I'm sorry, Mr. Boothe. I didn't ask you about the legislation, because there was not a single chair of this board since its establishment in 2001 who had a conflict—not one—until Annette Verschuren, and she was appointed over the objections of the senior management team, which told the ADM, the deputy minister and the minister's office that they shouldn't appoint a board member who was conflicted, yet they did.
It boggles my mind that we've had ministers here like Navdeep Bains, who, in doing his Sergeant Schultz routine, claimed that he knew nothing and he doesn't remember anything. All he was responsible for was appointing corrupt Liberals to the board. He wasn't responsible for overseeing the corrupt Liberals on the board. It's appalling to me that everyone has said, “It's not my fault. We just let it go on.”
I would think that you, as a former deputy minister, would be appalled by the fact, regardless of who it was, that a deputy minister would sit here and say, “I didn't know anything. I spent absolutely no time overseeing, when I had an ADM in every meeting, and I spent absolutely no time figuring out how they're doing it.” It's beyond belief that an ADM sitting in on every single one of these board meetings...unless it's because he was asking one of the previous chairs for a job outside of government. Maybe he was conflicted.
It's incredible to think that we're going to get the same old stuff, the same old management, the same old approach, the same old “whatever, okay, they were legitimate companies and everyone's conflicted and everyone in this industry is conflicted”. Half of all the transactions in the audit period had a problem, and there's absolutely no way that the four directors who did this are in control of half of all the companies in the entire green technology industry. It just happened that the half they had an interest in managed to get through the system.
Come on. It's a conspiracy of corruption and defrauding the taxpayer, and nobody in the government seems to care—no current minister, no current deputy minister—and you, as a former deputy minister of finance, don't seem to care, yet they've put you in charge.