Madam Speaker, my colleague asked a question for those watching out there today. Many have heard about this. What is this green slush fund and why are we here today?
The Liberal government is obstructing justice by refusing to turn over documents to the RCMP showing that Liberal-appointed managers used the green slush fund to pay nearly $400 million to companies that they owned. There is so much scandal with this particular NDP-Liberal government that it is hard to keep track, and we just get desensitized to it, even in this place. There is so much of it, as my colleague mentioned. She did not even get through the full list of the scandals. We are here today because Canadians deserve transparency and a full investigation into this scandal. This is a big one. It is $400 million as it stands, and further investigation needs to happen.
I think we also need to highlight that while the NDP-Liberals have their carbon tax and are bleeding money from Canadians to pay into their carbon tax schemes, this is where the money is going. While people are literally turning down their thermostat or buying noodles for a dollar a package at the grocery store just to survive, these guys are filling their friends' pockets with literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
I will make one additional point here. In relation to northern B.C., I was in the House a few weeks ago and talked about how we have just lost two mills in the area. Why have we lost those two mills? The costs are so exorbitant just to get timber now that some of these companies have said that they cannot afford to do it anymore, a direct attribution to the carbon tax and its costs.
I am going to talk about the basics and then I am going to get into it. It is going to take some time, but I think the folks out there want a deeper dive and want to know a little bit more. What are the basics of the scandal? At least $390 million has gone to Liberal insiders and this is what the Liberals are trying to hide, obviously. That is why they are opposing this production order for documents to be turned over to the RCMP. Obviously, it is better to cover it up, and we have seen the examples of where they do it all the time. That is why the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, defied the order of the House to produce these documents and ordered departments to redact all sensitive information.
This is a delay tactic. We want the documents. They gave us some black sheets of paper and that was supposed to pacify us in this place, but we had some pretty sharp members that caught it, and we are standing up to say that this will not cut it.
How bad is it? This is from my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets, who has done yeoman's work on this: “a Governor in Council appointment, a person appointed by the government entrusted to oversee taxpayer money, is not to personally profit from their work on a committee, as a GIC appointment, and neither is their family”.
That is pretty obvious. We call it a conflict of interest in this place. We all know the rules. These folks did not just break the rules but they did it in abundance. Again, in terms of the rules that were set up before, when we were in government, the NDP-Liberals are pushing the boundaries of any limits that were set for any of us in this place.
“In a five-year period where there were 405 transactions approved by the [Sustainable Development Technology Canada] board, the Auditor General sampled 226, so only half of them, and found that 186 of those 226 transactions were conflicted.” One would be bad enough, but there were 186. “That is the 82% and that is, again, the $330 million”, as my colleague had said.
Those numbers are massive, but they are still a little bit unclear. It gets vague when you get past the $100-million mark. What does that actually mean?
Let us talk about Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It was established in 2001 by the Government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology Act to fund the development and demonstration of new technologies that promote sustainable development, and it did some good work. Prior to these guys forming government and some of their ministers getting involved, it was actually doing okay.
SDTC is a federally funded non-profit that is supposed to approve and disburse over $100 million in funds annually to clean-technology companies. Executives awarded projects in which they held conflicts of over $330 million in funds.
In 2019, former Liberal industry minister Navdeep Bains began appointing conflicted executives to the board of SDTC. I will later get into what some of those members have done.
The Prime Minister-appointed board began voting companies in which executives held active conflict of interest SDTC funding. Members were being put on the board that they actually knew were in conflict. They were already getting money from this board, yet they were still appointed to it. It is unbelievable. Governance standards at the fund deteriorated rapidly under the leadership of the new chair, Annette Verschuren. The Auditor General and Ethics Commissioner initiated separate investigations after whistle-blowers came forward with allegations of financial mismanagement at the fund.
I think I want to get into some of these individuals and what the story is. We will talk about Annette Verschuren. She was the chair of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, so she was the head of it. This is from The Globe and Mail:
What’s mind-boggling is that SDTC was already funding an NRStor project in 2019, when Ms. Verschuren was appointed as chair. The Liberal government chose her to oversee an agency that had a funding contract with the company she ran. [Red flag.] ...Last week, SDTC’s former chief executive officer, Leah Lawrence, told a parliamentary committee that she warned an assistant deputy minister at Innovation Science and Economic Development, Andrew Noseworthy. “I expressed concern there was a potential for both conflict of interest and the perception of conflict of interest,” Ms. Lawrence said. “I expressed concern that Ms. Verschuren and SDTC could potentially be damaged by the appointment.”
For her to be still there as a board member is unbelievable. From my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets:
They established something called accelerators, and those accelerators were outside organizations that the board hired to vet proposals and make recommendations to the board. One of those was an organization called the Verschuren Centre at the University of Cape Breton, which is in the name of and was set up by the chair of the green slush fund.
There is MaRS Discovery District at U of T. Members probably know that. Can members guess who chairs MaRS? It is the chair of the green slush fund, Annette Verschuren.
Companies would be screened through the board member-controlled organizations, and shockingly, their companies got recommended to the board for funding. That is just a pure coincidence. With 82% of the transactions that they approved, nine directors were conflicted. These directors do not represent 82% of the green technology industry in Canada....
That is a good thing to highlight. There are so many other entities and companies they could have picked, but they just happened to pick 82% that are part of this particular board. It is unbelievable.
It is strangely a pure coincidence with these hand-picked directors from the Prime Minister.
If that were not bad enough, this particular director [Andrée-Lise Méthot] in 2022 left and went to the Canada Infrastructure Bank board, and the first thing she did was to vote $170 million of infrastructure bank money for a company owned by the chair of the green slush fund, Annette Verschuren.
It is absolutely unbelievable. This is one that is less money, but it is just so obvious that I have to say it.
Annette Verschuren also sought $6 million for the Verschuren Centre at Cape Breton University because it was failing. SDTC said no when it went through the process, because there was a conflict.
However, in emails, it said it would help her find money from other government departments. Pretty soon after that, the Verschuren Centre got $12 million from ACOA and the ISET program. Her other companies got $50 million from Natural Resources Canada, and then of course there is the Infrastructure Bank one.
From a government document, these are some of the numbers that Annette Verschuren was approved in conflict: $332,500, $698,250, $98,000, $102,000, $111,000, $150,000 and it goes on. That is just one of these members of the board who was in conflict.
The next person is Stephen Kukucha. I will quote my colleague again, and he spoke of:
...another director, a fellow named Stephen Kukucha from British Columbia. Stephen Kukucha was a political staffer to former Liberal environment minister Anderson, and he was the organizer for the Liberal Party for the Prime Minister in British Columbia. As a reward, they put him on the green slush fund board. Surprisingly, we have another Liberal on the board in whose company he had a financial interest. In his time on the board, the companies he had a financial interest in received almost $5 million from the very board he was serving on.
This is another conflict. I have some examples of the expenditures listed here for Stephen Kukucha. One is $157,000. Another one is $151,000, and one is $1,033,771. This is all funding approved by the absolutely corrupt board.
We have more. The next member was Guy Ouimet. My colleague said:
...another board member handpicked by the Prime Minister, Guy Ouimet, who has admitted in committee that $17 million of green slush fund money went to companies he has a financial interest in. He said that it is a small amount of money. It may be a small amount of money to him, but it is not to most Canadians, and that amount of money, he admitted, had gone up 1,000% in value since that investment was made in 2019. It [definitely] pays to be a Liberal insider.
He says $17 million is a small amount of money. I do not know what world this guy comes from, but $17 million, to most Canadians, probably 99% of Canadians, is a lot of money. He has an amount in an approved conflict list that actually says $17 million. There is another amount that says $157,000 and another one for $151,000. It is just unbelievable. It just keeps going. It is endless.
We will move on. This is the last one I will mention. This is the one with direct ties to the current radical environment minister. This particular board member's name is Andrée-Lise Méthot. As my colleague said:
One director was particularly aggressive.... She was appointed in 2016 by the Prime Minister. Her name is Andrée-Lise Méthot. She runs a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital, in green technologies. Andrée-Lise Méthot's companies, before and during her time on the board, received $250 million in grants from the SDTC.
That is a quarter of a billion dollars, folks, and that name of Cycle Capital will come up again. My colleague continues, “while she was on the board, $114 million went to green companies that she had invested in.” I already made reference to the connection between this person on the board and the current radical environment minister, the same environment minister who is causing mills to close in my riding, is limiting oil and gas development in my riding, and is limiting mining investment in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.
That same radical minister is having an effect. He wants Canadians to pay the carbon tax so he can get more money and give it to his friends. As my colleague said, “her in-house, paid lobbyist for 10 years before he was elected...was the current radical Minister of the Environment. While he was lobbying for Cycle Capital, the current radical Minister of the Environment got $111 million.” That is what he went to work for. He made money for this company. He brought that kind of money in before he was a minister.
This is the radical Minister of the Environment. In his time as lobbyist for Cycle Capital, for which he lobbied 25 times in the year before his entering the House, the PMO and the industry department gave over $100 million in green slush money to Cycle Capital.
What is even more shocking is that the minister is a member of the House right now, but he still owns shares in that particular company. The question is that we are not sure what the value of those shares is. He has not declared that. That is, again, what some of these documents will disclose, and we will hopefully find out how much that is.
I will read on. My colleague said, “even though, as a cabinet minister of government, he participated in discussions that gave the green slush fund another $750 million, of which over a quarter has gone to that company.” This is the cabinet minister who has given the money to the same group to spend because he figured he could help out the Liberals' friends by dumping money into this thing, so he funded the fund with another three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The minister has given money to a company he has direct ties to and has shares in. It is hard to argue that it is not going over there. We hope the documents will be forthcoming so we can actually see it. As my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets said, “He still owns shares in it. He has not disclosed what they are worth.” He then makes reference to the minister having previous experience wearing an orange jumpsuit.
I think what bothered me the most when I saw some of these numbers is that we are the ones who go up to the northern communities, and I face this every time I go to Fort St. John and other northern communities in my riding. There, this is the issue that folks are dealing with. I will use an example. The carbon tax bill for a person in Fort Nelson living in a 1,500 square foot mobile home was over $500. This was in the spring, by the way, and over half of that bill was pure carbon tax. This person, who probably cannot afford much, is trying to stay warm in the north in a mobile home, and the radical minister is saying that this person can afford to pay a bit more. It would be one thing if it were going to a good cause and was for a good reason, but now we see evidence that it is going to line the pockets of his Liberal friends. That is even more of a travesty in what is happening here.
We have used what maybe some would call a slogan, but people are genuinely struggling to feed themselves, stay warm and house themselves. Some people in these homeless encampments just cannot afford to live in an apartment anymore. They have nowhere else to go. They ran out of money or have lost their job in the natural resource sector for some reason, again because of the radical minister's policies.
What do we know in conclusion? The Auditor General of Canada found that the Prime Minister had turned Sustainable Development Technology Canada into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. As my colleague pointed out, “A recording of a senior civil servant slammed the ‘outright incompetence’ of the [Trudeau] government, which gave 390 million dollars' worth of contracts—
