Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston for having established some discussion on the real issue of climate change as we approach the motion on the question of privilege in front of us and the levels of breakdown of normal processes that occurred within Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which has now absorbed us for several days of debate.
I will cut to the chase and say this: With respect to the views of the Green Party, when Parliament requires documents to be submitted, they should be submitted in full so we can work on them.
I also recall the incident that my colleague was just referencing, which had to do with the documentation of Afghan detainees. My hon. colleague from Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound knows much about this as well. We did, at the time, realize that evidence was coming to light that Canada was complicit in sort of grabbing anyone off the street who might be considered suspect, including street vendors and other people who were not combatants, and turning them over to U.S. forces, where they faced torture.
That was the issue we were last seized with in the House with a demand for documents that was thwarted. As my hon. colleague recalls so correctly, it led to an election and to not talking about the issue ever again. One of the first things I did when elected as a member of Parliament was to try to pursue it with questions on the Order Paper to try to find out, if we could, what had occurred and how it was that Canada was caught up in doing something that, certainly on the surface, violated international law and subjected totally innocent people to torture.
However, we are where we are now, discussing Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It is really important that we define and try to avoid the obvious partisan appeal of screaming “scandal” and “corruption” in ways that will alarm Canadians by suggesting that this is just a cesspool of corruption here in Ottawa. I do not think it is, but there are some strands that require full inquiry and transparency.
I am glad we are having the discussion here today. A lot has already been said in previous speeches. I am going to start with saying something about the context of a setting that I hope is helpful to Canadians, which is that there are a lot of different kinds of corruption. We throw the word around. I want to clarify that, in this particular narrative, I see three different kinds, and some are more alarming than others.
The first, and of course this is the issue that Canadians think of right away, is when a bunch of politicians are pointing fingers and saying that certain individuals are corrupt. The first and completely unacceptable level of misuse of public funds is when public funds are taken to enrich oneself. This is the kind of issue that we faced here when we called to the bar the head of GC Strategies, Kristian Firth, who had made millions on the ArriveCAN app. We know that story, and we have not concluded it. We have not had an RCMP investigation. We did not get the money back. Taking public funds to enrich oneself is an egregious wrong.
The second form of corruption that comes into the story of the process of government's allocating public funds is a failure to exercise proper oversight. In other words, the people involved are not enriching themselves nor their friends, but the system somehow breaks down through some kind of overload, allowing our public service to descend to a level that falls below mediocrity and become incompetence.
The third level of corruption at play here is when public funds are shovelled into projects where the goal is political. That does surface in the instance we are debating, and I want to go into it somewhat. This may cause discomfort for some of my friends on the other side, because a lot of public money is being shovelled into technology that simply does not work, because it helps the narrative that we can keep producing fossil fuels and meet greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, doing both at the same time.
In other words, the strategies on the climate crisis could be described as someone having their cake and eating it too, the kind of diet to lose weight that says that, by the way, we can keep eating chocolate cake because we have a magic pill to take later. In the same category are some of the things that were referenced by the previous speaker about projects with environmental benefits that were exaggerated and not proven.
This particular category of energy projects is called carbon capture, utilization and storage. It is heavily favoured by the oil sands companies, particularly by the Pathways Alliance corporations operating the oil sands. It is the category that first triggered interest by any of the auditors, so let me start with that one because chronologically it comes first.
The first time an Auditor General report said that we had better ask Sustainable Development Technology Canada to improve its performance was in 2017. A branch of the Department of the Auditor General is the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, which I wish had been created as a separate office, like the parliamentary budget office.
I remember appearing before the environment committee when the chair was the late Hon. Charles Caccia, who at one point had been environment minister under former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Charles Caccia's committee looked at how to set up a commissioner for the environment. It was one of the red book promises of the Liberals in 1993. It decided it could put it in the Office of the Auditor General. That is why we have the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development as a branch of the Auditor General's office.
The report of the commissioner in the fall of 2017 looked in detail at a number of energy projects, those that dealt with trying to reduce greenhouse gases through new clean-energy technology projects. It found there were several sources of funds that went to them, which were reviewed by the report of the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development: the clean-energy fund run by Natural Resources Canada; the ecoENERGY technology initiative, also run by Natural Resources Canada; and the sustainable development tech fund administered by Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
In 2017, just to note the date, the commissioner said that overall they were very pleased to find that the funds were being well administered, that they were audited and that close attention was being paid to conflict of interest. Nonetheless, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development said that Sustainable Development Technology Canada should take steps to ensure that we know that the projects are achieving their goals. We needed to follow up. The recommendations were clear that it should, in the words of the Auditor General, “improve its challenge function over projected sustainable development and environmental benefits.”
This lays the groundwork for the commentary we find in the Auditor General's report that was recently quoted by my friend from Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, the part of the Auditor General's report that states, “We found that in 12 out of 18 completed projects in our sample, the projected reduction of greenhouse gas emissions were, on average, half of what was presented at the time the project proposals were assessed.”
My hon. colleague asked what could be the reason SDTC was shovelling money out the door for projects that did not work; it must have been to get money into the hands of the people they wanted to have the money. I would posit a much more likely explanation, which is that the government has put forward a plan to achieve greenhouse gas reductions that depends on achieving magical results from unproven technologies. Therefore, we have seen a big increase in the amount of money that goes to carbon capture, utilization and storage, despite the fact that all around the world it has been shown not to work, and the projects within Canada have not achieved the demonstrated promised results. That is clear.
By the way, carbon capture, utilization and storage, for anyone who does not know, says basically that as we produce more fossil fuels or as we burn coal to create electricity, we will find a way to get the carbon that would otherwise be going into the atmosphere, capture it and drive it deep underground. Therefore we will avoid the impact of anthropogenic greenhouse gases by sweeping them under the carpet and hoping they stay there.
They tend not to stay there. It is a very expensive way to reduce greenhouse gases even if it works, and it tends not to work. The one thing we can absolutely prove about carbon capture, utilization and storage is what it captures. It captures public money. It captures politicians. It does not capture carbon much. It does not work.
However, when we look at the Auditor General's reports, and particularly the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development's report, we find that even though the results were not showing that it worked, by budget 2017, hundreds of millions of dollars more were dedicated to it. They were writing a report that stated their plan to reduce greenhouse gases, that this much of their target is going to be achieved by something that they just love and Pathways Alliance just loves, and that it is all wonderful. However, it is not even in the footnotes; it is not proven, and it does not work.
Therefore I put to my friends here that part of the incentive for shovelling money out the door for projects that did not work was that there is an ideological article of faith in the Department of Natural Resources Canada and in the industry that the “have our cake and eat it too” strategy is going to work and help us meet our targets. That is not classic corruption, and my Conservative friends should look at it, because I know, to the extent that we have any idea what the Conservative Party would want to do about climate change, the Conservatives have said it would be technology. I suspect they would not have a problem with shovelling more money to the oil sands companies in what is essentially a disguised subsidy.
Obviously, that is another way to subsidize the fossil fuel industry. The government created a public fund to pay for technology that does not work. That technology is and always will be a failure.
This is always going to fail.
Let us now look at the other aspects of the SDTC issue and what we learned from it. One aspect clearly is that it was a fund created under the Chrétien government that was working very well for a very long time. It was supposed to look at technologies that were unproven and emerging. The government was not supposed to step up and say, “We love this one. It may never work, but it is really good in press releases, so we are just going to keep throwing money at it.” It is the case that in the fall 2017, the report of the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development said that the operation did not have a problem with conflict of interest.
We certainly know from the 2024 report of the Auditor General that there was a lot of difficulty with conflict of interest. The way the board was being run was rife with conflict of interest, and that is a terrible shame because this was an operation, as I have said previously in this place, that, over decades, had worked in assisting companies with emerging technologies, which tend to have trouble getting seed funding through commercial banks and so on. It is very hard to get investment capital for something that is innovative, unproven and not an article of faith of the government of the day, which we would have to shovel money at, whether it works or not. In other words, Sustainable Development Technology Canada had done much good work.
The chair of the board changed after the 2017 report that found no conflict of interest problems, and I always feel awkward about using the name of a private citizen in this place, but she had to resign as chair of the SDTC board. Annette Verschuren had private interests in and continued involvement with companies that received SDTC funding. This violated the conflict of interest guidelines of the organization.
This also violated basic conflict of interest guidelines. I do not know about the rest of my colleagues here in this place, but when I was first elected and read the ethics code, I thought to myself, “Does this really need to be written down? Do people not know this?” The conflict of interest guidelines said that no member of Parliament should hire a family member in their office as that would be a conflict of interest. I remember thinking, “Who do they think we are? They do not have to write this stuff down.” Apparently they do though, and one cannot be chair of a board and forget that they cannot distribute money to themselves when they are on that board.
Now, whether this rose to the level of criminality is something else to be explained and examined. The steps the government has taken so far mean that this is no longer going on. The SDTC operation has been folded into the National Research Council. The board members have completely changed. The new board operates to make sure these funds continue to flow to legitimate projects.
It is very important that operations are not tarnished by what is a completely unacceptable episode. To call it “sloppy” would be a compliment. How on earth do people sit around a boardroom table and say that, because of COVID and because everybody is getting this benefit, it cannot really be seen that I gave myself a special benefit? This is the kind of argument we heard in the committee. We also heard the people involved say that they talked to a lawyer, and they said it was okay. I practise law, and I ask what kind of lawyer gives that advice.
There is a code of conflict of interest that must be followed. Every member around that boardroom table had a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that happened. There was a large system failure, but let me say very clearly that this is not at the level that it would be so easy to say this was a bunch of Liberals doing favours to other Liberals. We do not have evidence of that. I certainly would like to know the political affiliations of the various people who got the money, but we know a lot of the money went to the oil sands, so I do not think this is your classic hand-in-the-cookie-jar kind of scandal.
This is a large system failure that concerns me greatly. I worked in the Government of Canada many decades ago when I was non-partisan. I was not a member of the party at the time, and I am very proud of my record of working in the office of the minister of environment from 1986 to 1988 when there was a majority Progressive Conservative government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
The Government of Canada in those days was a gold standard. I do not mean just in a political sense, and I especially mean in a non-political sense. I mean the civil service, the people who rose to the level of deputy ministers. It was really gold standard stuff. There were deputy ministers, such as Arthur Kroeger, Harry Swain, and Gordon Ritchie, who were people of great intellect who were completely non-partisan. They provided to the government of the day advice that was evidence-based and solid. Those kinds of civil servants, and unfortunately some of them have passed away, so I guess they are rolling in their graves, are wondering what the heck happened.
Where did this mediocrity creep in? Whatever government is the government of the day, and I think, in fairness to some of my colleagues who are currently on the front benches of the Liberal Party, the level of competence at the civil service had already been significantly eroded, and then we were hit with COVID. Fixing this is going to be a bigger problem than pointing fingers across the aisle. Fixing this will require that we no longer have captive regulators that do what the industry they review as their client wants. I see far too much of it throughout the government of Canada.
I saw Environment and Climate Change Canada pick the target of net zero by 2050, and I am sure it was not because science dictated it. Science says that is fraud, but it was the kind of target that the oil sands industry was not going to mind because they can pretend they are going to meet anything set for 2050 through magic later on. We need to be honest and transparent. We need to face facts, and in this kind of debate, I commend all of my colleagues for digging into the facts to make sure that conflict of interest guidelines are never blurred again and to make sure that, when public funds go to reducing greenhouse gases, we get value for money by actually reducing greenhouse gases.