So V ote

May/30/22 4:35:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this comes down to the very foundation of our democracy. If we cannot restore confidence and trust in our democratic institutions, including in the government itself, then chaos will prevail. We need to make sure that we do not fall into the practices of other failed states where kleptocracies rule and corruption is part of everyday business. We are better than that, and that is why this committee report and the ongoing work that we are doing as members of Parliament at the ethics committee must be respected.

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May/30/22 4:34:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am disappointed with the member for Winnipeg North and his constant defence of the ethical behaviour and unethical consequences that have been caused by his government. I will say this. We know that parliamentary institutions are being questioned quite vigorously by Canadians when they see unethical behaviour and sanctions brought forward by the Ethics Commissioner against the Prime Minister, former minister Morneau and other members of the government. When it comes down to truth, honesty and integrity, we have to make sure that we are holding those up in the utmost. It is important that we have these debates and carry on with these studies at the ethics committee to restore that trust in our democratic institutions.

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May/30/22 4:32:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we do have a practice in the House of Commons of making sure that there is ministerial accountability. It is in our rules and procedures. The minister was sworn in under oath, and recommendation 3 of the report said that given the failure of the minister to reveal her April 17, 2020, meeting with Mr. Craig Kielburger, a review of ministerial accountability in committees must be undertaken. We know that committees were misled. I would say that the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands can use her legal background to determine what term she wants to use, but I will say that it is in the report and that report has been tabled in the House. That is why I believe the member for Waterloo, who is no longer a minister in the Liberal cabinet, needs to appear and account for her testimony during the 43rd Parliament.

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May/30/22 4:30:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is important that the committee is allowed to finish off its work and that anyone who obstructed those investigations in the past is allowed to appear now so we can get the truth for all Canadians on how the WE Charity scandal had played out.

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May/30/22 4:30:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will address the point of order. First, I would say it was in the committee report that was tabled that there was misleading evidence given or there was a failure to acknowledge that there were previous meetings between the minister and the Kielburgers that she had denied at her first—

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

May/30/22 4:19:57 p.m.
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moved that the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics presented on Thursday, March 31, 2022 be concurred in. He said: Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure to join everyone in the House virtually today, as I am still back in Manitoba. I am going to splitting my time on our third attempt to move concurrence on this report with the member for Battle River—Crowfoot. It is interesting to note that every time we have brought this motion forward, the Liberals have adjourned debate, similar to the filibusters we saw in the 43rd Parliament when they tried to stop this report on the WE Charity scandal from coming forward to the House. I will go into some detail on the litany of ethical breaches done by the Liberal government, but I can tell the House that in addition to the Prime Minister taking illegal vacations and being found in contravention of sections of the ethics act, sections 5, 11, 12 and 21, we know that he also was found guilty with regard to SNC-Lavalin for putting undue pressure on the then-minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, as well as his continued breaches of ethical behaviour that we have seen from time to time, and how that has impacted other members of cabinet. I do not need to remind the House of former minister Morneau and all the challenges he had when he was the finance minister, such as his having been found in contravention of the ethics act for having accepted an illegal gift, a vacation offered by the WE Charity. He also forgot to recuse himself when talking about the WE Charity's delivery of the youth program that was proposed at that time. We know that he was also in conflict because his daughter worked for the WE foundation. We need to also remind everyone of the former minister of fisheries' contravention of the ethics act through a conflict of interest, actually practising nepotism to make sure that family members received multi-million-dollar contracts in what we have called the surf clam scam. We have a number of ethical breaches, and here we find today that the Ethics Commissioner, Mr. Dion, has opened another investigation on another Liberal cabinet minister, this time the Minister of International Trade and Small Business, for awarding a contract to a very close personal friend. That has resulted in looking at whether the minister contravened sections of the Conflict of Interest Act in her decision-making, whether she used her influence and whether she practised the duty to recuse. I can tell the House that the minister of trade was working closely with a long-time fellow staffer back in the Wynne government days and also in the McGuinty era in Ontario, and that they are very close personal friends with the founder of Pomp and Circumstance, Amanda Alvaro. We know that the $17,000 contract, which was gifted for two days of media training for two people, was quite costly. It does not sound like much in the big scheme of things, the way we spend money in Parliament and the way the Government of Canada spends, but when someone can get away with sole-sourcing contracts, small amounts of money like $17,000 can come to be a big amount of money. When we think about it, it was for only two days of media training for two people. There is no wonder that the Ethics Commissioner is doing the investigation on our international trade minister. I want to again thank the ethics committee for the work that it did, both in this Parliament and in the first session the 44th Parliament, in getting this report tabled on March 31, as well as the work that was originally done on this report in the 43rd Parliament, second session, when this report was tabled originally. There is a pile of great recommendations on how to strengthen the Lobbying Act by giving more powers to the Commissioner of Lobbying and to the Ethics Commissioner to prevent these things from happening in the future. Unfortunately, we have a situation of the current government, under the Prime Minister, continuing to violate ethics rules. One of the key things on which I have not gone into detail in my previous interventions with respect to this motion and the third report of the ethics committee in this 44th Parliament is that three individuals who were political staffers were supposed to appear: Ben Chin, Rick Theis and Amitpal Singh. All of them were political staffers either in Minister Morneau's office or the Prime Minister's Office, and it was important for the ethics committee to hear from them specifically. They refused to appear before the ethics committee in the 43rd session. The committee was actually required to come before the House to ask for an order from the House of Commons to ensure that they would appear before the committee. Unfortunately, the House leader for the Liberal government of the day refused to allow those political staffers to appear to talk about their role in awarding a half-billion-dollar contract to the WE Charity and how those decisions were made so that we could look at how pandemic spending was being used to help out friends of the current Liberal government and specifically friends of the Prime Minister and Minister Morneau. We know they failed to appear because of the direction from the House leader of the day, who is now the Minister of Canadian Heritage. I can tell the House that this again is in contravention of our parliamentary rules. I want to quote our former parliamentary law clerk, Mr. Robert Walsh, who said this at a previous committee hearing in the past: ...the Prime Minister, and any minister, has no authority to prevent someone from appearing in front of a committee. Their ministerial function may present a limitation on what you can ask that political aide when they're in front of you, but everyone has a duty, apart from members of Parliament, senators, and the Governor General, to show up when summoned before a committee. While the government prevented these individuals from appearing before the ethics committee, it is inherent upon us today to compel them to appear. We know for a fact that contempts of Parliament in the past are not, as any criminal activity, purged from the record just because of an election and a new parliamentary session beginning. We now have the ethics committee's report on the WE Charity scandal before the chamber and we need to talk in detail and investigate further the outstanding questions of how this came into being. We also know that aside from these political staffers, the member for Waterloo, the former minister of youth and social development, who was in charge of implementing this program through the WE Charity, essentially perjured herself at committee when she first said that she had never met with the Kielburger brothers, and ultimately we—

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May/2/22 4:17:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I note the hypocrisy of that member. He used to stand in here and rail against the government on the WE scandal itself, because the Prime Minister and the former minister of finance, Bill Morneau, refused to recuse themselves from the decision process. This is the member who always wanted to make sure that we did not do closure on debate, and now since he has become, I guess, deputy leader of the NDP-Liberal coalition or deputy House leader, NDP members are now standing here defending the government on moving things like closure on debate and trying to limit the ability of committees to do their work on things. He wants to kick the can down the road another week or two before we actually do it, but we have a chance to get this done today: to put it to a vote and let the committee get to work immediately on making sure that those who committed contempt on this Parliament are actually held to account.

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May/2/22 4:14:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think we all sit here and witness every day the member for Winnipeg North self-destruct on an ongoing basis. When we really want to get down to it, the member for Winnipeg North stands in here every day to help with the cover-up of government corruption and unethical behaviour. We know that we just voted on a closure motion to ensure that there was a vote on Motion No. 11. Motion No. 11 is going to be coming into force whether we like it or not. The government, with its unholy alliance with the NDP, will get its Motion No. 11 through, and we do not feel like it is necessary to sit here and debate this in a long, drawn-out process. What is important is that we have committees that have been doing important work here on the ethical behaviour of the current government. We need to refer this back to the committee so that we can dig in deeper and the committee can do its work and report back to the House on those who actually held this place in contempt by refusing to appear before committee. The member for Waterloo perjured herself in committee by refusing to share information with the committee and lying about it, or misleading us. We have this opportunity to bring those people back and get down to the bottom of what actually happened in the WE scandal.

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

May/2/22 3:59:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Battle River—Crowfoot for splitting his time with me and for his great intervention. We brought forward this concurrence motion last week, but because the government does not want to discuss the WE scandal in any more detail, it moved a motion to go to orders of the day, which essentially shut down the debate on the concurrence motion. I want to thank the ethics committee from the 43rd Parliament, second session, which tabled the report “Questions of Conflict of Interest and Lobbying in Relation to Pandemic Spending” in June 2021. I also want to thank the current ethics committee, in this Parliament, which has now tabled it on March 31. It is important that we have a chance to revisit what happened in the WE Charity scandal, why this is important and why we need to continue to look at how we can improve upon our officers of Parliament, like the Commissioner of Lobbying, the Ethics Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner, and ensure we have better oversight of government officials who are being lobbied and entering into certain contracts that oftentimes put ministers of the current Liberal government into a conflict of interest. We have now seen multiple reports done by the Ethics Commissioner, both the previous Ethics Commissioner, Mary Dawson, and the current Ethics Commissioner, Mr. Dion. I do not think we need to spend a lot of time reminding everybody of the unethical behaviour of the current Prime Minister. Again, during question period I asked him about the criminal investigation the RCMP had started with respect to the luxury vacation gift he got on a tropical island. Not only was he found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act by the former Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, contravening sections 5, 11, 12 and 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act, but we also know that the RCMP investigated him under paragraph 121(1)(c) of the Criminal Code for fraud in relation to the government. We also know the Prime Minister was found guilty of contravening section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act over the issue of SNC-Lavalin and the prosecution going on there with respect to influence. He essentially had a concerted campaign against Jody Wilson-Raybould, our former Attorney General, who refused to offer a plea deal to SNC-Lavalin, what we call a deferred prosecution agreement, and stood on her principles as the Attorney General of Canada to ensure that it faced the music. However, she lost her job because she stood up to the Prime Minister and stood up for the principles of justice. We know that the Treasury Board president of the day, Jane Philpott, who sided with Jody Wilson-Raybould, was also fired from cabinet, and ultimately the two of them were kicked out of the Liberal caucus. That scandal in itself had huge overarching impacts on the Liberal Party of Canada. The principal secretary to the Prime Minister at the time, Gerald Butts, had to resign. The Clerk of the Privy Council at the time, Michael Wernick, also resigned. They both resigned in disgrace. The Prime Minister is not the only person who has acted unethically. I want to get to former finance minister Bill Morneau right away, but when the current Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, who is the MP for Beauséjour, was Minister of Fisheries in the last Parliament, he was caught up in a lucrative clam scam because he practised nepotism and made sure that family members received lucrative $24-million contracts for clams. Then we come to Mr. Bill Morneau, our former finance minister, who was found guilty of violating the Conflict of Interest Act when he failed to disclose to the Ethics Commissioner that he had a luxurious villa in the French Riviera. It took him two years to disclose his property, when all members of Parliament, and especially public office holders, whether members of cabinet or parliamentary secretaries, are required to submit all of their financial information to the Ethics Commissioner for review and public disclosure so that people will know if there is any way members of this House, and public office holders in particular, can be influenced. As I mentioned already, the Prime Minister was found guilty on four different charges for the luxurious vacation that he took on the private island and he has been investigated for fraud, but it is important to point out that both the Prime Minister and Bill Morneau failed to recuse themselves from discussions around WE Charity. We know that We Charity was offered a chance to develop a program for summer students and to support students during the pandemic. That was over half a billion dollars. Both Bill Morneau and the Prime Minister had relations with the Kielburger family, as well as with WE Charity. Bill Morneau's daughter worked for it. Bill Morneau and the Prime Minister had received benefits directly from WE Charity. They were both close personal friends of the Kielburgers. Because they failed to recuse themselves from the discussions at the cabinet table, awarding a sole-sourced contract to WE Charity, that is what was found to be in contravention under the Conflict of Interest Act. We know that because of it, Mr. Morneau was removed from cabinet and resigned as a member of Parliament. We also know that WE Charity produced 10 videos of the Prime Minister, which were essentially campaign-style videos. They were valued at over $217,000. To make the point, in one of the videos, the Prime Minister said he pledged to work hard for all Canadians, something that we hear from him in question period. Then he went on to say that he is going to invest in our youngest leaders: the students. This is a campaign-style promise by the Prime Minister to these future voters. It clearly was a political message. We also know that the Prime Minister's wife had received a $20,000 getaway vacation to speak at a WE Charity event in London, England, and that was just a week or two after the Liberal government awarded the Kielburgers and WE Charity the half-billion-dollar sole-sourced contract. As we dive into this report, we find out that there were multiple people in Morneau's office and the Prime Minister's Office, as well as the member for Waterloo, who were working directly with the Kielburgers on how to design the program. Why did they have to work with WE Charity to design the program? It was because WE Charity had never done a program like this, ever. It did not have the capabilities to offer this program and it was designed specifically for it to orchestrate this program. Because of the hand-holding that took place, we know, as the member for Battle River—Crowfoot just said, that public trust in our democratic institutions was eroded. On Thursday, March 25, 2021, some of those staffers who worked in the Prime Minister's Office and Minister Morneau's office were asked to appear at committee by a House order. Ben Chin, Rick Theis and Amitpal Singh were all ordered to appear. Ben Chin was senior adviser to the Prime Minister and directly messaged with Craig Kielburger of WE. We know that Rick Theis, who worked in the Prime Minister's Office as director of policy and cabinet affairs, met with the Kielburger brothers from WE as well, and then Amitpal Singh, who worked for Bill Morneau, also worked directly to make the tailor-made program for WE Charity. All these people failed to comply with the order from the House and are in contempt of Parliament. Because we had an election and we are in a new Parliament, that does not purge them of their contempt of Parliament. We also need to dive more into the role of the MP for Waterloo. I wish to move an amendment to the motion. I move: That, the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: the Third Report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Thursday, March 31, 2022, be not now concurred in, but that it be recommitted to the Committee for further consideration, provided that (a) the committee be instructed (i) to make every effort possible to receive evidence from Ben Chin, Rick Theis and Amitpal Singh, the witnesses who did not comply with this House's Order of Thursday, March 25, 2021, to appear before the Committee, (ii) to consider further the concerns expressed in the Report about the Member for Waterloo's failure “in her obligation to be accurate with a committee”, and (iii) to report back by Monday, October 17, 2022; and (b) the committee be empowered to order the attendance of the Member for Waterloo, from time to time, as it sees fit.

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

May/2/22 2:25:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister should really answer his questions. He can run, but he cannot hide from the law. The RCMP's deference to the retired commissioner Dawson was asserted as one of the justifications for why it was not in the public interest to pursue a criminal investigation, but all the public interest arguments by the RCMP for not pursuing charges have been undone in the past week. It is in the public interest for Canadians to know that the Prime Minister is not above the law. Will the Prime Minister and his staff co-operate with the RCMP in this investigation of fraud on the government by the Prime Minister?

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

May/2/22 2:23:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary can sit here and be part of a government cover-up. That is why, this morning, I again wrote to the RCMP commissioner regarding the RCMP's criminal brief on the investigation into the Prime Minister's $215,000 private island vacation. The criminal brief says that the RCMP deferred to the Ethics Commissioner's interpretation that the Prime Minister's actions were not criminal in nature. However, we now know, from the news, that former commissioner Mary Dawson was unfamiliar with the Criminal Code offence of fraud against the government. She had no interpretation to give. Has the Prime Minister spoken to the RCMP in the past week about his criminal behaviour?

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Context: House Hansard - 60 - Apr/28/22

Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/28/22 2:27:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister cannot dodge these questions much longer. We have to remember, there is no statute of limitations under the Criminal Code here in Canada. In fact, the Prime Minister's silence sounds a lot like an admission of guilt. The RCMP criminal brief said that, if the Prime Minister were any other Canadian, he would have been charged. Canadians are demanding that the Prime Minister be held to a higher standard. Will the Prime Minister lift the veil of secrecy, clear the air and proactively speak to the RCMP?

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Context: House Hansard - 60 - Apr/28/22

Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/28/22 2:25:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals need to understand that we are talking about the RCMP investigation of fraud against the government by the Prime Minister, not the Ethic Commissioner's study. The Prime Minister thinks he is above the law and the rest of us are under another piece of law. He accepted a $215,000 luxury private island vacation from someone who is actively lobbying the government for millions of taxpayers' money. The environment minister provided the missing piece of the puzzle the RCMP needed to charge him. He admitted he did not have permission to take the trip. The RCMP has all of the puzzle pieces they need now to charge the Prime Minister with committing fraud against the government. Will the Prime Minister co-operate with that investigation?

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Context: House Hansard - 60 - Apr/28/22