Madam Speaker, it is an honour to come in here and finish my speech.
As has been described, what has effectively happened is that, after nine years, the NDP-Liberal government has completely lost the plot. There has been scandal after scandal, and the Auditor General of Canada's findings have continually shown all kinds of misgivings in terms of spending and any kind of compliance. In fact, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC, turned into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. We have heard from a variety of different whistle-blowers about just how bad this is.
In fact, one SDTC whistle-blower said, “Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.”
Another whistle-blower said:
The true failure of the situation stands at the feet of our current government, whose decision to protect wrongdoers and cover up their findings over the last 12 months is a serious indictment of how our democratic systems and institutions are being corrupted by political interference. It should never have taken two years for the issues to reach this point. What should have been a straightforward process turned into a bureaucratic nightmare that allowed SDTC to continue wasting millions of dollars and abusing countless employees over the last year.
These quotes are exceptionally troubling. This is not the first time the current Parliament has had to have conversations that are very serious in nature regarding the government's trying to cover up scandal. One part that I am actually quite frustrated with when it comes to this particular piece is the number of conflicts of interest in which Liberal insiders were getting money.
In fact, the Minister of Environment served as a strategic adviser for a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital from 2009 to 2018, prior to joining cabinet. This was not a short period of time. The Prime Minister has entrusted the same person to handle Parks Canada. We have seen that this is an absolute failure in terms of what has happened in Jasper, where those at Parks Canada were either completely incompetent or negligent and let 30% of the homes in that community burn as a direct result of mismanagement. However, the minister still has shares in Cycle Capital, which is interesting, and this company actually got money from the green slush fund. It just continues to show the number of conflicts of interest, and this is where it becomes a serious problem.
We have Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet and to put food on their table. We are approaching Thanksgiving, yet the homes of 30% of the people in Jasper are gone. The NDP-Liberal government sat on its hands for the last nine years, mismanaging the forests because it failed to accept that the pine beetle was a real threat. There are emails. There is correspondence that went back and forth as to whether the government should consider the political optics of prescribed burns. The Liberals completely neglected forest management. Then, to add insult to injury, they turned away fire trucks and firefighters who were there, ready and willing to help. The Liberals also, interestingly enough, decided to install fire hydrants in the townsite of Jasper, but they were actually not compatible with the fire trucks in Alberta and British Columbia. This seems to be a total miss because it basically means that people are very limited in the amount of outside help they can get. That is because Parks Canada officials do not understand the western Canadian perspective. However, I digress here.
The problem is that the government has completely lost the plot. It continues to funnel money to Liberal insiders, giving them almost a blank cheque to mismanage Canadian funds. In addition, they put real people at risk day in and day out. It is exceptionally clear that Canadians have had enough. Every single weekend, when I go home to my riding of Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, I hear from people who tell me, “We just need an election. When are we going to have an election? We cannot handle the pressure of the mismanagement by the NDP-Liberal government any longer, with its waste, its corruption and its chaos.”
They see crime rising at an ever-increasing rate as a direct result of the catch-and-release bail policies the government pats themselves on the back for bringing forward. They are currently fighting this and preventing documents from going to the RCMP because they are afraid of what is in the documents. They make arguments that this is about charter rights, ignoring the fact that the Parliament of Canada has the right to have these. The Speaker has ruled very clearly that these documents were not to be redacted, yet we received redacted documents.
It is clear that these documents have to go to the RCMP, completely unredacted. Canadians deserve it.