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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/28/22 2:27:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister cannot dodge these questions much longer. We have to remember, there is no statute of limitations under the Criminal Code here in Canada. In fact, the Prime Minister's silence sounds a lot like an admission of guilt. The RCMP criminal brief said that, if the Prime Minister were any other Canadian, he would have been charged. Canadians are demanding that the Prime Minister be held to a higher standard. Will the Prime Minister lift the veil of secrecy, clear the air and proactively speak to the RCMP?

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/28/22 2:25:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals need to understand that we are talking about the RCMP investigation of fraud against the government by the Prime Minister, not the Ethic Commissioner's study. The Prime Minister thinks he is above the law and the rest of us are under another piece of law. He accepted a $215,000 luxury private island vacation from someone who is actively lobbying the government for millions of taxpayers' money. The environment minister provided the missing piece of the puzzle the RCMP needed to charge him. He admitted he did not have permission to take the trip. The RCMP has all of the puzzle pieces they need now to charge the Prime Minister with committing fraud against the government. Will the Prime Minister co-operate with that investigation?

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Apr/28/22 10:35:44 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, here we are wanting to talk about ethics. At the very basis of what we do in this chamber, we have to have the trust of all Canadians, and right now there is a cloud of suspicion hanging over the head of the Prime Minister. This government, this Liberal-NDP coalition, refuses to be held to account and to allow Canadians to look underneath this veil of secrecy of what exactly this Prime Minister has done, whether it comes down to his private vacations or his involvement in the WE scandal. Canadians deserve to know exactly what is up, and people need to be held accountable. If the NDP want to be here giving a get-out-of-jail-free card to the Liberals, shame on them.

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Apr/28/22 10:34:32 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as we see with this unholy alliance between the NDP and the Liberals, NDP members are standing here helping to support the Liberals and later today are going to push through a motion here that undermines this democratic institution. This motion is about a three-hour debate. I am talking about how the public confidence in our institutions, including the Parliament of Canada, is being undermined by this government, and the NDP is now enabling and allowing this government to cover up this failure of accountability and this unethical behaviour. Now there is this dictatorial approach on how they are going to ram through legislation in this very chamber.

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Apr/28/22 10:33:33 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am getting heckled by the member for Winnipeg North. Again, as the chief spokesperson for lack of accountability, for cover-ups and for the unethical behaviour of this government, we can always point to the member for Winnipeg North to stand up and be there shouting the loudest.

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Apr/28/22 10:32:49 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised that the member for Winnipeg North wants to avoid accountability. I am not surprised that the member for Winnipeg North wants to be the chief cheerleader to help cover up the Prime Minister's, and this government's, unethical behaviour and the possibility that some of it may even be criminal these days, when we look at the investigation by the RCMP into fraud against the government by the Prime Minister himself—

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/28/22 10:21:33 a.m.
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moved that the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Tuesday, March 31, 2022, be concurred in. He said: Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes. Just so everyone knows, he lives in Brockville. He has one of the biggest handles in the entire chamber. In my role as shadow minister for ethics, a position that I have had for just a few weeks, it has been an incredibly busy time. It comes down to the fact that the Liberals have had quite the record of scandals during their tenure in government. We were reminded earlier this week of the unethical behaviour of the Prime Minister in that he was found, four times, by the former Ethics Commissioner, Mary Dawson, being in contravention of the Conflict of Interest Act. He was guilty of violating and contravening sections 5, 11, 12 and 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act for taking an illegal vacation. We now know, from the beginning of this week, that the Prime Minister was also investigated by the RCMP for fraud against the government under paragraph 121(1)(c) of the Criminal Code for that illegal vacation on a private island. We also know that the Prime Minister was found guilty of contravening section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act over his interference in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and the unnecessary interference and his concerted campaign to pressure the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould, into offering SNC-Lavalin a special plea deal, what is called a deferred prosecution agreement. We have to remember that Jody Wilson-Raybould stood on her principles, stood up for justice, refused to interfere and, because of that, lost her job as the Attorney General of Canada. The Treasury Board president of the day, Jane Philpott, was also fired from cabinet. Both of them were kicked out of the Liberal caucus by the Prime Minister. We know that this scandal in itself had huge overreaching impacts on the Liberal Party. We know that the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, had to resign, along with the Clerk of the Privy Council at the time, Michael Wernick, who also resigned in disgrace. As I go through this, I go to Bill Morneau, the former Minister of Finance, whom I am going to talk about in just a bit. Along with that, there is also the former Minister of Fisheries, who is now the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities and the MP for Beauséjour, who was caught up in the lucrative clam scam agreement when he ensured that family members, using nepotism, were awarded lucrative contracts worth over $24 million. When we talk about Mr. Morneau, the contents of the report that the ethics committee did, tabled here a month ago, and the report tabled in the previous Parliament, concentrated on Bill Morneau and the WE scandal, but even going into that, Bill Morneau as the finance minister was also found guilty of contravening the Conflict of Interest Act for failing to disclose that he had a luxurious villa in the French countryside. He refused to disclose that to the Ethics Commissioner for two years. The Liberals have a long history of scandal. As we just witnessed with the Prime Minister's failure on the issue of his private vacation and being four times guilty under the Conflict of Interest Act and investigated for fraud against the government under the Criminal Code, we do not know if the RCMP investigated Bill Morneau over the WE scandal and the contents of the report that we tabled on March 31, on which I also got up on a question of privilege, as you may recall, Mr. Speaker. We have to remember that Mr. Morneau failed to recuse himself from the cabinet table when decisions were made about awarding the WE Charity over half a billion dollars, and gave it preferential treatment. Mr. Morneau allowed his ministerial staff to work directly with the WE Charity, help them develop their proposals and intervene on behalf of WE at federal, provincial and municipal levels to deliver a program that was beyond WE's capabilities, as we found out through testimony. Additionally, Mr. Morneau failed to talk about how his own daughter worked for the WE foundation. In the wake of this WE scandal, and in the wake of the work that was done by the ethics committee in the previous Parliament, Mr. Morneau was removed from cabinet. However, it was not just Mr. Morneau who was caught up in this scandal: We know that there were at least 10 videos made by WE that involved the Prime Minister, and we know those were produced by Door Knocker Media and were worth over $217,000, yet the Prime Minister was not investigated by Elections Canada on third-party endorsement and third-party expenditures for campaign-style video productions. We know for a fact that the Prime Minister made a campaign statement in one of the videos, where he said, “I pledge to work hard for all Canadians.” This is something we hear in the House every day and heard just yesterday during question period with the Prime Minister. He always says he is working here for all Canadians. He also said that he was going to “invest in our youngest leaders: you”. That was a promise to soon-to-be voters, and it was clearly a political message he used in those videos paid for by the WE Charity. We know that the Prime Minister's wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, received over $20,000 for a weekend getaway in London for the WE Day the organization held in 2020. Just weeks before that, WE was given a contract for half a billion dollars to deliver the Canada student service grant: something that was specifically designed by the Government of Canada, orchestrated by Bill Morneau and implicated by the Prime Minister in ensuring that it was delivered through the WE Charity, which was an organization that had never done anything working with students at this scale during a pandemic. These facts appear a clear conflict of interest, and have severely damaged public confidence in our democratic institutions, especially here in the Parliament of Canada. During our testimony, there were calls to bring a number of witnesses who refused to attend. The House ordered, on Thursday, March 25, 2021, that Ben Chin, Rick Theis and Amitpal Singh all appear as witnesses. I want to remind everyone that Ben Chin is the senior adviser to the Prime Minister, and that he received a LinkedIn message from Craig Kielburger of WE that stated, “Hello Ben, Thank you for your kindness in helping shape our latest program with the government. Warmly, Craig”. Mr. Chin responded to Mr. Kielburger, “Great to hear from you Craig; let's get our young working”. Ben Chin refused to comply with the order of the House to appear. Rick Theis, who is also in the Prime Minister's office as the director of policy and cabinet affairs, met with the Kielburger brothers from WE on May 5, 2020, regarding this new program, and Amitpal Singh, who was an adviser to Bill Morneau in early April, suggested a youth services program would eventually be developed into a tailor-made, half-a-billion-dollar WE Charity program. All three witnesses were instructed to comply, but instead the ministers told them not to. That is contempt, and that election we just had and this new Parliament do not purge those witnesses from being held in contempt. I also want to point out that the MP for Waterloo, who at the time was the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, also perjured herself at committee. She testified that she did not discuss the half-billion-dollar program with the Kielburgers, yet in documentation submitted to the ethics committee, it was clear that she and her staff were working with the WE foundation. As members can see, when we put in the litany of scandals the current government has been plagued with, and we look at the WE Charity and the scandal here, it is important we look again at this report as well as have the ethics committee do more to study this issue.

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Apr/27/22 4:52:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, again, it is a perfect illustration of how the Liberals will say one thing but do something completely different, and it continues to undermine the economic prosperity of individual Canadians across this country. Instead of offering things as simple as tax relief, all we get is more ridiculous spending that is unnecessary, and it is ultimately undermining the government's ability to support Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

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Apr/27/22 4:50:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from the Bloc for his intervention, because he is dead right. The one thing the provinces asked the NDP-Liberal coalition government to do was increase health care transfers. About $28 billion was asked for and they got nothing. Instead, they got $5.3 billion for an imaginary dental plan, and that is nothing the provinces have asked for. Again, the federal government, now with the support of the NDP, continues to ignore the interests of our provinces in delivering health care to all Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and continues to venture into that type of jurisdiction. The housing program is another example of this. The federal government is stepping into provincial jurisdiction to create housing stock. We all know the money it is offering is not going to create half the housing stock that is required. It also penalizes people who are trying to increase housing stock through property developments, condo developments and flipping houses, which are all now being taxed even more by the Liberal-NDP coalition. That is disgusting.

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Apr/27/22 4:48:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind the member for Winnipeg North that under Stephen Harper, when we were at war in Afghanistan, there was defence spending. This is before the Liberals cooked the books on how we calculate the amount of money that is allocated to national defence by adding things like the Coast Guard, veterans' pensions and other things that are spent under foreign affairs, not under defence. If we had added those numbers in, we would have been well over 1.5% when we were at war in Afghanistan. When we pulled out of Afghanistan, defence spending went down because we balanced the books. The government here continues to spend recklessly. This means that the debts and deficits of today are going to be the taxes of tomorrow on our kids and grandkids, and we know the Liberals still have not made the investments, because the money they promise does not get spent.

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/27/22 4:37:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to rise today and address the budget, which I will call “the good, the bad and the ugly”. I am expecting Clint Eastwood to walk through the doors and the music to play. I will say this, just to address the speech. There is a section of this budget that I agree with. The good part is that the government is promising to give Ukraine $500 million and to provide weapons that are so desperately needed right now in the war against Russia. We need to make sure we send whatever lethal weapons Ukraine has been asking for. I am glad to see the government has made this announcement and will be out there on the market buying up as many weapons as possible. I know, for example, that there are lethal weapons being built in Winnipeg by PGW Defence Technologies, which builds sniper rifles. It has already done business on its own directly with the Ukrainian government in the past, and has also sent sniper rifles over very recently. I believe those high-quality sniper rifles being made in Winnipeg would be very valuable to the Ukrainian armed forces, and buying more of those weapons with this $500 million would be welcome news. I have been advocating this for quite some time, going back to early March, right after the invasion started. There is an inventory of Canadian military equipment that is sitting around and that is about to be retired and turned into museum monuments at war memorials and legion halls across this country, but we do have light armoured vehicles, such as the Coyotes and the Bisons. There are 32 armoured ambulances in the Bison configuration that can easily be used and shipped over to Ukraine. The reason we can use these vehicles to provide armoured personnel carrier protection to Ukraine is that the replacement LAVs, the new super Bisons that are being built in London at GDLS, are almost complete. The parking lot is full of new LAVs. They just need to be accredited by the Canadian Armed Forces. Taking those Bisons, Coyotes and our M113 tracked LAVs and sending them to Ukraine would provide much-needed protection, especially for the civilian domestic defence force that has been stood up with recruits from across Ukraine as they battle against the Russian aggressors. I have also been working with people here in Canada who want to buy Role II mobile field hospitals, which Ukraine has requested. Unfortunately, the government here has yet to provide those hospitals. We have extra Role II hospitals that are sitting in containers. They were purchased for the pandemic and were never used, so we could be moving them over. There are some mobile field hospitals that are available for sale in the Netherlands. Again, they are ready to go. The Government of Canada could buy those off the shelf and move them over there in under a week. I hope it will consider that and get it done, because Ukraine desperately needs them and has asked for them as part of the shopping list it has given to NATO countries around the world. Finally, there is the issue of the Harpoon missiles. We had defence and industry experts in Canada who came forward and said that we have over 200 unused Harpoon missiles sitting in inventory. There are launchers sitting on one of the ships that are under refurbishment right now. We could send over a whole cache of truck radar systems, all built here in Canada, with our excess Harpoon missiles that are sitting in inventory, to help protect Odessa from the onslaught that is taking place from the Black Sea. The more we can eliminate the Russian navy's ability to bring its forces to the coastline, the better off Ukraine will be, and the more protected. I welcome the $500 million. I encourage the government to do more and make sure we are repurposing some of our existing assets. We do not have to actually go there and put cash on the table, just send those and donate them to Ukraine, as well as the $500 million that is approved in this budget. Unfortunately, that is the only good thing in this budget, and I am not going to be able to support this budget, because of the bad and the ugly that are still in there. The bad is that the current government continues to print money like it is going out of style. The Liberals have increased the deficit again this year by another $52.4 billion, which has taken our national debt to $1.2 trillion, and all of that has not been entirely tied to, as they would like to say, pandemic spending to support the economy. We know there have been many situations where this budget is about unnecessary spending. It has put increased money into circulation, devalued the Canadian dollar and driven up interest rates and inflationary pressures on our economy. Canadians are now worse off because of the reckless spending by the Liberal-NDP coalition. They know that they have to deal with higher food prices and higher fuel prices, and that continues to increase the cost of living. In Manitoba alone, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's own numbers, Manitobans are now $2,000 poorer just because of inflation created by the government. I know they will try to argue that there are supply chain issues. They will try to argue that this is an international phenomenon, but, at the same time, we are talking about 6.7% inflation rate. That is higher than in so many other countries in the G7 and the G20, and it is because of excess government spending and putting too much cheap Canadian money into circulation, which has taken inflation out of control. The other bad part of this budget is that there is no help there for farmers. We are seeing higher input costs because of inflationary pressures. We are seeing higher input costs on farmers because of the carbon tax, which affects everything from diesel fuel to fertilizer prices. We are seeing that the Liberals continue to push farmers farther and farther down into the deep red hole on their balance sheet because they do not care about protecting our farm families. They may, as a government, expect that they will be able to import cheap food from elsewhere, but why do we want to make our farmers less competitive on the international market? Why would we not let our beef, pork, grain and oilseed producers flourish and be competitive on the world market? Instead, we are increasing their input costs to such a level that they will never be able to compete on that global scale. We expect government to actually care about our farmers, our farm families and our rural communities and give them relief from things like the carbon tax, give them relief from rising excise taxes on fuel, give them relief from the increasing costs of fertilizer. We need to know if the government will ever commit to helping out our farmers. In my riding of Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, our farmers last year dealt with a very devastating drought, the fourth year of dry conditions, and again, the help from the federal government was next to nil. We know that there is no help in the budget for farmers who dealt with that drought, whether it was trying to buy feed for their livestock or having major shortfalls in crop production. The ugly part of this budget is the way the government continues to treat our Canadian Armed Forces. Our members in uniform deserve to be given the best equipment and the best support, and have a warrior culture that is out there actively recruiting and rebuilding our Canadian Armed Forces. We are 10,000 members short as it stands today, and the government seems not to care about making sure that we have a critical mass of soldiers, sailors and aircrew across the country to serve here at home and to be able to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves around the world, including what we are seeing happening in Europe. Although the Liberals talk about increasing spending and getting it up to about 1.5% of GDP, it is still far short of what NATO members expect of us. Our NATO partners are asking us to spend 2% of GDP, and it is not happening in this budget. On top of that, the government continues to fall short in spending and buying new equipment. Procurement has been well short of satisfactory. We know that in this budget there is a $15-billion gap between what the government is promising to do and what is actually in the Department of National Defence departmental plans for the next year. We know they already have $12 billion lapsed over time that should have been used to buy new ships, new planes and other equipment for our Canadian Armed Forces members. It just comes back to the fact that the Liberal-NDP coalition has not made the proper investments in national defence, at a time when the world is getting more and more scary. We are witnessing what is happening in Europe with the Russian aggression in Ukraine, and we are always concerned with other nefarious actors on the world stage who are watching and seeing what Canada does, as well as our allies. We need to do more, not less.

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Apr/27/22 3:20:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, today during question period, the Prime Minister danced around answering any questions about criminal charges that he could be being investigated for. I believe it is only fair that I share with all members of the House the criminal briefing documents from the RCMP on the Prime Minister's fraud against the government.

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/27/22 2:50:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know the Prime Minister cannot keep his litany of scandals straight and that he is always confused between his multiple charges under the Conflict of Interest Act. What we are talking about here is the Criminal Code and a Prime Minister who thinks he is above the law. The RCMP needs to reopen the investigation into the Prime Minister accepting a gift from a lobbyist worth over $215,000. The Prime Minister cannot act with impunity. He should be held to a higher standard. Will the Prime Minister commit today to co-operating with the RCMP regarding his fraud against the government?

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/27/22 2:43:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will tell the Prime Minister that the one thing Canadians are sick and tired of is a Prime Minister who acts with impunity and thinks he is above the law. In the House yesterday, the Prime Minister gave the RCMP the missing clue it needed to begin a formal investigation into defrauding the government of over $200,000: He did not grant himself the permission to take this trip. Will the Prime Minister face the consequences and make himself and his staff available to be interviewed by the RCMP, or is he just going to refuse to face the music?

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Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)

Apr/27/22 2:42:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know that the Prime Minister is very uncomfortable with this line of questioning, and he will try to spin, spin, spin, but Canadians deserve to know that the Prime Minister is not above the law and in fact should be held to a higher standard. Yesterday, he admitted that he did not have consent to accept the vacation, and took it anyway. The unknown is now known. Will the Prime Minister come clean and remove the cloud of suspicion and proactively speak to the RCMP about his unethical and criminal behaviour?

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