On November 16, 2023, I received a letter from the interim Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. The commissioner was responding to a letter that I had written.
In the letter, I laid out how Ms. Verschuren, who is the chair and chief executive officer of NRStor and a beneficial owner of the company, moved a motion at a meeting of the board of directors for Sustainable Development Technology Canada to provide COVID-related emergency relief payments to a number of companies, including her company. Further to the motion being adopted by the board, the company received $106,000 in 2020 and $111,000 in 2021.
Her participation in making these decisions, which provided an opportunity to further her own interests, is contrary to subsection 6(1) of the Conflict of Interest Act. She used her position as chair of the board to influence her fellow directors in reaching a decision with respect to the motion that she moved herself, which furthered her private interests, contrary to section 9 of the act. She failed to recuse herself from a matter in respect of which she had an opportunity to further her private interests, contrary to section 21 of the act.
This is what the Ethics Commissioner was looking at. He said, “I have considered your request and am of the view that it satisfies the requirements set out in subsection 44(2) of the Act. I am therefore commencing an [investigation] under subsection 44(3) of the Act into the matter you raise and I have informed Ms. Verschuren accordingly.”
This has come out of having a whistle-blower bring forward the information that this committee has and that Canadians have. The Auditor General launching an investigation comes from the information that Canadians have.
Now, did we get fast action, and were executives, the CEO, the board chair and the board fired for their role in these things that were known to the government? No, because the whistle-blower.... It didn't even rise to the minister's attention, apparently, for several months.
We heard from the CFO for the industry minister, in recordings of him that were played in the media, that the minister was to be briefed within the first few months after this, before the final RCGT report was issued. However, the minister says that's not what happened, so this didn't even land on the minister's desk until the end of September.
What we know is not because of due diligence from the government. What we know is from a whistle-blower kicking “at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight”. That's why we know what we know. The 300-page slide deck that the minister hasn't read gave rise to the concerns that now have the Auditor General investigating this.
It was a struggle to get this off the ground at the committee, but we can't have a situation where there's a whistle-blower who is speaking to the media and speaking to parliamentarians and the committee is not going to entertain a motion, like we just had, to have them come before the committee. The invitation should be furnished. That's the minimum standard that this committee should be willing to abide by—for us to pass a motion to have a whistle-blower come before the committee. I won't speak to the accommodations that I described in it, because the motion was defeated, or your decision to find the motion admissible was defeated. That's why I'm going to move another motion.
We find ourselves in a situation where we have a standing committee that has interested whistle-blowers begging for the opportunity to have accountability in an organization that, the committee would learn, is very important to them. The sustainable tech sector is the life's work of these people who work at SDTC. They want the confidence of Canadians restored in it. Their expressions, to me, have been that, if this doesn't get sorted out, it will undermine investment in their life's work in the sustainable technologies sector. I think it's fair that they're concerned about that, because we've seen rampant corruption at this organization.
The Auditor General came before a different committee—public accounts—and the representative from that office said that this is a new phenomenon at SDTC. The Auditor General had previously audited this organization through to 2017, so we're not talking about ancient history. We're talking about the recent development of conflicts of interest, the lack of fund-stream compliance, recipients who are not compliant, a flawed and corrupted project approval process with ineligible payments being made, and of course rampant issues with their human resources practices.
With respect to the importance of my motion, this is the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. In the RCGT report, one of their key observations is that “A backdated declaration of conflict of interest between the CEO and the expert reviewer was made under the direction of the Corporation's external legal counsel.”
They hired outside counsel, and outside counsel's recommendation to the CEO was, because she didn't follow their conflict of interest practices, to backdate them and then she'd be compliant. That's what we're dealing with here. There's no other organization where that would be acceptable, and it can't be acceptable at an organization that is supposed to be stewarding a billion Canadian dollars.