Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to be changing the channel on the Conservative speeches that the House has been stuck with for the last two months.
For the benefit of my constituents in the great riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, I will note that the House of Commons has been held up since the end of September because of an ongoing argument over a House order to produce documents from Sustainable Development Technology Canada. That order was made by the House back in June; of course, because the government has not complied with it, we are faced with a motion of privilege. Basically, a privilege motion is brought forward by any member who feels that their personal rights as an MP of the House or the rights of the House as a collectivity have been breached. In this case, it was brought forward by the Conservatives.
The original motion that we are dealing with is very simple, and I will read it out for the record: “That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs”. The Conservatives, throughout the last couple of months, have been putting forward different variations of amendments and subamendments, but I will just stick to debate on the motion because I think that is an order with language that people can clearly understand.
On the face of it, it seems simple enough. The unfortunate thing is that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have found a way out of the mess that we are currently in. However, because both of these parties have abdicated their responsibility and are basically stuck in a playground fight with one another, all business of the House of Commons has come to a complete standstill. That is a problem. It costs a lot of money to run this place each and every day. We not only have the sitting members of Parliament, who are collecting their salaries, but we also have an extensive House of Commons administration, which is here to make sure that this place runs as smoothly as possible. I think Canadians would be quite full of regret if they were to see how their taxpayer dollars are being wasted in this frivolous debate, which has been going on for over two months now.
We have incredibly important bills and business of the House that could have been discussed, but instead, day after day, we are just treated to a litany of Conservative MPs, who keep on talking about the same old thing. However, I will say this for the record: I firmly believe that the House absolutely has a constitutionally protected right to send for persons and papers. The House can make an order, which is an important function of Parliament, to send for papers, and those papers could be documents of any kind, physical copies or electronic copies, but really the only limits are that they need to exist and they need to be within Canada. This is an unfettered right; it has been upheld again and again by the parliamentary counsel in rulings. Not only you, Mr. Speaker, but also previous occupants of the chair have reaffirmed that this right exists. Therefore, from the outset, I want to state clearly that I agree with the main thrust of what we are trying to achieve here, which is that the House wants to see all of those documents in their unredacted form.
However, we are at an obvious impasse. The government is unwilling to budge, and the Conservatives are unwilling to stand down. As a result, we are not going anywhere in the House, and important issues in foreign affairs, economic policy, health policy and all the things that Canadians elected us as MPs to come here and deliberate about on their behalf are not getting dealt with. In fact, the only recourse we have as members of Parliament right now is to bring up the occasional concurrence debate on a committee report that has already been tabled. It is not much of a debate because, of course, those committees have already agreed to those reports by majority vote, and they have been duly tabled. Therefore, we are left with the only option of spending three hours here and three hours there debating a report that has already been deliberated in thoroughness at its respective committee.
However, because that is the only avenue we have available to us, that is the only way that we have been able to bring forward important subjects on foreign affairs, on health, on economic policy and, again, on what Canadians are expecting us to do. As we are at an impasse, we have to look at this and try to be the adults in the room.
I will remind people that the Conservatives are filibustering their own motion right now. The motion they have brought forward is to bring this matter to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. That is a very important committee. That committee not only determines the membership of other standing committees, but it deals with all of these really important issues. If the House is at an impasse, it falls to that committee to deliberate and find a way forward. If we were to arrive at a space where we could send this motion, again, a Conservative motion that they brought forward and are filibustering, if we could find some way to bring this to the procedure and House affairs committee, so that that committee could deliberate on the way forward, then it would allow this House of Commons to get back to the business of debating the issues that matter to Canadians.
Now there are a few things I want to raise, because I have listened to Conservative speech after Conservative speech on this matter and it is unclear exactly what details they are looking for. On one hand, there are major problems with how this funding was allocated. The Auditor General observed that and the committee in its investigation observed that there were obviously major problems. Were they criminal? That is not for me to say. Obviously, there was some gross mishandling of taxpayer dollars and people absolutely need to be held accountable for that, but it is not up to us to determine whether this is a criminal matter. That falls on the independence of the RCMP and also our criminal prosecution services. They are the only ones who can decide whether this proceeds in a criminal way.
There have been some arguments back and forth on whether the House of Commons is within its rights to hand these documents over to the RCMP or whether that would constitute interference in an independent investigation. Again, this is not a question that I am best equipped to answer, nor the House as a collective body. I have repeatedly asked Conservative MPs after their speeches, because there is this uncertainty about what role the RCMP should play in this, if it would not be best to refer this to the PROC committee, call the commissioner of the RCMP forward as a witness and get best guidance from the top RCMP official in the land. I take this very seriously because at two standing committees I serve on, public safety and justice, I can say that I have dealt with this subject matter quite a bit. I have a lot of respect for the work that our police do.
Again, in an effort to find a reasonable and adult way forward, could we not just break this impasse to find a way for the RCMP to appear at that committee to find a way forward? If the procedure and House affairs committee recommends a path forward, then if the House is still not satisfied, we can again continue this privilege debate. However, I think it is sincerely unfair that debating this now very frivolous motion has held up the business of the House for more than two months. I lay the blame equally on both the Conservatives and the Liberals. They have obviously been unable to find a way forward.
What I would say is that a lot of the Conservatives' speeches these days seem to have to fit several criteria, as set out by their leader: They have to be full of hyperbole, they have to fit on a bumper sticker and often they have to rhyme. I think we are lowering the quality of the debate that could be had in this place. I do not think this House as a whole is rising up to the expectations that Canadians have at this moment.
Over the last two and a half months, all I have been witness to, from both the Liberals and the Conservatives, has been Liberal and Conservative members pointing to each other saying they are not as bad as the other when they were in government. To borrow from Tommy Douglas's fable on Mouseland, it is like the mice are being asked to choose between the blue cats and the red cats. At the end of the day, they are all cats and they are all bad for mice. We are not in a good situation.
We are in a cost of living crisis right now. I would much rather spend my time in this House talking about how, over the last 40 years of Conservative and Liberal governments, we have developed a culture in Ottawa that is full of corporate deference. We have seen our corporate tax rates slashed to one of the lowest in the G7. We have seen policies enacted by both Liberals and Conservatives that have allowed mergers and acquisitions to result in the concentrated corporate power we see in so many of our sectors right now, whether it is telecommunications, grocery retail, or even oil and gas.
We keep hearing arguments from the Liberals saying that they have done so much, and that we should look at what they have done and that ask why Canadians are not happy with what they have done. They are obviously missing the mark. They are out of tune. They are led by someone I once described as radioactive. I hope the Liberals understand that they are not going anywhere with the current Prime Minister as their leader.
However, the Conservatives are not doing any better because those bumper sticker slogans full of hyperbole and rhyming are just cheapening the debate. I do not see a very real offer coming from them, especially when their leader is fighting against a system in which he has been a member of Parliament for quite some time now. He was first elected in this place in 2004. I am the same age as the leader of the Conservatives, so when he was first elected, he was 25 years old. At that time, I was out in the wilds of British Columbia, breaking my back as a tree planter. For him to fight against the system that he is so clearly a part of and offer himself as something new is a complete and total joke.
Let us face it. He gets his politics from the time he was Stephen Harper's favourite attack dog. I can say that it was people like him who inspired me to run in this place. I remember when I first saw the Leader of the Opposition on TV and could not believe someone could be elected who was so arrogant, so full of spite and just downright nasty. It is quite obvious from the antics he displays here now that he has not changed his ways. I will always be inspired to run against that kind of politics and against the politics of the Liberals, who believe they are God's gift to Canada and wonder why everyone cannot just be happy with the incredible work they are doing. The Liberals have let people down. They are not doing enough. The Conservatives are going to bring in the exact same types of policies the Harper government was tossed out of office for in 2015, and that is a fact.
The other thing is that the Conservatives stand here and talk about affordability issues when we know the leader of the Conservative Party has already started his fundraising circuit and is going to be frequented by the exact corporate executives who are jacking up prices everywhere and taking Canadians' hard-earned money. Many Canadians would agree with me that billionaires do not need more relief, the working class does, and yet, because of the corporate deference policies that we have seen from these two parties over 40 years, we are at the natural result of those policies. They are, number one, many corporate sectors have seen record profits and, number two, those record profits are happening at a time when Canadians are suffering.
It is not a hard stretch of the imagination to link the fact that in 2023, the corporate grocery retail, five companies that control 80% of the market combined, saw profits of over $6 billion. At the same time, we have a record number of Canadians having to visit food banks. The math is simple. I would agree with my friends that I would rather see the dollars in the pockets of my constituents, but it is not the government removing those dollars, it is corporate profits. More and more of Canadians' net incomes are being spent on the essentials of life: heating, fuel, transportation, housing and food. That is not the government's fault, it is the fault of corporations that have been unfairly jacking up prices. They are acting like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up the hard-earned net dollars of my constituents to pad CEO bonuses, stock buybacks and dividend payouts.
It is a system that needs to be changed. It needs a wholesale cleanup, and we cannot trust the two parties that have built this system. It is not New Democrats, the Green Party or the Bloc Québécois. It is Liberal and Conservative federal governments trading places. Canadians need to realize these two parties, at their core, are but two sides of the same coin. They may quibble over the big partisan talking points of the day, but these two parties are two different sides of the same coin. They fundamentally believe in that neo-liberal economic policy, which over the last 40 years, especially since the greed of the 1980s, has led to deregulation, mergers, acquisitions and unrivalled corporate power that has put Canadians in the economic situation they are in today.
I want to talk briefly about some of the other things that have been held up. I will be personal here. I have a private member's bill, Bill C-277, which was voted on unanimously by the House of Commons at second reading in May. It sailed through the Standing Committee on Health, with some minor amendments, but again, it was unanimously adopted by the Standing Committee on Health and reported back to the House. It is being held up by this filibuster.
There are even good Conservative bills that are being held up by this filibuster, some of the Conservatives' own legislation. There are some good bills from the government that, in those rare occurrences, we can find all-party agreement on, but we are again in a situation now where these are being held up.
Going back to my particular bill, the brain injury community has been without hope for a long time. Bill C-277, is designed to set up a national strategy on brain injuries. I have received compliments from Conservative and Liberal MPs across the political spectrum. They have told me that this is a good bill and this is what is needed. The brain injury community's hopes are being dashed right now because of this filibuster.
Just last week, because of the support this bill has, I sought unanimous consent to see it reported, go through report stage, through third reading and be sent off to the Senate. This was denied by the Conservatives. I have been trying to find ways we can get good legislation through this impasse, but we are at a stage right now, this last week of sitting, where the partisan emotions are so high that we are unable to see past each other's talking points, especially the Liberals and the Conservatives, to find a way to let good legislation go through. This is not only a shame on us as an institution, but it is a shame for Canadians.
With the new incoming Trump administration, the way Canadians are falling behind in the cost of living crisis and what we are going to do with the future of our foreign policy, it is a dangerous world out there. It is not good for Canadians within our borders. We are stuck in this stasis field of continuous filibustering, and the House is not living up to the expectations of Canadians. I urge my fellow parliamentarians to reach for the spirit of Christmas, if they need to, but we need to find a way to break this impasse. We need to find a way to live up to the expectations of our constituents.
I will conclude with the following. I fully agree with the unfettered right of the House of Commons to send for papers. The Liberals have some explaining to do. They need to answer why they are not releasing all of those documents and why some of those documents were redacted. However, I am not going to absolve the Conservatives of responsibility on this either. They are the ones who are putting up speaker after speaker. They are the ones who are preventing us from voting on their motion—
