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Results: 271 - 279 of 279
View Colin Carrie Profile
CPC (ON)
View Colin Carrie Profile
2020-10-20 11:29 [p.953]
Mr. Speaker, I think the leader of the Bloc Québécois is bang on. In Quebec there is a long memory. We all remember the sponsorship scandal and this idea of kickbacks, where favoured companies and favoured individuals seemed able to funnel money back either to individual Liberals or to the organization. It is an extremely dangerous situation right now. It is almost as if history is repeating itself.
Why is it so important that we move forward with this committee so that Parliament can get on with the business that Canadians would like to see parliamentarians do? Does he think this is a reason to have an election, or is it important that we get our work done?
View Yves-François Blanchet Profile
BQ (QC)
Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my esteemed colleague.
I will start with the last question.
We are in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a second wave that may be followed by a third, and we are not sure what is coming after that. This is obviously not the best time to trigger an election.
I heard the bombastic but occasionally likeable leader of the government say that I wanted to trigger an election. No. We wanted to defend our position and condemn a throne speech that was an insult to Quebec for a thousand and one good reasons, rather than condone it by voting for it. This is not the best time, but the question is always the same: Which is the lesser of two evils? Is it better to allow His Majesty the Prime Minister to do whatever he wants, however he wants and whenever he wants, to the detriment and at the expense of Quebeckers and Canadians, or is it better to say that he needs to be taught a lesson?
That is the fundamental question. If management improves afterwards, and if, supposing he is re-elected, someone is there to give him a rap on the knuckles and tell him that he can be replaced, that might not be a bad thing.
We need to examine the fundamental issues. On the issue of elections, I must say that I would prefer not to have one, but we may have no choice.
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
View Charlie Angus Profile
2020-10-20 11:38 [p.955]
Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to be here to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay.
We are currently in the midst of an unprecedented economic and health crisis. The pandemic has disrupted our economy. This morning, the Liberal government declared its intent to plunge Canada into an election to avoid questions about the WE Charity scandal and the Prime Minister's family. That is not acceptable. The government must stop shutting down committees and start collaborating with the other parties to explain the WE Charity scandal to Canadians. That is why I am here.
I would like to read a quote:
It has come to this, Mr. Speaker. In order for members of the House to do our jobs and make informed decisions...we need to pry scraps of relevant information out of the Conservatives' clenched fists and drag it out of them as they kick and scream at committee.
Who said that? It was our Prime Minister, in 2011. Remember that man? That man was open by default. He was the man who told the Canadian people that his would be the government of transparency. That was around the time the Prime Minister was the youth critic for the Liberal Party. He fessed up that while he was the youth critic, he had a side gig of charging massive amounts of money to speak to young people for his private business.
It was fascinating when the Prime Minister had to explain how much money he was making running his side business while acting as a member of Parliament. He listed about 28 public speaking events. I thought it was pretty extraordinary to get paid $10,000 to talk to young people when every member of the House does it for free because we believe it is our job. However, we found out yesterday in the release of documents that, no, our Prime Minister did not speak 28 times and get paid for it; it was more like 128 times. We just found that out yesterday because the government was forced to turn over documents.
We are here because of a series of decisions, made at the cabinet level by senior Liberal politicians, that threw off so much of the good work and goodwill in the first wave of the pandemic. I remember those first frightening days in March, when we did not know what was happening and our offices were dealing with Canadians who were trapped all over the world trying to get home. We were trying to answer questions on COVID, and every morning our Prime Minister stood out in front of his house and reassured the Canadian people. Every morning in my home we stopped what we were doing to listen to our Prime Minister speak. I was so proud that in Canada we were showing a unity of spirit.
I remember the press conference on April 8, when the Prime Minister responded to pressure that the New Democrats had been putting on him to deal with the crisis facing university students. Post-secondary students are not only facing massive levels of student debt from years of Liberal and Conservative indifference. They also have huge loans because of the fees they have to pay for university. They knew they had no work coming up this summer, so the ability of post-secondary students to continue their studies was a serious issue.
We heard from some Conservative media people too. They wondered: Are we going to pay students so they can sit in a hammock and smoke pot all summer? What disrespect for students, who are coming out of university with $50,000 or $100,000 of debt.
We pushed the Prime Minister for action, and on April 8 he said very clearly that he would have a plan to help university students. It was a promise, and we are going to get into what happened between April 8 and April 22, when the Prime Minister and his team decided that instead of helping university students across Canada, they would help their friends the Kielburgers. I say this because when the scandal broke and it became clear that the money that should have gone to help university students was being diverted to a group that had close financial ties to the Prime Minister's family, Canadians from coast to coast balked.
What did the Prime Minister do? He pulled that money. None of that money ever flowed. He took that money away from university students, who deserve better.
What we are being told today, after the Liberals prorogued and shut down our committees, after two weeks of blocking our work at the ethics and finance committees, is that the Liberals are ready to plunge this nation into an election. We are in the worst medical and economic crisis in a century. The second wave of this pandemic is already much more serious than the first. We have much more insecurity economically right now, yet this Prime Minister is willing to plunge the nation into the uncertainty of an election when we know that the vectors for the virus could easily be magnified a thousand times by polling and people going door to door, and having to do the jobs of a democratic election, but also leaving Canada without any leadership for the coming three months.
Why is that? It is to avoid giving answers about the WE scandal.
We are here this morning because the Conservatives put their offer on the table. We had gone to the government and said that we needed to get focused. The government cannot continue to avoid questions on the WE scandal and the misspending that happened, and we need to get answers. We cannot have our committees prorogued. We cannot have them filibustered. We asked, in good faith, to set up a committee where we could deal with this so that the finance committee could do its work, House procedures could do its work and ethics could do its work. Boy oh boy, I would love to be sitting at the ethics committee and looking at issues like the importance of getting legislation on facial recognition technology.
We reached out to the Liberals and said, “Let us get a committee in place.” The Liberals said they would get us a committee. It would be chaired by Liberals and dominated by Liberals. The Liberals would then get to do what they do at all the other committees they do not like: They would just monkey-wrench them and shut them down. That is not going to work.
Now the Conservatives have come forward with their anti-corruption motion. As always with the Conservatives, they cannot just come forward with a motion that is something that will pass the nod test with Canadians. Not only was it called the anti-corruption motion, and now they are having to walk that back, but the Conservatives had to start naming a bunch of people who have never actually been charged with corruption. Frank Baylis, a former member of Parliament, sat on the ethics committee with me. I know Frank. I do not know anything about Frank's business, and I do not know if Frank has done anything corrupt. That is something to be found out. However, I find it very uncomfortable when I see people's names being thrown around just because they happen to be Liberals. We can do better than that. The Conservatives have a motion on the table, and it is a very serious motion. We need to get this work done.
Of course, there is actually a third option, which the New Democrats have put forward. It is trying to get, between these two old-line parties, a sense of responsibility in the middle of a pandemic: that we have a committee that has the ability to call for documents. That is unlike the House leader, who said that calling for documents would put thousands of civil servants at risk in the middle of a pandemic. Wow. I have heard a lot of whoppers over the years in the House of Commons, but that is going to rank up there in my top 10 favourites: the right of parliamentarians to get documents is somehow putting not hundreds, but thousands, at risk. We are saying no: that another committee, if it is struck, has the right to get documents.
We agree that perhaps the Conservatives demanding that all the documents be turned over in 12 hours, or 15 or 20, is kind of ridiculous. A committee can decide what is reasonable. We also said that given the fact that we saw, under SNC-Lavalin, how the Liberal chair did such an extraordinary job of shutting it down and squashing it, we cannot trust a Liberal chair.
Now I can see that the Conservatives are very wary of our friend from Carleton who keeps taking over the chair at his own committee. They probably do not want that either. Therefore, let us have an opposition chair and let us vote on it. Let us vote on someone who all parties can agree would be a good, solid opposition chair. That way we would know that we could get the job done. That is about working together. That is the offer that is on the table.
In terms of the documents, we have made a number of suggestions. For example, at the ethics committee I put a motion of an amendment to my hon. colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes. We said we understand the Prime Minister has drawn a line in the sand about his family, and the fact that the WE group was paying Margaret and Sacha Trudeau.
We know they got paid. There is no surprise there. We were told they were not paid. That was false. The WE group asked the Kielburgers if the Trudeau family was being paid and was told they were not being paid. We have to ask ourselves what was going on at WE Charity that the board of directors tried to find out whether Margaret and Sacha were being paid and was falsely told they were not being paid. We went from being told they were not being paid anything to being told they were paid an extraordinary amount of money. That is a key issue in terms of the overall question of the conflict of interest facing the Prime Minister, because my colleagues in the Liberal party have gone out of their way to try and read the Conflict of Interest Act to say that family members, such as a mother or brother, cannot be shown in any way under the laws of Canada to be relatives. That is quite the reading, because it is very clear in section 3, and the definitions of family and relatives, that they are relatives.
Why does that matter? Because under section 5 of the Conflict of Interest Act, it is up to the Prime Minister to keep his personal life in order so that he is not put into a conflict of interest.
I invite my colleagues to read the Trudeau 1 report. It was the family members' relations with the Aga Khan, not the Prime Minister's, that resulted in the Prime Minister being found guilty. The Prime Minister's familial connections to WE are very important.
Does this mean the Prime Minister knew what the family was making? I do not think so. I do not think we can make that leap, but what we could say is there is a very strong prima facie case that, once the Prime Minister became the Prime Minister of this nation, the WE group was extremely adept at insinuating itself within the Liberal ranks by hiring the mother and hiring the brother. The Kielburgers told us they were not being paid to do public speaking: they were being paid to do corporate events, which they call ancillary events. That is a serious issue, in the same way as the Kielburger group insinuated itself by inviting all kinds of key Liberal cabinet ministers to participate, and when the WE group was in trouble it called those same people who had spoken at its WE events and got the all-access pass.
Having said that, we know Margaret Trudeau and Sacha Trudeau were paid. To me, that is not the hill to die on. The government has released a whole bunch of documents about the payments already. We have that. Whether they got paid 27 times or 28 times is not relevant to me. What is relevant is the issue of lobbying, so let us put that aside. We said that at ethics. We were more than willing to say at ethics not to deal with the family, but with the Prime Minister. Then the Liberals talked the clock out, so I really do not know what their strategy is half the time, because we could have gotten this motion through.
The issue of documents is really important. My colleagues in the Conservatives are demanding documents and saying they do not have enough documents. We have 5,000 pages of documents. Our friend from Carleton came in, threw them all over the room and walked out. Five thousand pages of documents was so much that the Conservatives set up a website and asked the public to do crowdsourced reading of the documents for them.
How serious are the Conservatives? Either we are going to read these documents and take them seriously or we are not.
While the Conservatives threw the documents all over and stomped out and then asked for public help reading the documents, we sat down and read the documents. Those documents raised very serious questions, because they clearly contradicted the government line, where it threw the civil service under the bus time and time again. It is still throwing the civil service under the bus. It is trying to claim that it was the idea of the civil service: the non-partisan, professional civil service. The Minister of Youth said 23 times, in one hour at hearing, that the professional, non-partisan civil service came up with the WE idea. The Liberals said it was the professional, non-partisan civil service that blacked out these documents. That is not true. This was done in the PMO.
What do the documents show us? They show that it was not the civil service that came forward with this idea. This happened at an April 17 meeting with the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, the Kielburgers and WE's director of government relations, Ms. Sofia Marquez.
WE is not registered to lobby, but it has a director of government relations. In fact, it had more meetings with government officials than General Motors did. That is pretty wild for two guys who present themselves as young idealists from Thornhill. They were so busy with government relations that, on top of their director of government relations, they were going to hire a manager for government relations, and none of that was registered under the Lobbying Act.
Why is that important? It is because the Lobbying Act allows us to see the key meetings that are being held. It allows us to see where the insiders are moving, but the Kielburger group were such total insiders that they did not bother to register to lobby, because they had the key ministers on speed dial.
They had the Minister for Diversity and Youth, who they had invited to come to one of their WE events, where she got to speak and was treated like royalty. When they were in financial free fall, they called her and had a special meeting on April 17. My Conservative colleague asked the minister at the finance committee, at our very first meeting on the WE scandal, if she had taken any meetings with anyone from WE prior to the decision by the government. She said that she never discussed the youth engagement proposal with anyone from WE. Naively, we thought she was telling the truth. We found out four days later she had held the April 17 meeting, so we brought her to the ethics committee and tried to get a straight answer. She said again that she never discussed the youth engagement proposal. That is because on April 17 the youth engagement proposal did not exist. It did not exist until April 22.
She said that she never talked about any of the issues around it, but that is not what we got from the documents from Craig Kielburger. That is not what we got from Sofia Marquez. Craig Kielburger wrote to the minister and said, “We appreciate your thoughtful offer to connect us with the relevant members of your ministry.... Over the weekend, our team has also been hard at work to adapt your suggestions for a second stream focused on a summer service opportunity.” That minister still has her seat at cabinet after the misrepresentation she made.
On the morning of April 19, two days after that meeting, Rachel Wernick, the civil servant we have been told came up with this idea and who has been blamed again and again by the Liberals, emailed Craig Kielburger for an urgent meeting because she had been told that this was the direction to go.
On April 20, senior policy officials in Bill Morneau's office were involved. There is a man who had one of the most powerful positions in the country. He never bothered to read the Conflict of Interest Act, and he wonders why he does not have a job today. I asked him if he had read the Conflict of Interest Act, as he had been found guilty, and he shrugged and said he was given a lot of documents. It is the failure of the Liberals to take the issue of conflict seriously that has gotten them into trouble.
We are here today as the Liberals have taken yet another step to avoid accountability. We have offered to work with them and have offered to lay out a committee, but this work will continue. This work will get done. If they obstruct us here, we will continue at the committees that we can control and in which we can use our leverage, because Canadians need an answer. What Canadians need, in terms of an answer, is better than the threat of the government to force an election for the Prime Minister to escape taking accountability.
View Blaine Calkins Profile
CPC (AB)
View Blaine Calkins Profile
2020-10-20 12:25 [p.961]
Madam Speaker, what a pleasure it is to be back in the House for regular sittings. It is the first time since, I believe, March 12, so I am glad to be back here speaking on behalf of my constituents in central Alberta and the riding of Red Deer—Lacombe.
I want to thank my colleague who just spoke for the excellent work he is doing in holding the Liberal government to account. He has a very busy job as the ethics critic for the Liberal government, which means he is the busiest man in Canada. I want to thank him very much for the fine work he is doing. I know my colleagues will join me in showing him some appreciation.
My constituents are very frustrated on a number of fronts. They are frustrated with the Liberal government's policy on energy. My riding is much like that of Sarnia, Ontario. There is a large petrochemical installation in my riding. It was one of the last holdouts of good paying jobs in central Alberta, which is now under attack by the Liberal government. Those jobs now seem to be in jeopardy.
More important, my constituents are frustrated with the amount of unaccountable spending by the government. Billions of dollars have been rushed out the door. I cannot remember the last time the House sat and passed an actual budget.
These are unprecedented times. We all know, going back in the history books to 1995 and the previous Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, that when money is being spent in a big rush under the guise of an urgent matter, such as the sponsorship scandal then, the Liberals cannot not help themselves when it came to lining their own pockets. The amount of money back then pales in comparison to the amount of money being spent today.
One only has to look at the reason for this motion today to have an anti-corruption committee because of the amount of money that has gone out, with virtually no accountability. First, we needed to shut down the House because of the pandemic. Now the Liberals are keeping Canadians and Parliamentarians in the dark, not because it suits the health care interests of the country but because it suits their design of holding onto power desperately, so desperately, in fact, that they are willing to cause an election that nobody actually wants. They are willing to throw down that gauntlet, force an election on the Canadian public during a pandemic just to cover up the fact that they do not want to talk anymore or have anymore information uncovered about this WE scandal.
Why is this important? It is important on a number of fronts. One is that we need to have trust and confidence in our institutions. The primary institution that Canadians need to have trust in is Parliament. If parliamentarians are not able to do their jobs, if we are not able to get the information we need at committee, if we are not able to have the correct information to make decisions and recommendations, then we are not able to do our jobs. We need that confidence and ability to get that information.
What have we seen so far? My colleague who just spoke said that we were in the third wave of Liberal corruption. I would suggest that we are in a wave pool. The waves just keep coming. The first one was cash for access, which was a very big deal. If people wanted to have influence with the government, all they had to do was go to a fundraiser. If it was a foreign government, all it had to do was to put a whole bunch of money into a foundation that happened to share the same last name as the Prime Minister and it could get what it wanted, so much so that the government had to change the rules. Because the Prime Minister was unable to follow his own rules, we had to change them so political entities could continue to do their business without the issue of cash for access or the perception of being able to buy one's way into the Liberal government's inner circle.
That was one of the first major issues the government had.
Then we had the trip to billionaire island, friends of the family. I remember that very well as the former chair of the ethics committee at the time. It was epic.
Four times, under four different counts, the Prime Minister is the very first prime minister in Canadian history to be charged under ethics laws.
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: Harper brought it in.
Mr. Blaine Calkins: Madam Speaker, my colleague said that Harper brought it in. Yes he did. He was wise. He knew that the Liberals would someday form government again and they could not help themselves, which is why we know about this. I thank Stephen Harper for that.
This was the beginning of the erosion of trust that Canadians have in the government. The Prime Minister broke the rules four times, but that alone was not enough.
Then we moved to the SNC-Lavalin affair, which is absolutely disturbing. I remember one of the low points in the last Parliament was the feeling of complete and utter disgust. The former attorney general, now an independent member of Parliament, an aboriginal woman with a good reputation who wanted to do the right thing, resisted at all measures and all counts the pressure she was put under by the public service doing the Prime Minister's bidding, by the Prime Minister himself, and by several in the Prime Minister's cabinet and their senior officials. This suggests that the Prime Minister was going to get his way, one way or another.
I guess that is pretty indicative of how this Prime Minister runs things, which is where we find ourselves today. He is going to get his way on this motion, one way or another. How someone does one thing is usually how they do all things, and we have seen this behaviour before. The Prime Minister has thrown down that gauntlet because he was going to get his way in SNC-Lavalin, and he is pretty sure he is going to get his way this time as well.
I am curious to see what the NDP will do when it comes time to vote. The New Democrats say that there are three options before the House, but the last time I checked we can vote yea or nay for a motion. Those are the only two options. I suppose they can abstain and run away, but we will see what the NDP does.
With the SNC-Lavalin affair, it was the first time in history that we had an eminently qualified woman of aboriginal descent, and she was absolutely treated like rubbish. She was cast out of not only her cabinet portfolio but also her caucus. Her reward was her voters in the last election, who sent a clear message, not only to the Liberal government but also to all parliamentarians, that the way we conduct ourselves and the way we comport ourselves matter. Ethics and integrity matter, which brings us to the present day and the WE scandal.
We know, because of the bits of information that we have been able to extract so far, that the government's message and narrative on this issue does not match the evidence we have. It does not match it at all. It is no coincidence whatsoever that the prorogation was timed immediately prior to the release of documents. By the way, the parliamentary law clerk was supposed to oversee the redaction according to the committee's request. However, because Parliament was prorogued, the government got to decide what was redacted in those documents. That is not a coincidence. That has cover-up written all over it. It is not the crime, but the cover-up that causes all the issues.
Instead of talking about the things that we ought to be talking about today, we, as the official opposition, find ourselves doing the work that is necessary to expose this corruption for Canadians, to get to the bottom of it and to send a message to Canadians that their tax dollars are going to be spent on the interests they have. Those dollars will not be spent on the interests of the Liberal Party, the Liberal Prime Minister or well-connected Liberal insiders, instead of being used to deal with other economic issues, health issues or first nations issues. There are all kinds of issues across this country. Many of them are manufactured, I would suggest, by the policies of the current government.
We should be talking about those issues, but there are 338 of us here in this House. There is not a problem at all with a dozen or so of us taking time out of our otherwise busy days and having one more committee to sit on to look into this corruption. Canadians deserve answers.
I am proud of our leader. I am proud of the team I am surrounded with here, and I am proud to stand up for all Canadians across this country to get to the bottom of this. I will be supporting this motion wholeheartedly.
View Mark Strahl Profile
CPC (BC)
View Mark Strahl Profile
2020-10-20 15:22 [p.989]
Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to address the House. It is also a pleasure to be back in Ottawa to participate in the debate, after being away for a few months in my riding, doing work on behalf of my constituents who had been impacted by COVID-19.
I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Lethbridge.
The day is developing in an interesting fashion. For anyone watching, this is a day that is specifically allotted to the official opposition to choose whatever matter it wishes to bring before the House for debate. The idea that this is somehow hijacking Parliament or that we somehow are not doing our jobs by bringing forward a matter that we consider to be of importance to Canadians is outrageous. We are doing our jobs. This is a day that the government provides to the opposition to bring forward a matter that it believes should be addressed by the House. Therefore, we will take no lessons.
Repeatedly today the Liberals have been saying to the Conservative opposition that we should do whatever they are doing. They want to know why we are not working with them to come up with programs that benefit Liberal-friendly firms. They want us to step aside and let them railroad all over Parliament. When the Liberals shut down Parliament and prorogued it for weeks, they wondered why we did not agree with them. Why do we not all become Liberal members of Parliament and just embrace the government's agenda? That is what the Liberals are asking us to do today.
We have been working with the government on COVID-related matters for months. In fact, I was part of a group that sat down with leadership from all parties to discuss how we would go forward and govern ourselves during this pandemic. In good faith, we allowed for Parliament to take a break because we did not know what the pandemic would bring.
What was the response from the Liberal government? After that act of good faith and after working together to put the safety and security of Canadians first, what did the Liberals do? They tried to jam a bill down our throats that would have removed the power of Parliament until December of 2021. That was the Liberal response to working together.
Forgive me if I do not just stop doing my job as a member of the opposition and give the government a blank cheque to do whatever it wants. We have seen what it will do with it. The Liberals are asking us to just work on COVID-related matters.
The WE Charity scandal was borne out of an attempt to rush money out the door and do it in a way that benefited a Liberal-friendly charity. Charities all over the country are suffering right now. Their donations are down. They do not know how they will make ends meet. The people who they serve are not getting the same level of support.
However, not all those charities have paid half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's family. Therefore, they did not get a half-a-billion program designed by themselves from the government.
The fact that the program has now been abandoned in its entirety tells us that it was a complete and total failure. If the government actually believed in the program, it would have stuck it out. It would have stuck with WE and continued down the road of a completely flawed program that did not serve the people it was intended to serve, but rather served people who had served the Liberal Party through the Prime Minister's family. It also produced some fantastic propaganda videos for the Prime Minister in the past and pumped his tires wherever it could. It was a Liberal-friendly charity that got Canadian taxpayer dollars. That is what we are talking about today.
The motion we are talking about today calls for the creation of a parliamentary committee so the Liberals will finally stop blocking the work of the finance committee, the ethics committee and now the health committee. Right now they are blocking any attempts to get work done at those committees. They have been talking non-stop for days to avoid votes coming to the floor at those committees.
Why would they do that unless they were afraid of what those motions call for? The motions call for the production of papers for documents that had previously been agreed to be released, before the Prime Minister shut down Parliament just days before those documents were set to be released. It was supposed to be for a historic reset. The Liberals needed time to get the brains around the table, as was said in QP today, to come up with a new plan that would launch Canada into the new reality that we would face in COVID-19, post-COVID-19 or a “living with COVID-19” world.
What did they do instead? It was just a rehash of things they have not delivered on over the last five years. There was no grand vision that was launched. There was no reset. It was just a rehash, a warming over of previous Liberal promises that have not been delivered on. Liberals prorogued Parliament to prevent those documents from coming forward. However, the Prime Minister said it was just temporary and that, when Parliament came back, if parliamentarians wished, they could ask for the information again. This was not shutting down investigations; it was just a little delay.
Of course now they have switched tactics and will not allow votes to come forward at those committees, which has prompted us to come forward with this motion.
What is the response to a motion to create a committee? The response is that before they let that happen there will be an election. That is what we are hearing today from the Prime Minister. He bragged about it today. The House leader was similarly threatening to plunge Canadians into an election over the creation of a committee and the release of documents that have been previously ordered released.
These are the reasons the government is giving for threatening an election. What the Liberals are really doing is threatening members of Parliament. They are threatening members of Parliament by saying, if we vote for the creation of this committee, if we vote to have these documents released as was previously voted on and agreed to by all parties, it is go time. It is time for the election. It is time to get signs out, go door knocking in a pandemic. It is “we will stop at nothing”. The ultimate nuclear weapon in a minority Parliament is to threaten an election.
The Liberals have done it to protect the Prime Minister from whatever is in those documents. I do not know what is in the documents. Canadians would like to know. The motion calls for the documents to be examined in camera. The Liberals are threatening an election over letting 12 parliamentarians see documents and not be able to talk about them in public. That is enough to threaten an election.
Conservatives will not be intimidated. We will do our jobs. We will talk about the pandemic and, quite frankly, I resent the use of health workers, small businesses and the people in my community to suggest that if we bring forward this motion to demand accountability, somehow we are not supporting them during COVID. What a ridiculous assertion.
To use health care workers, who did not have PPE at the beginning of this crisis because of the inaction of government, to say that the Liberals are standing up for health care workers and if we vote for this motion, we are not, that is outrageous. To say about small business owners, who are hanging on by their fingernails because the government failed to secure the borders early enough because the government gave bad advice from the start, that somehow if we vote for the creation of a committee we are voting against those small business owners, that is outrageous.
My constituents will not allow the COVID-19 pandemic to be used as a fig leaf to cover up Liberal corruption. I am tired of hearing it. I have heard it all day long. If we do not talk about that every moment of every day, stay tuned. We have another day that is allotted to us to talk about the issues we wish to raise later this week, and not by obstructing the work of the House.
If the government does not cause its own defeat over this motion, we will talk about the failures of the government on COVID-19. We will talk about where we have worked together, but what we will not be is intimidated into silence, into sweeping Liberal corruption under the rug simply because that is what the government wants to threaten us with, saying there will be an election if we vote in favour of a committee. What a ridiculous thing. We are here to work for Canadians, but we are not here to turn a blind eye to Liberal corruption.
We will be voting in favour of this motion and so should all members of Parliament who actually want to get to the bottom of the WE scandal and the Liberal corruption in it.
View James Bezan Profile
CPC (MB)
Mr. Speaker, I take exception with a number of things that my colleague from Winnipeg South and parliamentary secretary said. He is saying that the government does not want an election, yet the Liberals are claiming that this is a matter of confidence. The motion clearly states that it is not, in the opinion of the House, a matter of confidence. There is nothing in the parliamentary committee we are suggesting that would stop the work of government, or of carrying on all of its different COVID-19 responses and programs.
The parliamentary secretary says he does not want an election, yet the Liberals are prepared to go down in a ball of flames, in a great ball of glory, over this motion to bring about a committee to look at accountability and transparency. I am looking forward to this coming to an election. I am ready to go and will personally spend time campaigning in Winnipeg South explaining to the constituents in Winnipeg how their Liberal members stood here and covered up this scandal.
View Terry Duguid Profile
Lib. (MB)
View Terry Duguid Profile
2020-10-20 16:02 [p.995]
Mr. Speaker, I welcome the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman to Winnipeg South to campaign if he wishes. Of course, I am hoping there will not be an election. I have heard the official opposition all day talking about a lack of confidence in the government and now saying why this should not be a confidence motion. I think the Conservatives are talking out of both sides of their mouths.
I want to go back to what the member for Chilliwack—Hope said. The Conservative Party is very famous for its games. We will remember the 36-hour voting marathon, another 20-hour marathon and obstruction at every turn. They want to do this again, and really paralyze Parliament. We are just not going to stand for it.
View Kenny Chiu Profile
CPC (BC)
View Kenny Chiu Profile
2019-12-13 11:09 [p.393]
Mr. Speaker, November 24 may be a normal day for Canada, but it was a good day for democracy in Hong Kong. Participation in the district councils election was peaceful and orderly. Voters turned out in record numbers and made a clear statement in support of democracy.
It was an honour to serve as an independent observer, and from what I saw, execution of the election was open, fair and transparent.
This is a tremendous achievement for a city that has for so long been gripped by turmoil. Here in Canada, democracy, freedom and the rule of law are essential to our way of life and must be nurtured and protected.
As a Canadian immigrant born in Hong Kong, I am truly blessed to be a member of Parliament here in my home country of Canada.
I would like to thank the people of Steveston—Richmond East for giving me this opportunity to serve them and I wish them and all members of the House and their families a merry Christmas.
View Jamie Schmale Profile
CPC (ON)
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the people of the United Kingdom went to the ballot box, and it was a great success for the Conservative and Unionist Party, the world's oldest and most successful political party. Our sister party was re-elected for a fourth mandate, putting Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the helm of a majority government.
Despite a history of success, the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher notched another new record last night. The Tories are the first government in British history to be re-elected three times while scoring an increasing share of the vote every time. This result also reminds us that when elites try to substitute their own judgment for the will of the people, the people will have the final say.
When Conservatives are united and when they focus on the people, Conservatives will win. We extend congratulations to Prime Minister Johnson.
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