cases, on the property of the first nations themselves. They are the owners, and therefore they should have the harvesting rights in many of these particular projects. That is why we will streamline the approval process to get resource projects built. In the process, we will lift thousands of first nations people out of desperate poverty and into great upward mobility with jobs, schools and hospitals paid for through revenues generated from their communities.

That is—

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, where we last left off was on the importance of holding governments to account.

This is the House of the common people where we restrain the Crown and limit its powers to maximize the liberty of the people. In this instance, the allegation is that the Prime Minister personally and politically interfered with the criminal prosecution of a powerful corporation.

In other words, the judicial branch of government suffered, or almost suffered, a major act of interference by the head of the government in the person of the Prime Minister. As Parliament, we are the legislative branch but we have the accountability mechanism here in the form of question period, committees and the other tools at our disposal to bring the Prime Minister back in check when he abuses the other branches of government.

In other words, we do not as legislators dominate the judicial branch. We merely provide it with the laws it interprets, but we can act as its protector here in the House of Commons in instances where the executive has spilled over and invaded the territory of the judicial branch.

That is precisely what we are doing. Just as the judicial branch sometimes must constrain the executive, particularly when the executive infringes on the rights of the population., we as parliamentarians in the legislative branch can also restrain the executive when it attacks the sacred ground of the judicial branch. That appears to be what the Prime Minister attempted.

The decision to prosecute an enterprise charged with fraud and bribery is one left to independent prosecutors in the office of the director of public prosecutions. Interference in that prosecution by any member of the executive has the effect of contaminating the judicial branch with politics. We, as parliamentarians, are the decontamination team. We are here to decontaminate the corruption that spilled out of the executive and almost into the judicial branch, but for the courageous acts of the former attorney general, who closed the floodgates and prevented that contamination from spilling completely into this criminal trial.

Thank God, she was there. What a relief. Canadians should breathe a sigh of relief that we had such a woman of integrity doing that job at that moment. Do we think that things happen for a reason, that people are in a certain place at a certain time because they are especially needed there?

In May of 1940, Europe was collapsing under the aggressive attacks of an evil and mendacious dictator. If it had not already, France was soon to surrender. Germany had already successfully attacked numerous of its neighbours and Chamberlain, who had signed a “peace for our time” treaty with Hitler, was on the verge of almost losing confidence in the British House of Commons. While he commanded a majority still, it was clear that he did not have enough support in the commons to carry out a war effort.

There is a story of a famous meeting where Churchill, Chamberlain and Lord Halifax gathered together in one room. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall. It was clear that Chamberlain was on his way out, and the obvious replacement was Lord Halifax. Most people would have assumed it would be Churchill.

Who was Lord Halifax, and what was his plan? He was a widely respected member of the aristocratic elite and a senior Conservative of the British Parliament. He had engaged in efforts already, in the early stages of the Second World War, to initiate negotiations for the surrender of all of mainland Europe to Hitler. He initiated those negotiations through Mussolini. In other words, he was going to ask Mussolini to be the mediator in negotiations between Great Britain and Hitler on the surrender of Europe. That was his plan.

The three of them went into this meeting expecting that Lord Halifax would come out as prime minister. As certain historical accounts relay the events, Chamberlain said that he believed that he was losing the confidence of his caucus and perhaps of the commons and that he could no longer be prosecuting this war and would resign. On the question of who would replace him, he said that he thought it should be Lord Halifax. As the story is told, Lord Halifax said no, that he thought it should be Winston Churchill. Of course, Winston Churchill said, “I agree”.

Thank goodness that happened, because days later, when Churchill would become prime minister, he fundamentally altered the policy of the British government. It was not just that he was giving these stirring addresses to rouse the nation. There are many of those examples, and we can get lost in the soaring and brilliant rhetoric of the time. However, we miss, sometimes, that he actually changed the policy of the British government from one of survival to one of victory. He said, “You ask, what is our aim?... It is victory, victory at all costs”. He prosecuted the war with that full intention in mind. It was not to delay and frustrate the enemy for a later date, when they could one day renegotiate a settlement. It was to totally obliterate Hitler's Third Reich, and that is exactly what he did.

However, imagine if Lord Halifax had come out of that room as prime minister. Imagine the different world we would live in today. He would have attempted to negotiate a settlement that would have surrendered all of western Europe to a monster, but instead, we had a courageous lion who was prepared to fight and win at any cost. We might live in a very different world today had Winston Churchill, who in the years leading up to that moment was a very controversial and often very isolated backbencher during his wilderness years of the 1930s, not emerged as the prime minister, an unlikely prime minister, but arguably the most consequential one in modern history.

I relay this story merely to point out that sometimes certain people are in certain places at the right time. Although the stakes are nowhere as high today as they were then, as I think we will all admit, there is no doubt that there is something very important at stake in this particular controversy as well, and it is the independence of the prosecutorial arm of the government from politics. Had it been another attorney general, someone more malleable, someone whose convictions rested on sand rather than stone, we might have had a different outcome. That person might have said, “Sure. Clearly the Prime Minister wants this. It's illegal, but he gets what he wants. We know how he is. The clerk has made it clear that he is in a mood and he is going to get it done one way or another”.

A less courageous and principled attorney general might have just folded like a cheap suit and allowed that to happen. However, it was not someone else. It was this attorney general, and she stood up again and again. They pushed and they pushed, and she would not back down. She finally said that she felt like she was about to witness the Saturday night massacre, which was a reference to Nixon's Watergate firings. She said to the Clerk of the Privy Council that she was waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, and it did. Less than a month later, the Prime Minister would shuffle his cabinet and punt her from her position, making up a confusing and incredible, fantastic story about a game of musical chairs that resulted from the simple resignation of one Treasury Board president, who was completely unrelated to the situation at hand. She was then replaced with another Attorney General, who the Prime Minister thought would be more malleable.

This takes us to the future. What can Canadians expect of this case if the government is re-elected and the Prime Minister continues in office? They can expect that within weeks, he will direct his Attorney General, someone he believes will do his bidding, to sign a special deal with SNC-Lavalin. That is what he has done twice before. Once was on December 8, 2015, when his government immediately, upon taking office, granted an exemption to SNC-Lavalin, allowing it to continue bidding on federal contracts, even though it was charged with fraud and banned from bidding for being charged with fraud and bribery. The second time he attempted to provide a special deal for SNC-Lavalin was the controversy we are now discussing regarding his former attorney general.

Let there be no doubt that if the Prime Minister is re-elected, within days he will interrupt the criminal proceedings, the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, to protect the company from trial. He has noted, and so have his staff and former staff, that they can do this right up until the moment a verdict or a plea is rendered. In other words, he knows that he has time on his hands. He knows that if he is back in office, he can try this same game all over again. He has shown a relentless determination to allow this corporation to avoid criminal prosecution, and he will carry out that determination if he is given a chance after the next election.

That is yet another reason we cannot allow him to serve in this office one minute longer than necessary. We need to replace him with a prime minister who respects the independence of both the judiciary and the prosecution so that decisions on criminal charges are rendered by judges and juries, not by politicians. That key separation is essential for the successful functioning of any democracy. That is precisely why we are holding him accountable for his already egregious interference, and it is further why we will argue to the Canadian people the need to replace him to make sure that this kind of odious, monstrous interference is never allowed to repeat itself.

I look around this chamber today, and the member from the Okanagan is here. He was among the very first to notice this strange amendment to the Criminal Code that popped into the omnibus budget bill. There we were, at 10 o'clock at night, turning 500 pages as we rushed to pass a bill the Prime Minister said needed to become law quickly. All of a sudden, there it was, right before us, an amendment to the Criminal Code right in the middle of a budget bill. It was the last thing we ever thought to find there. It was like finding fish in trees, so completely out of place it was.

There was only one witness to comment on it, and it was a public servant who simply gave the technical explanation of what it was. That was it. There were no anti-corruption crusaders, no corporate accountability experts and no law professors to come forward and explain to us what we were getting ourselves into. We were told that, by the way, we had to move quickly. We had to get this passed.

All of us were asking the same question: Who is asking for this? Who wants this?

We all go to church suppers or neighbourhood farms, or we knock on the doors of our communities in the suburbs of Canada, and nobody ever says, “Our laws are really cruel to corporate criminals. We really ought to find a way to let the crooks get off without a conviction. Maybe they could just pay a fine, fess up, promise not to do it again, and that would suffice.” Nobody ever says, “Enough with all this business of trials and convictions. Enough with calling the executives before the court to testify under oath. That is too inhumane. We need to find a nicer way to do it.” I do not remember hearing that from anyone in my constituency at the tens of thousands of doors I have knocked on since last summer, yet it was indeed a top budget priority of the Liberal government in mid-2018. Then, of course, it became the Prime Minister's top priority in relation to his attorney general in September, as soon as that Criminal Code amendment became law.

All of a sudden, there was panic. The attorney general had to be called on the carpet to answer to the clerk and the Prime Minister about why she had not moved with haste to direct the director of public prosecutions to extend this settlement offer to SNC-Lavalin.

The company was concerned. It was telling the Clerk of the Privy Council and others about a board meeting that was coming up on September 20, only days away, and it asked if the Liberals could not get it off the fraud and bribery charges within the next week. It had a board meeting, for God's sake. How was it supposed to do business?

Of course, the right answer that a normal prime minister would give if a corporation made such a demand would be, “Get out of my office. Go to court. If you did nothing wrong, defend your case and get acquitted. I never want to see you here again.” That would have been the right answer.

However, the Prime Minister kept inviting them back again and again. He said that they were doing everything they could for them, but there was one problem with the attorney general. She was getting in the way and mucking up their plans. The government set it up so that SNC could get off without a trial. It even amended the Criminal Code to make it possible for this one company, but this nuisance attorney general would just not play ball. She was told that she had a few months to get it done or they would move her out.

That is exactly what the Liberals did. They sent her packing, because she would not play ball. The old boys told her how things were going to work, and she said that where she comes from, they have the rule of law, and it does not work that way. They told her that she was no longer the attorney general, and they found someone perhaps more malleable.

The Prime Minister said the cabinet shuffle had nothing to do with the former attorney general's refusal to co-operate and give a deal to SNC-Lavalin, but here is what we know for sure.

When she was the attorney general, the answer to SNC-Lavalin's request for a settlement was a clear “no”. She looked at the act, she looked at the decision of the prosecutor and said that it was not going to happen, period. Therefore, the status of that request was, no.

The new Attorney General comes in. What is his public position is on it? Maybe. Therefore, by moving the former attorney general out and moving a new one in, SNC-Lavalin has gone from “no” to “maybe”. The Prime Minister would have us believe that his decision had nothing to do with that issue. Of course it did and it has had the consequence of reopening the possibility that this company, charged with stealing $130 million from the poorest people in the world, might get off without a trial. That is the effect of the cabinet shuffle. The Prime Minister can deny that was his intention, but it is definitely the effect.

We really have to wonder why the government is so obsessed with helping this one company get around the rules and avoid consequences. There are thousands of trials in Canada every year. People are charged all the time with crimes. Why this particular company? Why this particular group of well-lobbied-for executives? Could it possibly have something to do with the $100,000 of illegal donations that the company flowed to the Liberal Party of Canada? Those donations were funnelled through phony invoices, bonuses and expense claims, in a systematic fraud designed to move cash into Liberal Party coffers, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the decision?

I hear the deputy House leader of the Liberal Party blaming Stephen Harper, that it is Stephen Harper's fault that SNC-Lavalin gave illegal donations to the Liberal Party, that Stephen Harper must have somehow carried out mind control to force all of those executives to ask their employees to generate phony expense claims, bonuses and invoices so they could give the money to the employees, who would then give those donations to the Liberal Party. Stephen Harper then must have exercised mind control over the Liberal Party officials who received all of those donations and thought nothing unusual of them. It must have been Stephen Harper's incredible power of mind control that he was able to do that. I have to give that member across the way some points for creativity. First it was Scott Brison's fault. Now it is Stephen Harper's fault.

I admit it was Stephen Harper's fault. Let me tell people why. The member got me on to another train of thought.

Back in the sponsorship scandal, the Liberal Party was never prosecuted, even though it admitted it received a million dollars of illegal money. It was funnelled in through what Judge Gomery called an “elaborate kickback scheme”. Harper was always just a wee bit suspicious about why no one in the Liberal Party got prosecuted for it. He thought that maybe it was because the attorney general was a Liberal politician and controlled prosecutions, so maybe we should make the prosecutor independent from the political process.

That is why we created in the Accountability Act the director of public prosecutions, a completely separate office wherein decisions to pursue prosecutions of federal crimes would be made with no politics involved. So independent is this office that the director cannot even be removed by the executive without a vote in the House of Commons. Therefore, the process for removing a director is the same as for other officers of Parliament. Therefore, Stephen Harper created this office in the Accountability Act and he said that the only way an attorney general could direct the DPP to change course in any prosecution was in writing.

The attorney general has to write it down and publish that direction in the Canada Gazette so every Canadian has the ability to see what direction the politicians are trying to give to the prosecutor. There are no more backroom deals. It is because of that act that the Prime Minister could not secretly exert pressure on the prosecutor and allow that political interference to go ahead.

Therefore, yes, it is Stephen Harper's fault. He is the one who brought in the Federal Accountability Act, the very first act of his government. Because of that, the current Prime Minister got caught once again trying to help his friends in trying to violate the rule of law.

Therefore, we can blame Stephen Harper for something and be truthful about it. I know he is devastated to learn that the Liberals are blaming him for all of their political heartache right now, but as much as they would like him to be to blame, all of the misery is self-inflicted. Nobody forced the Prime Minister to help is corporate friends. Nobody forced him to interfere 20 times with the former attorney general to try to get to her shelve a criminal prosecution of a Liberal-linked corporation. Nobody forced him.

Yes, the lobbyists were persuasive; yes, they were abundant; yes, they were crawling all over Parliament Hill pressuring Liberals around him, but the Prime Minister had a choice. He could have said no to the old Liberal way of doing things. He could have said no, but instead he did exactly what Liberals always do, which is to help friends in high places, the powerful insiders, the people behind the scenes who pull the strings. He made a decision to let them drive his agenda and he is now suffering the consequences for that decision right now. That is the core reality.

We hear the Liberal member on the other side heckling away about Stephen Harper. The problem the Liberals are having is that they refuse to take responsibility for their own conduct. If they were to do that, they might be able to heal the wound. However, by continually lashing out and blaming everybody under the sun for the Prime Minister's personal conduct, they only make their problems worse.

First Scott Brison was to blame, then the former attorney general was to blame and now we hear it is Stephen Harper. I am sure we will hear soon that the former Treasury Board president is to blame. Everyone is to blame except the Prime Minister for his own conduct. He is making others pay for his mistakes.

The Prime Minister should learn from the case before him, that people must be held responsible for their own conduct. That is the case for SNC-Lavalin as well. If he had recognized the principle of personal responsibility, he would have understood that this corporation should have to go to trial to own up for what it did and for the actions that it allegedly carried out in Libya, with fraud and bribery amounting to $130 million. Would it not have made more sense for the Prime Minister to hold this company to the standard of law rather than to the instincts of politics? I think we all agree now that if the Prime Minister had thought in those terms, he would not find himself today in the state of disgrace in which he is currently.

Here we are at a fork in the road. There is a decision to be made by the members across the way. Will they allow the investigation to run its course so the truth can be known and the players can be held to account or will they continue with the cover-up?

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I will note with interest that the Liberals now claim that the matter of deferred prosecution agreements has nothing to do with budget policy. That is ironic indeed, because those deferred prosecution agreements were created in the budget bill that the Liberals introduced here in the House of Commons. If they thought at the time that it was not a budget measure, why did they put it in the budget? If they thought it was completely irrelevant to the budget, why was it in the budget bill?

The answer, of course, is that it should never have been in the budget, but now that it has been put there, it is perfectly fair game during this budget debate to discuss it.

We learn every day of another form of deceit, another contradiction, just like this one. Less than a year ago, Liberals were claiming that this tool to allow corporations to avoid trial was a budget measure. They forced it through the finance committee, through the House of Commons, and then through the Senate finance committee, again and again claiming “This is a budget matter.”

Now we have a member who stands up and says that this has nothing to do with the budget and it is completely irrelevant. Is that not the whole story of this scandal? It is one flip-flop after another, one change after another in the versions of events and the stories that Liberals tell. They will say anything at any time in order to justify their inappropriate conduct. The intervention by the colleague across the way is just the latest example.

I can point to other contradictions. On February 15, the Prime Minister came out and said to 37 million Canadians that if anyone, including the former attorney general, had issues with anything they might have experienced in the government or did not feel that we were living up to the high standards that the government set for itself, it was her responsibility to come forward and their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.

Of course, that is absolutely false. She did come forward, again and again. She went to the Prime Minister personally on September 18, and then to his clerk of the Privy Council, when she said in a recorded conversation, about which top Liberals cannot lie and which they cannot deny, because it is all caught on tape, “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 can’t act in a partisan way and it can’t be politically motivated. All of this screams of that.”

If that is not a warning, I do not know what is.

Now the latest story from the Prime Minister is that he never heard about that conversation. After an attorney general had an explosive conversation of this nature with the top public servant about a priority file for the Prime Minister, in the two months that followed, the Prime Minister did not hear a word about it.

The story from the government was that he did not hear about it because he immediately left for vacation. It turns out that the public record shows that is false. He did not leave for vacation. He does take a lot of vacations, but unfortunately for his story, this was not one of the occasions when he did take such a vacation.

Even if he had, this is what the clerk himself said on the availability of the Prime Minister. He said:

There were multiple, multiple, multiple occasions where the minister could have expressed concern to the Prime Minister, and every single day could have picked up the phone and called.

He said as well:

The Prime Minister is available through the switchboard seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and is working seven days a week. The Prime Minister is interrupted all the time for calls with foreign leaders, security matters, heads-up.

Further, he said:

All ministers have the option of reaching the Prime Minister. Give or take a little bit of scheduling and where he might be in private time, and so on, every minister of the cabinet can reach the Prime Minister.

I presume that if that is true, then the Clerk of the Privy Council could have found time in the two months that followed this extraordinary conversation with the former attorney general to relay its contents to the Prime Minister, yet Liberals expect us to believe he never did and that as a result the Prime Minister did not know anything.

His chief of staff was involved in the interference, but the Prime Minister did not know. His principal secretary and best friend was involved, but the Prime Minister did not know. His senior adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, was involved, but the Prime Minister did not know. The Prime Minister's top adviser, Elder Marques, was involved in the interference, but the Prime Minister did not know. The finance minister was involved in the interference, but the Prime Minister did not know. The finance minister's chief of staff, Ben Chin, was involved in the interference, but the Prime Minister did not know.

Everyone was involved in this, as we now know because of documented text message conversations, journal entries and even audio recordings, right up to the Clerk of the Privy Council, but we are expected to believe that the Prime Minister did not know a thing.

According to the Clerk of the Privy Council, he works 24-7 and is available at any time to be reached easily and brought up to date on all these matters, but somehow this one just slipped right by him.

Why is it that Canadians find that so hard to believe? The answer is that it is because it is not true.

That brings me to the matter of the ethics committee, which will convene on Tuesday, a week from today, to decide whether to carry out a full-scale investigation and hear from all of the key witnesses who are alleged to have interfered in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

Conservatives will be calling on all members of the Liberal Party to vote in favour of this study, particularly the two members who said they were open to such an investigation but that it had been premature at the time it was brought before the committee the last time it met.

The Prime Minister needs to understand something that has become very difficult for him to appreciate. It is this. The House of Commons does not work for him. It is the other way around. He holds that office only as long as the majority of MPs in this place say that he holds that office. It is not an entitlement. It is not a family heirloom to be handed down from father to son. It is the property of the Canadian people, and through their delegation to us, it is our job to decide whether he is able to hold that office.

In the meantime, this chamber and its committees are one gigantic accountability machine, an accountability machine that demands answers for the government's conduct and, particularly, the Prime Minister's conduct. This is not the Prime Minister's personal self-esteem factory. We do not exist here to try to elevate his sense of ego and self-importance. It is not the job of parliamentarians to gush and heap praise on him and treat him with the adoration and respect he expects and demands. That is not what Parliament does.

Parliament is supposed to ask the difficult questions until such time as we get accurate and believable answers. So far, they have not been forthcoming. Thus, we march on and I continue speaking on behalf of my constituents. I think in this sense that I am carrying out the role that all MPs are supposed to do, which is to stand up, speak up and fight back when they see something wrong.

It is not only opposition MPs who do that. There are courageous members on the government side who have been willing to take a principled position, for example, the former attorney general. She was prepared to put her principles ahead of her career ambitions. Then we have the former Treasury Board president who, likewise, said that she was not prepared to be part of the cover-up and that there is much more to this story that needs to be told. Therefore, let us tell it.

I am ready to end my speech now. All I need is for a member of the government to stand up and commit that the majority Liberal-controlled ethics committee will open a full-scale investigation into the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal. As soon as one member of the other side rises and purports to speak on behalf of the Prime Minister, I will terminate my remarks and allow the debate to go on otherwise.

Until that happens or until you stop me, Mr. Speaker, I will continue to speak up for accountability in the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal. I thank the members who are here with me, providing moral support for me to stand here on behalf of the Conservative caucus but also on behalf of my constituents.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

It is shameful that the Liberal Party has found a way to break the law even in circumstances that relate to its own caucus management.

I would add that while this sounds really complicated, it is actually quite simple. The act just says that after an election, a caucus should go into a room to hold a vote on the rules for the expulsion of members.

Conservatives did it and it took us about 10 minutes. As a group, we decided that caucus members could only be expelled through a vote of the full caucus. That stripped a future leader of the ability to remove anyone arbitrarily, and it empowered MPs, whether they are in the front, middle or back bench, to be equal in making that decision.

There are members of the NDP who I believe did exactly the same thing. They held the same vote, as they were required to under the act, and it is my understanding, though I was not there, that they did this. However, the Liberal Party refused to abide by this legal requirement and make that administrative decision on its first day and now it is caught in this strange situation where it wants to carry out retribution against courageous whistle-blowers in its own caucus. The Prime Minister is determined to have them kicked out and punished for speaking their minds, but nobody knows the legal status of an expulsion from the Liberal caucus.

Mr. Speaker, I bring this to your attention because it could land on your desk. You could find yourself as the arbiter of this messy situation that the government has created for itself by failing to follow the legal steps that are provided for in the Parliament of Canada Act.

I have my opinions on whether the former Treasury Board president and former attorney general should or should not be allowed to remain. Absolutely they have the right to remain. In fact, they should be celebrated for their courage and honesty. However, I believe that whatever decision the Liberals make, which is theirs to make and not mine, should be done in accordance with the law. They need to follow the law.

The Prime Minister broke the law when he took a quarter-million-dollar free vacation from someone who was seeking a government grant. He has broken, at the very least, the spirit of the law by applying inappropriate pressure and interfering in the criminal prosecution of his corporate friends at SNC-Lavalin. For God's sake, let him not break the law as he carries out retribution against the courageous whistle-blowers who exposed him for that earlier misconduct.

The Prime Minister has some time to fix the legal problems within his caucus. He could potentially, with counsel from you, Mr. Speaker, and the law clerk, convene another caucus meeting to discuss the application of the Reform Act to his caucus. I believe that after he does that he would have to table in the House of Commons a full report on how he and his caucus have come into compliance with that act. However, failing that, he is operating lawlessly as he attempts to punish those who have spoken against him.

Speaking of the law, there is another law worth noting in this affair, which is the whistle-blower protection law that exists for public servants. I was proud to serve as the parliamentary secretary in the Harper government that passed into effect the Federal Accountability Act, which contained protections for whistle-blowers.

The House will recall that the impetus for this act was that a courageous whistle-blower, Allan Cutler, had spoken up against the sponsorship scandal. He witnessed that money was being funnelled out of the coffers of the government into the Liberal Party of Canada and to Liberal-linked ad agencies. He blew the whistle and he was fired. He was fired for speaking up and he suffered serious career damage as a result. Therefore, we passed a law to protect public sector whistle-blowers in the event that they witness wrongdoing. Under the law, they are allowed to make a formal complaint to seek an investigation with the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner who then carries out an investigation.

I acknowledge that the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner does not have jurisdiction over a party caucus or over cabinet ministers. It strictly applies to members of the public service. However, this is about the example we set as political leaders. If we have a law that protects public servants who blow the whistle against retaliation, how could the Prime Minister violate the principles of that law by punishing the whistle-blowers in his own cabinet? What message would he send to public servants about the propriety of standing up and speaking out when they see something wrong if he punishes the very people who have done just that?

What the Prime Minister should do is, first, apologize to both of these whistle-blowers, and second, thank them for standing in his way when he was trying to behave inappropriately.

The former attorney general may have done the Prime Minister an incredible service when she refused his personal and political interference in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. She may have been helping him in a strange way by stopping him from doing something very dangerous, both to himself and to our legal and justice systems. She warned him in the most emphatic way that he ought not push her any further.

Allow me, for a moment, to reflect on the chronology of those warnings. It started on September 18, 2018, when the Prime Minister and the Clerk of the Privy Council called in the former attorney general and pushed her to allow a settlement with SNC-Lavalin that would shelve criminal charges for fraud and bribery. She made it clear at that point that she was not interested in giving the company a special deal, as the company simply did not qualify for a settlement. He pushed some more. He made up stories about how the company headquarters would leave if she did not immediately intervene, stories we now know are patently false.

Still, she stood her ground so he pushed again. She said she looked the Prime Minister in the eye and asked him if he was interfering with her work as Attorney General, and that she strongly advised against it. One would think he would have gotten the message, but unfortunately that was just the beginning. Then, in the days that followed, his senior staff would continue the pressure campaign. The finance minister would jump in on the action as well. Strangely, he personally met with senior—

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, there are new developments in the SNC-Lavalin scandal just breaking today, and I rise today to bring them to the House's attention.

As members will recall, the justice committee decided to convene an investigation into the Prime Minister's interference in the criminal prosecution of the company known as SNC-Lavalin. That investigation, unfortunately, was short-lived. As revelations about the Prime Minister and his team's 20 points of contact with the former attorney general, in which they made veiled threats, in which they interfered, in which they applied inappropriate pressure, came to light in committee, members on the Liberal side, who constitute a majority, voted to shut down the investigation altogether. I was present when that happened, and it was clear that the government had engaged in a cover-up.

That being said, we concluded at the time that there was still hope of getting to the truth, and that hope resided in the ethics committee. As such, numerous members of the House wrote the chairman of that committee, who would confirm that a motion to carry out an investigation into the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal was in order. Roughly a week later, members convened at the ethics committee, under the leadership of that chair, and debated whether the committee should proceed with an investigation.

One Liberal member on the committee had previously voted for a full-scale public inquiry, and thus it was expected that he might be supportive of allowing the ethics committee to proceed in carrying out that investigation right within the parliamentary precinct. When presented with the opportunity to do so and vote in favour of the motion, allowing the investigation to go ahead, he began to speak and said that he was not ruling out a future investigation at committee, that perhaps at some future date an investigation could proceed, but doing so would be premature before the justice committee had received all its written submissions and before the justice committee had decided to conclude its own work.

A second Liberal MP, the member for Ottawa—Vanier, said, in a post-committee scrum with the media, “I believe that today we had a conversation on the fact that the Ethics Commissioner is currently studying, and that's why we are waiting for him to get back to us and report. Also, the justice committee is still working on it, as we know. [The member for Mount Royal], the chair, will receive more information, so it's premature for us to go forward.” I emphasize “premature for us to go forward”.

Two members of the Liberal delegation on the ethics committee expressed an openness to having a full-scale committee investigation into the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal but concluded that it would be premature to do so until such time as the committee received all its written submissions and heard all its testimony and concluded its own work on the file.

In fairness to those two Liberal members, while I disagree with them, it is a reasonable point of view. There is no need to have two committees doing the same thing at one time. In other words, why not wait to find out what the justice committee was going to do with all the testimony it had received and what it would eventually do with the then forthcoming written submissions of text messages that both the former attorney general and Gerald Butts were to provide.

The justice committee has done that now. It has completely terminated the investigation. It has received all the written submissions. Those submissions have now been published for all eyes to see. The justice committee's work is known. As of this morning, according to Liberal members who met in a secret in camera meeting, that committee will do no more work on this file.

The two Liberal members of the ethics committee, who were waiting on the justice committee to wrap up in order to get the final evidence that the committee report would provide, can no longer claim it is premature for the ethics committee to begin its work.

I report to the House of Commons today that next Tuesday would be the appropriate day for the ethics committee to consider whether to proceed with the investigation into the Prime Minister's SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal. I note that he has attempted to shut down two previous investigations, and that might cause pessimism among members of the House. However, I also note that there is reason for hope and optimism in that at least two Liberal members of the ethics committee have now said that their opposition to an investigation was time limited.

In other words, because it was premature at the time the motion for such investigation came before the committee, they may now have changed their mind because all of the information that another committee had to provide has now been provided. The conversation now shifts over to the ethics committee where we will once again debate whether to open an investigation into this file.

The Prime Minister has tried to put this matter to rest by shutting it down. When I use the term “shut down”, I am quoting the Prime Minister's former Treasury Board president. This is not an allegation of an opposition MP; these are the words of a former member of the Prime Minister's inner circle, a doctor, a woman to whom the Prime Minister entrusted one of the most senior cabinet positions any prime minister could offer. She believes the government is trying to shut down the investigation into this scandal.

It is not working. The Prime Minister has been incapable of grabbing this scandal and forcing it underground. Every time he tries, the people of Canada, as well as conscientious members of his own caucus speak up against him.

I believe he will have to conclude, one week from today, that his only recourse is to open the entire matter up for all eyes to see. As he was fond of saying in the last election, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”. Let us lift the curtains at the ethics committee and let the sunshine pour in so everyone can see the truth. “Sunny ways my friends, sunny ways” as a prime minister we all know once said.

Mr. Speaker, I put you and the House on notice that next Tuesday, a week from today, we will all be watching carefully as Liberal members join with Conservative and NDP members to determine whether to end the cover-up and open up a full-scale investigation to get to the truth in this matter.

With that notice having been given, I now turn the attention of members to another important legal matter.

We are lawmakers; ergo we must not be lawbreakers. There is an important law, which was passed into effect in the previous Parliament, called the Reform Act. That bill came from the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. He has long been a student of Parliament and an advocate for its supremacy. The member came forward with this bill in the previous Parliament, with the intended purpose of limiting the executive branch's ability to commandeer the House of Commons at the expense of public interest. It was under the previous government that the bill was in fact passed.

The Reform Act did two principal things.

The first change the act made was it took away the legal authority of party leaders to ban candidates from running. It used to be in the Elections Act that one could not be a candidate for a political party unless one had a signature from the leader of that party. That created a bias within the act, in favour of the party leadership against the grassroots. The Reform Act, instead, allowed the party to assign any authority it chose to have the power to accept or reject candidates. In other words, the party could say that a local electoral district association president or some other trusted figure would have the authority to accept or reject candidacies. However, no longer would it be a given under law that such authority would reside exclusively in the hands of the leader. It is possible for a party to craft its own constitution, as any free organization can, in an open, civil society to assign that power to its leader. That decision now rests with a party and not with the law. That was the first change.

The second change the Reform Act made is particularly relevant to today's conversation. It stated that at the first caucus meeting of every party, after an election occurred, there must be a vote on whether to apply a set of rules to determine the expulsion of members of that caucus. In other words, in the past, party leaders had been able to just banish people from the caucus arbitrarily. This law empowered caucuses to create a set of enforceable rules that would be embedded in legislation, whereby no one could be removed from a caucus without a vote of the caucus members.

At the very first Conservative caucus meeting after the last election, we decided to vote in favour of applying that rule to our caucus. The Conservative Party, as it stands now and in this Parliament, cannot remove members from caucus without holding a vote of caucus members. In other words, a party leader cannot simply wake up one day and say that Mr. Smith is no longer a member of the Conservative Party. Instead, caucus members need to vote on the future of Mr. Smith.

That brings us to today's debate. We are now hearing rumours of retaliation against two courageous whistle-blowers in the Liberal ranks. Both the former attorney general and the former treasury board president had the incredible audacity to tell the truth about the Prime Minister's conduct in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

A number of the Prime Minister's top supporters in caucus have gone to media outlets and suggested they should be banished from caucus altogether because they dared speak up and defend that truth. As the argument goes, they should be punished for allowing Canadians to learn that the Prime Minister interfered in a criminal prosecution.

Here is the legal hiccup. It turns out that the Liberal caucus failed to follow the law and hold a vote at its first caucus meeting to determine whether there would be rules for the expulsion of members. In other words, if the caucus decides to expel these members, that expulsion might be illegal.

I want to read members some background. This is a letter that the hon. member for Wellington—Halton Hills wrote to the current Attorney General. It states:

Dear Minister,

I would like to congratulate you on your new role as the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada.

In a letter to the previous Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada, dated February 29, 2016, I brought to the Minister's attention the possible non-compliance of Section 49.8 of the Parliament of Canada Act by members of the cabinet. I also sent a letter to the Deputy Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of Canada, dated May 11, 2016, voicing the same concern. Both the Minister and Deputy Minister did not respond to me directly and as such, I have no idea of what action, if any, was taken. I am now bringing this matter directly to your attention for your consideration and action.

As you are aware, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General is the chief law officer of the Crown, responsible for ensuring that the administration of public affairs is in accordance with the law, and responsible for upholding the rule of law. The Attorney General has a duty to provide objective legal advice in order to ensure that government action complies with the law. Given that the government is bound by the rule of law, as well as the Attorney General's advice on legal affairs, traditionally it must be accepted by Cabinet even if it is an unpopular policy.

As you are also aware, the Reform Act past in the House of Commons on February 25, 2015, passed in the Senate on June 22, 2015, received Royal Assent on June 23, 2015, and subsequently came into force on October 26, 2015. It amended the Parliament of Canada Act.

According to Section 49.8 of the Parliament of Canada Act (appended for ease of reference), at its first meeting following a general election, the caucus of every party in the House of Commons must conduct a separate recorded vote among the caucus members in respect of each of the following questions:

(a) whether sections 49.2 and 49.3 are to apply in respect of the caucus;

(b) whether section 49.4 is to apply in respect of the caucus;

(c) whether subsections 49.5(1) to (3) are to apply in respect of the caucus; and

(d) whether subsection 49.5(4) and section 49.6 are to apply in respect of the caucus.

Furthermore, Section 49.8 stipulates that “as soon as feasible after the conduct of the votes, the chair of the caucus shall inform the Speaker of the House of Commons of the outcome of each vote.”

It has been publicly reported by various news media (one report of which is appended for ease of reference) that the Liberal Members of Parliament, including Ministers, did not comply with Section 49.8 of the Parliament of Canada Act, instead deciding to “defer” the four votes. This appears to be in contravention...of the Parliament of Canada Act.

The Minister of Justice and Attorney General is responsible for upholding the rule of law, ensuring that Cabinet acts in accordance with the law, and is ultimately accountable to the House of Commons. I ask that you uphold your constitutional and statutory responsibility and take the necessary steps to ensure that the government complies with Section 49.8 of the Parliament of Canada Act.

While Section 49.8 concerns the conduct of not just Ministers but all Members of Parliament of a recognized party in the House of Commons, it is important to note that according to Open and Accountable Government, Ministers are to be held to the highest standards of conduct for all their actions, including those that are not directly related to their official functions. Ministers are therefore expected to adhere to these standards in circumstances, whether they are acting as a Minister, a member of the House of Commons or private citizen.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

In other words, the member was laying out very clearly that there are laws that determine how a caucus must conduct itself and that those laws determine how members can or cannot be expelled.

So far the Liberal Party is not in respect of those laws. All other caucuses held votes to ensure they were in compliance with the Parliament of Canada Act.

To simplify, this is what it means. Those sitting back home right now wondering whether their member of Parliament works for them or the party leader should ask themselves who can remove a member of Parliament from his or her caucus. If the answer is that the leader simply removes the caucus member, then apparently that caucus member works for the leader. If, on the other hand, as is the case in the Conservative Party, a member of Parliament works in a caucus that is bound by the Parliament of Canada Act to ensure that no one can be removed except by vote of a majority of MPs in that caucus, then that MP works for constituents. That is how simple it is.

It is not that the Liberal caucus decided to give its leader the power to remove members of caucus. It is that the Liberal Party broke the law requiring that the caucus set rules for the expulsion of members. In so doing, the Liberal caucus is now in a legal twilight zone, as it is unable to tell anybody the legal procedure required for two of its senior members to be expelled from caucus.

It has been brought to my attention that Liberal caucus meetings have been going on all day and that Ontario Liberals have gathered to discuss the future of the former attorney general and former Treasury Board president. They are discussing whether those two distinguished parliamentarians should be punted from the Liberal caucus altogether. However, here is the problem. Liberals cannot do it legally until they have addressed the requirement in the Parliament of Canada Act, which stipulates that they must decide whether the leader or the caucus has the power to do that.

The Liberal Party very much risks finding itself in yet another legal crisis in the next day. Tomorrow its caucus will meet, and I understand that there may well be a decision to expel members of the caucus. However, we do not know how that decision will be made, because so far the Liberals are in violation of the Parliament of Canada Act, which stipulates how exactly that procedure is to be carried out.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I regret to inform the House of Commons that I will be terminating my remarks, as soon as the Prime Minister comes in and announces that there will be a full-scale parliamentary investigation into his interference in SNC-Lavalin.

I guess I will not be terminating my remarks just yet. They will have to go on.

I am getting some heckles across the way from my colleagues. Someone yelled across the way that I have a crooked tie. It is better to have a crooked tie than a crooked leader.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, despite my hon. colleague's interruption, I must say, I am pleased to see a member stand up in the House of Commons to defend our farmers.

Our canola farmers are really suffering right now as a result of trade action imposed by another country, China. The Conservative Party just wants to hold a debate so we can protect those farmers and help them continue to sell their top-quality product internationally.

I am extremely surprised that the government does not want to take part in such a debate, and I think it is disgusting that this government is showing such disregard for a crisis of this magnitude. I realize that there are no Liberal members representing western Canadian farmers, but the Prime Minister is supposed to represent all Canadians, regardless of whether they voted for the Liberal Party.

This gives me an opportunity to point out just how divided our country is becoming. Three years ago, everyone was saying that there was no more Bloc Québécois and that nobody was talking about Quebec sovereignty any more. After 10 years under the Harper government, it is true that many Quebeckers did not agree with all of the Conservative policies or with the Conservative Party. I will admit that, but I think that everyone can at least agree that the sovereignist movement had practically disappeared. The Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois were no longer a political force. What a change compared to the Liberal years in which the sovereignist movement was able to feed off the sponsorship scandal.

It was a huge success for the former Conservative government to see that, in 2015, the sovereignist movement had all but died out across the country. I think that is because the Harper government, regardless of whether people agreed with its intentions or not, respected the autonomy of the provinces and their citizens. It reduced the power of politicians in Ottawa and gave more power to people in our communities. That helped everyone to be able to see themselves as part of a Canada that could meet their needs, even if they did not vote for the Conservative Party.

Today, after the government has been in power for three years, the Bloc Québécois's standing is up in the polls. Furthermore, in western Canada, polls show that almost half of Albertans are open to sovereignty. That is a tragedy.

I was born in Calgary and spent more than 20 years in southern Alberta. I never would have believed that westerners would be talking about sovereignty. It is true that there has always been some concern and complaints about the federal government's powers, but we never spoke about sovereignty in western Canada when I was growing up. Now, voices are being raised and we see a division, and that is exactly what we should avoid.

We need a prime minister who unites Canadians from coast to coast to coast and creates a wonderful country that all Canadians can be extremely proud of.

I think that Albertans and all westerners believe in Canada. They love Canada and are very patriotic. However, when the Prime Minister constantly tries to attack them with his policies on pipelines, the carbon tax and others that target western Canada's economy, it is understandable that there is such frustration in the west.

In my view, a government formed by our Conservative leader would bring together Canadians in a respectful environment that ensures the maximum amount of freedom for all provinces and all Canadians. That is the story of our country, and prime ministers, such as Wilfrid Laurier, united Canadians by doing exactly that.

Sometimes we forget that, in the early 1900s, Wilfrid Laurier was the most popular leader in the west. At that time, the Liberal Party of Canada was in favour of a free market, free trade and the power and autonomy of all provinces. Although hard to believe today, that is why the Liberal Party of Canada was popular in the Prairies.

However, the Liberals have moved away from economic openness in favour of having federal politicians control everything. This is an attempt to centralize all powers, but it ultimately ends up dividing all Canadians. This is why the Conservative Party of Canada will diminish the power of governments and increase the power of Canadians, which will, in turn, bring all Canadians together.

We have a team that is speaking about the Prime Minister's personal and political interference in the SNC-Lavalin scandal. It is speaking about the cover-up budget that is designed to make Canadians forget about that political interference. It is also shifting attention to the issues that the Prime Minister is incapable of managing, like the multi-billion dollar attack by the Chinese government on our canola producers.

The Prime Minister is incapable of responding to these kinds of international crises because he is absolutely consumed with scandal. He and his party are meeting right now to talk about how they can punish courageous whistle-blowers. They are not meeting with representatives of the People's Republic of China to get tariff penalties removed. They are too busy trying to cover up a scandal of the Prime Minister's own making.

It not just ethical deterioration that we see in this scandal; it is the distraction that it causes. Would people not like to know right now that the Prime Minister is at his desk busily working on a strategy to end the trade attack by China? He is not. He is busy, huddled with advisers, trying to find a way to punish whistle-blowers, courageous women in his own party, for daring to tell the truth about his conduct.

Would people not like to know that he is busily on his phone with his ambassador in Washington, discussing a plan to end Trump's tariffs on steel, aluminum and softwood, or to end Trump's buy America policy that discriminates against Canada? No, he is not doing that. Right now he is busy, huddled with a group of political advisers, trying to hatch a plan to cover up a scandal and punish the women who exposed it.

Would people not like to know that the Prime Minister is busy meeting with financial officials, urgently crafting a plan to phase out the deficit over the medium term and prepare us for troubled times that might be in our future? Well, we know that even if he were not distracted by scandal, the deficit would not be of the least bit of concern. We know that the Prime Minister thinks budgets balance themselves.

I will cede the floor to you, Mr. Speaker, for Standing Order 31, Statements by Members, by saying that we need a Prime Minister who is not capsizing in his own ship of corruption and scandal, but instead is working hard every day to serve the Canadian people and get the job done, so Canadians can get ahead.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his very substantive intervention on the matter at hand.

As I was saying, there is the Liberal three-step: massive scandal, massive deficit to distract from that scandal, and of course massive tax increases to pay for it all after the election. We are now on step number two, the cover-up budget.

The Prime Minister believed he could extricate himself from this scandal by spraying $41 billion of new cash spending at Canadians in this recent budget. There would be a chicken in every pot, he told us. The money certainly did flow. That spending, as I said, is $41 billion on a cash basis, or $23 billion if we use accrual accounting. Either way, it is a lot of money. He believed that if he could pile up that money on top of the scandal, no one would be able to peer through and see what was going on underneath it all. Canadians would be so grateful to see dollar signs flying at them in the lead-up to the election that they would forget all about his interference in a criminal prosecution and re-elect him to keep that money flowing.

However, the bad news for the Liberals is that Canadians know it is their own money. They know the Prime Minister has not generously bestowed upon them money of his own. He has taken it out of their pockets and out of their children's pockets by growing debt to pay for all that spending.

He promised the deficit would never exceed $10 billion in any year. Multiple times it has been $20 billion. He said the total debt he would add is no more than $25 billion. We are already up to $60 billion and headed to three times as much as he promised. He said the budget would be balanced in 2019, and yet here again we have a large deficit.

It is not just that he is breaking his word and spending excessively to little end and with few achievements. It is that he is putting us in this precarious situation of debt at a time when the world economy has done so well.

In the first years of the Prime Minister's governance, growth in the U.S. economy was among its highest in over two decades. Of course, one-fifth to two-fifths of our economy is dependent on the United States. We often go as it goes. Additionally, the government had huge amounts of cash pouring into its coffers as a result of the sugar high from booming housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto, unsustainable levels of housing speculation that led to tax revenues for the government, and of course recovery in natural resources prices from their historic lows the year before the Prime Minister took office.

In other words, everything went in his favour. He inherited much good fortune in his public life, just as in his private life, and he squandered all of it. Not only did he receive massive revenue windfalls, vastly exceeding what anyone had projected only years ago, and not only did he spend every penny of those windfalls; he then went $20 billion deeper in deficit year after year after year.

Here is the problem. What happens when things go badly? We live in a country that is susceptible to the impacts of the global economy. We are a trading nation. In other words, problems abroad can very quickly arrive on our shores. We all remember when the U.S. financial crisis struck in 2008. It was a crisis that hit Canada from abroad, but one that affected us nevertheless.

Here is the good news. Governments, both Liberal and Conservative, paid off a phenomenal amount of debt in the roughly 10 years leading up to that crisis. To their credit, the Martin and Chrétien governments ran surpluses and paid down debt. They understood that they make hay when the sun shines.

Then, when Harper and Flaherty took office, they too paid off about $40 billion in debt. Combined, well over $100 billion had been wiped out from our national debt in just over a decade, and it had shrunk to the lowest level as a share of GDP of any country in the G7. This allowed us an enormous buffer, so when that crisis struck we were in a position to absorb the impact, to protect our citizens and to lower rather than raise taxes as countries around the world had done in order to recover their plummeting revenue.

We were able to lower the GST from 7% to 6% to 5%; to bring income taxes down, particularly on low-income people; erase a million people off the tax rolls; bring in a working income tax credit that effectively gives a pay bonus to the lowest-income workers; bring in tax credits for kids' sports, public transit, tradesmen's tools and numerous other targeted savings for individual Canadians. We were able to drop the small business tax rate and lower the corporate business rate from 22% to 15%. We did all of this to help our people and businesses plow through that terrible global recession almost, though not entirely, unscathed.

We went into the recession last and came out first. We had a million jobs coming out of that recession. We were among the first countries in the developed world to balance our budget. When it was all over, our debt as a share of GDP had actually remained the same. That was extraordinary at the time, given that the Americans and Europeans were stacking up massive debts in relation to the size of their economies.

UNICEF marvelled at how child poverty fell in Canada during the great global recession while children around the world were falling perilously into want.

That was due to good economic management at the time. However, if we are being fair, it was also due to the decisions of leaders of both parties in the late nineties through to the mid-2000s to pay off debt and prepare our country for troubled times ahead.

However, the current Prime Minister, who inherited good times by contrast, has squandered them completely and rendered us extraordinarily vulnerable for the trouble that may be ahead. We already see signs of that trouble. Canadian households are among the most indebted in the OECD. Their levels of household debt are about $1.75 for every dollar of income, which is a massive increase over the last several years. This makes them vulnerable to increases in interest rates.

Furthermore, if we add household, corporate and government debt together, we have a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece by that measurement. Greece, of course, has much more government debt as a share of its economy, but we have much more household debt as a share of ours. We have one economy and it has to support all of that debt. All three categories, household, corporate and government, are all supported by the same $2 trillion Canadian economy. The more we add to that debt, the more difficult it becomes for the economy to carry it around.

Therefore, what would be a wise course of action? The wise course of action would be to live within our means today and make adjustments now, before it is too late.

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that we are not broke yet. The bad news is that with another four years of the current Prime Minister, we will be. When that happens, life will get ugly. It will become unavoidable that difficult decisions, not pleasant ones, will have to occur if we do not make the modest adjustments now that can avoid those difficult times.

It is kind of like the situation of a family who sits around their kitchen table. They know they are not going bankrupt and are not on the edge of losing their house or car, but they notice that their debt is growing more and more every year. They realize that if they keep doing that, in about five, six or seven years, they will, as a family, be in a crisis. That family then realizes that they have two options. Option one is to say that it should enjoy the good times while they last, forget about the future and when the repo man knocks on the door in six years, they will cross that bridge when they get to it. Option two is that the family can make a few adjustments now that are not particularly painful, and maintain their existing quality of life without adding further to their debt and vulnerability. That option will ensure that in six years the family will be on solid ground, with savings built up and debt paid down, a house secured with a small mortgage, and enough financial freedom to make good decisions for the future.

The other option, the one that the Prime Minister has our country following right now, is for the family to keep on spending until the repo man knocks on the door. That is not how Canadians run their household finances. Anyone who has not inherited a family fortune or a multi-million dollar trust fund knows what the Prime Minister has never understood, that budgets do not balance themselves, one cannot borrow one's way out of debt and one cannot make others pay for one's mistakes. Every Canadian family who has had to pay a bill or raise a child without inherited wealth knows that is the basic reality of life.

Unfortunately, families who are sitting around that kitchen table are finding life more and more difficult. Wages have been absolutely flat since the Prime Minister took office. He has raised taxes on middle-class families by $800. That does not even include the carbon tax, which kicked in for Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick yesterday, or the increases to CPP premiums that he is imposing right across the country, outside of Quebec. Families are getting by with less and less. They are telling us that they are getting by, but they are not getting ahead.

The mission of our leader, the Conservative leader, is to open up a free enterprise, low-tax economy where people can get ahead through their own hard work. That has a little something to do with his life story. He is the son of a working-class family. He paid his way through university by working at a restaurant before he moved to Saskatchewan from Ottawa and met his wife, and worked in insurance before he was elected to Parliament. He did not have a famous last name, but he managed to win by working really hard and showing that he had the right values and experience for his Saskatchewan community. Then he won the support and respect of colleagues from across party lines in becoming the Speaker of the House of Commons, possibly the youngest in Canadian history.

What is most amazing about our Conservative leader's story is that most people who have a career trajectory like that would have relied on a family lineage, a well-connected family with a big name. This particular leader has had none of those things. He had a great family. They were rich in love, common sense and good values, but they were not rich in money. He took those working-class values to Parliament Hill. He wants to create a country where everyone else can get ahead the way that he did, by working hard, putting forward his best foot and trying his best to serve others. That is how he got ahead, and that is how other Canadians want to get ahead when they walk out the door in the morning to their jobs. They should have the right to get ahead through their hard work and their own enterprise, and we should create a free market economy where that is possible, where everyone gets ahead based on meritocracy rather than aristocracy.

That is the Canada that the Conservative leader is attempting to build with a platform that allows people to get ahead. He has already started to clarify exactly what that means, for example, cancelling the carbon tax to make life affordable and taking GST off home heat so that we do not punish Canadians for staying warm in Canada's record winters. He has decided that he would take taxes off EI maternity and parental benefits, so that it is more affordable for moms and dads to stay with their children in those precious six to nine months after a child is born. Those are the early announcements he has made that will be designed to allow Canadians to get ahead. Basically, the formula has three parts, which are that the government should live within its means, leave more in people's pockets and let them get ahead.

The Conservative platform of our leader will be based on those three pillars of the stool. They are the same pillars that he and his family lived by when he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood here in Ottawa. They did not have a car; he took the bus everywhere. I guess that is one thing that he and the Prime Minister have in common: They both had a driver. The difference is that the Prime Minister had a chauffeur and the Leader of the Opposition had a bus driver. However, they both had drivers.

The Conservative leader is fond of telling the story about how hard it was to get a date by asking a girl if she would meet him at a bus station. I guess that is one of the ways he was able to gain his skill of persuasion that he has brought to bear on his political life.

That is ingenuity. People who come from modest means are able to become creative and inventive in making the most out of what they are given, and that is the great Canadian dynamism. The voyageurs who travelled across the country in canoes and our first people who survived in this wretched climate for so many thousands of years with nothing but their own courage, ingenuity and hard work are the people who set the example of how one can survive in this country of ours. Then, the pioneers came and broke in the land so that we could farm and create some of the most prodigious crops anywhere in the world, from the Prairies to the farm fields of central Canada and beyond, to the modern wineries in the beautiful Niagara or Okanagan regions.

These are all examples of Canadian ingenuity that go back thousands of years, when people very simply got by through their own hard work. That is what the Leader of the Opposition wants to be possible again. What frustrates him is that when he travels across the country, he sees how hard people are working, but they tell him that they feel they are on a treadmill that is getting faster and faster. They are running harder, but they are not moving forward. Every time that they put one foot in front of the other, the government keeps pulling them back.

Think of the number of taxes that people are hit with. I was talking with a young guy the other day on a doorstep, and he said that every time he takes a breath he pays a tax in this country. He earns income and pays income tax, and he has to pay payroll tax on the same income. With what is left after that, he makes a purchase, and he has to pay HST on that purchase, so another bite is taken out of that dollar. Now we have something called the carbon tax that hits him every time he drives to work, heats his home or buys something that is transported or made using energy. Then, God forbid, if he is tired of all the taxes and he decides he needs a beer, then he gets hit with another sin tax for the crime of drinking one, which has an escalator tax that rises automatically every single year without holding a vote in the House of Commons.

This is just one young person. On that one dollar he earns from his own hard work, he has many bites taken out of that dollar to pay for the growing cost of government. Government has grown in cost since this Prime Minister took office three and a half years ago by 25%. Do people believe that they are getting 25% better services or products from the Government of Canada? Look around at the roads that are in worse condition and the hospital wait times that continue. What extra service is there? Rural communities are not getting enough policing to protect against crime. They are all paying 25% more for the cost of government, and what are they getting in return?

When average people go to a grocery store and see that prices have gone up by 25% without anything extra for the additional cost, they shop at a different grocery store. That is the competitive system of the free market, and I believe they will go shopping for a better alternative in the next election. That alternative will be based on the sound principles that have allowed Canadians to advance throughout the ages, a system of free market where people voluntarily exchanged work for wages, investment for interest and product for payment, so that every participant was always better off.

If I have an apple and someone else has an orange and I want what he has and he wants what I have, we trade. We are both better off, even though between us we still have an apple and an orange. That is the genius of the free market system. People can sacrifice what they have for something they want more as long as they find others willing to do the inverse on the other side. In other words, every time a free market transaction occurs, the participants must believe they are better off than they were before they did that transaction.

For a young person like the Leader of the Opposition, when he got a job working at a restaurant, he believed sacrificing those four hours three or four times a week was worth it because the wage was worth more than his time. For the restaurant owner, his time was worth more than the wage he had to pay to get it. In other words, in that voluntary exchange, both worker and employer believed they gained from the exchange. We know that because they both voluntarily agreed to participate in it.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if the member wants me to submit my glass of water to a chemist so that it can be studied. It is a glass of water, albeit a little cloudy. I will not blame it on the plumbing system in this 150-year-old building, but so far it has not killed me, so I am left to trust that it is, in fact, water.

[The Budget, April 2nd, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, it is remarkable that Liberal members would not consent to the tabling of a letter to Liberal members. This is a letter from a Liberal to other Liberals, and the Liberals want to ban it from being tabled in the House of Commons. It goes on and on.

The member across the way talks about personal attacks. The former attorney general stood on the solid ground of truth. She first spoke truth to power, and when power would not listen to truth, she spoke truth to the people. When power contradicted truth, she provided evidence to prove truth. Now she is being punished for it.

If that party, the once great party of Wilfrid Laurier and St. Laurent and Mackenzie King, has descended to a point where someone is punished merely for telling the truth, what message is it sending to all Canadians? What message is it sending to young people who want to come and serve in this place? If they tell the truth, they will be called names and insulted, and their gender and ethnicity will be raised as points of contention. Finally, at the end of it all, they will be kicked right out of their party altogether.

That is not the message we should send to our young people. We should send them the message that this is a place full of truth-tellers; it is full of people who will say what they know to be true. More than that, it is a place full of leaders willing to accept the truth when they hear it.

That is not the kind of leader we have at the head of the government today. Rather, he has played a game of cover-up, denial, contradiction, evasion and, finally, shutting down debate altogether. We have two parliamentary committees that have closed their doors to this matter because the Prime Minister's majority voted to do so. The Prime Minister kept his members here all night long, for 30 hours straight, voting in the House of Commons rather than just accepting a very simple demand from the official opposition that the former attorney general be allowed to complete testimony before a committee.

Now the government refuses to end my speech by simply agreeing to my one simple demand, which is for a parliamentary committee, namely the justice committee, to convene all the witnesses involved in the political interference in the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal, question them under oath and without restriction, and issue a final report all Canadians can read before they vote in the next election. If the government announces right now that it will agree to that demand, I will terminate my speech immediately. Otherwise, I will continue to speak about this absolutely fundamental issue at the heart of our democratic system and the rule of law.

There is nothing members can do to silence members of the opposition on this. They might attempt to silence their own former ministers with threats, expulsion and denigrating comments in the media, but they will not silence members of the other side of the House. Ultimately, they will find they cannot silence Canadians either.

The people of Canada are too wise. They know that where there is smoke there is usually fire. In this case, there is a heck of a lot of smoke. We have a Prime Minister who is changing his story from one day to the next and making statements that are soon disproved by written evidence and audio recordings.

We have a Prime Minister shutting down an investigation at the justice committee and another investigation at the ethics committee. Here we have it: a justice committee with no justice and an ethics committee with no ethics. That is what it has come to with this Liberal majority.

However, we should not worry, because Liberals have a political strategy to get around it. Their plan, as witnessed by the motion we are now debating, was the Liberal three-step: a massive scandal, step number one; massive deficit spending to distract from it, step number two; and a massive tax increase to pay for it all after the election, step number three.

I have already spent a lot of time talking about step number one, the scandal itself. Let us talk about step number two, the massive deficit spending. The Prime Minister famously promised in the lead-up to the last election that the budget would balance itself. He said it would happen in the year 2019. Well, that time has now arrived. Here we are debating a budget with a deficit of $20 billion, not zero as the Prime Minister promised, but—