Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues. It is always very humbling and an honour to rise in this place to speak on behalf of the people of northwestern Ontario.
Today, of course, we are speaking about a very important matter. I wish I could say that this motion is unprecedented, but it is not the first time the government has disobeyed, disregarded or otherwise simply not cared about an order the House has made.
When I was first elected over five years ago, I made a promise to the people of northwestern Ontario, the people who put their trust in me to represent them here and fight for their best interests. That promise was to ensure that government is acting in their best interests and spending their tax dollars responsibly. That is something we have not seen the government do.
Currently, the regular business of this House, as many know at this point, has been on hold because the government refuses to hand over documents the House has ordered of it. This is preventing us from doing anything. We are at an absolute standstill, and it is preventing us from addressing other issues that the NDP-Liberal government has caused, such as the doubling of housing costs; the creation of the housing crisis, with many young people giving up completely on their dream of home ownership; the affordability crisis; the infrastructure gap in first nations; and the crime the government has unleashed by breaking the bail system and implementing catch-and-release policies for violent criminals.
All of these issues are on the back burner now because the government is instead choosing to gridlock Parliament. It is the only one that has the power to end it. If the government were to comply with the House order and hand over all documents related to the green slush fund, we could get back to the regularly scheduled programming of the House. Instead, it is going to great lengths to protect itself and withhold them. I would imagine it is very damaging information given the extent it is willingness to go to do this.
I want to touch a bit on parliamentary privilege. Of course, it is a crucial function for ensuring that the legislative branch of government can meet one of its main objectives, that is, holding the government accountable. With this privilege comes extraordinary powers to ensure that the government cannot interfere with parliamentarians meeting that objective. In particular, this privilege includes the power to order the production of documents that the House deems necessary to carry out its duties. This is important. There is not a similar privilege afforded to the government to refuse an order for the production of said documents. I will get back to that more later, but I first want to talk about why we are here discussing the motion before us.
Last year, as folks at home know and members of the House know, we learned of allegations that Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, the organization the government entrusted to administer its billion-dollar green slush fund, was grossly mismanaging this fund. When a former employee blew the whistle, the government commissioned Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton to inquire about the allegations. Its report later confirmed a number of those allegations to be true.
If we fast-forward from that point to December 11, 2023, one of those employees testified at the industry committee. This former employee outlined that tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were misspent by SDTC. Alongside that, there were conflicts of interest, and senior-level managers were playing favourites. On top of all of that, when concerns were raised, complaints were never taken seriously and were always swept under the rug. This is the testimony that was heard at committee.
The whistle-blower made it clear that the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry and his office had known about the corruption within Sustainable Development Technology Canada and had helped to cover it up. The whistle-blower said, “The minister said, on the record and multiple times, that he was briefed on the outcome only on August 27, but that's definitively not true.” He also went on to say:
The minister and PCO [which is the Privy Council Office] have been aware of this file longer than they are telling the public. There is documented evidence that they even engaged with everyone at ISED to make sure there were edits to the briefings before they were officially sent to them.
All of this is backed up by documents, transcripts and recordings, some of which we've already submitted to this committee.
That is disgraceful. These are shocking allegations about the improper use of taxpayer dollars. That it would not be taken seriously and that the minister would cover it up is even worse. At that point, the committee also learned that Liberal-appointed members had violated conflict of interest rules. Alongside the committee's investigation, the Auditor General and the Ethics Commissioner were doing their own investigations. Unfortunately, under the government, it has become even more unsurprising what it has allowed to happen under its watch.
As we look to the industry committee's meeting from January 31 of this year, during that meeting, Leah Lawrence, the former president and CEO of SDTC, told the committee that she had warned the government about the board chair's conflict of interest. That is very clear. The government was warned about this conflict of interest. She had also told the committee about the chair's conflicts of interest. However, the chair disregarded that and sent money to her own company.
Ms. Lawrence's testimony also said that she shared those concerns with former Liberal minister Navdeep Bains' office, but the Liberals allowed the chair to stay in charge. Despite Liberal claims that they only learned about the abuse of the fund this year, Ms. Lawrence's testimony made very clear to all parliamentarians, and indeed, all Canadians, that they have known about it since 2019, which was five years ago.
I will also note that, at that time, the NDP-Liberal government and the Bloc Québécois were refusing to get documents from SDTC that would expose the level of corruption at this organization. Disclosure documents had also gone missing, or were filled out after the fact when the probe asked for them. A report into SDTC said the conflict of interest policy was “inconsistently applied”.
If we are going through the timeline, as we have been doing, and we fast-forward a bit more to June 4 of this year, the Auditor General released a damning report about Sustainable Development Technology Canada. She, the Auditor General, found the government had turned SDTC into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. She also found that SDTC had awarded funding to projects that were ineligible and where conflicts of interest existed. In total, 123 million dollars' worth of contracts were found to have been given inappropriately, with $59 million being given to projects that never should have been awarded any money at all.
On top of this, the Auditor General discovered that conflicts of interest were connected to approval decisions. As a consequence of this, nearly $76 million in funding was awarded to projects where there was a connection to the Liberals' friends who had been appointed to roles within SDTC, while $12 million in funding was given to projects that were both ineligible and had a conflict of interest. In fact, the Auditor General discovered that long-established conflict of interest policies were not followed in 90 instances. In one case, the Prime Minister's hand-picked chair siphoned off over $200,000 to her own company.
The Auditor General made it very clear that the blame for this scandal lies directly at the feet of the Prime Minister's industry minister, who did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were being awarded to Liberal insiders. He utterly failed in his duty to protect the Canadian taxpayer.
Following the revelation from the Auditor General's report, common-sense Conservatives put forward a motion that required the government, SDTC and the Auditor General to hand over all relevant documents that are in their possession related to this scandal. They had to do so within 30 days of the motion being adopted. The motion passed on June 10; go figure, only Liberal MPs opposed it.
That brings us to today and why we are discussing this issue. Since the adoption of the order, the Liberals have refused to comply. That is really what it comes down to. As I mentioned earlier in my remarks, they could end all of this. The Liberals could get the House back working on their legislative priorities, if we can call them that. However, they are choosing to hold up their priorities because their only priority right now is to ensure that Canadians do not get answers and that there is no accountability for this scandal.
The Conservative House leader raised a question of privilege. In the days leading up to the Speaker's ruling, the government tried to justify its defiance. It argued that Parliament may have exceeded its authority when it adopted the order. In the ruling, the Speaker noted:
The procedural precedents and authorities are abundantly clear. The House has the undoubted right to order the production of any and all documents from any entity or individual it deems necessary to carry out its duties. Moreover, these powers are a settled matter, at least as far as the House is concerned. They have been confirmed and reconfirmed by my immediate predecessors, as well as those more distantly removed.
He also quoted page 985 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, which I will quote for the benefit of members of the House. It states:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers....
That brings me back to the privileges we, as members of the House, enjoy, whether individually or collectively as a chamber. In this case, it is clear that the government is violating one of our collective privileges as members of Parliament. Unfortunately, this is not the first time the government has refused to comply with an order of the House. Many previous speakers have also highlighted this.
Many of us will remember the Winnipeg lab scandal. How could we forget? At the time, the House again ordered, among other things, that the government hand over all relevant documents. Just as it is doing now, the government refused to comply with the order and instead tried to suggest that it complied with the order by sending the documents to the Prime Minister-controlled National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. The Speaker at the time ruled that this was not acceptable since said committee was not a parliamentary committee.
What the government did next, however, was really shocking. It took the Speaker to court to argue that the government had the legal authority to withhold documents requested by the House. The government taking the Speaker to court is absolutely unheard of. There was never a court ruling, because the government called an early and unnecessary pandemic election shortly after, which effectively cancelled the order to produce those documents. However, this shows just how far the government will go to disregard the will of Parliament and, by extension, the will of all Canadians, who brought us to this place and who elected us as members of Parliament to represent them.
It is beyond unacceptable that the government has continued to defy the House order to hand over the documents. The government has caused this place to be in gridlock or, as we have heard, paralyzed for almost three weeks now, and it begs the question of whether the documents are damaging to the government.