44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 30, 2022 11:00AM
- May/30/22 4:30:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is important that the committee is allowed to finish off its work and that anyone who obstructed those investigations in the past is allowed to appear now so we can get the truth for all Canadians on how the WE Charity scandal had played out.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to this concurrence motion. Those watching at home might be wondering what a concurrence motion is. A report has been tabled by a committee in the House. Very rarely would there be a concurrence motion like this to vote on a report. It is, in my opinion and as the member for Winnipeg North indicated earlier, nothing more than a tactic by the Conservatives to jam up more House time.
What makes this particular concurrence motion even more remarkable is this. We start off with the rarity by which reports are dealt with in a concurrence motion, but this one is not even a report from the current ethics committee. This is actually a report from the previous committee. I am sorry, I should not say that. All of the work was done by the previous committee. It developed the report, put together the report, studied it, questioned the witnesses and put it forward. All the current ethics committee that exists in this Parliament did was retable that report.
We start from a place where it is very rare to have a motion like this on a report. To make it even more bizarre, it is not even a report that the current ethics committee dealt with. It did not interview the witnesses. It did not ask questions or form the recommendations. It is going off of work that was done before. People might ask themselves why it is doing this or they might become skeptical when we accuse the Conservatives of using this as just another political opportunity. It is very clear, when we look at the games they are playing, that they are willing to go to any lengths to make sure that we cannot get government legislation through.
For those watching, what we otherwise would have been discussing right now is Bill C-18. Bill C-18 is a bill that the Conservatives, at least in their election platform, support. It is a bill that would provide supports to news outlets throughout our country to make sure they can continue to be independent. Rather than doing their job and following through on commitments they made during the election campaign to Canadians, they see no political win or political gain out of this particular bill because the vast majority of members in the House, if not all, already support it. They are looking for blood, quite frankly, and they do not see any here. That is why they say, “Rather than spend time talking about Bill C-18, a concept that we agree with, why not go after something that we can actually attack Liberals and individual Liberal members on?” That is exactly what we are seeing here with the introduction of this concurrence motion on this report that has been tabled by the committee.
One of the comments that I found very interesting, and I was surprised to hear from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, of all people, was when she questioned the member for Winnipeg North as to why he was using time to debate this. That criticism or question might hold water if nobody else in the room was speaking to it, but Conservatives are. They are using the time, burning the day, by debating and talking about this particular motion. The question then becomes: Why would we not use our designated slots to speak to this and to tell Canadians what is going on?
I find it quite interesting that we would be accused of wanting to speak to this just because we do not want to talk to it. That is like saying that we should not be speaking to it because we do not want to be talking about this anyway. Of course we do not want to be talking about this. We want to be talking about Bill C-18, but the reality of the situation is that through their political games the Conservatives have put us in the position of having to debate this right now. We are clearly going to use that opportunity to debate it and show Canadians what is going on right now. I would expect, to be completely honest, that question to come, in a very cynical way, from my colleagues across the way, but I was surprised to hear it from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. Maybe she has had an opportunity to reflect on it and thinks differently of it now.
I would like to talk about this report specifically. I realize there are 23 recommendations in this report that were put forward by the previous Parliament's ethics committee. It put forward these recommendations. When one starts to read the recommendations, it becomes very clear how incredibly focused they are on individuals: the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's wife and people who work in the Prime Minister's Office.
We heard a Conservative member talk earlier about wanting to get certain staff to come before the committee. One of the deep criticisms was that the government would not allow staff to go before the committee to testify. Instead, the President of the Treasury Board, if I remember correctly, offered to go to the committee to speak, but the Conservatives, the opposition, were not interested in that. They wanted actual staffers to go there.
I find that very concerning. I realize that Conservatives have no issue with attacking individual people. For the slightest bit of political gain, they will take down somebody's career. We already know that. They did, after all, for the first time in over 100 years, drag someone before the House, to the bar of the House. It had not happened in 100 years, and it had never happened to somebody who was outside of the government. The Conservatives dragged before the bar the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. That demonstrates how willing they are to take down anybody if they think they will get the slightest political gain out of it, and that is exactly what we are seeing happen here today.
When the minister who is responsible for these staffers says they are the leader, they will take responsibility, they will go before committee and they will answer the questions, that shows what a leader does. Was that enough blood for the Conservatives? No, of course it was not. They wanted to go after the staffers, the individuals who are employed by the minister responsible, which, coming from the ethics committee of all places, is extremely unethical.
In any organization, there is always somebody who is going to take responsibility for those decisions, somebody who will be the accountable one. The minister wanted to do that. Were the Conservatives and other opposition parties interested in that in at committee? No, they were not. They wanted staff. They wanted individuals who do not have the same power to defend themselves, who do not have a voice in this place and who do not have a voice in the public to be the ones to go in and be berated for two hours.
The minister was not interested in doing that, which should not come as a surprise to anybody in this House. It certainly should not come as a surprise to Canadians, especially when Canadians witnessed the Conservative Party, propped up by the Bloc and the NDP, drag before the House of Commons a public service individual, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Never in the history of this Parliament had that happened, and when it was done before that, it was never an individual in his position.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, they are heckling me now. I can always tell when I hit a nerve. I can always tell when the truth is starting to sink in. When someone is calling them out, we can tell, because that is when they start to heckle, and that is exactly what they are doing right now.
When it comes back to this particular report and the committee work that was done, Liberals did participate in this committee at the time. They participated in the committee. They helped studies with the witnesses. They helped to create their own recommendations. I know that three recommendations that came from the Liberal benches, which I do not see in the same form in the report, were never adopted. I would like to read out what those recommendations were.
The recommendations from the Liberal members do not mention individuals' names or look to berate people. They look to set and develop policy. The recommendations, which were in the dissenting report, were that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics conduct, at an earliest opportunity, a full statutory review of the Conflict of Interest Act with appropriate recommendations.
It seems like a legitimate thing to do. It seems like a legitimate thing to do from a policy perspective if we are is generally interested in trying to fix perceived flaws in our system. That is what we would do, not talk about all these recommendations that they have in here referencing the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's wife and various other people, as well as how certain information needs to be turned over immediately. The reason I say that is that colleagues will recall that the Ethics Commissioner was already doing his own study on this issue.
Everything that the committee was demanding in the form of recommendations through this study was for no purpose other than to grandstand and put all the dirty laundry of everybody out in public, regardless of what their involvement was. They are attempts to do that. That is all this was. We know that is because the Ethics Commissioner is not going to do this to the same degree as the official opposition wanted the committee to do it. That is all they are interested in.
The Ethics Commissioner was already investigating this, and it was as if the committee said, “No, no; we're better at this. We should do all this work instead of the individual who has been hired to do this in a fair, non-partisan, unbiased way.” That is exactly why this report has been tabled again.
As I mentioned previously, this is not a report generated by this particular Parliament at the ethics committee that sits now, but one from the previous Parliament. They basically just grabbed the report and retabled it so that the Conservatives could continually do this over and over and over.
The second recommendation that the Liberals put forward in that dissenting report was that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics conduct at the earliest opportunity a full statutory review of the Lobbying Act, with appropriate recommendations.
Again looking at it from a policy perspective, the Liberals were saying that they recognize there is concern out there, that it is possible there are flaws out there, and that this is how they would address it. They would look at the Conflict of Interest Act and look at the Lobbying Act and at ways to make them better and strengthen them. That is what proper policy from a committee should look like, not these arbitrary demands that are being made by the opposition for no purpose other than to try to shame individuals and try to keep a scandal going as long as they possibly can. That is all they were interested in.
The third and final recommendation made by the Liberal members in the dissenting report was that the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics refrain from conducting parallel investigations with any independent office into the conduct of members of Parliament, either directly or by proxy.
That last recommendation was the Liberal members saying, “Hold on a second, as this ethics investigation is already ongoing by the individual who has been appointed to look into this stuff. Maybe it is not a good idea that we do this at the same time.” It would be the equivalent of a judge reviewing a case in court while a parliamentary committee is trying to do the exact same thing on the side. They are trying to influence it. They are trying to highlight and bring everything possible to the surface so that they can try to attack individuals and personalities. They do this time after time.
This brings me back to where I started in the five minutes I have remaining. What we are seeing here today is part of a pattern. It is part of a pattern that has been developed lately by the Conservative Party of Canada, a pattern of continually trying to put up any possible roadblocks. They are moving concurrence on a report that a committee in this Parliament did not even write. They are not even doing the work before trying to move the motion here. They are just grabbing a report from the last Parliament and retabling it here so that they can move concurrence on it. We are seeing this time and time again.
As indicated by the member for Winnipeg North on a number of occasions, the Conservatives have complained, saying they want debate, that they want to debate the issue. They say, “Why won't you let us debate these very important pieces of legislation?”
Then the government says, “Good point. Maybe we do need some more time to debate.” Motion No. 11 comes along, basically saying, “Let us sit later into the evening.” What did the Conservatives do? They tried to filibuster that. We had to move closure on that motion, the motion to try to set our work schedule. That is how incredibly obstructionist they have been.
Earlier today we saw a Conservative member stand up and move an amendment to the concurrence motion. He was just trying to create another vote. He was trying to burn more time. That is what is happening over and over in here. This is not about actually debating policy.
If Conservatives wanted to debate policy today and had a genuine interest in advancing the objectives of Canadians, they would be debating Bill C-18, something we know they care about because it was in their platform, and something they had said they are pushing forward on.
However, it appears as though the Conservatives are only interested in moving it forward if they form government. As we saw, they put it in their election platform and they ran on it. We get here and say, “Let us bring this idea forward.” It should be a fairly easy one to get through, because we know the Conservatives support it, but every single time we bring it up in this House, they put up a roadblock like this to prevent us from actually talking about it.
The Conservatives are only interested in delivering for Canadians if they can be in the driver's seat. That is not how democracy works. Democracy works, in Canada at least, with people being elected from 338 parts of the country, coming together and figuring out the best way forward. If we cannot do it through consensus, which by default we rarely ever could, then we vote on it. Then we move on. We recognize that we played our role in that democratic process, that we helped advance the lives of Canadians for the better. We accept the roles that we have been given in the House.
Canadians will notice that the Liberal Party said that we accept the role we have been given in this House. We accept the role of being a minority government. What did we do? We looked to other parties. We went to the NDP to see if it wanted to work with us to advance issues for Canadians. The NDP accepted its role. It said yes. It had an interest in advancing issues for Canadians and wanted to get together and work together. That is how we got a supply and confidence agreement.
We know what the Bloc's objective is. It is interested in being its own country. I guess, by default, it is going to be a lot harder to work with them for the interest of all Canadians, but at least we know exactly what its position is. We know exactly where it is coming from. The Conservatives, however, are literally rudderless right now. Who is driving the ship over there? I would absolutely love to know. There is no way that they can continue to operate in this way. They do not even know what their role in this House is.
I have no problem voting against this concurrence motion and I have given my reasons. I have referenced the report, but this is not what we should have been talking about today. We should have been talking about Bill C-18, an issue that would genuinely advance the interests of Canadians and make our country more independently focused for news organizations and outlets throughout the world. Unfortunately, we are not there, because the Conservatives are once again playing games.
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- May/30/22 8:23:13 p.m.
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Madam Chair, how many prosecutions have occurred from DFO investigations for out-of-season fishing in the Maritimes?
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