Thank you, Mr. Chair.
MP Drouin got me. I think that's it.
You convinced me. Actually, you didn't.
I sometimes feel sorry for the Liberals. Then I remember they're covering up a $400-million scandal. I give my head a shake as to why it is they want to cover up such a scandal.
What they're doing here is a closure motion. They try to do closure motions anywhere they can. They can't do them in the House. You can't shut down the fact that they are filibustering in the House regarding providing documents. It's 29,000 pages, if I recall what the government House leader said. They provided 29,000 pages, but not of words. It's ink blacking out the words. They view that as compliance. You might as well put in 60,000 blacked-out pages. For all we know, there are only 12 pages of information and 30,000 pages of nothing but Liberal black ink. That's the only time Liberals find black ink. Usually, they live in the world of red ink.
Finding MP Drouin concerned about the spending of millions of dollars is just beyond me. I wonder if this government, which has spent more money than all other governments combined, would actually be concerned about expenditures of dollars. Let's talk about the red ink and how they spend taxpayer money.
This organization called SDTC had a legitimate role helping pre-commercialized companies in the green space. That means it's fairly experimental stuff. Getting some money from the government allowed those companies to leverage others. It's like a good-housekeeping seal of approval. If the Government of Canada's arm said, “This is a company worth taking a risk on even though they haven't proven their technology or driven any revenue”, it allowed them to get a lot more money from other sources and other government departments. The recently disgraced chair of SDTC used the staff as her own business development agency for her own personal business interests. We've had lots of testimony on that from employees.
The agency was doing this work and had a chair who's very well known to most Canadians, a fellow who changed the world. His name is Jim Balsillie. Our chair here, as well, changes the world every day with his excellent work in New Brunswick Southwest. I'm referring to Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of BlackBerry, who was brought in to fix a lot of the administrative issues that existed. He hired a new president and they cleaned it up.
Guess what happened, though? This is from testimony of the former CEO of SDTC. Jim Balsillie didn't think the government was doing a very good job on what's called the surveillance economy. That's the big tech companies, including Google, Meta and Facebook, using your data in ways without your permission. They were making major data breaches with your personal information. The chair of SDTC at the time, Jim Balsillie, went before parliamentary committees exposing the failures of this Liberal government.
By Leah Lawrence's own testimony, one of the witnesses we had here today, ADM Noseworthy, communicated on behalf of the higher-ups. He doesn't remember any of their names now, for some reason. The higher-ups told him to ask Leah Lawrence if they could get the chair to shut up. They wanted to get him to stop talking about the failures of this government. After all, he's a Governor in Council appointee. He was appointed chair of the board but getting no pay. Multi-billionaire Jim obviously needed this job because he had no other income, I guess. They, with their pressure, said, “You should value that job more than your freedom to expose the government on their failures.” Guess what? Jim didn't stop.
According to the CEO, Leah Lawrence, it was communicated by Mr. Noseworthy, who again forgets the contents of these calls, that there was something in the water over at industry, that the CFO had just left and that he should be warned not to drink the water in that building over there because, apparently, former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains, when he appeared before this committee, couldn't remember anything.
He said that he made 100 appointments and that out of the 100, he appointed six people to that board. He said that he told them to appoint Ms. Verschuren to the board, even though she had conflicts of interest, but he didn't remember that. He did remember that he was in charge of the industry department. He did remember that he was in charge of reducing Canadians' cellphone bills, but then he left government to go work for the most expensive cellphone company in the world, Rogers.
He forgot what his responsibility was in government and said that he was going to get on the gravy train. He appeared before this committee and couldn't remember anything. We might think he was just another Liberal minister with maybe not a lot going on upstairs.
Unfortunately, his chief of staff—let's start with the chief of staff—remembered a number of things. He went off to great success from Navdeep Bains' office to be the salesperson for the Phoenix pay system, adding more Liberal competency to the public service and to Phoenix pay. However, he couldn't remember any of the phone calls, although he could remember the names. He didn't remember anything.
We had the former deputy minister here, who said that Mr. Noseworthy was his eyes and ears, but he didn't remember if he ever talked to him about it. He did give him bonuses, though, every year for his excellent performance of never telling him anything.
Then we had former deputy minister Simon Kennedy. He worked for the current minister, Minister Champagne, who sat there and said that he knew nothing for 40 months, even though his ADM sat in on every meeting. He was doing that Hogan's Heroes, Sergeant Schultz thing, too, when he spoke about this in the House, and he said that he “acted”.
A lot of you will remember an old Hollywood actor named W.C. Fields. Does everyone remember him? One of my favourite movies with W.C. Fields is David Copperfield.