Madam Speaker, I would be happy to answer questions at the end of my speech.
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: When will that be?
Hon. Andrew Scheer: Madam Speaker, we will get there.
We wanted to get to the bottom of that. I held the role of Speaker. I cannot imagine something like that happening by any other prime minister I have ever served with or come to know over the years, except for this one. He did not like it when the democratically elected representatives of the people demanded to get to the bottom of a scandal that impacted every single Canadian. If it is related to public health, it impacts us. Our national security impacts every single Canadian. We have the right to come to this place and demand those types of answers.
Every political party agreed, and it takes a lot to unite opposition parties in this chamber. We are fundamentally different than the Bloc Québécois.
We believe in a united Canada, in our history and our future. There are a lot of areas of concern on which no common ground has been found with the Bloc Québécois.
The New Democrats and the Conservatives disagree on a whole lot of things. We believe in free markets and individual liberty. The NDP believes in central planning and government control. Therefore, when we have something that units the Conservatives, the Bloc and the New Democrats, and we all come together to we demand accountability and transparency, it means something. That is significant.
Providing Canadians with openness and transparency is the disinfectant that the Prime Minister used to like to talk about. We do not hear him say that a lot. He used to like saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant, and many Canadians took him at his word, but we do not hear him say that too often now. He has drawn the blinds, closed the drapes and gone into the darkest corners of the house to avoid that openness and transparency.
Therefore, rather than having that long-drawn-out court fight, as he started to feel the political pain from suing the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Prime Minister called an election. Do members know what happens to government legislation when they call an election? It kills it all. Here we are today, halfway through November, and now the government has suddenly realized that it has a time issue on its hands. It wants to get more and more of its agenda rammed through, so that is the motivation behind this move.
There is one other piece when it comes to motivation that we must make sure that Canadians are aware of and that is the real reason behind this move. Something has been going on since September that the government really does not enjoy and that is what is happening at committees.
At committees, the opposition parties have developed a working relationship where we can expose Liberal corruption and mismanagement. That is very unpleasant for the government because at committee we have been getting to the bottom of these kinds of scandals. At committee, we have found out that the government spent $54 million on an app that experts say could have been done for $250,000 over the course of a weekend.
When we found out who got paid, the companies the government had on that itemized list, we did what many people would do. We called the companies to ask if they had been paid for the work. Some of those companies are saying they never did the work and they never got paid, yet the government put their name on a list to try to justify the spending. We are finding that out at committee and the Liberals do not like it.
We are finding at committee some of the information as it relates to some of these scandals that I have already mentioned, with Winnipeg labs being one of them. The point is that at committee, members of Parliament are drawing out and exposing Liberal corruption and that scandal.
How does work at committees relate to this motion today? As members know, the House of Commons gets first dibs on parliamentary resources. Therefore, when the House of Commons sits late, translators and IT workers have to serve the House of Commons. This is the primary chamber of Canada's parliamentary democracy, and when they extend hours they take resources away from committees. That is what this is actually all about: killing accountability by stealth and using this bogus excuse of time management as a rationale for diverting resources away from committee.
Members do not need to take my word for it. The best indication of future behaviour is past behaviour, and there were outcomes of a motion similar to that we are debating here today. For a bit of context, the government did this back in May of last year. It brought forward a very similar motion.
I will read a headline from the Hill Times. It said, “Stretched thin: Resources to support committees strained amid virtual format, late-night sittings”. The article continued, “A total of 13 parliamentary committee meetings were cancelled last week, with MPs citing limited support resources as the main cause.”
The last time they moved this same motion it had a direct and devastating impact on the ability of committees to get to the bottom of Liberal corruption and Liberal scandals. That is what this is actually about, using this type of excuse to draw resources away from where the Liberals do not control the agenda to where they do.
In the House the government gets to set the agenda and it gets to call government business. Other than on opposition days, the government gets to tell members of Parliament, every day, what we debate. If we would like to debate something else, we have to wait until one of our precious few days to do it. We cannot propose government legislation. We are not the government.
The government controls all of that here, but it does not control it at committees. Committees are masters of their own domain. Even though the government would like the ethics committee and the public accounts committee to just rubber stamp all its decisions, hard-working Conservative MPs are using those valuable resources and those opportunities to expose the Liberal corruption and the mismanagement. That is why the Liberals are bringing forward this motion today.
Again, rigging the rules of the parliamentary calendar would be like in a sports contest. If one team was worried that they might not get to score enough points, then they unilaterally decide that when they had the ball the clock would not run. The Grey Cup is coming up in Regina, and I hope the Speaker is able to make it out. It is going to be a fantastic—
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: Go, Bombers.
Hon. Andrew Scheer: I could put up with all the other heckling, Mr. Speaker, but when the member for Winnipeg North says, “Go, Bombers”, I have to react to that and ask if that is parliamentary. I am pretty sure that should get him ejected from the chamber.
In a football context, imagine if the Bombers got the ball and they tried to unilaterally tell the referees they were not going to run the clock while they had the ball. It would not be fair. It is not part of the game. It is not part of how the dynamic works.
To have a situation mid-session where, all of a sudden, the Liberals were going to rig the clock, rig the calendar, to help them ram through more of their legislation, hoping to exhaust Conservative MPs from using our time in the House to make these points. It is not just about time, when the government counts the number of hours or days when the debate is actually going on. That is just part of the picture. We can think of many examples where, thanks to the debate taking some time, flaws in the bills were exposed. I can think of the medical assistance in dying bill that the chamber has debated in several Parliaments now.
I can appreciate the goodwill from members on all sides to try to get aspects of that right, and to put in proper protections for vulnerable Canadians. It was because it took time to go through that many people expressed their concerns and identified flaws in the legislation, saying that vulnerable Canadians, people with mental health issues, young Canadians and our veterans would be more susceptible. They may fall through the cracks and may have this type of medical action taken, maybe without their full consent or by catching them at a vulnerable time.
Conservatives used that time to help expose it and inform Canadians. As a result, we saw many disability groups and other types of groups become more engaged and ultimately try to make the bill better when it did get to committee.
There are lots of examples I could run through. Thanks to the fact that we had more time in the House, not just time in terms of hours of the day or number of speeches given, but literally days off the calendar, it gave those industry groups, stakeholder groups and people affected by the legislation more time to run through the bill and inform their members of Parliament. Therefore, before the bill even came to committee there was already a plan in place to try to fix the deficiencies.
Right now we have Bill C-11 in the Senate. It is a massive expansion of the government's power to regulate the Internet and control what Canadians could see and say online. If the government had had its way, it would have sailed through all stages and it would have been law by now. However, it was because we took extra time to debate it that more Canadians realized that this would have a massive negative impact on Canadians' abilities to express themselves freely. We were able to hear from content creators, who are very famous people with their own YouTube followings and social media presences. They talked to individual MPs and said that, as Canadian content creators, Bill C-11 would have a negative impact on them. They did that because we gave them that time to do so.
Rather than seeing the number of days as a problem, the government should see it as an opportunity and welcome it. What the government does has an impact on every single Canadian and I, for one, hope that it would want to get that right. That goal is actually good government not just Liberal priorities being passed.
If it should come to light that there is a flaw in a bill or unintended consequences, it should welcome that the same way that a small business owner does who hears from one of their staff that the way they operate is making them lose money or annoying customers. A good small business owner wants to hear that. Any business owner wants to hear that. I want to hear from my own family if there are certain things we do that have a negative impact on one of my kids or my spouse. We want to hear that. We want to have a good family environment, and business owners want to have successful operations with happy employees and happy customers. We should welcome that.
When Conservatives say they want another day of debate or we want to talk about this a little bit longer, the government should say that is great and it wants to hear what we have to say and the constructive feedback. The government House leader spoke at great length about this type of thing, encouraging conversations, encouraging feedback and critiques and admitting that the government does not get it right all the time. That is why it is so hypocritical to hear a House leader talk about all this context while he is putting through a motion that is going to assist the government to ram through its agenda at an even greater pace. That is why Conservatives are opposed to this piece of legislation.
We are in favour of good government, we are in favour of good legislation and we will do our part. The government continuously ignores the feedback from Canadians. When Canadians are saying they do not want record-high inflation and to stop the printing presses, stop the deficit spending and stop borrowing money to throw it into an economy that drives up prices, it is not listening. We have to be that voice. It is our constitutional role to do that. We actually have a moral obligation as the official opposition to do that. We are not going to be cowardly or apologetic just because the government is frustrated with its timelines.
To close, it is so difficult to hear a Liberal member of Parliament, the government House leader, talk about cultivating a climate of respect and talk about cordial and constructive conversations when his leader, the Liberal Prime Minister, speaks with such contempt for anybody who disagrees with him, pitting Canadian against Canadian and dividing us.
Remember the government's reaction during the pandemic when many Canadians wanted to make their own health care choices and make their own determination for themselves as to what medicines they put in their body? The reaction from the government was that it forced people to choose between keeping their jobs and taking a medical treatment that they may not have been comfortable with. That does not sound very constructive or respectful to me.
Then the Prime Minister openly asked if they should even tolerate these people. That is the type of language we hear horrible dictators use against segments of their population that they would rather do without. We saw the contempt that he had for those who came to Ottawa to fight for their freedoms. He invoked an Emergencies Act that had never been used in Canadian history. By the way, now it is coming out how flimsy the excuse was for doing that, as police entity after police entity, from the Ottawa police to the Ontario Provincial Police are all saying that they did not ask for it and that existing laws were sufficient to do the work that they were asked to do. We have a Prime Minister who insults, demonizes and bullies.
The government House leader talked about the impact that type of toxic environment has had on its own family, yet he sits in a caucus where many members on this side witnessed the Prime Minister get up out of his seat, walk over and bully a former Black female member of Parliament who was forced to leave politics. She said that one of the reasons she was leaving politics when she did was the personal treatment that the Prime Minister inflicted upon her.
The Prime Minister fired the first female indigenous justice minister. What did he fire her for? She would not go along with his corruption. She had the audacity to stand in her place and say no. As the former minister of justice and the attorney general, she had a higher obligation to the law than to her political master. He fired her.
The government House leader has no problem sitting beside the Prime Minister and supporting the Prime Minister in all he does. It is a bit rich. The reason the opposition party does not put a lot of stock in his words is that he is clearly quite comfortable with the toxic behaviour that his own Liberal leader has put his own colleagues through.
Since it is a massive undermining of a very important check on the government's ability to ram through its agenda, because of the hypocrisy of a government that has so mismanaged its own timetable and its own calendar and because of the direct impact that this motion would have on committees, Conservatives cannot support this motion.
Since we are hopeful that some of what the government House leader said may have been sincere, we are hoping that they may support an amendment to specifically protect the very important work that committees are doing.
I move:
That the motion be amended, in paragraph (a), by replacing the words “and that such a request shall be deemed adopted” with the words “and, provided that if the Clerk of the House personally guarantees that there would be no consequential cancellation or reduction of the regularly scheduled committee meeting resources for that day, the request shall be deemed adopted”.