Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to stand on behalf of the great people of Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley. Axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Conservatives have been saying this for months. To be honest, when I have been saying, “Stop the crime”, I was not, until now, thinking about the crime actually being committed by the government.
What made me think about it was the response in debate last night made by my colleague from Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner. He was asked about delivering documents to the RCMP. He is a retired police officer, and what he said was that the government is not acting like the victim of a crime. He went on to say that victims normally want to co-operate with the police. He said that the Liberals were behaving the way the perpetrator of a crime would behave: not co-operating, deflecting, stonewalling and trying to avoid at all costs providing important evidence to the police.
Conservatives say, “Stop the crime”, and it is sad that people now need to be wary of their own government's participation in the crime. It is time to call the cops. Where is ministerial responsibility in all of this? Why is the minister not insisting on documents being delivered to the RCMP? I know my colleagues will say that the RCMP has said it does not want the documents, that it is a breach of charter rights and a violation of people's privacy, and that it is not the place of the official elected body, the House of Commons, to provide evidence to the police.
However, I have a letter to the chair of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, dated October 9. It is from the commissioner of the RCMP, Mike Duheme. He writes, “I wish to inform you that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation into SDTC is ongoing.” He goes on to say that the RCMP has received documents from the law clerk and parliamentary counsel that were produced pursuant to a June 10 order of the House of Commons. The RCMP is obviously okay with receiving documents from the House of Commons.
The argument the Liberals are making, the fallacious argument they are standing behind, which is that this is somehow a breach of charter rights and that the RCMP does not want any documents from us, is just not true. It begs the question of why they are not delivering these documents. I am going to get to that.
For people watching, I want to go back a bit and explain what happened. The House voted for the evidence to be produced, and various departments and agencies of government have refused to comply. The Speaker correctly ruled that the House order had not been complied with and that this was a matter of privilege. Liberals are how saying that the Auditor General's report is not sufficient. They want to turn this over to committee to study it even more. Most people who are the victim of a crime, and who are asked whether to call a committee or the police, do not say to call a committee. They say to call the police.
Most people would say that the Auditor General's report alone is reason enough to call the police. Another committee report would not do anything but further delay the process, again stonewalling the ability of the House to hold the government accountable. To those watching the proceedings today, if someone steals from them, do they call a committee or do they call the police?
There are so many problems with SDTC that need to be highlighted. I am going to go through some of the horrible details that have fanned the flame of this scandal. From March 1, 2017, to December 31, 2023, Sustainable Development Technology Canada's board approved 226 start-up, scale-up and ecosystem projects to receive $836 million. Eight start-up and scale-up projects totalling $51 million did not meet eligibility criteria. For example, some projects did not support the demonstration of a new technology or the projected environmental benefits were unreasonable. Two ecosystem projects totalling $8 million were ineligible because they did not fund or support the development or demonstration of a new technology.
The board of SDTC approved $20 million for seed projects without completing the screening and assessments required by the contribution agreements with the government. There were 123 million dollars' worth of contracts that were found to have been given inappropriately. This is from the Auditor General. There was $59 million that was given to projects that never should have been awarded any money at all, and 82% of these contracts were found to have been part of a conflict of interest.
On top of this, the Auditor General found that over $330 million in taxpayers' money was paid out in over 180 cases where there was a potential conflict of interest with Liberal-appointed directors. This is the important part and what this is all about: Liberal appointed directors were funnelling money to companies that they owned. Let me say that again. Liberal appointed directors were funnelling money, taxpayers' money, to companies that they owned. In other words, they were funnelling money to themselves.
What do we do when somebody illegally funnels taxpayer dollars to themselves? What do we do? We call the police, but again, we do not have ministerial accountability. The minister is nowhere. He will stand up to say that they shut it down, but of course they shut it down. They had no choice but to because the Auditor General had caught them red-handed.
What is next? Why are they not co-operating with the police? That is really the big question, and the answer has to be that there has got to be some really bad stuff in these documents that the Liberals do not want to come out. I can understand why the Liberals do not want it to come out. They are hanging on by a thread.
There are several members I am looking at across the aisle here who have signed a letter saying that they want the Prime Minister to step down. There is discord within. They are over there. They are everywhere. They have all signed the letter.
However, for some reason, these members have come into the House today to say that the they are trying to circumvent charter rights and the privacy of Canadians and that, when money is stolen, we do not call the police, we call a committee. That is what these members are trying to have us believe, and it is just total nonsense.
It is obfuscation, and I feel sometimes that some of these members are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. They do not know what to do. They are like held prisoners. Should they criticize the Prime Minister or protect the Prime Minister? They are protecting the Prime Minister one day, and then they are criticizing the him the next. They do not know what to do. They are completely lost. They are completely falling apart, and Canadians see it for what it is. The Liberal government is a tired, out of steam, corrupt government that really needs to call it a day.
There are other things that happened at SDTC. It was not even in compliance with the basic requirement to have 15 members who were separate from its board of directors to represent Canadians and appoint most of its board. Instead, they only had two. As a direct result of this, Canada's Ethics Commissioner ruled in July that the Prime Minister's hand-picked chair of the Liberals' $51-billion green slush fund broke the law. The Liberal government was aware of the chair's conflicts but decided to appoint her to the position anyway.
Of all this, the Auditor General said, “Like all organizations funded by Canadian taxpayers, [SDTC] has a responsibility to conduct its business in a manner that is transparent, accountable, and compliant with legislation.” This sordid affair leaves serious concerns about the government's ability to account for public funds.
I ask the question of how we can account for public funds. We are the official opposition. It is our job to hold the government to account, but its members do not want to be held to account. All they have to do is release these documents to the RCMP. As I said earlier, the commissioner said, “We have received documents from the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel”.
The argument that the RCMP is not interested in seeing documents produced by the House of Commons is just simply not true. It does not hold up. I am still trying to get my head around this. As stunning as these revelations are by the Auditor General, we should not be surprised because the government has no problem with ethical lapses.
My short time today does not allow me to go through every scandal of the Liberal government. There are really too many to mention in the short period of time that I have. However, we all remember, for example, the SNC-Lavalin affair. That company had been charged under the Criminal Code and was actively lobbying the Prime Minister for something called a deferred prosecution agreement. The problem was that our Criminal Code did not allow for a deferred prosecution agreement. What did the Liberals do? They slipped the provision into a massive budget, what we call an omnibus budget bill, hoping nobody would ask why it was there. Sure enough, nobody did. All of a sudden, the Criminal Code contained a clause that allowed for a deferred prosecution agreement.
The Prime Minister pressured his then attorney general, the first indigenous attorney general in Canadian history, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to agree to a deferred prosecution deal for SNC-Lavalin. What I find interesting about this story is that I read Jody Wilson-Raybould's book after she left office. She said a bunch of really interesting things. I wish I had enough time to read out the whole book, but I am just going to read this one passage:
As I sat there in that room – a big room, all by myself – waiting for Prime Minister...to arrive, I asked myself why I felt that I had to try to help him out of this mess, to protect him. Especially when his government had been digging a deeper and deeper hole by the hour by not coming clean on how I was pushed to take over the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin to enable them to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA. Especially when his office had been telling their MPs to repeat lines they knew were not accurate.
That sounds like a very familiar pattern because it is exactly what is going on right now. The Prime Minister is sending his members out. He is sending the member for Winnipeg North out to defend the indefensible. The member for Winnipeg North knows it is indefensible, but he will stand up and do it anyway because he is not being true to himself. As Polonius in Hamlet said to his son, Laertes, “to thine own self be true”. I know that the member for Winnipeg North has been co-opted by the Prime Minister into saying things he would not normally say to defend the indefensible.
That is the tale of the Prime Minister. He has a pattern of using people. He used Jody Wilson-Raybould. He is using the member for Winnipeg North. He has used every single Liberal member in the House who has said that the RCMP will not accept the documents or that the Conservatives want to breach Canadians' charter rights.
Earlier, one of my colleagues asked a Liberal member about which charter right. The answer he got back was that she did not know. She rambled on and on about something incomprehensible. We have asked that question a few times. I would like an answer to that question. Maybe we should do an Order Paper question to get in writing specifically what the charter right is, what section, what right of Canadians they are protesting.
