Evidence of meeting #20 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was company.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:55 p.m.
Liberal
Siobhan Coady Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
That involved senior executives within the department as well as parliamentary secretaries, and so on.
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Liberal
Siobhan Coady Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
Are you saying you thought he'd just basically do a Google search, maybe talk to some departments and kind of figure things out, and report back?
4:55 p.m.
Director, Upper Canada Solar Ltd.
Yes. And if it came back that this particular infrastructure program--
4:55 p.m.
Director, Upper Canada Solar Ltd.
--covered components, I'm not sure that even then--given the fact that our business at that time was pretty much 100% under the FIT program, under the Ontario subsidized feed-in tariff program--there would have been anything there. So it wasn't an issue that I gave a lot of thought to at the time.
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Liberal
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Bloc
Richard Nadeau Bloc Gatineau, QC
Madam Chair, I have a question for you. Will the committee start work at 5:00 p.m.?
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Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Sure. We don't have to. It's the committee's will. If you want to give the last round to Mr. Warkentin after this, then we can start. It'll be five and five--ten minutes.
Is the committee willing to go up to 5:10, since we had a break for the vote? If you're willing to go to 5:10....
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Bloc
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Conservative
Chris Warkentin Conservative Peace River, AB
Yes. I know that my colleague Mr. Gourde had a couple, and I--
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Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Fair enough. You can take five minutes, and then we can go to committee business.
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Conservative
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Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
You talked about going to get information on programs. You just said earlier that you know your way around Ottawa. How do you usually go about looking for information on the programs you mentioned? Could you do the same thing without the help of the people we are talking about, including Mr. Jaffer? A member of the opposition mentioned that they were secret programs. If you were able to go get the information, were they secret programs?
5 p.m.
Director, Upper Canada Solar Ltd.
No, no. I guess I could have undertaken the search myself.
The thing was, from the onset, I didn't think this particular infrastructure funding program was any match for what we were doing, for a variety of reasons that I've laid out. So I spent about six minutes on the briefing note that I put together, and that thing went off into cyberspace and the snowball went down the mountain.
This wasn't an issue that I took seriously at the time. I submitted a briefing note to somebody who supplied it to him, and then things happened.
It was my understanding, and my experience in Ottawa, that these programs don't pile subsidy on subsidy. That was the key issue for me. The provincial government was not going to allow you to get a grant or whatever from the feds and then make that aggregate on top of what they were doing. And they made that very clear in the regulations of the renewable energy program when they clawed back the ecoENERGY program when it existed.
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Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
So you look for the information that you need on the programs from public sources. You do the research yourself and it is easy to find.
5 p.m.
Director, Upper Canada Solar Ltd.
I suppose I could have. I didn't. But I did bring the NRCan renewable energy federal funding sources web page and the Canadian solar association web page. Both had links to financial assistance for renewable energy, and this program is not listed on either of those.
The reason I made that point is it explains why, when he brought this program up, I wasn't aware of it, because that's the normal way I would have taken a look and seen what programs were out there, what envelopes were out there.
But to go back to the point, in the FIT program in Ontario, it's already a subsidy. You don't need to go looking for others. In fact, there's a little push-back to say that the subsidy is in some cases too generous. I disagree with that. But it's already a program that's subsidized, so we had no interest really in exploring other sources. That's especially if they were going to be roads that would take up time with a very, very, very limited chance of any success--in this case no chance of success.
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Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
To conclude, you received no money from those programs and there was no money exchanged with Mr. Jaffer.
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Conservative
5 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you.
Thank you for being here and thank you for giving us a clarification.
Yes?