Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses.
I will begin my questioning with Ms. Urie.
I'll start with a quick summary. In 2019, the Prime Minister's hand-picked chair for the SDTC—which the public knows as the green slush fund—came in after SDTC had a clean governance audit in 2017 from, I believe, both Treasury Board and the Auditor General. It seems to me like the culture of the organization changed quite a bit, and we had testimony here that it changed too—the concept that Minister Bains and his office referred to, “to manage conflict”. There were a number of directors doing transactions that ended up.... According to the Auditor General's report, almost half of all transactions, out of the 420 from 2017 to 2023, were conflicted transactions. It is quite an amazing thing, because I don't believe those directors represented half of the green technology sector, yet somehow they managed to get almost half the funding, when you combine the 90 that were undeclared conflicts, the 96 that were declared conflicts, and the $58 million spent outside the terms of the contribution agreement.
You were, I believe, the finance person all this time. We had the deputy minister here last week, and he agreed that, in a lot of cases, or in some of these cases, the money should be paid back because it went to an inordinate number of these directors and outside, in many cases, of the limit set out by Parliament as to where it should be spent.
Has the Liberal Minister of Industry today directed you, both the current acting chair and you as finance director, to seek any of this money back?