Mr. Speaker, once again, happy birthday yesterday, plus one. It is always a happy day.

I normally would be pleased, and I am always pleased, to rise in this place, even when it concerns a $400-million Liberal scandal. For those who are watching and just tuning in, perhaps I could recap. We are in the 66th hour of a Liberal filibuster on the refusal to provide documents to the House of Commons. This was demanded in June and voted on by a majority of members of Parliament, representing a majority of Canadians, in terms of the $400-million scandal identified by the Auditor General with regard to the Liberal green slush fund. Hand-picked directors of the Prime Minister funnelled that money to companies they own.

Just to give us some perspective, the Liberal filibuster began at the end of September. It is the longest in parliamentary history. The previous one, over yet another Liberal scandal, was only 16 hours. This issue has seized the House simply because the Liberals are redacting, as it is called, documents ordered by the House. What is redaction? Redaction means that they are censoring them.

The House of Commons ordered the production of documents on this scandal. Over 10,000 pages were provided. Most of them went through a lot of black ink toner cartridge because there was so much blacked out in them. They had to bring in new photocopiers in the PMO. This was ordered by the PMO, by the Prime Minister's own department, to breach the rules.

The Speaker found what is called a prima facie case of privilege. What that means, for those watching, is that the ultimate authority above everything else is the House of Commons' ability to order documents to be provided by government, to hold the Crown, the cabinet, to account for its actions. The cabinet is defying it.

What could we do with $400 million instead of funnelling it to Liberal insider companies as the Liberals have done? I will get into it. I am sure that it is not $400 million. I may be mistaken. It may be closer to $700 million, and I will explain that in a minute.

What we could do in my province of Nova Scotia with $400 million is build a thousand homes. However, the priority of the Liberals was to funnel it to their own companies so that they could enrich themselves while Canadians line up in record numbers at food banks and while people in my riding have to live in trailers and campers in camping parks because they cannot find housing. Those thousand houses that could have been built with that $400 million in Nova Scotia would be enormously helpful.

I will just tell us how extensive this cover-up is. We had the architect of the Liberal green slush fund, former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains, in the industry committee this week. Some may remember him. He was the industry minister for the Liberals from 2015 to 2021. He directly appointed all the corrupt Liberal insiders to this board, who then funnelled money to their companies. At committee, we asked him some pretty straightforward and simple questions. If I could, I will read from Hansard from the committee meeting this week.

I asked a simple question of former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains. I asked him where he worked. He said, “As I've indicated, the topic I was asked to speak on was Sustainable Development Technology Canada”. Again, I asked where he worked. He said it was on the public record.

Indeed, it is on the public record. While he was industry minister, he was responsible for lowering cellphone fees. The Prime Minister gave him the mandate. We all know that we have the most expensive cellphone costs in the world, according to international studies. Can we guess who former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains works for? He was too embarrassed to say, or perhaps those at Rogers ordered him not to say it at committee because they were too embarrassed to have him mention their name and that he worked there. However, he works for Rogers, which is the most expensive cellphone company in the world. He just kept saying that it is on the public record.

He was a good Liberal who always followed the talking points from the PMO. I suspect that he was following talking points from Rogers saying to please not associate Rogers, this most expensive cellphone company, with the Liberal corruption scandal that he was in charge of.

We had testimony from the former chair whom Navdeep Bains appointed, who he was warned had a conflict. He said to her, and to everyone in SDTC, that it was okay and they would manage the conflict. They managed the conflict of that money into their companies. The former minister himself said that was okay. That appointee, Annette Verschuren, said in committee that she never applied for any job in her life. She said Navdeep Bains called her twice to talk her into running, putting in an application and becoming the chair of the board. She said, even though he knew she was conflicted, he called her twice. I asked him if he called her twice, because that is what she testified to, and he said he did not remember.

Then I said the former CEO of the Liberal green slush fund testified before the committee that former minister Bains called her and told her to vet the candidate. She said they could not have this person as a candidate for chair because SDTC did business with her companies. If she were picked, she would be the first chair in the 20-year history of SDTC who had a conflict. Bains said it was okay and to ask her if she wanted to do it. He was warned again. Whether we believe it or not, there was actually somebody who worked in the Liberal Prime Minister's office, who was doing communications in a nice patronage job in the Liberal green slush fund. She warned the minister's office that he should not appoint this person because of the conflict. It was still ignored. This was not some mistake or some hands-off occurrence where they did not know what was going on because they are an incompetent minister who does not follow anything in their department.

I then asked Navdeep Bains if he remembered going to cabinet to get another $750 million of taxpayer money for the Liberal green slush fund. He said it was in the budget. I said that the things in the budget have to have the minister's approval. I asked if it had his approval, but he did not remember. We have a Liberal who does not remember giving away $750 million of taxpayer money. I guess that is just pocket change for the Liberals. It is either that or he was just unwilling to admit that he was part of this scheme.

We have asked, in those documents, for all the documents from the department that the former minister ran, the industry department. Can we guess which department has not complied with the whole order? It is the industry department. Can we guess which department has the most blacked-out and censored documents? It is the industry department. It is rivalled only by the Prime Minister's department, the Privy Council Office, which has also refused to give the truth about its documents. An incredible cover-up is going on.

The way to solve this and break the Liberal filibuster against giving up the documents is for them to give them up without redactions. It is the easiest way for the House to get back to dealing with the issues that Canadians are concerned about, such as the doubling of housing costs, with mortgages and rent, and the tripling of the carbon tax to 61¢ a litre. Is everybody aware that the Liberals plan to increase the carbon tax? I can just see the Liberals' campaign slogan now: “Re-elect us and we will put taxes up to 61¢ a litre.” I think it is a winner. We can just ask Joe Clark how that worked out for him in 1980.

We have a group of Liberals who are so desperate to cover up all the emails between former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains and the current industry minister, who has been responsible for the Liberal green slush fund for 45 months. They are trying to hide those documents. They have kept the House from getting to the business of actually dealing with issues for three months: September, October and into November as of today. We must hold the government to account for failing to deal with two million people a month going to food banks in Canada, for tripling the carbon tax, for increasing the cost of food and for its massively unsuccessful housing decelerator fund, in which it has spent billions of dollars to hire bureaucrats and not built a single house.

We could get to those things if the Liberals would stop filibustering and obey the House order of a democratically elected Parliament. As has been the case for over 400 years, when the House asks for something, the government is compelled to give it. It must really be bad for them to delay what they think is their priority legislation and to continue their filibuster on releasing the documents.

We all know that we would like the House to get on to the plan of fixing the budget. We have a Minister of Finance who has never met a target, nor did her predecessor, former minister “Bill no more”. They have never met a target. She said that the government was going to keep it to a $40-billion deficit, as if it were some sort of a challenge to spend only $40 billion more than the taxes it takes in. She could not even do that. She is over by $8 billion already, and we are not even through the year. We can imagine what it is going to be in the spring, when the final numbers come in about the incompetence of the government's financial ability. Maybe that is why it is delaying the release of the documents, so it cannot be held to account for its incompetence on fixing the budget.

Now let us talk about the government's inability to build homes. It brags about the billions of dollars in its housing accelerator fund, which has not built a house. That is why I call it the “decelerator” fund. My home province is Nova Scotia. The Minister of Housing is from Nova Scotia, but we would not know it. Maybe we would, because he gave $30 million of housing decelerator money to the City of Halifax. How many houses did it build? It built zero. How many people did it hire? It hired 30 more urban planners to make sure it could slow the housing process down. That is why it is the housing decelerator fund. The government is refusing to release the documents on the green slush fund so that it cannot be held to account for its ineptitude on housing.

We know that crime has massively gone up. In the city of Toronto, in the large cities and even in Nova Scotia, we are seeing the massive thefts of cars. People are being told by the Toronto police to just leave their keys by the door so that thieves do not come in and maybe harm them. They are told to let them take their car because that would be easier than them enforcing the law. What would be easier to ensure that this does not happen is to not let people who are charged with the theft of automobiles, who have been convicted time after time, out on bail.

The other election slogan of the government, other than that it will raise the tax to 61¢ a litre, will be to re-elect it so it can allow more criminals on the streets. However, it does not want us discussing those issues in the House. That is why it is not releasing the documents. It needs to stop the crime.

Let us not forget about the tax that is putting the price of everything up: the carbon tax. We believe it should axe the tax, but the government does not want to be held to account for that. Here is what happens. For 20 years, I worked in retail. I can tell members that, when one buys a good from somebody who has to manufacture it, producing that good takes a lot of energy. When it takes a lot of energy, there is a carbon tax on that, which increases the price of buying that good. One of the biggest costs in retail is the cost to transport that good from where it was made to our stores. Can members guess what is used to transport it? It is diesel and gas, not sailboats or bicycles. We cannot use the Minister of Environment's bicycles to truck a container of rum to Nova Scotia; it has to come by truck or boat. That fuel gets taxed, which increases the price. Of course, when one operates 100 or 1,000 mass market retail stores across Canada, can we guess what one's number one cost is besides labour? It is not the rent; it is paying for the energy to operate that store. Because the energy costs are there, the carbon tax is put on that. When we tax the manufacturer or the grower, tax the transportation and tax the retailer, can we guess what happens? The price of everything goes up. According to Dalhousie University, 84% of Canadians say that food is the number one thing they have seen go up.

This Liberal filibuster could end and we could get on to dealing with these issues if the Liberals would stop covering up their green slush fund and release the unredacted documents.

Rick Perkins

$589,362.00