Mr. Speaker, I, too, am very glad to rise for the motion of privilege in front of the House today. I want to thank my colleagues, the member for Cariboo—Prince George and the member for Brantford—Brant, for their speeches today.
I have been working with my colleague from Brantford—Brant on the ethics committee, and this issue came before it almost a year ago. That is when we started looking into the SDTC scandal. However, even then, we were just scratching the surface of what was to come and what has led us to this point today.
I want to go back to August 12, 2020, just over four years ago. Of course, the world was dealing with the uncertainty of COVID at that time. The House was operating as a committee of the whole, and I remember that I gave a speech. We were just starting to really understand the extent and scope of some of the sole-source contracting that was going on. In particular, there was an issue with CMHC and Frank Baylis's ventilators. We were seeing insider cronyism start to take root within the Liberal Party, and sole-source contracts related to COVID matters, COVID equipment and so on were being given to Liberal-connected insiders.
I want to go back to what I said on August 12, 2020. I said, sitting right over where the hon. member for Edmonton Manning is right now:
The sponsorship scandal will look like a speck of sand in a desert when this is all over. When this is all over, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance [Bill Morneau] will be just fine.
I have a question to ask on behalf of every Canadian before more stories surface, because they will. How many more Liberal-connected friends, families and insiders have had their palms greased and have personally financially gained from this pandemic at the expense of Canadians who have suffered so much during this crisis? Will the Liberals be honest for once or do we have to wait for the Auditor General to tell us?
Well, the Auditor General has been telling us. Several investigations later, we have landed on the SDTC scandal, and what a scandal it has become, with Liberal-connected insiders and cronies greasing their palms to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars without any thought of conflict of interest and somehow without any thought to putting measures in place that would stop the fleecing of taxpayer dollars by the board of directors running SDTC.
It is important that we remember what got us to this point. It was the Auditor General who found that the Prime Minister had turned Sustainable Development Technology Canada into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. I remember being at the meeting where she presented her report and how she talked about the malfeasance that was going on within SDTC and the fact that there was very little oversight and a whole lot of conflict of interest going on.
I have heard some of the questioning today from the Liberal side about criminality. It was not the Auditor General's task or role at the time to look into criminality. What she was looking for was how taxpayer dollars were landing in the hands of Liberal insiders without any regard for conflict of interest rules. That is what she was looking for, that is what she was reporting on and that is what shed light on the extent and scope of the scandal that the ethics committee was looking into almost a year earlier.
The other thing the Auditor General found was a recording of a senior civil servant who slammed the outright incompetence of the government, which gave out 390 million dollars' worth of contracts inappropriately. The whistle-blower was speaking about the very things that were going on. I recall that we had Doug McConnachie at the ethics committee. He had been recorded by the whistle-blower. They were talking about this scandal, and even Doug McConnachie was saying that this was a sponsorship-level scandal. The sponsorship scandal was $40 million, which is enough money, and we all know what happened there. It led to the Chrétien government being brought down. This is upward of $400 million of taxpayer dollars being funnelled to Liberal-connected insiders and cronies without any oversight.
The Auditor General found that SDTC gave $58 million to 10 ineligible projects and that it, on occasion, could not demonstrate an environmental benefit, not one environmental benefit, or the development of green technologies. Over 186 cases, $334 million went to projects for which board members held a conflict of interest. It is unbelievable that $58 million went to projects without ensuring that the contribution agreement terms were met.
I think of the coordinated effort that it takes among those boards of directors and the people involved to distribute that amount of money to what we now know, in many cases, were companies that they had a financial interest in. If that does not border on criminal, there is nothing that does, quite frankly.
The Auditor General also made it clear that the blame for this scandal falls on the Prime Minister's industry minister, who did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were given to Liberal insiders, so it was common-sense Conservatives who really started the process of trying to get to the bottom of this. We had the industry minister in at the ethics committee, and we had an audit report that was done on this that we had asked for. We got it back, and it had been redacted. Then, the ethics committee had asked that we get the report unredacted and that the report actually come to us, and it did, finally, after a lot of push and pull.
However, I think it is important to really talk about why these oversight committees are so important to Parliament. The standing committees on ethics, public accounts and government operations, or “the mighty OGGO”, as we like to say, are important because they are chaired by opposition members. I have been the chair of the ethics committee now for two years, and that is why I am glad to speak to this. In my role as chair, there is a level of neutrality that is required, and we have to make sure that we are operating in a neutral way, in a neutral function, and giving a fair chance for all members.
However, these committees are run by the majority opposition members, and their intent is to hold the government to account. In the case of the ethics committee, we deal with ethics issues, and we have been dealing with a lot of ethics issues. I refer to it as the “shooting fish in a barrel” committee because of the amount of ethics scandals that we have been dealing with, and I will touch on those a bit later.
The mighty OGGO deals with government operations and contracts. Through OGGO, we found the arrive scam scandal and how that played itself out. Of course, there is public accounts. Quite frankly, this issue has been touching many committees, not just the oversight committees that are led by the opposition. We have been trying to do our job, our constitutional responsibility as His Majesty's loyal opposition, to get to the bottom of the many scandals that have been occurring, and we have been doing a very good job at that, sometimes with some opposition from the opposition.
We have not always had team players within other parties. We certainly saw that when the coalition agreement was on between the NDP and the Liberals. The NDP would provide cover in many cases for motions that we were trying to pass to shed light on many of these scandals.
We have seen, what I would call hopeful, signs that they have backed away from that, and we are getting to the bottom of many of these scandals, not the least of which is the “who is Randy” scandal that the ethics committee, and now Parliament, is currently seized with. When we look back on SDTC and we look at what its mandate was, it was, and still is, a federally funded non-profit that approves, and was supposed to disperse, $100 million in funds annually to clean technology companies. The key problem, of course, as I mentioned earlier, is that SDTC executives awarded projects, for which they held conflicts, amounting to over 330 million dollars' worth of taxpayer funds.
In 2019, when there were not any scandals in relation to the fund, former Liberal industry minister Navdeep Bains began removing Conservative executives from SDTC and started replacing them with Liberal-appointed executives. The Prime Minister's newly appointed board began voting in companies for which the executives of held active conflicts of interest in SDTC funding. Governing standards at the fund deteriorated rapidly under the leadership of the new chair Annette Verschuren, who was appointed by the Liberals, and who we had at the ethics committee.
In July, the Auditor General and the Ethics Commissioner initiated separate investigations after those whistle-blowers came forward with allegations of financial mismanagement at the fund. The Auditor General's investigation, as I said, found severe lapses in governance standards and it uncovered almost $400 million in funding that was awarded to projects that either should have been ineligible to receive funding or were awarded to projects in which board members were conflicted during that five-year audit period. This is just incredible stuff.
I wanted to talk a little about history. It is not just the SDTC scandal that we or Canadians should be focused on. It is a myriad of other scandals as well. As I said, as chair of the ethics committee, I have had a front-row seat over these last two years to many of these scandals. I also had a front-row seat when I was opposition House leader under our interim leader, Candice Bergen. At that time, we were really dealing with the Winnipeg lab document scandal. The government had not provided documents that were asked for by Parliament. In fact, it dug its heels in so much that the government took the Speaker to court to prevent these documents from being released.
We are seeing a very similar situation here. There was nothing in the order by Parliament, and Parliament is supreme. When committees ask for documents, there is an obligation on behalf of the government to provide those documents, and if documents are asked for in an unredacted manner, there is an obligation, because of the supremacy of Parliament, to provide those documents unredacted. That was not the case here with the SDTC scandal.
When I go back to the Winnipeg lab scandal, almost the exact same thing had happened. The documents were not provided. What did they have to hide? Who was connected? Who is further connected to the SDTC scandal that the government does not want us to understand or know about? Why would the Liberals not want the potential criminality to be exposed in this scandal? These are questions that the government and its members are going to have to answer when, and if, we get to an election.
However, it was not just Winnipeg labs or SDTC, it was also the arrive scam scandal. Over $60 million was given to Liberal-connected insiders for the arrive scam application. There were no answers, and the government pushed back. We had to call Mr. Firth to the bar, proving the supremacy of Parliament and the fact that we are the arbiters of what we need to determine and what we need to get to the bottom of. There is also the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, which we have been dealing with at ethics committee, and foreign interference.
Oversight committees are intended to hold the government to account. Whether the government likes it or not, that is our constitutional role, and it is our constitutional role as His Majesty's loyal opposition to push and fight to make sure that government is on the up and up and that we are the stewards of taxpayer dollars. We will continue to do that.
Now, we are dealing with another situation, as I said earlier, which Parliament is now seized with, and that is the ruling of the Speaker on the question of privilege that was brought up by the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, whom I sit with on the ethics committee.
However, we are dealing with another question of privilege, which I am sure the House will be seized with over the next few days, and that is with respect to the “who is Randy” scandal and the fact that the minister was seemingly operating his business while he was a minister. The conflict of interest in that is palpable. The illegality of that is real, and we need answers to that.
Back in July, the ethics committee had a meeting. We had requested documents from a witness, Mr. Anderson, who failed to provide those documents to the committee. We gave him a timeline for when we needed them, and he failed to provide the information that was requested. Again, asserting ourselves and the supremacy of not just the committee but Parliament, I reported to the House what had happened, as was the committee's wish. The member then rose on a question of privilege and the fact that the privileges of the committee and the privileges of its members were not adhered to by Mr. Anderson. The Speaker ruled that the question of privilege is now before the House and the motion has been duly moved. It is a motion that we will be debating, likely over the next couple of days and perhaps even into next week.
Part of that motion is to have Mr. Anderson come before the bar of the House to not only be admonished by the Speaker, but also, more important, to answer the questions that parliamentarians have been asking for him to answer. That is our job, not just on ethics, but on the mighty OGGO and, of course, on public accounts as well.
As I know members have heard a couple of times, it all goes back to 2015, when the Prime Minister stood up before Canadians and said that the government will be transparent and open by default. In fact, it was in the throne speech of 2015. All of the examples that I have been citing over the last few minutes prove that it is a government that has not been transparent, accountable and open by default. In fact, it has been anything but.
Part of our responsibility on the ethics committee is to deal with access to information. We issued a report on access to information a few months back after studying it and having experts come in, including members of the media who have been involved in the access to information system, and it is broken. Often, the wait times for access to information documents are months, if not years. Information comes that is redacted. That is not open, transparent and accountable by default. That is anything but.
Therefore, as I conclude, it is not just the system that is broken in this country in many ways, such as the affordability system, housing and the fact that young people have lost hope and are despondent now of a prosperous future for themselves. The division that the Prime Minister has sown in this country along regional lines, race lines and faith lines, pitting neighbour against neighbour, are all things that are broken. The worst part about what is going on right now is that we have a decline in democracy as a result of the government's not being open, transparent and accountable by default. It really speaks to the diminishment of our institutions and the ability of Parliament to ask for the information that it requires to protect the people of this country and to protect their money.
I will conclude by saying this: I am extremely disappointed that we are on this path once again. The only thing that is going to change it is a change of government to a common-sense Conservative government. I hope that happens soon.