Ottawa, ON – While Carney spent the week touting his ability to increase carbon taxes and lose cabinet ministers, Conservatives once again exposed his conflicts with Brookfield, which he had worked for months to try to keep hidden from Canadians.
On Tuesday, Brookfield COO Justin Beber confirmed to the Ethics Committee that 95 per cent of Brookfield-owned and operated companies are not included in Carney’s ethnics screen. That’s 1,900 companies that will personally enrich Mark Carney if they perform well.
What’s worse, even in obvious cases of conflicts of interest, Canadians discovered the ethics screen is not working. Brookfield’s COO “took the afternoon off” to take a private meeting with the Prime Minister at his office in Ottawa last month. Yet, this meeting did not trigger the ethics screen as Carney’s Chief of Staff and the Clerk of the Privy Council said should happen.
Carney was also given the opportunity to show regret for responding “who cares” when asked about his failure to get a US trade deal that leaves thousands of Canadians out of work. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre invited him to take part in an emergency debate on the tripling of softwood lumber tariffs, but despite being in Ottawa, Carney was a no-show.
It demonstrated once again that Carney doesn’t care. Nor do the Liberals care about restoring equality under the law when it comes to sentencing non-citizen offenders. As the House debated Bill C-220, which would end two-tier justice and prevent judges from considering immigration status in sentencing, the Liberals preferred to pretend it’s not happening.
They also wanted to pretend they didn’t break our immigration system by voting against dozens of common-sense amendments to Bill C-12 at committee. Conservatives continued to fight to restore the value of Canadian citizenship and deliver real solutions to fix our broken immigration system.
Conservatives also called out Liberal failures to stand up for the men and women who served our country. On Thursday, Blake Richards, Conservative Shadow Minister for Veterans Affairs, and Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative Quebec Lieutenant, joined with Conservative veterans to hold a press conference calling for transparency on Carney’s cuts to Veterans Affairs Canada’s budget.
This week also saw Statistics Canada release another devastating report confirming that 10 years of Liberal government is making farming economically unviable. By increasing the industrial carbon tax, operation costs for farmers have jumped, and income has collapsed, putting our food security at risk and costing Canadian farmers their global edge.
To cap the week off, Canadians were once again let down that Carney’s much vaunted MOU turned out to be just another pipe dream. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre made clear that the only one blocking a pipeline is the Prime Minister and that “a Conservative government would approve a pipeline to the Pacific without a carbon tax, without delay, without excuses. Period.”
Canadians have seen the cost of Liberals getting in the way, and this week, they continued to prove it. It’s time for Carney to get out of the way and unlock trillions of dollars in investment that will make energy, food and homes affordable again and our economy strong, self-reliant and sovereign.