Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I gave this notice several days ago of this motion for another study:
Given that a former federal public servant at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) pled guilty to criminal breach of trust for directing 72 sole-source contracts worth $231,663 to a company he owned, the committee hold two meetings on this topic, and invite the minister, RCMP and ISED officials to better understand this fraudulent billing scheme that took place under this Liberal government.
As you may be aware—I'm sure you are—this former public servant funnelled taxpayer money to companies he owned through a procurement process that clearly is faulty at ISED. I think it's an indication that we don't know, as MP Rempel Garner said earlier, what is happening to the spending controls at this department. This is perhaps the bare surface of the iceberg.
We've seen the big iceberg of the billion-dollar Liberal green slush fund, which, as the Auditor General indicated, had $390 million that was either conflicted or misappropriately spent by Liberal-appointed board directors. Now we have the department that was meant to oversee that not even able to manage basic procurement processes to ensure they're not being abused by their own employees. According to the RCMP and international internal accounting record-keeping practices, that's what led to it. What wouldn't have led to it was stopping it in the first place, when they had a procurement process in place in the department that allowed this kind of abuse.
I think this is an urgent matter. This department is one of the biggest-spending departments in the government. It has many programs, some of which have very loose terms—I would put it that way—like the strategic innovation fund, SIF, which is a nondescript multi-billion dollar fund that's used to fund anything the government wants. It doesn't really have any parameters other than “hey, let's reach in and pull out a ton more money for this government priority.” It seems to be a mystery out there, other than that they have rounds of funding, any company can apply and there doesn't seem to be any consistent terms or records.
There appear to be very lax standards by the CFO of ISED, and by the now former deputy minister of ISED. They've changed the deputy minister. I'm sure it had nothing to do with SDTC and taking the fall for the inadequacies of the minister, who has been in place for 40 months and can't seem to get his hands on understanding where the money that his department is responsible for is going.
It's incumbent upon us as a committee, as a parliamentary body, to provide that scrutiny on the expenditure of these critical tax dollars at a time when the government is running up a $50-billion deficit and says they can't find any savings. Maybe they should find savings by actually having proper accounting standards within their own departments. A couple of meetings on this right now I think are timely, given that the department is, I'm sure, intent over the next few months, as we head into 2025 with a shaky Parliament, on spending a little more money for some reason. We need to make sure it's not being spent in ways that either particular individuals within the public service or those the Liberals have appointed to things are going to abuse.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.