- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am proud to stand today to speak to Bill C-281, the international human rights act. I want to thank the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South for bringing forward this important piece of legislation, which would amend legislation I introduced in the House back in 2018, Bill S-226. My partner in crime in the Senate at that time was Senator Raynell Andreychuk, who worked very hard on that bill. She and I had had numerous meetings with the government, to the point where we had unanimous consent on the bill. The legislation we are debating today reintroduces some of the changes to the earlier iterations of Bill S-226.
We have to make sure everybody understands that we use Magnitsky sanctions to move in lockstep with our allies. When the parliamentary secretary says we want to have a coordinated response with our allies, our allies, whether it is the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia, are all using Magnitsky sanctions. Unfortunately, the government has not used Magnitsky sanctions since 2018.
All the sanctions that have been brought against some of the corrupt foreign officials and gross human rights violators we are seeing today in the war in Ukraine, and what Russia has been doing with its kleptocracy, have all been under the Special Economic Measures Act. We know that act does not have the same teeth or accountability built into it as the Magnitsky law itself. Having Parliament provide a mechanism to put names on a list to present to the government through the foreign affairs committees of either the Senate or the House would provide more accountability, as well as debate and discussion as to why certain names should be added to the list.
I have worked with numerous communities for years to try to get more of these gross human rights violators and corrupt foreign officials on the list. We have submitted names to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development and the Department of Justice, and none of those names have ended up on any sanctions list, either SEMA or the Magnitsky law. The Vietnamese community, the Cambodian community and Falun Gong practitioners have dozens of names of people proven to have committed gross human rights violations against citizens in those countries, yet the government sits idle.
Amending the Magnitsky act, as has been brought forward by my colleague from Northumberland—Peterborough South, would address that shortfall. It would allow communities and parliamentarians to come forward with names. Then, the ultimate accountability of the government would be to report back within 40 days as to why it is either taking action or not taking action. It would also file annual reports. The bigger goals are naming and shaming those committing gross human rights violations around the world.
We have to make sure we move forward with this legislation. I am glad we are getting to the point of probably having unanimous consent for sending this bill to committee, but I would say to my colleagues in the Liberal Party that, instead of trying to make a whole bunch of amendments to the bill at committee, they actually listen to the people who have suffered violations of their human rights because of corrupt foreign officials, the human rights violators who put their own ideology or wealth ahead of that of the citizens they are supposed to be serving.
We have to make sure we go back to using Magnitsky sanctions, just as our allies do, to ensure there is one declaration that these individuals have violated the human rights of their citizens, are corrupt, they are being held to account and cannot use Canada as a safe haven. I know the government has been apprehensive about using Magnitsky sanctions because it is required to report on financial institutions on a quarterly basis whether any of the names on the sanctions lists we have under Magnitsky are making use of our financial institutions to hide their wealth, or hiding their families here and taking advantage of our great universities. Those practices have to be monitored, and the best way to do that is through the amendments suggested in Bill C-281.
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- 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. Speaker, I know one of the concerns we have as Conservatives with this bill is relative to the issues around accountability and whether the checks and balances are going to be there to ensure we do not have another situation where procurement is taking place and padding the pockets of former Liberal MPs, such as Frank Baylis, and other friends of the Liberal Party of Canada.
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