Mr. Speaker, I mentioned the word “budget” at the very outset of my remarks. I realize that this is a very large chamber, with imperfect acoustics, and that the NDP sits very, very far down the way and that sometimes my voice, as delicate as it is, does not travel that far. I also have a tendency to turn to my right when I speak, and therefore those to my left often do not hear what I am saying.
Back to the subject at hand, which is the cover-up budget, the Prime Minister has introduced $41 billion of new cash spending, money he is splashing all over the land, far and wide, hoping he distracts Canadians from the SNC-Lavalin scandal with their own money. I have said it before but I will say it again: this is the Kathleen Wynne three steps. Step number one is a massive scandal. Step number two is massive deficit spending to cover it all up, and step number three is massive tax increases to pay for it all after the election. That is exactly what the Liberals have planned here. They are now into step two.
However, I believe that if we lay out the facts of the case about this scandal and the corruption, in addition to the outrageous tax-and-spend policies of the government, Canadians will choose differently in October, and the Liberals will not have a chance to carry out step number three. That is the case we are making here today.
I was speaking earlier about the falsehood that the Prime Minister was trying to save the headquarters of SNC-Lavalin. I had just finished disproving that claim altogether. As I was saying earlier, the company's headquarters cannot leave because of a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan that keeps the company HQ in Montreal until 2024. As well, the company is in the process of renovating its headquarters there to accommodate its thousands of employees in a building on which it has just signed a 20-year lease. In other words, it did all of this knowing that it would be prosecuted and knowing that it was not getting a deferred prosecution agreement. The Prime Minister's threat to the former attorney general that the headquarters would leave if she did not intervene and offer a special deal was absolutely and totally false.
Furthermore, when asked before the justice committee what evidence he had for this claim that 9,000 jobs would vanish unless the SNC charges were shelved, Gerald Butts said there was nothing “specific”, no specific evidence. He sat there hour after hour and made the claim that 9,000 jobs would disappear, that he had been twisted in knots over these lost jobs, and that is why he and the Prime Minister took the extraordinary step of intervening 20 times with the former attorney general to have the charges set aside. When we asked him where he got the idea that 9,000 jobs would vanish, he said that it was nothing “specific”.
We then asked Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council, who has his hands on every briefing note that moves around the ministry, if he had any report or document he could table with the committee showing that 9,000 jobs would vanish. He said no.
There is no documented evidence or specific information, no proof whatsoever, that these jobs would vanish, yet the whole justification for the government's interference in this file was that these jobs were at stake. The jobs were never at stake. We found that out 10 days ago, when the CEO of the company came out and said that he never threatened 9,000 jobs or a headquarters move. We know that he cannot move the jobs out of the country, because construction jobs are done at construction sites, and construction sites cannot be moved. A construction site is where the construction is being done.
For example, SNC-Lavalin will be involved in the construction of a transit project that will go from right around this area out to south Ottawa. A dozen kilometres or so of track will be going out to the south end of this city and into my riding. The last time I checked, a rail system cannot be built in Beijing, carried by helicopter and dropped from the sky on the nation's capital. The work will be done here, and so will the work on the $52 billion worth of projects the company has in this country. It has the five biggest construction projects in Canada, and those jobs have to be done here in the country. They cannot be shipped abroad. This is where they will be done. To suggest otherwise is a complete falsehood.
The final falsehood in this whole jobs fantasy is that the company will automatically lose its ability to bid on federal contracts if it is convicted. We now know that this is not true. In fact, one of the very first acts the Liberal government undertook when taking office was to extend an exemption from the bidding ban to SNC-Lavalin. The company was allowed to continue bidding on federal work even though it had been charged with fraud and bribery. On December 8, 2015, the deputy minister of public works issued that exemption, and the company has continued to bid on, and I believe has even successfully won, federal contracts since being charged. The cabinet is now reviewing the bidding ban policy and likely has it in its power to ensure that SNC gets an exemption from a bidding ban even if convicted.
The reason I am getting into the technicality of this is that we keep being told that the reason the company needs to avoid going to trial is that it needs to be able to bid on federal contracts and that if it is convicted, it will lose that ability. However, we know that is not true.
If it is not about protecting the company's ability to bid on federal work, not about keeping the headquarters here and not about job losses, what is behind this incessant desire to protect this corporation from criminal prosecution? It is astounding the lengths to which the Prime Minister has gone in this matter.
There are high-profile trials every day in every country. In all my time here, going back to 2004, I have never seen a prime minister become personally involved in any of them. It is just not done. If people walked into any of our constituency offices and said they were charged with a crime and wanted our political assistance to get out of the charges, we would politely show them the door. We would say that we are sorry but that they have come to the wrong office and need to see a lawyer to defend their case in court before a judge, and perhaps a jury, but we cannot help them. Why? It is because we do not adjudicate criminal trials in a political setting. We have courts for that.
The fact that the Prime Minister became embroiled in this particular criminal trial, the fact that he went to such lengths to execute a campaign of pressure on his former attorney general to set aside criminal charges, is spectacularly unusual. I would defy any member of this House to give me another example of a prime minister getting involved in a criminal trial at all, let alone to this degree.
I am not speaking rhetorically. I am literally asking members of the House of Commons to feel free to shout it out. Give me an example. Name a trial, just one. There is dead silence. No one here can point to a single example of a prime minister or any politician getting involved to set aside criminal charges on anyone. It is a spectacular and bizarre act by a prime minister in this country.