- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- Feb/27/24 5:14:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Edmonton West for his amazing work. He is one of the few MPs in this House who takes his fiduciary responsibilities to a whole new level. He actually goes through all the public accounts and makes sure that we are spending money wisely. Here we have, right now, the arrive scam situation with over $19 million going into the hands of two individuals working out of their cottage in the Ottawa suburbs.
We have a Westminster system here where there is supposed to be ministerial accountability, so I would ask the member for Edmonton West this: Who is responsible for it? Is it the President of the Treasury Board; the Minister of Public Services and Procurement; the Minister of Public Safety, who contracted the CBSA to go out there and contract the arrive scam and waste $60 million on absolutely nothing; or, is it the Prime Minister himself?
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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 4:19:57 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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- Apr/28/22 10:21:33 a.m.
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moved that the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Tuesday, March 31, 2022, be concurred in.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes. Just so everyone knows, he lives in Brockville. He has one of the biggest handles in the entire chamber.
In my role as shadow minister for ethics, a position that I have had for just a few weeks, it has been an incredibly busy time. It comes down to the fact that the Liberals have had quite the record of scandals during their tenure in government.
We were reminded earlier this week of the unethical behaviour of the Prime Minister in that he was found, four times, by the former Ethics Commissioner, Mary Dawson, being in contravention of the Conflict of Interest Act. He was guilty of violating and contravening sections 5, 11, 12 and 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act for taking an illegal vacation. We now know, from the beginning of this week, that the Prime Minister was also investigated by the RCMP for fraud against the government under paragraph 121(1)(c) of the Criminal Code for that illegal vacation on a private island.
We also know that the Prime Minister was found guilty of contravening section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act over his interference in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and the unnecessary interference and his concerted campaign to pressure the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould, into offering SNC-Lavalin a special plea deal, what is called a deferred prosecution agreement. We have to remember that Jody Wilson-Raybould stood on her principles, stood up for justice, refused to interfere and, because of that, lost her job as the Attorney General of Canada. The Treasury Board president of the day, Jane Philpott, was also fired from cabinet. Both of them were kicked out of the Liberal caucus by the Prime Minister.
We know that this scandal in itself had huge overreaching impacts on the Liberal Party. We know that the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, had to resign, along with the Clerk of the Privy Council at the time, Michael Wernick, who also resigned in disgrace.
As I go through this, I go to Bill Morneau, the former Minister of Finance, whom I am going to talk about in just a bit. Along with that, there is also the former Minister of Fisheries, who is now the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities and the MP for Beauséjour, who was caught up in the lucrative clam scam agreement when he ensured that family members, using nepotism, were awarded lucrative contracts worth over $24 million.
When we talk about Mr. Morneau, the contents of the report that the ethics committee did, tabled here a month ago, and the report tabled in the previous Parliament, concentrated on Bill Morneau and the WE scandal, but even going into that, Bill Morneau as the finance minister was also found guilty of contravening the Conflict of Interest Act for failing to disclose that he had a luxurious villa in the French countryside. He refused to disclose that to the Ethics Commissioner for two years.
The Liberals have a long history of scandal.
As we just witnessed with the Prime Minister's failure on the issue of his private vacation and being four times guilty under the Conflict of Interest Act and investigated for fraud against the government under the Criminal Code, we do not know if the RCMP investigated Bill Morneau over the WE scandal and the contents of the report that we tabled on March 31, on which I also got up on a question of privilege, as you may recall, Mr. Speaker. We have to remember that Mr. Morneau failed to recuse himself from the cabinet table when decisions were made about awarding the WE Charity over half a billion dollars, and gave it preferential treatment.
Mr. Morneau allowed his ministerial staff to work directly with the WE Charity, help them develop their proposals and intervene on behalf of WE at federal, provincial and municipal levels to deliver a program that was beyond WE's capabilities, as we found out through testimony. Additionally, Mr. Morneau failed to talk about how his own daughter worked for the WE foundation.
In the wake of this WE scandal, and in the wake of the work that was done by the ethics committee in the previous Parliament, Mr. Morneau was removed from cabinet. However, it was not just Mr. Morneau who was caught up in this scandal: We know that there were at least 10 videos made by WE that involved the Prime Minister, and we know those were produced by Door Knocker Media and were worth over $217,000, yet the Prime Minister was not investigated by Elections Canada on third-party endorsement and third-party expenditures for campaign-style video productions.
We know for a fact that the Prime Minister made a campaign statement in one of the videos, where he said, “I pledge to work hard for all Canadians.” This is something we hear in the House every day and heard just yesterday during question period with the Prime Minister. He always says he is working here for all Canadians. He also said that he was going to “invest in our youngest leaders: you”. That was a promise to soon-to-be voters, and it was clearly a political message he used in those videos paid for by the WE Charity.
We know that the Prime Minister's wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, received over $20,000 for a weekend getaway in London for the WE Day the organization held in 2020. Just weeks before that, WE was given a contract for half a billion dollars to deliver the Canada student service grant: something that was specifically designed by the Government of Canada, orchestrated by Bill Morneau and implicated by the Prime Minister in ensuring that it was delivered through the WE Charity, which was an organization that had never done anything working with students at this scale during a pandemic.
These facts appear a clear conflict of interest, and have severely damaged public confidence in our democratic institutions, especially here in the Parliament of Canada.
During our testimony, there were calls to bring a number of witnesses who refused to attend. The House ordered, on Thursday, March 25, 2021, that Ben Chin, Rick Theis and Amitpal Singh all appear as witnesses. I want to remind everyone that Ben Chin is the senior adviser to the Prime Minister, and that he received a LinkedIn message from Craig Kielburger of WE that stated, “Hello Ben, Thank you for your kindness in helping shape our latest program with the government. Warmly, Craig”. Mr. Chin responded to Mr. Kielburger, “Great to hear from you Craig; let's get our young working”. Ben Chin refused to comply with the order of the House to appear.
Rick Theis, who is also in the Prime Minister's office as the director of policy and cabinet affairs, met with the Kielburger brothers from WE on May 5, 2020, regarding this new program, and Amitpal Singh, who was an adviser to Bill Morneau in early April, suggested a youth services program would eventually be developed into a tailor-made, half-a-billion-dollar WE Charity program.
All three witnesses were instructed to comply, but instead the ministers told them not to. That is contempt, and that election we just had and this new Parliament do not purge those witnesses from being held in contempt.
I also want to point out that the MP for Waterloo, who at the time was the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, also perjured herself at committee. She testified that she did not discuss the half-billion-dollar program with the Kielburgers, yet in documentation submitted to the ethics committee, it was clear that she and her staff were working with the WE foundation.
As members can see, when we put in the litany of scandals the current government has been plagued with, and we look at the WE Charity and the scandal here, it is important we look again at this report as well as have the ethics committee do more to study this issue.
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