Thank you, Mr. Chair.
There have been some interesting suggestions.
The committee's not going to tie me down if the minister deems to show himself here. There are a lot of things to ask him questions about. I hope he would come for the two hours. As the chair said, it's hard to get him out of here. I hope he'll come for two or three hours, so we have the time to go through this. If he comes for only the hour—the government seems to try to limit the exposure of its ministers—then one five-minute round is not going to allow me or other members to ask what we need to ask of him.
On this one, I'm certainly open to the broader issue that MP Masse mentioned about looking at the broader procurement issue. Obviously, there's a systemic problem throughout the government when a public servant can sole-source contracts to himself or when an ADM can sit at every board meeting in the green slush fund, where they vote for their own personal interests' money 82% of the time, according to the Auditor General. That's not bad legal advice; that's a culture of conflict of interest. It's a culture of entitlement in the billion-dollar green slush fund.
I'll have you know, that fund has spent $22 billion since it began. It was established by Paul Martin. It's the $2 billion in the last few years under this government that has been abused by the Liberal appointees. Nobody seemed to care about the accountability of it in the government—among government officials or in the Liberal government. They'll look at this thing and dismiss it: “Well, it's just a small amount of money again.”
We heard that with the one about Futurpreneur: “Well, it's only $35 million or $45 million. That's all.”
They spent $15 million on potted plants for an Oscar party, so who cares about how $200,000 got abused and sent 72 times to an employee?
MP Patzer was very clear. We won't go on. We have not proposed to prosecute other abuses of expenditures here because they're being done well in ethics in dealing with this government. It's persistent, whether it's the procurement problems that led to the arrive scam and to Firth and his company, GC Strategies, being able to basically fill their pockets without doing any work.... It was a company of two that got hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts to then subcontract.
Public servants were involved in that too. There were lavish single-malt scotch tastings, people being bought off and no government control. There was no government control at the green slush fund and no government control at GC Strategies.
Let's not forget the most recent one. Here we have the special adviser—the next leader of the Liberal Party. He won't be the next prime minister unless the Prime Minister resigns because he's too afraid to call a carbon tax election.
Carbon tax Carney, who chairs Brookfield, is trying to get $10 billion from the federal government. Brookfield will get a 3% commission on that. It sure pays to be a connected Liberal and to be the real minister of finance, while conveniently avoiding conflicts of interest by saying that he's employed by the Liberal Party, not by the government, but he gets access to all the government information.
Not being willing to look at this in any timely way on its own and relegating this procurement issue in the ISED department to just asking a couple of questions of the minister is typical of trying to dismiss and sweep the corruption under the carpet, which we see so frequently with the Liberal Party.