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 misspent 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.
The House has been seized with a debate on the issue 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.