Madam Speaker, I thank the member for being attentive, but when I speak, there are usually lots of people in the House. It is not usually a problem for me.

Let us get back to the matter at hand. There are lots of technical terms, legal linguistic terms and acronyms, such as SDTC, that we can utilize. Of course, there are different names.

What we need to understand is that there was a pool of nearly a billion dollars that was established by the Liberal government. The government then entrusted this money to a group of individuals who came under the auspices of SDTC, the then minister Navdeep Bains and eventually the current Minister of Innovation. SDTC was given this billion dollars and told what the government wanted SDTC to do with it. What the government was selling to the Canadian public was that this money would be used to get a cleaner, greener, more efficient and more productive economy.

Let us not forget where that billion dollars came from. It came from single moms, seniors, high school kids and folks working two or three jobs trying to get by in this ever-diminishing Liberal economy. One might say we would get this money from the wealthy, but that is not the reality. A large portion of Canadian tax dollars comes from the most vulnerable and, in fact, the poorest of our society. For example, people would probably be shocked to know that, with clawbacks and taxation, there can be folks earning less than $40,000 a year but paying more than 70% of their dollars to clawbacks and income tax.

The government is taking this money from people who are struggling to get by every day, to get that last meal of the month. The government is taking millions of dollars. In fact, as I said, it was $1 billion. The taxpayers do not get a choice as to whether they pay. Either people pay or they go to jail. The government took a billion dollars in hard-earned tax dollars, taken under a threat of force. What did the government do with it? It told the Canadian public that it would make the environment clean and more efficient. It said that it would make the economy more productive and get patents and intellectual property that would grow our economy. Nothing could be further from the truth of what actually happened.

In this cabal of individuals, we saw $58 million given to 10 ineligible proposals. This means that these proposals did not fit the criteria. Once again, there is that billion dollars, which had rules attached to it. There was an agreement on how that money was going to be spent because it came from all those hard-working Canadian taxpayers. SDTC decided which people it was going to give the money to. What has been found so far is that it flagrantly disregarded those criteria with 10 proposals. There were $58 million that went out the door for things that did not fit the criteria of making the economy cleaner, greener, more efficient or more productive.

The question of whom SDTC gave this $58 million to needs to be asked, as well as why it did that. This is what I will talk about in the latter part of the story. There were also 186 cases in which board members held a conflict of interest. We will get back to that.

There was a group of individuals in charge of this billion dollars. As I said, it was to get a more efficient economy. It would make sense that it was not there to benefit this group of individuals. We do not need complex conflict of interest regulations or policies; if a billion dollars is given to grow the economy, one would just assume that the money is not going back to the people who are deciding where that money is going.

I will say that again. One would presume that billion dollars would not be going back to the individuals who are deciding where the money is going. Obviously, they are not going to be objective, and this creates the opportunity for corruption. Clearly, we have seen some things Canadians would not be proud of. There was millions more given to parties that did not perform the contracts.

The way it works is that there are tranches of money that are given out. Usually, certainly in the private sector, if someone does not meet certain criteria, and “specific performance” is the legal term, then the rest of the money is not given to them. In the case in question, however, the money kept flowing and flowing. We have seen so far that millions of dollars of the billion-dollar pot was given out either where there were conflicts of interest or where contracts were clearly ineligible.

What is it that Conservatives asked for in the privilege motion? What did we possibly ask that is trampling the rights of the charter, interfering with a police investigation, or other red herrings the parliamentary clerk has said are not the case? In fact, the people through their representatives have the ultimate and unfettered right to ask for any documents they require. What is the awful step we have taken? We have just asked for documents. At the end of the day, we want more information to find out what went on so the RCMP can proceed with its investigation, unimpeded by the Liberal government.

The member for Winnipeg North might say that we should just let the RCMP decide, and that would be well and good if what I am going to describe had not happened, which is a series of different scandals that have occurred over the last nine years. This forms the context as to why Conservatives feel it is important that we help get the documents across the way to the RCMP.

We have to go back to December 2017, when, just two years after the Prime Minister was elected, Canada's Ethics Commissioner ruled that the Prime Minister had broken the conflict of interest rules by accepting vacations, gifts and flights in 2016. He had been elected less than a year before and had already started a pattern of corruption. It was the first time a prime minister had ever been found guilty of such a transgression.

There have been a number of things between then and now. Clam scam was in there as well, and a number of other scandals, but we will just jump forward and hit some of the highlights of the corruption.

In February 2019, former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould accused the government of inappropriately pressuring her to help construction giant SNC-Lavalin avoid a corruption trial. Public works minister Jane Philpott also quit, citing loss of confidence in the Prime Minister. The Ethics Commissioner ruled that the Prime Minister and officials had breached ethics rules.

In 2020, there was one of the larger scandals, and there are quite a few. It was another nearly billion-dollar scandal, with the WE Charity. Of course, with the WE Charity, the government took the opportunity, just like with SDTC, of the cloak of COVID in order to promote its corrupt agenda, which included a $912-million program that the Prime Minister promised as part of a $9-billion COVID-19 financial aid program for post-secondary students.

Shortly after, the Liberal government announced it was awarding the sole-source contract to WE Charity, and it came to light that the Prime Minister's family had a connection there. Once again, underneath the cloak of COVID, the government took the opportunity to stuff the pockets of Liberal insiders full of hard-earned Canadian taxpayer dollars.

We go on with the scandals. We jump forward to a more recent one, the arrive scam scandal. It came out on February 12, 2024, with the Auditor General's report in which she said that there were so many dollars spent and the bookkeeping was so bad that it is impossible for anyone, including the Auditor General, to know exactly how much money was wasted on arrive scam.

Just so everyone remembers, ArriveCAN was an app that IT professionals said could have been designed and completed in a weekend for a quarter of a million dollars. In fact, because the bookkeeping was so bad, they could not even determine exactly how many resources were dedicated to the creation of the ArriveCAN app. Estimates put it at least $60 million. It resulted in a single update sending 10,000 Canadians to quarantine despite doing everything right. It resulted in a massive scandal involving dozens of senior officials in the public service.

As I said, it should have cost a quarter of a million dollars. Instead, it ended up costing $60 million. The app had numerous other issues. An interesting one, in terms of corruption, is that after so many self-inflicted issues with the Ethics Commissioner, the Liberals attempted to appoint the sister-in-law of the minister of public safety as the interim Ethics Commissioner.

I wonder what the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners would look like. They would be sitting there having turkey, discussing how the grandkids are, saying they are great, and what about that little ethics violation we had there? We will be able to take care of that over a couple wings of turkey and pass the cranberries and eliminate the corruption, please.

Of course, in May 2022, the Ethics Commissioner opened up an investigation into the minister of international trade's conduct from spring 2020, involving approximately $17,000 in a contract for media training given to a company co-founded by a Liberal strategist. The commissioner determined the minister broke the rules for refusing to recuse herself from the process that led to the decision to award the contract to a public relations firm due to her nearly 20-year friendship with the firm's co-founder. In that one, we had a Liberal consultant who was getting onto the payroll for media training for $17,000. The Ethics Commissioner found that broke the rules, but that should be no surprise to anyone.

Here is an interesting one, given that the themes of today seem to involve foreign interference. I would remind the member from Winnipeg North about this. It became well known that the Communist regime in Beijing used donations to the Trudeau Foundation to attempt to influence the Prime Minister.

Information published by La Presse and The Globe and Mail raised even more concerns about the $200,000 donation directed by Beijing. The foundation misled Canadians when it said the controversial donation made by two Chinese businessmen qualified as a Canadian donation. Testifying before the House of Commons ethics committee, Pascale Fournier said her predecessor, Morris Rosenberg, told the National Post in December 2016 that the foundation did not consider the donation to be foreign money because it was made by a company incorporated in Canada.

We see over and over again, from the sponsorship scandal on out, this culture of entitlement and of corruption, where when times are tough for Canadians, when that single mom is desperately working that extra overtime shift just to make sure she has enough money to pay for her son's hockey, or her daughter's soccer, the government members take the opportunity to stuff their jeans full of as much cash as they can. In this case, it was underneath the cloak of COVID.

One has to remember that, actually, if not for the Conservatives, during COVID, if we can believe this, the then finance minister, Bill Morneau, came to this place and tried to sneak in a piece of legislation. Because of COVID, we were moving quickly, and we were working largely in good faith and consensus. He tried to sneak in that the government could spend as much money as it wanted for whatever it wanted.

If not for our current leader of the official opposition, the then finance critic, that would have gone through. We are hearing so far, in these recent days, we have SDTC that is good for a billion dollars of corruption. We have the WE scandal that is a billion dollars worth of corruption. That is just what we have found so far, and there are more Auditor General reports to come.

There has been, over the last week or two, a lot of use of the word “reflection”. The Prime Minister and the cabinet may be immune to this reflection. It appears that when he has important decisions, the Prime Minister's max reflection time is about 18 hours or so. However, I would hope the Liberal members back there would have some reflection on what their government has become, including a leader who is clearly unpopular.

There is a reason they are cruising toward single digits in the polls. There is a reason that, when I walk and talk with my constituents, the number one question is: “When is the Prime Minister leaving, and can we help him pack his bags?” That is what I hear, and not just from Conservative voters but also from some folks who I know have never voted for me and are lifelong Liberals.

At a certain point in the life of a caucus, members have to stand up for their principles and beliefs. They have to decide if power is really worth it. Is power worth $1 billion in corruption through SDTC? Is it worth having $1 billion taken from hard-working Canadians and an attempt to have it given to WE Charity? Is it worth supporting a Prime Minister who is habitually convicted by the Ethics Commissioner for ethics violation? Is power really worth it?

We are asking for something entirely reasonable. We are asking for documents to be handed over to the RCMP. Some government offices have already complied, so we know it is possible. We are hoping that reflection comes to folks as they think about their hard-working constituents who, just like my constituents in the great riding of Northumberland—Peterborough South, are working day and night to get by and are giving, sometimes, 60%, 70%, 80% of their paycheques to the government. We hope they will think, “This is not right, and we should have the RCMP.”

There is going to be some discussion about how much time this has taken in the House, but the debate could end right now. All the government has to do is deliver those documents so the RCMP can look into this and hopefully, and I might be dreaming too big here, Canadians could get some of that $400 million back to help them pay for their kids' hockey, afford their rent or afford a meal so they do not have to go to the food bank this week. The government should get that money back, get those documents and let us end this.

Philip Lawrence

$492,727.00