Ed Fast

[Privilege, November 5th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I would be glad to. This gives me an opportunity to move—

[Privilege, November 5th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, that is right. Shame on the Prime Minister and his government.

This is what happens in tinpot dictatorships. We have a Prime Minister who has established himself as the ultimate supreme authority in this country, above the law and above Parliament. I hope Canadians understand that. I know his government is imploding, but that is the kind of Prime Minister we have in Canada right now. He is willing to defy the rule of law.

This issue will be referred to a parliamentary committee, as it should be. Of course, the government wants this matter to go to committee without having any of the relevant documents available for investigation and review. It wants a parliamentary committee to undertake its work without having the information it would require and that our police authorities would require to get to the bottom of this very ugly and incredibly expensive scandal, the green slush fund.

We are talking about a billion-dollar slush fund from which $330 million has been diverted to insiders and where 186 conflicts of interest by board members were never declared. A decision was made 186 times to act unethically on that board. It is unbelievable that this could happen in Canada today.

This matter is supposed to be referred to a committee, but we as a House, acting collectively, have decided that until the Speaker's ruling is complied with, we will not allow it to go to committee. It is that important. I believe Canadians who are watching today would agree with me and most of the members of the House that this scandal is of such proportion and significance that it goes to the very heart of the government. Canadians want this properly investigated and want the investigative authorities to have the information required to truly get to the bottom of it.

It has been said that a fish rots from its head. That is truly an apt description of the government and what is happening with the Prime Minister, in his office and within his cabinet. Certain ministers are doing their darndest to try to hide from Canadians the gravity of this scandal. It is disgraceful. They should not be surprised that this scandal has now bubbled to the surface and that Parliament is investigating this. It has been described as being of the same nature as the sponsorship scandal, which brought down the Chrétien government. Do members remember, “I am entitled to my entitlements”? This is akin to that.

I expect when all of this information comes out, as the government cannot hide this forever, that people are going to go to jail. I believe that hundreds of millions of dollars will have to be recovered from people who scammed taxpayers. I believe that the government is going to be held accountable in the next carbon tax election, which I hope takes place very soon, when Canadians can cast judgment on the corrupt, unethical and incompetent Liberal government.

We talked about accountability and transparency. The least I would expect of the government, when it gets caught red-handed with its hand in the cookie jar, is that it issues a mea culpa, says that it screwed up, there is a real problem here, it is going to get to the bottom of it, it wants to start afresh, it believes Canadians deserve to know how corrupt their government is and it moves forward accordingly.

Does the House remember, back in 2015, when the current Prime Minister was first elected, “sunny ways”? He sent a letter to each one of his cabinet ministers. It was headed, “Open and Accountable Government”. I am going to read to members a portion of that letter that will demonstrate to them not only the lengths to which our Prime Minister went to pretend he was an ethical Prime Minister, but how badly he has failed Canadians in delivering accountable government.

It reads, under, “A Message to Ministers”, “At its heart is a simple idea: open government is good government.” I think we can all agree on that.

It continues: “For Canadians to trust our government we must trust Canadians, and we will only be successful in implementing our agenda to the extent that we earn and keep this trust.”

Have the Prime Minister and the government earned the trust of Canadians? I ask the Canadians who are watching this today to ask themselves this question. After 10 long years of the failed Liberal government, has it earned their trust?

It continues, “To be worthy of Canadians’ trust, we must always act with integrity.”

It also states, “The trust of Canadians will also rest on the accountability of our government.”

Members should listen to this. It continues, “In our system, the highest manifestation of democratic accountability is the forum of Parliament.”

Our Prime Minister, in his letter to his cabinet ministers claiming to be the bastion of integrity, wrote that.

Now the very same Prime Minister has not only contradicted his letter from 2015 but defied this Parliament. He has defied the Speaker of the House of Commons, our highest authority within Parliament, from whom there is no appeal. That is the Prime Minister today, an unworthy Prime Minister, unworthy of Canadians' trust.

I am very upset by what I have experienced in this House in the last 10 years. I have been a member of this chamber for almost 20 years. I have seen the cut and thrust of debate and the ups and downs of governments. None of us is perfect. I am not expecting perfection from anyone in this House. I do not expect perfection from our government, but I do expect excellence, integrity, honesty and transparency. Sadly, that is lacking from the government. That is why Canadians should no longer have any trust or confidence in the government.

I know my Liberal colleagues listening to me speak today know I am telling the truth. They are still propping up the Prime Minister, even though many of them privately are saying he has to go, they do not trust him anymore and he is not their guy. However, publicly, they are chugging along and clapping like trained seals. The reality is he has even lost the confidence of his own MPs. They just do not have the courage to stand up and be counted today. We deserve better than that.

It gets worse. If I were only speaking about the green slush fund, that would be enough, but the government has a long history of corruption, graft, incompetence and recklessness. We will remember the SNC-Lavalin affair back in 2019 when the Prime Minister who stepped in to pervert the rule of law in Canada by interfering in a criminal prosecution of one of Canada's flagship companies, SNC-Lavalin. In the process, what did the Prime Minister do? He fired his justice minister, Canada's first indigenous female justice minister, a thoroughly capable woman. He fired another minister, Jane Philpott. It goes on. There was the WE Charity scandal and the vacation at the Aga Khan's island, whom he claimed was his friend. He was investigated for ethics violations. Time and time again, the government violates the trust of Canadians.

Therefore, I have a—

[Privilege, November 5th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, as I was saying, this green slush fund is about slush, which is effectively a term that describes insiders within government taking taxpayers' dollars and funnelling them to insiders, corporate interests and friends of the government. It is a Liberal green slush fund. It is a program that was put forward by the Liberal government that effectively allowed taxpayers' money, millions and millions of dollars, to be funnelled to private interests without any significant oversight.

Just to refresh everyone's memory, this fund was supposed to promote green energy technology by incentivizing the private sector to step into the environmental arena and come up with innovative solutions to environmental challenges facing not only Canada but the world. On its surface, this program seemed to be suited to our times, and there was a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, let us call it a billion-dollar fund intended to promote green energy.

What happened? Instead of this money going to worthy organizations, it went to Liberal insiders and corporations connected to the government in one way or another. Let me explain how that happened. When we establish a fund like this, typically the government will establish a board of directors and draw from the private sector individuals who have expertise in a particular space, in this case the green, environmental space. These directors have a responsibility to review every application for funding on its merits and make sure that no private interests and no conflicts of interest arise that would allow corruption to sent in.

Instead of doing this, what did the board do? The directors of the board made decisions that caused much of this money, huge swaths, to be funnelled to their own companies. That, by definition, is corruption, especially if directors have not declared conflicts of interest, which they did not on 186 occasions. Directors did not recuse themselves or remove themselves from the process to ensure that the integrity of the funding mechanism was maintained, and now we have this slush fund.

When we as MPs in the House became aware of this, we asked the government to deliver to Parliament all relevant documents relating to this scandal and corruption. That is the least Canadians should expect of their members of Parliament. Instead, the government said no and that these documents are confidential, sensitive and really not in the purview of Parliament. It said, “We are the government. We know best and we are not going to let you see those documents.”

Of course, those of us in the opposition benches in the House got very upset. We said the government had no right to withhold documents that are relevant to a police investigation into corruption at the highest levels of government, so we went to the Speaker. We said we believed there was a breach of privilege here, and we asked him to order that these documents be turned over to Parliament for delivery to our police authorities, in this case the RCMP.

The Speaker of the House, the highest authority in Parliament, said yes, and he ordered the government, the Prime Minister, to turn over these documents to Parliament. That was the order of the Speaker of the House of Commons, the highest authority in Parliament. There is no appeal from that order or decision. The Speaker, who is a Liberal, made the decision to make that order, and what did the Prime Minister do? He defied the order. He said he was above Parliament and above the law and would not turn over those documents, except in redacted form.

For Canadians who do not understand what redaction is, it is simply censorship. What happens is that government bureaucrats, at the instruction of their political masters, will black out huge sections of these documents, then say they turned over some documents. Of course, there is nothing of value to be read because all the relevant information has been blacked out. That is what the Prime Minister did. He refused to divulge and disclose information to the House, the people's House, the House that should be accountable to Canadians. He said he was defying the Speaker, defying Parliament and defying MPs. He placed himself above the law and Parliament and did not give us those documents in unredacted form.

[Privilege, November 5th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, this is a debate that I was not keen on participating in because it exposes the underbelly of the current government and its corrupt ways. I do not enjoy talking about the failures of our national government, but the reality is that there is so much to say on this. Today, we are discussing the green slush fund and the Prime Minister and his government's efforts to hide the corruption that undergirds this particular scandal.

At issue is, as I said, the green slush fund, and as its name implies, it involves money. It involves a purported green innovation fund that was brought forward by Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

I am having difficulty hearing myself because of discussions happening across the floor.

[Committees of the House, November 4th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I think you have also heard the clamour coming from the Liberal lobby. I cannot hear what my hon. friend is saying here in the House because of the noise coming from the Liberal side.

Could you please address that?

[Edward E. Fast, November 4th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, last week we laid my father, Edward E. Fast, to rest. He was 97. He was raised in Manitoba as a child of Mennonite immigrants. Dad's family barely survived the dirty thirties. By the time he was 14, he and his six siblings were orphans. A kind stepmother struggled to feed them. Although poor, Dad was an excellent student and studied dentistry in Toronto.

Nine months after he married Helene Schulz, I was born and we moved to Vancouver. There my father practised dentistry for many years. Seven more children were born, and my parents ensured that we were deeply loved and properly educated. What animated my father was his deep Christian faith, his family and an intense interest in politics. It was he who, 60 years ago, inspired my own career in politics.

I know that our father in heaven will have welcomed Dad with the words “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Predeceased by our mother, Dad leaves behind eight children, 35 grandchildren and, at last count, 109 great-grandchildren.

We love our dad.

[Privilege, October 8th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated my colleague's speech. She was interrupted at the end, just as she was starting to share with Canadians the large number of scandals that the Liberal government has been engaged in over the last nine years. Perhaps she would wish to continue her speech and regale us with more of these scandals, which have essentially brought the government to its knees.

[Electoral Participation Act, June 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, as they have done many times before, our Liberal friends across the aisle are trying to muzzle our leader. That is not going to happen.

Our leader will speak out on the issues of the day, especially foreign interference. Foreign interference is corrosive to our democracy. These folks over there are laughing at us. Look at them, Mr. Speaker. They are mocking us for taking foreign interference seriously.

When Conservatives form government, we will take foreign interference seriously, and we will take steps to fight back and ensure that we remain free and sovereign.

[Electoral Participation Act, June 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is not only the member and I who have concerns about foreign interference. We, as Conservatives, have a real concern about foreign interference

Canadians across this country are shocked to learn that the Prime Minister has already known for many years that foreign hostile actors were interfering in our elections. He knew about it, did not advise MPs who were affected by it, and did not put into place anything that would push back on efforts by foreign hostile regimes that were trying to manipulate our election outcomes.

As we know, there are a number of MPs in Canada who likely lost their re-election because of interference from the Communist regime in Beijing. Did it affect the ultimate outcome of the election? No, but it certainly affected the lives and futures of those individual MPs.

[Electoral Participation Act, June 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP members, who are part of the disastrous coalition, are saying “trust us”. They will fix it at committee, but let it go ahead in this House. They are saying to let these pensions vest for MPs who are not going to get elected and should not have these pensions vested.

The member is asking me whether, if this gets fixed at committee, I would support it. If this change did not come along, Conservatives would be very happy. Leave the fixed election date as it is. However, I am not prepared to, any longer, accept “trust us” as being the mantra coming from the Liberal-NDP coalition.