Mr. Speaker, I do not normally plan my date schedule on the floor of the House of Commons, but since the member for Winnipeg North is so eager, this seems the right time to invite all members to join us in Winnipeg during the November break week. I will fly to Winnipeg. Wednesday, November 12 would probably be a good day. It is the day after Remembrance Day, so it is not going to conflict with anything, but students will still be in their classrooms. I will rely on the member to make some of the logistical arrangements on the ground himself, since I am providing the courtesy of flying to his hometown. This will be a great debate in front of students and other members of Parliament, I am sure.
I have been visiting a number of university campuses precisely to ask this question to students: Are they better off or worse off than their parents generation? I know many students I talk to are telling me they are worse off as a result of the failing economic policies of the government. We can talk about economics. We can talk about foreign policy. We can talk about House procedure. I am happy to debate that member anywhere, on anything, anytime, and I think the students of Winnipeg will benefit from that greatly. This will be Wednesday, November 12 in Winnipeg, but it will be the responsibility of the member for Winnipeg North to arrange some of the logistical details and to pick me up at the airport.
On to the subject of this debate, which will maybe be a bit of a prelude to that grand event coming up in a few weeks, we are talking about the Prime Minister’s conflicts of interest. The Prime Minister we have in office at present is the most conflicted prime minister in this country's history. He will have to, or is supposed to, recuse himself from decisions related to more than 100 different companies he has an interest in. This conflict of interest screen will be administered, conveniently, by his chief of staff, as well the Clerk of the Privy Council. The process of a blind trust is that somebody else is making decisions about what is done going forward with those investments, but of course, a person cannot necessarily unknow what they had that was put into that conflict in the first place.
For those watching at home, this is how a conflict of interest screen works. I buy a Dunkin’ Donuts, and then I put it in a blind trust. In my job as a minister, or a prime minister, a decision comes forward with a potential subsidy for Dunkin’ Donuts. It is in a blind trust, but I still know I used to invest in that. This is the problem for the whole architecture of this, frankly. If the Prime Minister made all of these investments, continues to hold the investments, knows he has them, yet is involved in decisions that would materially benefit him, even though he cannot control further decisions made with those companies, that still raises some major questions.
It is important to analyze the Prime Minister's own words and his own philosophy as it relates to relationships between corporations and government. I would encourage Canadians to read his book Value(s) because I think it is quite revealing about the Prime Minister’s approach to things. It is revealing in that he very much believes in this kind of stakeholder capitalist, elite capitalist model of decision-making, which is not free markets, but rather, it is elite business leaders and elite politicians getting together to make decisions, to pick winners and losers, to decide what is going to go forward and what is not going to go forward.
We see the Prime Minister leaning into this elite capitalism, elite corporatism philosophy with some of the proposals he has put forward, which is, on the one hand, more government involvement and control in the market, and, on the other hand, simultaneously, government abridging processes for favoured companies. With Bill C-5, the government did not choose to reform the assessment process. Instead, it said it is going to create an opportunity to fully abridge that process for certain favoured companies or favoured projects.
What we see developing with the Prime Minister is the implementation of his elite corporatist agenda. It is the idea that large businesses and politicians at the elite level come together to say what they like and do not like and what they think should and should not happen, and then they provide a red carpet for favoured projects or subsidies for favoured projects or approaches, leaving in place all the existing roadblocks for other kinds of businesses and those who are not as well connected or part of the elite corporate circle involved in making these decisions.
To a lot of people, the language used in the Prime Minister's book Values, such as elite corporatism or stakeholder capitalism, whatever one calls it, sounds nice in a sense because the implication is that people will be coming together and discussing the common good. However, in practice, what it ends up being is a small circle of elite and powerful people coming together and theorizing about what the common good is, while doing a lot of things that are particularly in their own interest.
In opposition to that approach, the Conservatives believe in genuinely free markets and open and transparent democratic decision-making where, yes, we deliberate about the common good, but where all of society, a much broader range of individuals, is able to participate in discussions and decisions about the common good and where economic activity is driven by creative competition in which all businesses can take part, not in which there are a small number of favoured elites.
There is an elite corporatist philosophy coming from the Prime Minister, and it is combined with a personal reality in which he is personally invested in or connected to many of the companies that could play a consequential role in benefiting from the corporate-government relationship the Prime Minister has advocated for. This is a big problem, and I think we are going to see the implications of it going forward from a Prime Minister who believes in elite corporatist decision-making and who is connected to and invested in many of the corporations that could well benefit from that process.
If we want to talk about what is aligned with our values and what is going to advance the common good, I note we have a jobs crisis right now in this country, and we are seeing more decisions that lead companies to move jobs out of the country. These are companies like Stellantis, which received significant government subsidies and chose to move jobs out of the country.
We sadly have a Prime Minister who led by example. Brookfield's corporate headquarters was moved out of the country while he was running the show. We have a well-connected Prime Minister coming from that world, and he paved the way to moving jobs out of this country. It goes to show that elite corporatist decision-making very often does not align with the interests of workers and Canadian families, and that the kind of model he advocates in his book is not one that aligns with anything many Canadians would like to see.
I will sit down and invite the member for Winnipeg North to respond.