Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise in this House to speak to the important issues of the day. However, in this case, there is a sad irony in that opposition members are not using that privilege to promote or oppose legislation for the betterment of Canadians, but rather are being forced to defend those privileges on behalf of the Canadians we represent and against the stonewalling government across the way.
Last week, the editorial board of The Globe and Mail wrote, “The Liberals' naked disdain for Parliament [and by extension Canadians] is showing”. The Liberal government has such a profound disrespect for Canadians and for the long-held traditions of this place that it is choosing to defy not only the opposition, but the Speaker and, worst of all, Canadians themselves, who want and deserve to know the truth.
There is so much rot at the core of the government. The default toward secrecy and cover-ups, the antipathy toward law enforcement and the pattern of profound disrespect toward the people of Canada are all ingrained traits of the government and the failed and, as we can only be led to believe, corrupt Prime Minister, who has been the catalyst for a culture of cronyism, corruption and cover-ups.
This is nothing new. We are here today, as we have been for the last two weeks, debating the undebatable. The Auditor General has found that Sustainable Development Technology Canada appointed Liberals to run the program, who turned around and gave $400 million of taxpayers' money, the Canadian people's money, to their own companies. The Auditor General found a whopping 186 separate conflicts of interest, and rather than comply with the Speaker's ruling to produce documents related to the massive scam, the Liberals are choosing to hold up the business of the House indefinitely as they scramble to once again cover up their tracks.
This is not the first time the government has been accused of unethical behaviour. I know it is hard to believe, but it is true, and this is not the first time that government members have defied Parliament, defied the Speaker and even stonewalled the police in an attempt to cover up their sordid deeds. In fact, as I was preparing for this speech, when I searching in my emails and typed in the keywords “refusal to hand over documents”, what popped up was not about SDTC, which we are debating today, but another incident from back in 2021, when the government allowed Chinese spies, Beijing-sponsored scientists with ties to the Chinese military and bioweapons program, to access our top clearance national microbiology lab in Winnipeg.
The lead scientist, Dr. Qiu, at the same time as she was working in our top security level 4 lab, was flying back and forth to China for meetings in Beijing and helping Beijing set up its very own level 4 lab in Wuhan. At the time, the former Speaker ruled the government, his own party, to have violated parliamentary privilege and to be in contempt of Parliament when the Liberals refused to produce the documents related to this improper transfer of deadly Ebola and henipavirus samples from Winnipeg to Wuhan.
We still do not know how serious a leak that was because this House, through the Speaker's predecessor, ordered the government to hand over the documents and the government refused. The Liberals sought to cover up the truth of what happened, not on the grounds of national security but for political reasons, because they were trying to protect the Prime Minister, who had failed so spectacularly to keep Canadians safe.
It is the same Prime Minister who refused to hand over documents to the RCMP in yet another case. Back in 2019, it came to light that the Prime Minister had pressured and bullied the former attorney general of Canada to give SNC-Lavalin, which was ironically also facing corruption charges, a sweetheart deal to drop the charges so as not to negatively affect the Liberals' political fortunes in Quebec. She refused and he fired her, kicked her out of cabinet and eventually out of the Liberal Party. Clearly, there is no place for truth-telling and standing on principle in today's Liberal Party, especially when it comes to standing up to the Prime Minister.
The worst part of that affair is that all of the members on the other side who were there, all of the hon. ministers, all backed the Prime Minister. In fact, at the time, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, then the minister of tourism, called what Jody Wilson-Raybould had done “fundamentally wrong”. She was telling the truth. How morally backwards does one need to be to look at that situation and say that the former attorney general of Canada, who upheld the law, should be ashamed? The foreign affairs minister has been touted as a future leader of the Liberal Party. She certainly seems to fit into the mould.
Speaking of backwards, members may recall that that same week, we had in this House about 50 young women as part of a delegation from Daughters of the Vote, a youth leadership movement, and they turned their backs to the Prime Minister in protest during his speech to the delegation. Jody Wilson-Raybould and the one woman in cabinet who had the courage of her convictions and the moral clarity to support her, Dr. Jane Philpott, were treated shamefully by their colleagues in the current corrupt government.
To bring it back to the point about the documents we are discussing today, the government was ordered to hand over the documents and refused. In fact, so desperate was it to cover up the misdeeds of the Prime Minister that it not only withheld documents from the House, but withheld documents from the Ethics Commissioner. In his 2019 report, Commissioner Mario Dion wrote, “I was unable to fully discharge [my] investigatory duties”. As we learned, later that year it also refused to turn over documents to the RCMP.
Documents released by Democracy Watch, via an access to information request, show that the Prime Minister's Office refused to hand over documents to the RCMP when investigating the Prime Minister. I am really not sure what is worse here, the fact that the Prime Minister, who so clearly believes he is above the law, stonewalled the RCMP got away with it or the fact that the RCMP, under disastrous former commissioner Brenda Lucki, let him get away with it.
Subsection 139(2) of the Criminal Code of Canada states that it is a criminal offence “to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice”. In attempting to get the then attorney general to change her mind by attempting to convince her, the highest-ranking prosecutor in the land, to drop a criminal case for political reasons, it certainly appears that the Prime Minister and his staff were trying to obstruct justice. In fact, if we look at the RCMP report, we can basically paraphrase it as follows: The RCMP did not look at all the evidence because it could not get it because the government would not give it up, but it was probably just as well. That is shocking.
Then we have the ArriveCAN app scam, with an app that should have cost $80,000 ballooning to $60 million. The RCMP again opened criminal investigations into the actions of the Liberal government, 13 separate investigations at last count. There were allegations of identity theft, fraudulent and forged resumes, contractual theft, fraudulent billing, price-fixing and collusion, all with senior bureaucrats in and appointed by the government.
We could talk about WE Charity, with nearly a billion dollars handed over to an organization that paid nearly half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's family and paid for a lavish vacation for the then finance minister. Just on a side note, the then finance minister did repay the money he had been given for the cost of the vacation.
We could talk about how COVID contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars were handed out to Liberal cronies, who got richer while Canadians had to suffer. We all remember the $237 million given to Baylis Medical, run by former Liberal donor and member of Parliament Frank Baylis.
Baylis donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Liberals and did he ever get a return on that investment. There was a $237-million contract to produce 10,000 ventilators, which would normally cost about $13,700. He billed the Canadian government $23,750 a ventilator. If we do the math, that is $100 million over and above a normal profit. There was another $422,000 from the Department of Industry, the same department at the heart of the green slush fund. Frank Baylis has also expressed an interest, in recent days, in running to replace the Prime Minister.
There was also the $84 million given to MCAP, the mortgage brokerage firm that employed the husband of the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Katie Telford. Hundreds of millions of dollars from that period remain unaccounted for.
I just want to pause here and note that the Liberal sponsorship scandal, which brought down the last Liberal government, was a mere $2 million. We know taxes are up, we know costs are up and now we know scandals are up. It is not $2 million this time; it is billions of dollars that we are talking about. I guess Liberal inflation is even affecting scandals. Everything is either broken or more expensive under the Prime Minister.
At the time, even the CBC called the Prime Minister out. We know it has to be bad for the Liberals when the radical ideologues and propagandists at the CBC are willing to bite the hand that feeds them, generously feeds them in the case of the current government, and criticize the government.
On December 7, 2020, an aptly named series called “The Big Spend” started. It stated the Prime Minister's government “won't say who got billions of dollars in aid” and that “While some payments have been revealed, the destination of billions of dollars in aid remains secret.” Then it goes on to note, with some irony, that the Prime Minister ran on a promise of openness and transparency, a promise that he has broken, like so many. Sunny ways and sunshine are the best medication, are they not?
It used to be blackface. Now it is black ink on the scores of documents that the Prime Minister seeks to hide from Parliament, from the authorities and from Canadians. Every time the Liberals and their cronies get caught breaking the rules, they cover it up and refuse to tell Canadians the truth. Here we go again with another scandal, more Liberal cronyism and corruption, another cover-up, more blacked-out documents and more stonewalling.
What happened? The Liberals created a $1-billion slush fund for funding so-called green technology projects and programs. They appointed Liberal insiders to run the program, but instead of helping Canadians, we know they were busy helping themselves. Just as with ArriveCAN and their crony COVID spending, the Liberals were helping Liberals get rich off the backs of struggling Canadians.
Just as with ArriveCAN and SNC-Lavalin, the RCMP is investigating corruption in the government. True to form, as with previous investigations, the Liberals are blocking the RCMP from getting the documents it needs to determine who in the government broke the law.
Like the Prime Minister and five of his ministers before, the Liberals' hand-picked chair of the Liberals' billion-dollar green slush fund, Annette Verschuren, broke the law. Canada's Ethics Commissioner has ruled that she violated subsection 6(1) and section 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act, finding that her actions “furthered her private interests”. To make matters worse, the Minister of Industry was warned of Verschuren's glaring conflict of interest but allowed her to keep her position until she was forced to resign. She only did this after being exposed for wasting Canadian taxpayers' dollars on projects that benefited her financially.
On top of this, the Auditor General found that over $330 million in taxpayer money was paid out in 186 cases where there was a conflict of interest, with Liberal-appointed directors funnelling money to companies they owned, including Verschuren's. There was $59 million given to ineligible projects that never should have been awarded any money at all. This is no small scandal. This is a big deal.
When this came to light, the Conservatives took action. Our job is to hold the government accountable, and that is what we are seeking to do with this privilege motion and this debate.
Back in June, all parties, with the exception of the Liberals, voted in favour of a motion requiring the government to produce documents related to the mass corruption at Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It should be noted that the Liberals do not deny any of these allegations, and that makes this so much worse. It actually admits to the wrongdoing, but it is still engaging in a cover-up. The House, the majority of the members of Parliament, who are the people's democratically elected representatives, demanded on behalf of Canadians that these documents be turned over. Rather than comply, the government handed over redacted documents, or in some cases, refused to produce documents entirely.
The rules of parliamentary privilege are clear: The House has the authority, with its very broad powers, to request whatever documents it wants. It is up to the House to determine if those requests have been met to its satisfaction. The House has determined that they have not, so we sit here, day after day, asserting the moral right of the House on behalf of the Canadians who sent us here, including those who sent the government here and whom the government has abandoned. They are the Canadians whose money and trust it has treated with such carelessness and disdain. We demand answers, and we demand accountability.
Another scandal, which is criminal in nature, is the $400 million in conflicts of interest. There we have the same model, with the same players and refrains of denial and distraction from the government benches. It is just sad. The saddest part of all is that we will probably be here again. I am not sure if it will be the $10-billion conflict of interest they are setting up with Mark Carney, or on a much smaller scale, maybe the real Randy will finally stand up. Maybe the Prime Minister will finally tell us the truth about China. I do not know. What I do know is that, as long as the Liberals are in power, we will be back here again soon, doing something very similar to what we are doing right now.
The latest scandal has paralyzed the House of Commons from being able to deal with the issues that families are facing in Canada, including right here in Ottawa, like the cost of living, food inflation and the crime and chaos that are rampant in our streets. We know that everything is up. My constituents in Provencher know it. They talk to me about how their taxes are up. They talk to me about how the costs of everything they have to buy are up. They talk to me about how crime is up, especially rural crime. Then they add on, “And I think the Liberals' time is up, too.” I cannot disagree with them. I also think the Liberals have exceeded their shelf life and their best-before date has come and gone, if there ever even was one.
As a result of the Liberals' entitled attitude towards accountability, we have crime and chaos in government. It is not so much the gravity of what they have done as much as the artlessness and the utter brazenness, along with the regularity of and the apathy towards their misdeeds, that has even the most jaded Canadians scratching their heads in disbelief. What started as a simple flouting of ethics rules for the Prime Minister with his taxpayer-funded vacation to a lobbyist's private island, for which he received the dubious distinction of being the only sitting prime minister in Canadian history to be found guilty of violating ethics laws, quickly unfolded into a pattern of cronyism, corruption, cover-ups and ethical violations for the Prime Minister, his ministers and others in government. That is unprecedented in the history of Canadian politics.
There is a saying, and I read it again just recently, that anyone who can be trusted with a little, will be trusted with a lot. We have seen that over and over again in the Liberal government. We want to trust it because we, as members of Parliament, know how important trust is. We expect our constituents to place their trust in us to bring their cares and concerns to Parliament, to vigorously debate, to defend them and their rights, and to uphold the integrity of this place. We do that day after day. Our constituents expect that of us. We know that the trust they have in us is not something that we can take for granted because trust can be broken. When trust is broken, it is very difficult to repair. If we can be trusted in the little things, these big things that we are talking about would not even be an issue because we know that trust would carry on, even for the big things.
We know that after nine years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost, not worth the crime and not worth the corruption. Only common-sense Conservatives are standing up for Canadian families, and only Conservatives would end the Liberal culture of cronyism, cover-up and corruption. The Liberals must end their cover-up and hand over the documents to the RCMP so that Parliament can get back to working for the Canadians who sent us here.