Mr. Speaker, I was going to talk about a lot of things, but the news this morning, or the tweet from the finance minister, has really changed things.

We are here today debating the privilege motion, which is the failure to produce documents pertaining to SDTC and the corruption that ensued from that. We know that the government is withholding documents from the House of Commons. We have seen this happen before with the Liberal government. We have had elections over it in the past, and here we are again today, debating a production of documents privilege motion.

What is the debate about? It is about an organization called SDTC, which is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding to companies to pursue so-called green technologies, and this organization has been tasked with divvying out this money. It turns out, as we have heard from the Auditor General, that nearly $400 million this organization has given out was done under a cloud of conflict of interest, where people who were sitting on the board were giving their own companies money from this organization. That may come as no surprise to Canadians, as Canadians have come to expect that from this government, and Conservatives have been holding the government to account on this for a number of months now.

However, what is new today is that the finance minister has resigned her seat. She has written a letter to the Prime Minister, and I would like to read that letter here this morning just so we are all clear on what was going on there. The letter reads:

Dear Prime Minister,

It has been the honour of my life to serve in government, working for Canada and Canadians. We have accomplished a lot together.

On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your Finance Minister and offered me another position in the Cabinet.

Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the Cabinet.

To be effective, a Minister must speak on behalf of the Prime Minister and with his full confidence. In making your decision, you made clear that I no longer credibly enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with it.

For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada.

Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 per cent tariffs.

We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.

That means pushing back against 'America First' economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring. That means working in good faith and humility with the Premiers of the provinces and territories of our great and diverse country, and building a true Team Canada response.

I know Canadians would recognize and respect such an approach. They know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves. Inevitably, our time in government will come to an end. But how we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer. Canada will win if we are strong, smart, and united.

It is this conviction which has driven my strenuous efforts this fall to manage our spending in ways that will give us the flexibility we will need to meet the serious challenges presented by the United States.

I will always be grateful for the chance to have served in government and I will always be proud of our government's work for Canada and Canadians.

I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues as a Liberal Member of Parliament, and I am committed to running again for my seat in Toronto in the next federal election.

With gratitude,

The [former finance minister]

That is the letter that was written to the Prime Minister this morning. It was shocking news for all of us, and it speaks to what Conservatives have been calling for, for a very long time, which is that there is no confidence in the government.

We have been saying this for quite a while. The Bloc has recently joined us in this as well. Now the former finance minister is suggesting that Canadians have no confidence in the government. What is increasingly concerning or confusing to me is the fact that the NDP continues to prop up the failed government, continues to provide confidence in the Liberal government, despite the fact that we are now seeing that even top-level members of the cabinet no longer have that.

We saw the resignation of the housing minister earlier today in a press conference where he said he is no longer seeking re-election. He has resigned from cabinet as well. We see that the troubles of our country are piling up. The government is in chaos and unable to address the issues. Conservatives have put forward a common-sense plan to axe the tax, to get rid of the carbon tax, to free up our economy and ensure that Canadians can afford food. When we tax the farmer who grows the food, we tax the trucker who drives the truck to deliver the food and we tax the grocery store that sells us the food, Canadians cannot afford food.

We have seen this over and over again, and we have been relaying this message to the government, pointing out that more Canadians are visiting food banks than ever before. We have been calling for a common-sense plan to remove the carbon tax, to make us competitive with our neighbouring countries, like the United States, which is our biggest trading partner in many ways but also our competition in an increasing number of ways. To have our economy saddled with the carbon tax while the Americans are not puts us at a significant disadvantage.

I think that the former finance minister recognized that. She recognized that, so she chose to resign today. We noticed last week already that there seemed to be some daylight between the Prime Minister and the former finance minister around a fiscal guardrail. We heard repeatedly from the former finance minister that she was concerned about the finances of our country and that she wanted to keep the deficit to $40 billion.

From my perspective, a balanced budget is the thing we ought to be pursuing, not a deficit of $40 billion. However, it appears, in the fall economic statement the former finance minister was expected to deliver today, even that target would not have been met. We see that, increasingly, Canadians are lacking confidence in the government. The former finance minister is lacking confidence in the government, and Canadians are feeling the weight of the carbon tax, which is hampering our economy and making life unaffordable.

If that were not enough, the government intends to triple the carbon tax. As if life is not difficult enough in Canada, if we cannot afford to heat, house and eat in Canada because of the carbon tax at its current level, imagine what it is going to be when it triples over the next number of years. It is not an April Fool's Day joke, but every April 1, we get an increase in the carbon tax. This happens over and over again until Canadians cannot afford to live.

It is interesting as well that the housing minister resigned today. Common-sense Conservatives have put forward a plan to build the homes across Canada by removing the GST on new home builds. This would save on average about $50,000 per new home build and would stimulate new home builds across the country. We are building fewer homes than we did in the 1970s, yet our population growth is dramatically higher than it was.

I would also point out that the housing minister formerly was the immigration minister. In some ways, he was responsible in his former role for the problems in his current role, which he was unable to fix and now is resigning from that position altogether. I wish the former housing minister well in his new endeavours. I hope he is more successful in those endeavours than he was as the minister of immigration and then housing, as he seemed to have been a total failure in both of those.

It is interesting we get two ministers of the cabinet resigning on the same day, with one very clearly outlining that they have lost confidence in the Prime Minister. It is also interesting to note that, in the resignation letter of the former finance minister, she talks about “keeping our fiscal powder dry”. Conservatives have been arguing for a long time for that: to ensure that we balance the budget and keep the fundamentals of our fiscal home in order. This is something that the Prime Minister, from the get-go, has been loath to achieve.

I remember back in 2015, when I was first running to be a member of Parliament, that the Prime Minister said he was going to run small deficits. I also remember former prime minister Stephen Harper, at the time, pointing out that they were going to run these very small, very tiny deficits. Those deficits have ballooned dramatically. Never, ever, I think, in the entire tenure of the Prime Minister, has the deficit been $10 billion. It has always been dramatically more than that.

We have seen the initial four years of $10-billion deficits grow into multi-billion dollar deficits, $60-billion and $70-billion deficits, for nearly a decade. After nine years of the Prime Minister, the national debt has doubled. The Prime Minister has taken on more debt than all other prime ministers combined. To say that we need to keep our fiscal powder dry is almost somewhat humorous. I am glad that the former finance minister is pointing this out today, but the Prime Minister has failed to do that for nearly nine years and came in on a promise to run deficit budgets.

I do agree with the former finance minister when she says that we are facing “grave” challenges with the prospect of a 25% tariff. Particularly where I come from in northern Alberta, softwood lumber is a major part of the economy. I always say to everybody that I come from the promised land. We do forestry, oil field and farming where I come from. We have been suffering under double-digit percentage tariffs on our softwood lumber for as long as the Prime Minister has been the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has totally failed to secure a softwood lumber deal with the United States. He has put our industry at a significant disadvantage. He has failed to not only defend our industry against American tariffs, but also failed to defend our industry here at home when provincial governments worked very hard to shut down the forestry industry. Then he has failed in terms of forest management when the federal government is involved in it. In Jasper National Park, the federal government is entirely responsible for forest management, and we saw large swathes of the national park burn because of poor forest management practices over the last 10 years.

We know what it is like to live under these tariffs in one particular industry, and we are concerned about the possibility of the entire Canadian economy suffering under a 25% tariff. We need a government that is focused on Canada first. We need a government that is focused on ensuring we have a united front here in Canada. From the Liberal government, we see chaos. We see finance ministers resigning, a deputy prime minister resigning her post, because the Prime Minister no longer has confidence in them and they no longer have confidence in the Prime Minister.

Conservatives have been calling for a carbon tax election, and I think that there is no better time than right now to call that election, to ensure that we can have a government that has the confidence of Canadians, that can negotiate with the United States and that can ensure that we do not face the 25% tariff that the Americans are threatening. Then we can fix some of these other problems and disputes that we have with the United States around software lumber. We can then restore the dream of North American free trade, which I have lived under my entire life and which, I think, was good for North America in general.

We need a government that can combat the buy America policies of several of the American states, so that we can ensure that we have a fortress North America rather than a conflict between Canada and the United States.

I note that the former finance minister did not mention, in her resignation letter, the fiscal anchor that she had put in place for herself. I would note that this was, I think, the third fiscal anchor. A declining debt-to-GDP ratio was the first one, but when that no longer held, she then moved to this $40-billion deficit. I note that she does not mention it explicitly in her resignation letter, but we did note last week that there seemed to be a number of rumblings coming not only out of the Liberal caucus, but also out of the ministry, around a dispute between the Prime Minister and the former finance minister over these fiscal guardrails that the former finance minister had put in place and whether the Prime Minister was willing to abide by them.

What seems obvious from the letter that we have from the former finance minister is that there was a significant disagreement and that the Prime Minister chose to fire the former finance minister rather than abide by the fiscal guardrails. The letter notes that, “On Friday, you”, referring to the Prime Minister, “told me”, that is, the former finance minister, “you no longer want me to serve as your Finance Minister and offered me another position in cabinet.”

That is effective dismissal. The finance minister is generally noted to be the most high-ranking minister in the cabinet. It is generally the most prestigious position. A transfer out of that position to any other position would be seen as a demotion, which is an effective dismissal. I would say that the Prime Minister fired the former finance minister.

This has happened before to cabinet ministers who have stood up for Canada and who have stood up for what they believed to be right. We need to look no further than Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was in a very similar position. She felt that the defence of SNC-Lavalin should be done by the company itself in court and not by political interference by the justice minister, and she got into a dispute with the Prime Minister about this.

We saw a significant level of pressure brought to bear upon her to skirt around justice. We saw what happened to her as well. She was fired as the justice minister. She was also asked if she would be willing to take a lateral move. Therefore, we see that this is an MO of the Prime Minister, that he wants to get his way. No cabinet minister may push for what is good for Canada or for what is good for their ministry. It is insisted that they abide by the whims and wishes of the Prime Minister.

Today, we see another casualty of the whims and wishes of the Prime Minister, with the resignation of the former finance minister, which only goes to cover up, again, and distract from, again, the major scandals that have been plaguing the Liberal government over the last number of years. To bring it back to the privilege debate that we have been debating today, this just adds to a long line of scandals that have been happening with the government: SNC-Lavalin, the WE Charity scandal, SDTC and never mind the environment minister's severe conflict of interest with Cycle Capital.

All of those things would be more than enough to take down any government, yet here we are; it is still standing.

Arnold Viersen

$592,855.00