Thank you, Mr. Chair.
There seems to be some confusion about what a contribution agreement is. I thought I made it clear in my two statements. There are contribution agreements signed by ISED, written by ISED and given to SDTC—and it's still SDTC. It hasn't been collapsed into anything else yet.
The contribution agreements lay out generally where they're allowed to spend money and where they're not. Members seem to be confused. This is not an agreement between SDTC and an individual company once a grant has been given. There's nothing about that. This is about the contribution agreement and the language of SDTC. That contribution agreement is the one set out by ISED. That's what this is looking at. It doesn't actually list a single company. All it does is set out where you are allowed to spend a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The Auditor General said that they went outside of those agreements in creating a number of other funds that weren't part of that.
In addition to that, the whistle-blower has said that those agreements have now been amended in the new governance structure, and none of them have ever been made public, including by the board members. None of them have been made public to outline those restrictions.
They've been amended, according to the whistle-blower. One of them has been amended to recategorize the $58 million that was spent on COVID payments and other things to now be retroactively eligible. It's not a list; it's the parameters of how they spend taxpayer money and what they're allowed to spend it on. It's a very clear agreement. How they are to follow the contribution agreements set out by ISED has been talked about ad nauseam on the websites of both ISED and SDTC over the years. That's what this asks for. It does not ask for any individual agreement with a company once a grant is made.
The second part of this motion just asks for a list of the companies that have received money, and how much, since SDTC has started up again. That's essentially the same thing SDTC was publishing every quarter on their website until the government froze their assets. That's all the motion is asking for. It's very simple: Be transparent, as you were before this thing got shut down, about who you're giving the money to and show us the contribution agreements going back to 2018—because they've been altered—between ISED and the SDTC board and management on what they can spend money on.