Parliament on pause over docs debate

The government has been unable to put any of its own business before the House of Commons for a full week, and the Conservatives on Thursday said that’s the result of Liberal “corruption.”

Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer said the governing party would rather see the House bogged down in debate than produce documents related to missing government dollars in a program his party has dubbed the “green slush fund.”

House Speaker Greg Fergus ruled last Thursday that the government “clearly did not fully comply” with an order from the House to provide documents related to a now-defunct foundation responsible for doling out hundreds of millions of federal dollars for green technology projects.

Rather than order the government to immediately produce the documents, Fergus said the issue should be referred to committee for study, and Scheer moved a motion calling for just that.

The House has been seized with a debate on the motion ever since and Scheer said it will stay that way until the government agrees to hand over the documents to police.

“They’re willing to have Parliament ground to a halt rather than hand over this information to the RCMP for a potential criminal investigation,” Scheer said in an interview Thursday.

The RCMP told MPs this summer they likely would not be able to use the documents as part of an investigation, but Scheer said they should have access to all the information before they decide.

The Liberals claimed that ordering the production of documents to be handed over to the RCMP blurs the lines between Parliament and the judiciary, and blame 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 the Charter rights of Canadians.

“Let’s be very clear, this is the Conservatives trying to muck up Parliament,” Gould said Thursday.

“Conservative members of Parliament are here for their own political, personal objectives and they don’t care what they do to Canadians in the meantime, and that is 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.”

A similar dispute over government documents played out when the Conservatives were on the governing side of the aisle during a minority government dispute more than a decade ago.

In 2009, the House ordered the government to disclose unredacted documents related to Canada’s role in the torture of Afghan detainees.

A few weeks after opposition parties passed a motion demanding the documents be produced, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament for several months, preventing the House committee from pursuing the issue.

In this case, the Liberal government abolished Sustainable Development Technology Canada after the auditor general released a scathing report about the organization’s management last spring.

Of the projects she looked at, one in every six that received funding were ineligible. The auditor’s report also found 90 cases where conflict-of-interest police were violated.

A month later, the ethics commissioner concluded that the former chair of the foundation failed to recuse herself from decisions that benefited organizations to which she had ties.

The House has been in a state of almost constant turmoil since the MPs returned to Ottawa in mid-September.

The Conservatives have made two attempts to topple the minority government with non-confidence motions. Although both attempts failed to win the support of other opposition parties, the Conservatives promise there will be more such votes to come.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet decried a “lack of respect for democracy” in the chamber during an unrelated press conference on Thursday in Chicoutimi, Que.

Blanchet claimed Bloc MPs are among the few in Parliament asking thoughtful questions instead of “spouting slogans and banging on the desk,” like other parties in the House.

“They are proud to have repeated the same thing that they’ve repeated 60 times in the last 60 days,” he said in French.

“Refusing to answer questions, when there are real ones, is no more respectful of voters.”

Among the few votes that have gone ahead this week was a Bloc Québécois motion 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 bill.

Scheer did not respond to a question about why the party supported the motion.

The Conservative critic for seniors, Anna Roberts, said in a statement that the government’s inflationary spending has “increased the cost of groceries and gas and put added strain on Canadian families and seniors on fixed incomes.”

The Conservatives have also asked Canada’s lobbying commissioner to investigate whether it violates ethics rules for the prime minister to make Mark Carney a Liberal adviser.

The Liberals announced at their recent caucus retreat in Nanaimo, BC, that Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor, had 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.

Tory ethics critic Michael Barrett said in a letter to the commissioner that Carney is not registered to lobby federally, but his corporate positions put him in several potential conflicts of interest.

“How could any ministerial staff member, member of Parliament or cabinet minister not feel a sense of obligation to Mr. Carney because of his close affiliation with the prime minister and minister of finance?” Barrett asked in his letter Thursday.

Carney is also the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, which is in talks with the government to launch a $50-billion investment fund with support from 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 “smear” a Canadian who is renowned around the world.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 3, 2024.