Madam Speaker, there are many accusations flying across the floor, and one may forgive me that I do not want to say it is necessarily an epithet. I am trying to figure out if we can find any evidence that Annette Verschuren is in fact tied to Liberals, is a Liberal or was ever a Liberal. I have gone through Wikipedia and everything I can find about her. I am a Cape Bretoner; I will not say a former Cape Bretoner as once a Caper, always a Caper. I know she was really highly regarded as a Cape Breton girl who was the daughter of Dutch immigrants and worked hard on a farm all her life.
I look through her political connections: She was named by Stephen Harper to help in the economic advisory council in the financial crisis of 2008, and she was awarded a place in the Canadian Business Hall of Fame in 2019. She was also an adviser to Brian Mulroney. She seems to have been on all sides of the political fences. She was also on the board of directors of Natural Resources Limited, an oil sands company that also received money from SDTC, and she is currently on the board of the Ontario Energy Association.
She did not seem to understand that she was in flagrant conflict of interest as chair of the board of SDTC, which is clearly mind-boggling for someone with that kind of business career. There is no question about that. I heard it thrown around that her organization received millions. As far as I can see on the record, it got about $200,000 from SDTC. Of course, it is unacceptable if the organization got a nickel while she was chair of the board. My point is that she is not beyond getting punished in all this; her reputation is in tatters. Still, one wants to know more.
However, this is a case where a board was set up under Jean Chrétien and run under Stephen Harper with the same board structure; I do not see how, suddenly, the entire thing is now condemned as a Liberal slush fund. It certainly was mismanaged. She was chair of the board when flagrant conflict of interest occurred, but I do not see anything that ties her specifically to one party or another.