Madam Speaker, I was about to say that, when I worked in that field after graduation, I was involved in environmental waste containment projects. They were exciting projects, such as building sewage lagoons, mine tailings dams, solid waste containment and even waste water retention ponds. It was magical. Maybe that is not exciting to most, but it certainly was to our customers; the engineers, who are a difficult to excite crowd; and others who benefited. Yes, it is true: We all want clean water and clean air to breathe.
We were selling real products; they were being sold and installed by real people in real environmental projects. Materials were manufactured in Canada and sold throughout this country and in the United States. That means GDP for Canada, exports and productivity. These products were considered new technology at the time; therefore, while early adopters were happy to embrace them and realized their environmental and economic benefits, others were not so sure.
As such, we went to the government for help, but this was not a green slush fund; we had no contacts to get easy money. We did not have a slate of directors who were investors, who had contacts or who were sitting on the SDTC slush fund board. We applied to the government for research dollars and had testing carried out at our universities to prove the products. We conducted strength testing at the University of Western Ontario, as it was called then, and later at Queen's.
Why do I tell that story? How could my career possibly be germane to the House? It is because, as we heard earlier, 82% of the projects that were sampled by the Auditor General were conflicted. If we apply that rate of malfeasance over the universe of projects, we come to a staggering $832 million of questionable funding. If we add the opportunity cost back to that $832 million, we are very close to $1 billion of taxpayer money funnelled to sketchy destinations.
However, there is more: $58 million was spent on 10 ineligible projects in the sample. That scales up to $104 million if we factor up to the full size of the universe of projects in question. How many projects like the one I described above, that I was involved in and that was undertaken by the small business I worked for, were displaced because of the highly questionable awarding of funds by the board of the green slush fund? Certainly, because the money was misallocated to ineligible projects, good ones did not get funding. Some of these potential projects may well have been home runs.
That is forgone GDP, jobs and tax revenue. Does this not suggest to everyone in this place that oversight of this fund was weak at best and potentially criminal at worst? Does this not make one think that we may need a change in the management of the government's spending writ large? I see some heads nodding. We may need some people with real financial expertise in charge of the books. This is green technology science. This is not rocket science.
Getting to the bottom of this scandal may not be easy, but it is a journey worth taking. This is not $400 million that we are talking about. That is the number that has been confirmed. It only represents 226 projects of the 405 that were funded. As I stated earlier, this is $832 million plus opportunity cost, so we are very close to a billion-dollar scandal. One billion dollars could buy a lot of Girl Guide cookies.
One thing that is concerning for Canadians is the level of corruption in the board and the Governor in Council appointment to the sustainable development technology fund, otherwise known as SDTC. People at home are calling it the green technology slush fund.
Another thing is the federal government's refusal to produce key documents on this matter, which is stifling public scrutiny and raising red flags about accountability. When government actions, particularly those concerning the use of public funds, come under scrutiny, it is the right of every Canadian to demand clear answers, but we are not getting clear answers from the government, which leaves one to ask what it is hiding.
Who are the Liberals protecting? They are protecting their friends and associates who benefited. The fact that we are still discussing this and asking for a disclosure that was demanded by Parliament is bewildering to this rookie MP. Maybe I should not be surprised. When I consider the long list of Liberal scandals, there are almost too many to count, but I will name some here for good measure.
We will start with the SNC-Lavalin affair. This political scandal involved an attempt at political interference in the judicial system by the Prime Minister of Canada and the Prime Minister's Office. Ultimately, the company changed its name, partly to distance itself from its tarnished brand.
In no particular order, next we have the ArriveCAN affair, affectionately known as “arrive scam”. In this one, the federal government spent over $50 million on an original contract of $80,000. It spent $54 million. I am not making this up. A group of programmers created that app over a weekend, so this one is out of control. The GDP is under attack. Ten thousand people were erroneously forced to isolate. I may have been one of those because officials made me isolate for longer than I needed to.
There is the Aga Khan scandal. The Prime Minister was found to have broken no fewer than four provisions of the Conflict of Interest Act when he vacationed over Christmas on the posh private island in the Caribbean owned by his good friend the Aga Khan. The Prime Minister was the first prime minister in Canadian history to break federal ethics rules.
Next, we have the WE Charity scandal. This one in particular I did not like because my daughter actually participated in raising money for WE Charity. My daughter Charlotte raised over $10,000 to build a school in Africa by carrying water through the streets of Toronto—St. Paul's and generating donations by doing just that, so this one hurt. However, the Prime Minister granted his friends at WE Charity a project to oversee a $1-billion program for student employment grants. Do we not have government employees who do the same thing?
There are two common elements we can quickly identify through this partial list of government scandals. Members can identify their own, and these are the two that I have picked. If members have a few in mind, I invite them to keep them quiet and see if they match up with mine. The first one is friends in high places in the Liberal government awarding their Liberal friends at the expense of taxpayers. The second is a complete lack of ethical behaviour.
What we do not see is transparency. Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of any functioning democracy. They are the twin principles that ensure those in power act in the best interests of the public rather than serving their own narrow political or personal agendas. The concept of transparency is not just theoretical. It is embedded in laws and regulations that compel governments to disclose information, especially when there are questions about the misuse of public funds.
Parliament has this power. Parliament has asked for the documentation. Therefore, the documentation must be produced. The government's accountability to its people is not optional. This is a fundamental responsibility.
A 2024 CanTrust index poll revealed that less than 25% of Canadians trust the Liberal Prime Minister and the government. Is that a surprise to anyone? That number might be high since this poll was conducted back in February, but it makes sense. When the government refuses to release key documents, especially in response to serious allegations, it erodes public trust. It undermines the very fabric of our democracy. Without transparency, how can citizens know that their government is acting in good faith?
Let us look at this from another angle, and I promise again that I am not making this up. I will give a bit of a timeline of how we got here. In 2018, the then Liberal industry minister decided he did not like the chair of SDTC, which was Mr. Jim Balsillie, because he was criticizing the government. The chair of SDTC was asked to stop his criticism, and he did not.
In 2019, the then Liberal industry minister decided to appoint a new chair, but this one already had conflicts of interest. He did this even though the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office were warned of risks associated with appointing a conflicted chair. The new chair had ownership positions in companies receiving green slush fund SDTC funding.
The funding floodgates opened. Conflicts of interest were managed rather than outlawed. SDTC members began to award funds to companies where other board members held ownership. The following example is the one I love the most. If someone does something so audacious, maybe no one will suspect a thing. I think that is called hiding in plain sight. The founder and beneficial owner of Cycle Capital, Andrée-Lise Méthot, voted for Cycle Capital investments to receive a significant amount of green slush fund funding while she sat on the board of the Liberal green slush fund.
In fact, before and during her time on the green slush fund board, Ms. Méthot's companies received $250 million. Cycle Capital's lobbyist, before he came to the House, was none other than the radical Minister of Environment. One might ask, “So what?” In the year before he joined the Liberal government, he lobbied 25 times, and the green slush fund board gave over $100 million to the Cycle Capital companies. Then, when he was part of the government, he participated in talks that gave SDTC another $750 million to deploy, of which 25% went to Cycle Capital. We do not know, but he may or may not still own shares in Cycle Capital. It is a really good trade where I come from.
I spoke earlier about my career as an environmental engineer, but I actually spent most of my career in finance. That is another reason the misappropriation of funds in this green slush fund scandal speaks to me. When I was in the financial and investment industry, fund managers were generally paid dependent upon how their funds performed. The better someone's fund did, the more they would get paid. The better their fund did, the more assets they would attract, and again, the more they would expect to be paid, all else being equal.
What I find peculiar about this fund and the way it paid its principals is that they were paid based on the dollar volume of grants they made. I swear I am not making that up. The more money that was allocated, the more that was spent, whether it went to a good project, a bad one, a medium one or some other, the more money that was paid to those individuals. Rather than scouring the country for the best projects, the easiest thing to do, the path of least resistance, was to allocate funds to projects that were already known to the board, regardless of the expected return to the taxpayer. We call that a fiduciary duty.
For a government that loves to virtue signal about its care and vision for the environment, its behaviour when it comes to deploying funds is contradictory, as I just detailed. The government says one thing and does another. This matters, and here is why: Instead of investing taxpayer dollars in the most promising projects and companies, the Liberals appointed a chair, and her board funnelled taxpayer dollars to projects and companies that were run by their friends or into companies where they had a financial interest. This is the kind of situation we are taught to avoid in a business education. This is why we have ethics classes in business and financial education. Perhaps the financial leaders on the other side of the House missed those classes.
The misallocation of money and capital leads to the destruction of capital in this country. This leads to a loss of Canadian competitiveness, a reduction in productivity and a decline in GDP. We are seeing all these economic measures play out now in our economy, and we are worse off as a country for it. The green slush fund is not responsible for all of that, but the green slush fund and its grant allocation principles are emblematic of the attitudes and principles of the Liberal government over the last nine years. Good money put toward programs with admirable goals is great, but lacking in the financial know-how and financial management expertise to succeed is a waste of taxpayer money.
The reduction of our productivity and competitiveness in GDP is not an accident. This is the result of an overall mismanagement of the economy by the Liberal Prime Minister and the Liberal cabinet. At the heart of this issue is public trust. Canadians trust their government to act in their best interest, to steward public funds responsibly and be forthright about how decisions are made. When this trust is broken, it is incredibly difficult to rebuild, except perhaps with a new government. The refusal to release the green slush fund documents erodes this trust. It sends a message to the public that the government is not interested in being transparent and that accountability is a secondary concern.
