- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- Feb/1/23 3:10:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that was another bad answer from a random Liberal.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, Canadians are struggling like they never have before, but if one is a Liberal lobbyist or a high-priced consultant, it has never been better.
For the fifth time, these Liberals have been found guilty of breaking our ethics laws, which was done twice by the Prime Minister. This time, the trade minister was caught shovelling money to her good friend and CBC pundit Amanda Alvaro, who was also on the trade minister's campaign team.
Will the Prime Minister fire the trade minister and make her pay back the $17,000 she gave to her BFF?
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- Dec/13/22 3:02:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if the trade minister were truly sorry, she would pay the money back. In fact, she is the fourth Liberal cabinet minister to be found guilty of breaking the law by the Ethics Commissioner.
The trade minister got caught giving two sweetheart deals to her friend, who also worked on her campaign. The minister said there is simply no excuse for contracting with a friend's company. After Bill Morneau got caught, he did the honourable thing and resigned.
Will the trade minister follow suit and resign immediately, or does the Prime Minister have to fire this corrupt minister?
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- Jun/7/22 3:09:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister is being investigated by the Ethics Commissioner because she advanced the personal interests of her friend. Now we understand the Liberals need to pay a premium for spin doctors, given all their scandals. The Minister of International Trade is being investigated because she gave a $17,000 sole-sourced contract to a CBC pundit who is her dear personal friend and former campaign organizer. This is ridiculous.
Will the minister apologize for her unethical behaviour and hand over all records on this contract to the Ethics Commissioner immediately?
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- Jun/7/22 3:08:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when it comes to ethics violations, the Liberal government has already reached the super elite status. Whether it is a $1-billion sweetheart deal with WE Charity or SNC-Lavalin bullying, clam scam nepotism or the $200,000 illegal vacation by the Prime Minister, it is as though the Liberals are competing for who can be the most unethical.
Now the Minister of International Trade knew Amanda Alvaro was a close friend who ran her election campaign, and yet she awarded her a $17,000 contract anyway. When will the minister quit blaming her own department officials and take ownership of and responsibility for her own scandal?
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- Jun/6/22 3:05:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the trade minister really needs to brush up on her ethics rules. I would like to remind her that ministers are forbidden from advancing the interests of their close personal friends. This contract is not in dispute. The problem is that the minister awarded $17,000 to Amanda Alvaro, who describes the minister as a “dear friend” and who also ran the minister's election campaign in 2017.
Will the minister admit she broke ethics rules, and will she co-operate fully with the Ethics Commissioner’s investigation?
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- Jun/6/22 3:02:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Minister of International Trade needs to explain how a close personal friend wound up $17,000 dollars richer after giving the minister a couple of days of media training. Documents tabled in the House show that in April 2020, the minister hired a PR firm run by Liberal insider and CBC pundit Amanda Alvaro just a month after the COVID-19 pandemic began, at a time when many Canadian small businesses were struggling just to survive.
The minister needs to come clean. Why did she award a lucrative contract to someone who describes her as a “dear friend”?
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- 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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