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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour and privilege to rise in the House of Commons to speak on behalf of the great people of southwest Saskatchewan. I have done so many times before, and there seems to be a recurring theme that when I rise in this place, it is to talk about Liberal scandals. It has happened over and over again. If Liberals want to keep abusing the taxpayer, Conservatives are going to keep pointing it out. We will do it as long as it takes and as many times as we have to until they agree to comply with the will of the House of Commons.
What are we here for today? It is about Sustainable Development Technology Canada and the Liberals' failure to produce documents demanded by this House. More than $400 million were funnelled to Liberal-owned and Liberal insider corporations. When Liberals say they are here to deliver for Canadians, what they really mean is they are here to deliver for their friends to make sure they get the first crack at the taxpayer's dollar.
There are public scandals like the 's blackface, when he told reporters, “I should have known better, but I didn't.” There are corruption scandals like the SNC-Lavalin affair, where the Prime Minister became the only prime minister to violate the Conflict of Interest Act, which he has done multiple times. The list goes on. In fact, the list is so long that it makes up more than one-third of all corruption scandals at the federal level in our nation's history. One-third of corruption scandals have been committed by the current government in the last nine years.
I wish I could say that the corruption stops there, but it does not. On April 9, 2020, the government received an unsolicited proposal for a youth program from WE Charity. Just a couple of weeks later, the announced a student grant program for this very proposal. In June, when the program officially launched, the Prime Minister said it was not a conflict of interest, despite the charity paying his family members to speak at events, totalling $425,000 in expenses and money paid out. WE Charity co-founder Craig Kielburger also happened to have donated nearly $2,500 to the Prime Minister's leadership campaign back in 2013, and yet we are supposed to take the word of the Prime Minister when he claims his decision on involvement with them was not a conflict of interest. That is not going to happen.
The then finance minister, Bill Morneau, also had two daughters with ties to or working for WE Charity at the time of the scandal. He took paid vacations and attended special dinners, and he did not think it would be wrong to do so. All the former finance minister had to say on the subject afterward was that, in retrospect, he should have recused himself from the discussion. It is not so easy to tell the public someone should have made a different decision after the person has already made it, especially when it is a bad decision. At what point do elected officials need to be expected to make good decisions and not just constantly apologize for making bad ones? As the routinely says, we can all learn from this.
The WE Charity was put in charge of a $900-million grant, with an estimated operating cost of $19 million. However, as we learned, it could have been $43 million as it was under-reported. WE has three branches, including one in the U.K. and one in the U.S. and between those branches, more money has been sent to the organization in Canada than abroad, where it claims to be doing charitable work. Where it claims to do the most charitable work, in Kenya, it is not even listed in the top 50 NGOs. Instead, it is known for North American and European celebrity visits and photo-ops, as a reporter from the national newspaper puts it.
WE Charity also claimed it sent medical supplies as another way it spent on charitable efforts, but its U.S. tax filings in 2019 have no such purchases, and it refuses to make its Canadian statements public. The then prorogued Parliament to halt further investigations into the WE scandal. I wish I could say this was a poor decision on who the Liberals wanted to do business with, but they have shown time and time again that they deliberately do business with either corrupt or conflicted organizations, and it is not until they are publicly exposed that they claim to have regrets about their actions. Like the Prime Minister said, we can all learn from this.
As parents, we try to teach our kids to be sincerely sorry for their actions and not just simply for getting caught. What parents want to see are corrective actions, steps and measures they have taken to make sure that this does not happen again, and yet here we are in a gridlock once again over more Liberal corruption.
It seems to be something that the never learned, possibly was never taught. Either way, he is the one who is in charge of leading this country. We know that a fish rots from the head down and it seems to be true in the case of the government.
Before the WE Charity it was SNC-Lavalin. After the WE Charity it was the Manitoba lab. Then it was the arrive scam. Then it was appointing a sister-in-law as the Ethics Commissioner. Today, it is the green slush fund. What kind of a government thinks it is okay to appoint a sitting cabinet minister's sister-in-law to be ethics commissioner amidst potential investigations into conflict of interest allegations? It is a government that is trying to hide its corruption. That is just unacceptable, no matter what the member for says.
There have been so many scandals, yet the NDP-Liberals have found ways to avoid accountability for their corruption, the latest being the withholding of documents that belong to the public to hide the names and information of people involved in this corruption. Let us take a look back at how they have avoided accountability before this.
With respect to SNC-Lavalin, the pressured the justice minister to interfere with the lawsuit to get away without prosecution.
With respect to the WE Charity, the government prorogued Parliament to avoid further investigations into the scandal.
When Canadians demanded accountability with respect to the convoy, the responded by enacting the Emergencies Act to avoid being held to account for trampling on the rights and freedoms of Canadians.
The seems to believe that this House belongs to him instead of the people and that is a very serious problem.
In fact, when it came to the Winnipeg lab, he even took the Speaker of the House of Commons to court. The only thing that stopped that from happening was an election conveniently called by the .
Canadians should not have to worry about the institutions of their nation stealing from them. The government has robbed the taxpayers and has made no effort to make things right or to take accountability. The has still not demanded that the taxpayers receive their money back from the arrive scam scandal. Why is it that it is always the taxpayers who get stuck paying for the government's unethical behaviour?
Today, we are in the House debating a privilege motion on the corrupt Liberal green slush fund, the SDTC, and how it laundered more than $400 million of taxpayer money to the Liberals' friends and, in some cases, their own businesses. They refuse to hand over unredacted documents as per the will of the House of Commons and the Speaker's order. These documents, along with everything in this House, belong to the people. They are not the Liberal government's property and it has no right to keep them from the taxpayer, especially seeing how these hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent belong to the taxpayer. The government has no money. It only has taxpayers dollars that it has taken from the taxpayer.
The SDTC has become a playground for conflicts of interest. In 2022, the SDTC appointed Michael Denham, a previous appointee to the BDC by the . Mr. Denham has been a generous donor to the Liberal Party, donating thousands of dollars, including to a violator of the Conflict of Interest Act, former finance minister Bill Morneau, who is now “Bill no more”. It is no wonder the Liberal government has been responsible for more than a third of all scandals at the federal level in all of our country's history.
A board member at the SDTC, Stephen Kukucha, not only helped funnel taxpayer dollars into Liberal insider corporations, but has made hundreds of donations totalling in the tens of thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party, including donating to the 's leadership campaign in 2013.
There is Annette Verschuren, the director of the board, who was, as members can guess, also a Liberal donor.
Then there is the example of Mr. Kielburger, who invested in the 's success to be the head of the Liberal Party and has benefited greatly from receiving either money or positions years later from the government. Somehow it does not occur to the Liberals that this could be wrong, going even so far as to tell the public in the WE scandal that it was not a conflict of interest. I wonder how many others have gotten a return on their investment from the government that we do not even know about yet. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant.
It must be nice to have friends like the Liberals do. It is “I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine”. It should be hard to believe that in just nine years, to say it again, the Liberals have committed more than one-third of all the public corruption scandals in the entire history of the federal government. It should be hard to believe that they think the House belongs to them and are above accountability for their actions. It should be hard to believe that they have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money and have given it to their friends and their own companies. However, it is not, when we look at how the people who are appointed to arm's-length institutions are often donors, in-laws or close friends. Just as bad as conflicts of interest is using the executive powers of the House to appoint insider donors and friends to oversee the accountability that is supposed to prevent this kind of theft from happening in the first place.
Time and time again, those in the Liberal government have proven that they have absolutely no regard for the sanctity of this chamber or for the offices they hold. The Liberal government has managed to tally up, all in all, one-third of all Canadian ethics violations, while having been in government for less than a decade. Liberal grifting knows no bounds. There has been an ethics scandal every single year the Liberal government has been in office.
One of my first speeches in the House of Commons after I was elected as a member of Parliament was about the Joe Peschisolido report, which was a report from the Ethics Commissioner about former Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido, who the Ethics Commissioner concluded was involved in serial ethics breaches, meaning more than one. In other words, it was happening on a regular basis, permeating from the top down, clearly from the to the rest of his cabinet. I talked then about how as a new MP it was unfortunate that what I was speaking about early in my term was the culture of corruption the was continuing to demonstrate over and over again to his caucus and the bureaucracy, then allowing it to happen within the Liberals' own ranks.
From coast to coast, and especially across the southwest, Canadians are struggling more than ever. Just this morning at committee, I heard from witnesses explaining the debt that Canadians are digging themselves into just to afford essentials like food, clothing and shelter. All the while, Liberal insiders are being funnelled taxpayer money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite scandal after scandal and report after report, the Liberals still have absolutely no remorse for what they have done. The house of cards that sits across this chamber keeps trucking along. It is just insane. The Liberals do the same thing over and over again, yet we expect something to change and it never does. Maybe this time they will obey the rules, listen to the will of Parliament and release the documents, but so far, no. Canadians know this, though. Canadians can see the rotten-to-the-core Liberal government and they are ready for change.
It is worth pointing out the complacency of the Liberals' coalition partner the New Democrats, who are so terrified of facing Canadians and losing their pensions that they have refused to help bring the government down. In fact, it is 116 days until the 's pension will be vested. He has been making news lately by telling Canadians that he is absolutely not interested in bringing down the Liberal government. In 116 days from now, on February 25, is he magically going to grow a spine, be willing to take real action on behalf of Canadians and bring the tired, corrupt government down, or is he going to keep propping it up? Are the New Democrats going to pass the election reform bill, which will lock in a change to the election date so the NDP leader can make sure that his caucus members and members on the Liberal side are guaranteed to lock in their pensions, or will they do the right thing and call a carbon tax election at the soonest available opportunity? Is he going to put his pension above Canadians? I guess time will tell.
The Liberals hate the thought of accountability, whether it comes from this chamber or from their own caucus. The former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and the former president of the Treasury Board Jane Philpott were kicked out of caucus for doing the right thing when it came to SNC-Lavalin. As I said, one-third of all federal scandals in Canadian history belong to the and his cronies. The Prime Minister has had as many scandals in his nine years as Canada's first 20 prime ministers did over a span of 137 years. No matter what way we look at it, it is impressive that he was able to do that. That is not to mention that he has added more money to the national debt than every other prime minister combined. I guess when one is involved in that many scandals, of course it is going to cost the taxpayers money.
I would like to remind the House what happened in April: For the first time in over a century, the House called someone to the bar for questioning. That man, Kristian Firth, exercised absolutely no remorse over lining his pockets with taxpayer money.
Even when the most exclusive powers of the House are used, the Liberals do not care. Their friends do not care. They fundamentally believe that they are above accountability and certainly think they are above the will of the House. It is disgraceful. The man summoned to the House back in 1913 was imprisoned because he failed to answer the questions of the House, yet today, the Liberals and the people they empower do it shamelessly and just walk out.
At the core of this debate is the Speaker's ruling on September 26 declaring that this place's privileges had been violated. For nearly 350 years, the supremacy of Parliament was something cherished in Westminster systems like ours across the world. Here in Canada, our government, the executive branch, does not operate outside the confines of this place. It is formed by it. The and his cabinet sit just across the way, where every day they face the scrutiny of the opposition in question period. The centralization of power that the Prime Minister is overseeing should worry everyone in the chamber and everybody across this country, because it flies right in the face of how our system of government works. Parliament is supreme and the Liberals must respect it.
The government is a public entity and everything in the House belongs to the public. When will the Liberals stop hiding their corruption and stop withholding documents that do not even belong to them so the House can get back to work and Canadians can get the answers they are owed?
Another public entity out there, which hits a bit more closely to home, is Parks Canada. It operates Grasslands National Park. If we want to talk about the way the Liberals are abusing the authority they have, we can look at the species at risk. They are trying to tell Canadians and the ranchers down in the Val Marie area that the prairie dog is a species at risk that must be protected. However, a quick Google search shows that the prairie dog is not even a native species to Canada and it is not just surviving but thriving. We see it from the southern tip of Saskatchewan all the way down to Mexico and all the through the central states, yet the bureaucracy the government is overseeing is saying it is a species at risk.
What are they doing with the sage grouse? They are saying that these two species coexist. There is a way to prove they do not coexist and that the prairie dog does not belong in Grasslands National Park in the way the government says it does: The prairie dog likes to eat the root of the sagebrush. Sage grouse, which are called sage grouse for a reason, like sagebrush for its shelter and protection. When the prairie dog eats the sagebrush root, it turns into a tumbleweed and blows away, leaving the sage grouse exposed, at risk and in danger. When Parks Canada is trying to protect another species at risk, namely the sage grouse, it is creating all kinds of issues because of the way it is managing.
Let us talk about the new bridge being built at one of the historical ranches. Parks Canada is building it in a location that was not even recommended by the local RM but decided to plow through with it anyway. There is another species at risk out there called the nighthawk. All of their nests and where they like to be are right in the path of this bridge, and Parks Canada is building right through it. It said forget it; it is building this bridge there anyway.
Parks Canada is deliberately ignoring another species at risk, and it is doing it for triple the cost of what the municipality is able to build similar bridges for. If it would have accepted the proposal of the municipality, it would have had the bridge already done and done for a third of the cost, but, no, we have to get more bureaucracy involved and make it way more expensive.
Rather than just take up the local perspective, the views of the locals, the people at Parks Canada would rather take a view that, again, creates excessive and unnecessary spending. They would rather kick the ranchers out of the park. They say that bureaucrats can manage ranch land better than producers who have been doing it for way longer than the bureaucracy has even been around. It is shameful. If they want to prove to Canadians that they actually care, they would listen to locals. They would listen to the producers down in Grasslands National Park. They would listen to the RM of Val Marie and do what is right.
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Madam Speaker, I am indeed grateful for the opportunity to rise and participate in this debate today on the subamendment. I had the privilege to speak to the amendment and so it is a great opportunity to pick up where I left off and to speak to this important subamendment to this privilege motion.
The fact is, though, we are still where we were. The Liberal government continues to refuse to release the documents it has been ordered to produce by this very House. The Liberals do not wish to turn over the documents that will help to uncover clear corruption that has occurred at the green slush fund. Sadly, corruption has benefited Liberal insiders during the entirety of these nine years of the Liberal government. It is of vital importance that no matter how hard Liberals try to push it away from Parliament, we must continue to pursue this issue. No matter how many times the member for comes up with an attempt to shrug this off, we will continue to pursue this on behalf of all Canadians.
After all of these days of debate, the facts remain clear. First, taxpayer money was taken by conflicted board members of SDTC to benefit their own financial and business interests. Second, and equally important for the integrity of this place, the House has still not been provided with the documents necessary and there has been no indication of when, or even if, the money of these conflicted payments will ever be paid back.
In the time between when I spoke to the amendment and now as I speak to the subamendment, more and somewhat interesting information has come to light. In my previous intervention, on October 8, I discussed the importance of Parliament being the grand inquest of the nation and the necessity of the power of the House to send for persons, papers and records. Unfortunately, those in the Liberal cabinet and those in the bureaucracy seem to fail to understand this essential, constitutionally protected power of Parliament.
This indifference was clearly on display last week at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. On Wednesday, October 23, a high-ranking official, a deputy secretary in fact, at the Privy Council Office, one of the highest bureaucratic offices in this country, appeared. I asked the deputy secretary a very clear question: “Do you accept that Parliament has the constitutional authority to call for documents without redactions?” I did not get an answer. Instead, I got invalid excuses that ignored the key constitutional facts.
The right of Parliament to send for documents is not limited by any policy or statute. As explained in Bosc and Gagnon:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers and records.
It is, quite frankly, unacceptable that the Privy Council Office and its senior officials have chosen to ignore that fact. It is a simple fact that Parliament and its committees are the grand inquest of the nation. Our constitutionally protected ability is to call for the documents that we deem necessary, as the House did in June of this year when we ordered that the documents be provided to the law clerk, unredacted, to be provided to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The power of the House to send for persons, papers and records is an old power indeed. It is part of the very essence of our work within parliamentary democracy. Our Constitution, since the founding of our country in 1867, has affirmed such a right. In fact, the British North America Act, now called the Constitution Act, 1867, lays this privilege out in section 18:
The privileges, immunities, and powers to be held, enjoyed, and exercised by the Senate and by the House of Commons, and by the members thereof respectively, shall be such as are from time to time defined by Act of the Parliament of Canada, but so that any Act of the Parliament of Canada defining such privileges, immunities, and powers shall not confer any privileges, immunities, or powers exceeding those at the passing of such Act held, enjoyed, and exercised by the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and by the members thereof.
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Madam Speaker, to reaffirm, I am quoting a passage from the Constitution itself, something that defines the House and defines the very issue at play as well.
Not to send a spoiler alert across the way, but I will have some more interesting quotations coming up later in my remarks. I know the member for will be very intrigued to hear some of those quotations on this important issue. After all, I believe that no member has contributed more to this very debate than the member for Winnipeg North. I believe he has had north of 300 interventions on this very debate. I do congratulate him on his verbose contributions to the extensive debate he is taking part in.
Let us get back to the important, constitutionally protected, issue at hand. Those privileges, immunities and powers that were held by the House in 1867 and by the United Kingdom, its predecessor, continue today and have some of their roots dating back centuries. In fact, some of the greatest protections that we have as parliamentarians originate in 1215 with the Magna Carta.
I am going to give another quote for the member for . From the United Kingdom Parliament:
Magna Carta was issued in June 1215 and was the first document to put into writing the principle that the king and his government was not above the law. It sought to prevent the king from exploiting his power, and placed limits of royal authority by establishing law as a power in itself.
How true that is, and 800 years later, the Magna Carta still stands as the principle that no person, king or ruler is above the law. I have but 20 minutes to express my points, and I could go on at great length about the Magna Carta alone, but let us jump ahead a few centuries to 1688. I know members will be intrigued with the discussion on the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
I would note that the long-term impacts of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, a revolution that did not have bloodshed, I might add, are so important to where we are today and the rights that we have as parliamentarians, not for our own purposes, but on behalf of the people that we have the honour of serving.
I want to quote the Hon. John Dalberg Acton, one of the great UK parliamentarians, from his writing Lectures on Modern History. He wrote this about the Glorious Revolution:
...it is the greatest thing done by the English nation. It established the State upon a contract, and set up the doctrine that a breach of contract forfeited the crown—the former, in the English Convention; the latter, in the Scottish. Parliament gave the crown, and gave it under conditions. Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The great achievement is that this was done without bloodshed, without vengeance, without exclusion of entire parties, with so little definiteness in point of doctrine that it could be accepted, and the consequences could be left to work themselves out.
I point this out because our Constitution, our history of a parliamentary government in Canada, has a proud, long and respected history. This country and this system of government was built on those powers, where power was removed from the absolute Crown and given to the people's representatives, who are here to express the common sense of the common people.
I am sure the Speaker would agree that parliamentary democracy ought to be protected, and it ought to be done with the protection of each and every member of the House. Constitutional expert, the late Peter Hogg, expounded on this in one of his seminal works, Constitutional Law of Canada, 5th edition. I know the member for is eager to hear this quotation from the great, late Peter Hogg. He wrote, on page 314 for those following along at home:
The Crown is, of course, subject to its Parliament or Legislature. So long as a legislative body acts within the limits of its powers, it is free to make its laws applicable to the Crown (or government), just as it is free to make its laws applicable to other legal persons within its jurisdictions. Any other conclusion would be inconsistent with the supremacy of the legislative branch of government. Indeed, it was settled in England as early as 1561 that the Crown was bound by any statute which applied to it, and this is one of the fundamental principles of the British constitution that was received in British North America Act.
This reaffirms the very clear essence of this privilege debate. The House ordered the production of unredacted documents. It was not, “If you have time, would you be so kind as to provide these documents?” It was an order of the House and an order of the House's parliamentarians. Indeed, it comes down to the very essence of responsible government. Members will notice that in the subamendment we are debating, we are requesting the presence of certain experts, one being a senior official at the Privy Council Office who had some interesting things to say on responsible government.
However, let us dig a little deeper into the importance of responsible government. By the time the fathers of Confederation were discussing plans to become a united Canada, it became clear that it was preferable to continue with the constitutional precedents inherited from the United Kingdom and not to adopt a system similar to what had been done in the United States.
On February 6, 1865, the then attorney general, who was soon to become the first prime minister, the Right Hon. Sir John A. Macdonald, rose in the House of the Province of Canada to provide his thoughts on responsible government. He said, “In the Constitution we propose to continue the system of Responsible Government, which has existed in this province since 1841, and which has long obtained in the Mother Country. This is a feature of our Constitution as we have it now, and as we shall have it in the Federation”. That is from page 33 of the debates from the third session of the eighth provincial Parliament of the united Province of Canada
The first prime minister went on to explain that having cabinet held responsible to the legislative branch was an effort to avoid giving too much power to the executive branch, as had been seen elsewhere, including south of the border. Macdonald went on to say, “With us...the Representative of the Sovereign, can act only on the advice of his ministers, those ministers being responsible to the people through Parliament.” It is the essence of parliamentary democracy that Parliament is supreme and that cabinet is responsible to Parliament. It can neither ignore nor refuse an order of Parliament simply because a minister, or even a prime minister, may disagree with it.
Where does this bring us today?
In normal cases, ministerial responsibility means that the minister ought to take responsibility for the challenges within their department. When the made his initial question of privilege, he referenced a memorandum he had obtained from the Privy Council Office at the beginning of this Parliament. That memorandum was written by a certain Paul MacKinnon, and it states, “Public servants do not share in ministers' constitutional accountability to the Houses of Parliament but support ministers in this accountability”. He also wrote, “the ultimate accountability for deciding what information to withhold from or release to parliamentarians resides with the responsible minister.” As such, where is the accountability from the accountable minister?
The Liberal government may believe that the rights and privileges of Parliament do not matter, but we will soon see if the responsibility of the minister responsible is there. It is time that the and his ministers hold themselves accountable to Parliament.
I want to recognize that the current was not the minister of the early days of SDTC. Who was the minister? That minister was Navdeep Bains, who has since left cabinet and politics. We have now twice attempted, at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, to hear evidence from the former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains. He may no longer be a Liberal minister, but he sure still talks like a Liberal minister with his empty statements that mean nothing and are intended to convey nothing. He refused to answer even basic questions at committee about dates and names, and he even refused to confirm where he was currently employed. This is further evidence that Liberals, even after their careers in politics are over, refuse to accept responsibility and accountability for their actions.
This brings us to the subamendment before the House today. I must admit that I was slightly disappointed with the original ruling in that I do not believe the best course of action is to refer this to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. I know a member opposite is wondering why I would have concerns with the procedure and House affairs committee, but the member knows very well of past Liberal scandals where lengthy filibusters occurred at that committee. They were led by the member for , or the member for , who tried to prevent us from getting to the bottom of important Liberal scandals, such as the WE Charity prorogation scandal or the foreign interference scandals that we have seen.
That is why I think the amendment and the subamendment are so important to strengthening the motion of the Speaker's ruling. The subamendment would ensure that both Paul MacKinnon, the former deputy secretary to cabinet, and the Privacy Commissioner would appear as witnesses. Paul MacKinnon, as explained by the on September 26, is an official at the Privy Council Office who authored the memo that I cited earlier. It is important for him to explain before members of Parliament what he meant by, “the ultimate accountability for deciding what information to withhold from or release to parliamentarians resides with the responsible minister.” In my view, the ministers relevant to the June 10 motion have not been held accountable.
The other witness the subamendment proposes is the Privacy Commissioner. The commissioner is obviously an expert in the matter of protecting documents and could also provide valuable insights to the rules and procedures for providing papers and records based on a order of the House of Commons versus other means, such as an access to information request. I might add as well that the Privacy Commissioner is a former officer of Parliament as the former law clerk, so he also has the added benefit of knowing and understanding the rights and privileges of the House.
This subamendment, if passed, would further strengthen the main amendment and ensure that we would get the answers necessary. This debate could be over today if the Liberal government were to simply hand over the documents as ordered by the House so that they could be provided to the RCMP to do what it will with them. This is to ensure that the accountability of the House is upheld.