Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour and pleasure to rise on behalf of the good people of Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry, whether they be in SDG, Cornwall or Akwesasne to give a summary of what their views are. I will take about 116,000 people’s views and summarize them all in the next 15 or 20 minutes. I tried to get a pretty good pulse of the community. There has certainly been a lot of discussion about the legislation before us, with the Liberals looking to give themselves a majority on committees. How they got that majority has been the talk of the town in my part of eastern Ontario, to say the least, particularly in the last couple of weeks. I like to say I get my meals and miles in here around SDG on the weekends, going to different community events. Last Saturday, I was at King George Restaurant with a local resident having breakfast, talking and getting his feedback on some issues of the day. People at two separate tables asked me specifically what is going on with the floor crossings and how it is allowed to happen that the Liberals are going to give themselves a majority simply through floor crossings. This past weekend, I was in South Lancaster at a breakfast supporting the Guelph Medical Brigades and at some business openings and celebrations in Morrisburg and Winchester. I got a lot of feedback at the North Dundas Local Business Expo. Then, of course, I was at the Glengarry Agricultural Hall of Fame in Maxwell. I name-drop all of those places to show that there was a wide diversity of places I had the chance to go to this past Saturday alone. The feedback to me several times was concern about these recent floor crossings and how the Liberals have obtained their majority. People are dismayed by this. If I put to use my political science degree from Carleton going back a couple of years now, never in Canadian history have we seen this happen before. Just a year ago, the Prime Minister was given a minority government mandate. The Liberals were not given a majority but a minority mandate, meaning that they had to work with other opposition parties to pass legislation. At committee, they would not have a majority of seats, but, rather, a minority of seats. For the scrutiny of government legislation, the production of documents and efforts by the opposition party to hold the government to account, we were given key tools to do exactly that. I want to be very clear with Canadians. It was not the recent three by-elections that gave the Liberals their majority. The seats for University—Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest and Terrebonne in Quebec were already Liberal-held seats, and they remain Liberal seats. Whether it was one vote, 1,000 votes, 2,000 votes or 12 votes, the point is those three seats were Liberal seats and they remain Liberal seats. The only reason the Liberals are able to bring forward changes to the Standing Orders in Government Orders is because of floor crossings. Constituents and Canadians did not have a say in this. Canadians gave Liberals a minority government, in which they would have to work with opposition parties and the opposition would have key tools, including at committee, to hold them to account. Never before in Canadian history has a Prime Minister made a backroom deal by getting floor crossers to take them to a majority government. We talk about distrust in our institution and the frustration of Canadians at the ballot box. There are tens of thousands of people who voted Conservative and, in one case, voted NDP who, through no say of their own, but only after the fact, had members cross the floor, making their own selfish decision to do so. It has dismayed voters and taken away the valid votes of tens of thousands of people in the election that was held just a year ago. I will speak to those on the Conservative side who crossed the floor. Let me make it very clear that they ran under the Conservative leader, the Conservative platform and the Conservative plan. They knew exactly what that was and had no problem being on the ballot. They should remain in that case and maintain their word on that, but I will not say too much more on that. What is important about the legislation before us now, the changes to the Standing Orders, is committee composition. The Liberals now want to go from having a minority on the committee to adding two members from their side to give themselves a majority on every single committee. It is absolutely shameful. They argue that it is to advance their agenda. This is what they say, but here is the problem and here is the thing. If it is a budget bill that comes forward, it would go to the finance committee. If there is a bill on elections and we have amendments to the Election Act, that is going to go through to the House and procedural affairs committee, PROC. If it is a crime bill, it goes to the justice and public safety committee. If it is on natural resources, it goes to the natural resources committee. The transport committee looks after any bills that deal with transport, and so on and so forth. There are three things that show us how obsessed they are with taking complete control and squandering an opportunity for the opposition to have leverage to get documents, to get answers, to get ministers to appear at committee and to hold the government to account. They are not only taking majority stakes in those committees that I mentioned, such as finance, House and procedural affairs, natural resources and transport, but also taking majorities in our three oversight committees. Let us be very clear about those oversight committees. We have an amendment on the books that we are hoping the Liberals will agree to. It does not sound like they are going to because they, again, are absolutely determined to have complete control with 50.8% of the seats. They are going to have a much bigger sway, as they are going to take about 58%, as my colleagues have just mentioned, of the seats at the committee table. They are going to take over these oversight committees. None of these three oversight committees, be it public accounts, government operations, or the ethics committee, deal with government legislation. They are oversight committees that hold the government to account. They are chaired by opposition members. The public accounts committee goes through and scrutinizes line by line the government’s spending. I spent some time on that committee in the last Parliament. One of the best parts was that it reviews the Auditor General reports. A very key part of the work of parliamentarians is to look at the independent Auditor General, see what they are saying about government audits, services and programs, and make suggestions and improvements to the way the government operates programs. This also gives the opposition an opportunity to highlight the shortcomings of the government. The government operations committee obviously looks after the operations and studies the operations of the government, as well as the financing, the spending and the plans going forward for that. Of course, it is one of the most important committees we have here, and it is a very busy committee because of the Liberal government we have in office. The ethics committee is tasked with eroding and eliminating corruption in government. That is a tall order for those parliamentarians on that committee. What we are saying through our reasonable amendment is that we should look to keep the structure as is for the three oversight committees. They do not pass legislation. They will not be blocking any legislation that goes through. They are pure oversight. They are key tools for opposition. They are key tools for accountability, and they are key tools for holding the government to account. We are going to keep the government doing exactly that. We are going to try our best with the tools we have, but we need as many tools as we can get, and we need the tools Canadians sent us here with in this Parliament, electing a minority government where the Liberals do not have full reign. This is important because they will filibuster until no end to block themselves from having accountability on a wide variety of topics. We need to look back no further than the last time they had a majority. They got a majority through the ballot box, not like we are seeing this time, with them getting it through floor crossings. We can take a look back at the WE Charity scandal. We can take a look back at the SNC-Lavalin affair, which was one of the ones I remember at the justice committee. Particularly, SNC-Lavalin was during the last majority government. It was a significant issue of corruption. It was a major political issue, and the Liberals did all they could at the justice committee to dither, delay and filibuster Canadians getting information and parliamentarians, particularly opposition members, getting access to testimony from relevant ministers who were involved and key documents that were involved. Canadians know what the end result of that has been. Majority or minority, it is always difficult to get answers out of the Liberal government because, if we look at the WE Charity scandal, that was the $912‑million contract that was given to Liberal friends, where former prime minister Trudeau and his family were given paid speaking engagements by that organization, which is a massive conflict of interest. The WE Charity scandal was blocked time and time again, filibustered endlessly, but it was a minority government that we tried to hold to account as best we could. We need as much accountability, scrutiny and transparency as we can possibly get when it comes to the Liberal government. Think of the arrive scam app, which was discovered through parliamentary committee. In a minority setting, we were able to force through the production of documents, getting key testimony and understanding the massive abuse of taxpayers’ money under the Liberals’ watch. An app and a program that was supposed to cost $80,000, and we were told could have been done over the course of a weekend, ended up ballooning over to $60 million. The more we dug on GC Strategies, despite the Liberals’ attempts to block and swerve away and try to avoid the issue, it was in the minority setting that we were able to go and get answers and testimony from GC Strategies. We learned it did little to no work on many of the invoices it submitted, and it was an absolute scandal, which is the nicest thing I could say about that. In the scandal of the Winnipeg lab documents during COVID, the access to those documents was blocked and stonewalled. The House of Commons had to take the Liberal government to court, if we recall, to get access to those documents. The Liberals stubbornly delayed on that effort. In the last Parliament, again, if those scandals did not add up to be enough, we cannot forget the green slush fund and the $300 million given. Liberal insiders were appointed to the board. In an almost incestuous environment, board members were approving their own applications to the tune of tens of millions of dollars collectively given to each other and there were conflicts of interest galore. If not for the tools that we were given in the minority setting to uncover this corruption, I worry that Canadians would not have gotten the answers they needed in those situations. That is why it is absolutely essential that we do what we can, and we are going to fight to keep these committees as Canadians elected them, in a minority setting. Do not let a few floor crossers give a majority and steal the accountability that we need. We need to keep the committee structure as is because of what is going to be forthcoming in investigating Liberal scandals. Let us look only at the last couple of weeks, where we need more answers on Liberal spending. The $300-million PrescribeIT program was software that was supposed to eliminate fax prescriptions across the country. The Liberals spent $300 million of taxpayers’ money before quietly attempting to throw the program away into the garbage, not to be used at all. Who made the decision to spend $300 million? Who got the money? How was this allowed to balloon to the cost that it did? Even after the Liberals renewed funding, it was a failed program and they still dumped tens of millions of dollars into it. Right there are 300 million reasons for why we need to have the proper parliamentary committee scrutiny to get to the bottom of this on the oversight committees and the others that are studying it. Of course, there is the other news. If $300 million of wasted money uncovered in the last couple of weeks was not enough, there is another $200 million in a recent deal signed for the Maritime Launch Services: $20 million per year over the next 10 years for a launch pad in rural Nova Scotia. The more we learn about this, the more it stinks. A former Liberal Nova Scotia premier is on the board and Liberal insiders were leading the effort to get this contract. Whenever members go out and take a look at this, it is a gravel pit with a concrete pad and a couple of sea cans that is getting paid $20 million per year to operate. Whenever questions are asked, there is nothing but stonewalling from the government. In the last couple of weeks alone, there is half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money with a lot of questions swirling around. Who got the money? Who made the decisions for these wasteful boondoggles? What are we going to do, in some cases, if we can get taxpayers’ money back? How can we ensure that this does not continue to happen in our country? That is why the Liberals do not deserve the majority on committees. It is why they deserve the utmost scrutiny. That is why Conservatives are going to keep fighting day in and day out to get the accountability that Canadians deserve and to ensure good use of taxpayers’ money. It is going to take all the resources we can get in the House of Commons. That is why I do not support the efforts to change the Standing Orders the way the Liberals are doing it. The Liberals deserve more accountability, more transparency and more scrutiny, not less, when they try to take a majority in the committees.
