Madam Speaker, I wish I could think of a Seinfeld reference that is equally adequate to that of the esteemed member for Durham there. I hope that, as the night goes on, something will come to mind. Before I get into my speech, I just wanted to highlight something very briefly, if the House will quickly allow. I had the immense privilege to go and visit, last weekend, an organization called Jack.org. It is Canada's only charity training that empowers young leaders to revolutionize mental health.
The work they are doing is incredibly moving, and I wish I had more time in the House to share some of the stories. Suicide among youth is still the leading health-related cause of death for young people in Canada. One in seven young people in Canada reports having suicidal thoughts, to say nothing of those who do not report. This year, 150,000 will act on their thoughts by attempting suicide. For hundreds of them, the attempt will be fatal. Things need to change, and Jack.org is doing a lot of that work for us.
Now to turn to the matter at hand, which is the privilege motion here before the House. I rise with great disappointment to speak to this question of privilege. This particular question of privilege is related to the failure to produce documents required by an order of the House. On June 10, a majority of members in the House passed a motion that ordered the production of important documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
The key word there is “order”. It was not “ask” or “request”; it was not that, in the opinion of the House, the board “should”. The House of Commons has the authority to order the production of documents. That authority comes right from the Constitution; in fact, it is in section 18 of the British North America Act, also known as the Constitution Act, 1867.
It clearly states, “The privileges, immunities, and powers to be held, enjoyed, and exercised by the Senate and by the House of Commons, and by the members thereof respectively, shall be such as are from time to time defined by Act of the Parliament of Canada”. That power includes the time-honoured ability to send for persons, papers and records.
As is explained in Bosc and Gagnon at pages 984 to 986:
The Standing Orders do not delimit the power to order the production of papers and records. The result is a broad, absolute power that on the surface appears to be without restriction. There is no limit on the types of papers likely to be requested; the only prerequisite is that the papers exist in hard copy or electronic format, and that they are located in Canada.
It continues:
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 and records.
That is our collective right, as the House of Commons, as the grand inquest of the nation. Documents have been ordered by the House; those documents have not been provided. That, unfortunately, is why we are debating the question of privilege today.
Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC for short, is the organization we are focusing this privilege motion on once again today. It has become known here in the House as the green slush fund. Just to back up a bit, and for some historical context, the Office of the Auditor General made several key observations for the audit period of March 2017 to December 2023.
I will read a few quotes from the report that was tabled in the House on June 4. First, “10 projects were awarded $59 million” in funding when they should have been deemed “ineligible”. I would suggest that is concerning. Second, SDTC's “conflict-of-interest policies were not followed” in “90 cases”. Again, this is very concerning.
Third, “the board approved $58 million for projects without ensuring that they met the terms of the contribution agreements.” I would think that this is something the government would also be very concerned about.
Meanwhile, the responses to these issues appear to show the exact opposite. Of the responses I have seen to many Auditor General reports, I cannot recall such out-of-touch responses. In its written responses, SDTC made false and outright preposterous claims.
First, SDTC claimed, “Each project proposal goes through rigorous due diligence and evaluation” that is “robust” and “highly credible”. That is simply not true, but if it were true, SDTC would not be facing this $58-million scandal, unless the due diligence it was referring to is actually just its insiders looking at who on the board would be getting money out of each proposal.
Second, SDTC claimed that it was subject to an Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada evaluation in 2018. That was six years ago and outside the period of the Auditor General's audit. Essentially, SDTC was clearly ignoring the audit period and ignoring these findings.
Third, SDTC claimed it “uses external experts”, but then failed to identify them. For an organization whose problem is conflicts of interest to claim things are going to be better based on the advice provided by some unnamed external experts shows just how out of touch SDTC had really become.
Fourth, SDTC claimed that it did not fully agree to the Auditor General's recommendations because SDTC “has delivered strong outcomes against these objectives.” Unless those objectives were to push money into companies that board members had a financial interest in, that is simply not true. The Auditor General found that 82% of the funding transactions approved by the board of directors during the audit period were conflicted. That is unreal.
Fifth, SDTC wrote, “written records did not fully capture the robust deliberations that were made” and “SDTC is of the view that these projects met the eligibility criteria set out...but acknowledges that the [Auditor General] reached a different conclusion”, suggesting that the independent Auditor General was basically out to get them. The arrogance is appalling. The operators of the green slush fund were simply saying that the Auditor General got it wrong, there was nothing to see here, we should ignore it and let them get back to business. Then, at the same time, they admitted that their own written records do not support their claim, so they stuck by their story.
Sixth, SDTC claimed it “had clear processes for staff and directors to declare real, potential and perceived conflicts”. Again, this claim completely ignores the findings of the Auditor General and, subsequently, the public accounts committee. We know conflicts were not declared, and even when they were declared, they either voted for their own projects or took turns voting for each other's projects. The idea that there were clear processes for conflicts of interest would be laughable if it were not so sad.
Seventh, SDTC claimed it “further strengthened its conflict-of-interest policies” in November 2023. This shows exactly that the SDTC only cared about preventing corruption after they got caught with corruption. By November 2023, they knew the Auditor General's report was coming because the audit period was from March 2017 to December 2023. Claiming that policies have been strengthened and implying nothing further needs to be done after corruption has already been uncovered is disingenuous.
There is a word that comes to mind: entitlement. This kind of entitlement comes from an organization that is so used to getting vast amounts of money for its own purposes, it disconnects from the realities of honest and hard-working Canadians.
There is still a lot that we do not know about the green slush fund, but what we have learned through the industry committee and the public accounts committee is alarming. What we have learned so far has made those of us on the opposition benches determined to get the full story, and for that, we need these documents the House requested back on June 10th.
We know that SDTC was created in 2001, and as of an audit in 2017, no problems had arisen. The conflict of interest culture only emerged after board members were appointed under the current Prime Minister by former minister Bains. The most concerning of these appointments was in 2019, when the chair, Annette Verschuren, was appointed despite multiple warnings of conflicts of interest. Those warnings turned out to be warranted as, this past July, the former chair was determined by the Ethics Commissioner to have violated the Conflict of Interest Act by participating in decisions to benefit organizations she had an interest in. One would suggest that they were warned but went ahead anyway.
We now know that former assistant deputy minister Noseworthy was responsible for keeping watch over SDTC, but we can only call his job simply a failure. On December 11 of last year, he appeared at the industry committee and said, “To my knowledge, I am not aware of any decisions to allocate funds to projects related to board members where they did not recuse themselves.” However, the Auditor General's report released just two months later informed us that the system was filled with conflicts of interest. Again, the Auditor General is independent. Therefore, the assistant deputy minister either lied at committee or was willfully blind to the corruption that was going on around him. We also know that, if there were any semblance of good governance, the minister of innovation, science and industry would have been notified. However, because accountability is absent, we do not know what the minister knew or when he knew it.
Nevertheless, we do know that at least one Liberal MP was informed almost two years ago. When the whistle-blower known to the public accounts committee as Witness 1 appeared at public accounts last month, they informed the committee that they had informed the Liberal member for Calgary Skyview all the way back in May 2022. The whistle-blower further stated that this member “assured me that he took this situation seriously and guaranteed that he would facilitate contact with the appropriate people in the federal government and the Auditor General's office.” However, we now know that the member was not true to his word and subsequently refused to engage.
We know that the directors were appointed to the board. A key example of this was long-time Liberal operative Stephen Kukucha. He was appointed to the board in February 2021. This is after he had been a long-time donor, a ministerial staffer in the Chrétien government, original organizer for the Liberal Party and former general secretary for the Liberal Party 2016 Convention. Shortly after the Prime Minister came into office, this insider became a lobbyist; he advocated for energy and transportation businesses. It does not get more inside than this, yet he was appointed to the board of the green slush fund, exactly where companies that had a financial interest could receive contributions directly from the government.
Furthermore, in another twist, as my hon. colleague for South Shore—St. Margarets has explained, we now know that the Minister of Environment has had an interest in a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital. Cycle Capital also received funding from the same green slush fund. It just keeps unravelling more and more.
Finally, we now know from a member of the new board that, since this scandal broke, none of the money that was wrongfully sent out has been recovered. On behalf of the Canadian taxpayer, I will say that this is unfair, unacceptable and, quite frankly, incredibly frustrating. Simply put, after all this, it seems rather clear and painfully obvious that we need the documents that were called for in the motion passed by a clear majority of members on June 10.
This is not only a matter of parliamentary privilege; it is also a matter of the moral obligation we have to Canadians. In order to meet that obligation, we need to access documents when we have ordered them from the executive branch. The public accounts committee is still waiting on documents it has requested to receive. We do not have the contribution and funding agreement showing the requirements and obligations of the recipients. We do not have the conflict of interest declarations of the board members, and we owe it to Canadians to produce this information. When we put all of this together, we do not have transparency, oversight or accountability.
I started my speech indicating that I am disappointed to be rising in this debate in Parliament because it is not the first time we have seen this type of parliamentary privilege violated. Earlier this year, there was yet another privilege debate on yet another scandal, the one related to ArriveCAN. The slow erosion of rights and privileges is not a small matter. It is an absolute threat to our democracy. We saw this in the previous Parliament with the Winnipeg lab scandal, and it caused tremendous hardship for the scandal-plagued government.
On that occasion, in the 43rd Parliament, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada was even called to the bar of this House of Commons to be admonished for failing, or, perhaps more accurately, refusing, to provide documents that he had been ordered to provide to the House. One would have hoped the government had learned from that experience, but clearly, it did not, and here we are again.
In June 2021, 147 members on that side of the House, shamefully, voted against the motion on the question of privilege, which has proven to be a huge mistake. I should hope, this time around, history does not repeat itself and they do not repeat that mistake. However, now we have this green slush fund scandal. The government continues to refuse to release documents that it has been ordered to produce because, one can only presume, it does not want to help uncover corruption that has occurred under its watch for the past several years, corruption that has benefited its own insiders. It is an issue of vital importance. No matter how hard the government tries to push it away, Parliament must continue to pursue it.
When the opposition House leader raised the initial question of privilege, he referenced a memorandum he had obtained from the Privy Council Office at the beginning of this Parliament. That memorandum read, “Public servants do not share in ministers' constitutional accountability to the Houses of Parliament but support ministers in this accountability”; it also stated that “the ultimate accountability for deciding what information to withhold from or release to parliamentarians resides with the responsible minister.” The government may believe the rights and privileges of Parliament no longer matter, but we will soon see if it believes the ministerial responsibility still matters. It is the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry who is ultimately responsible for SDTC and for this violation of an order of the House. It is the minister who must be held accountable.
In conclusion, I support the motion as moved by the opposition House leader, and I will reference it here. The motion by the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle on the alleged failure to produce documents pertaining to Sustainable Development Technology Canada reads as follows: “That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.”
The amendment reads:
provided that it be an instruction to the committee:
(a) that the following witnesses be ordered to appear before the committee, separately, for two hours each:
(i) the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,
(ii) the Clerk of the Privy Council,
(iii) the Auditor General of Canada,
(iv) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(v) the Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada,
(vi) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons,
(vii) the Acting President of Sustainable Development Technology Canada,
(viii) a panel consisting of the Board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada; and
(b) that it report back to the House no later than Friday, November 22, 2024.
The green slush fund has been exposed as a tremendous waste, a scandal where taxpayers' hard-earned money was used to benefit government insiders at SDTC. We need more details. Canadians deserve to know more details and to know who is at fault. There are individuals who need to be held accountable, and the people within the government who should have known and should have prevented this from happening need to be held accountable.
I will be voting for this motion, and this time, I hope every member, regardless of party affiliation, does the right thing and votes yes, yes for accountability and yes for respecting orders of the House of Commons.
