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OTTAWA – The government has been unable to put any of its own business before the House of Commons for a full week, which Conservatives said Thursday is the result of Liberal “corruption.”
The leader of the Conservatives in the House, Andrew Scheer, said that the governing party would rather see the House mired in debate than produce documents relating to the misuse of government dollars in a program that his party has called a “green slush fund.”
House Speaker Greg Fergus ruled last Thursday that the government “clearly did not fully comply” with a House order to provide documents related to a now-defunct foundation responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of federal dollars for green technology projects.
Rather than ordering the government to produce the documents immediately, Fergus said the matter should be referred to the committee for study, and Scheer proposed a motion calling for just that.
The House has been seized with debate on the proposal since then and Scheer said it would remain so until the government agreed to hand over the documents to the police.
“They are willing to stop the Senate floor rather than turn this information over to the RCMP for a possible criminal investigation,” Scheer said in an interview Thursday.
The RCMP told MPs this summer they likely wouldn’t be able to use the documents as part of an investigation, but Scheer said they should have access to all the information before making a decision.
The Liberals claimed that the order to produce documents to be handed over to the RCMP blurred the lines between Parliament and the judiciary, and blamed the Conservatives for the dysfunction in the House.
Liberal House leader Karina Gould called the request for the documents an abuse of Parliament’s power that tramples on Canadians’ Charter rights.
“Let’s be very clear, this is the Conservatives trying to gut the Senate,” Gould said on Thursday.
“Conservative members of parliament are here for their own political, personal goals and they don’t care what they’re doing to Canadians in the meantime, and that’s something that should be extremely alarming to all of us .”
Scheer said the Charter exists “to protect the people from the government. It is not there to protect the government from accountability by the people. “
There was a similar dispute over government documents when the Conservatives were on the government side of the aisle during a minority government dispute more than a decade ago.
In 2009, the House ordered the government to release unredacted documents related to Canada’s role in the torture of Afghan prisoners.
Just weeks after the opposition passed a motion demanding the documents be produced, then-prime minister Stephen Harper sequestered Parliament for several months, preventing a House committee from pursuing the issue .
In this case, the Liberal government dissolved Sustainable Development Technology Canada after the auditor general released a scathing report about the organization’s management last spring.
Of the projects it looked at, one in six that received funding were ineligible. The auditor’s report also found 90 cases where conflict of interest policies were breached.
A month later, the ethics commissioner concluded that the former chairman of the organization had failed to recover from decisions that benefited organizations with which she had connections.
The House has been in an almost constant state of turmoil since the MPs returned to Ottawa in mid-September.
The Conservatives have made two attempts to topple the minority government with motions of no confidence. Although both attempts failed to gain the support of the other opposition parties, the Conservatives promise that there will be more such votes to come.
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet criticized the “lack of respect for democracy” in the chamber during an unrelated press conference Thursday in Chicoutimi, Que.
Blanchet claimed that Bloc MPs are among the few in Parliament who ask thoughtful questions instead of “waving slogans and banging on the desk,” like other parties in the House.
“They are proud to have repeated the same thing they have repeated 60 times in the last 60 days,” he said in French.
“Refusing to answer questions, when there are real ones, is not more respectful of voters.”
Among the few votes that have gone forward this week was a proposal by the Bloc Québécois to push the government to support its pension bill for seniors under the age of 75, a change that would cost more than $3 billion a year.
Although the Conservatives have criticized what they call politically motivated inflationary spending, they threw their support behind the measure.
Scheer did not respond to a question about why the party supported the proposal.
The Conservatives’ critic for the elderly, Anna Roberts, said in a statement that the government’s inflationary spending had “increased the cost of goods and gas and put additional strain on Canadian families and seniors on fixed incomes.”
The Conservatives have also asked Canada’s lobbying commissioner to investigate whether it is a breach of ethics for the prime minister to make Mark Carney a Liberal adviser.
The Liberals announced at their recent caucus retreat in Nanaimo, BC, that Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, has been appointed chair of a task force on economic growth.
They said Carney will help shape the party’s policies for the next election, and will report to Justin Trudeau and the Liberal platform committee.
The Tory’s ethics critic, Michael Barrett, said in a letter to the commissioner that Carney is not registered to lobby federally, but that his corporate positions expose him to several potential conflicts of interest.
“How could no member of ministerial staff, member of parliament or cabinet minister feel a sense of obligation to Mr. Carney because of his close association with the prime minister and the finance minister?” Barrett asked in his letter on Thursday.
Carney is also chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, which is in talks with the government to launch a $50-billion investment fund backed by Ottawa and Canadian pensions.
When asked about Carney’s potential conflict of interest in the House, Health Minister Mark Holland accused the Conservatives of trying to “smash” world-renowned Canada.
This report was first published by The Canadian Press on October 3, 2024.
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