Mr. Speaker, people back at home in Langley, British Columbia, are asking me what is going on in Ottawa, why Parliament has come to a halt and what is the impasse so soon into the fall session.

The NDP tore up its supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals. What happened there? The NDP discovered that hitching its wagon to the Prime Minister's train was not really helping it very much where it really counts, which is at the polls. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the Bloc Québécois jumped in and started flirting with the Liberal government in the hope of maybe leveraging some favours. However, it too is finding out that being closely aligned with the Prime Minister in the waning days of his political career probably is not all that good as a political strategy.

Both these opposition parties are learning what has been obvious to the Conservative Party for a long time: the Prime Minister has what resembles the opposite of a Midas touch. King Midas got his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold, which was really cool for a little while, until even his food started to turn into gold and he realized he would starve to death.

The Prime Minister has something similar; everything he touches gets tarnished. Eventually it falls apart in a pile of dust. Here are a couple of examples. The WE Charity was at one time a functional charity here in Canada. It had a very high profile. It worked with school kids. It had the additional advantage of being closely aligned with the Prime Minister, some of his cabinet ministers and some of their family members.

The Prime Minister thought he would reciprocate that friendship by selecting WE Charity, without any competition at all, to distribute almost $1 billion of COVID relief money. It was a short-lived golden moment for the charity, which ended when all the conflicts of interest became public. The harm was done and it shut its doors. It is history thanks to the Prime Minister.

SNC-Lavalin is another example. It was a profitable engineering and construction company with big projects right across the country and around the world. It made mistakes, admittedly, but if the Prime Minister had just left it alone, it would still be a thriving company today. His then attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's first indigenous attorney general, had one idea, based on the professional advice she was getting, as to how to prosecute SNC-Lavalin. However, the Prime Minister had quite a different idea, so Canada's self-declared feminist prime minister fired Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's female, first-ever indigenous attorney general.

I read her autobiography, and I hope everyone has read it. It is very informative. In there, she said, quite frankly, that she wishes she had never met the Prime Minister. She told him that to his face. There are many other people who have been too closely associated with the Prime Minister who feel the same.

Another example is former governor general David Johnston, a man with a huge reputation in Canada for the services he has provided to his nation. He was appointed to—

Tako Van Popta

$567,618.00