Madam Speaker, what a sad state of affairs we have seen this week from the Liberals. Here we are engaging in what should be a serious conversation about a pressing issue, only to hear the members opposite say, “What about them? They did something worse.” It is that old political tactic of whataboutism, the ultimate escape hatch for avoiding accountability. It has become the go-to response by the Liberals during the course of this debate.
Let us step back and look at the big picture. A government gets caught red-handed in a scandal. It is clear and undeniable and the public deserves an explanation. What happens next? We do not get an apology or even a hint of responsibility. Instead, we get a well-rehearsed, “But what about the other party?” They try to change the subject to someone else's wrongdoing, as if two wrongs somehow make a right. Whataboutism is the political equivalent of the schoolyard comeback, “I know you are, but what am I?” How childish.
This attitude of avoiding the tough questions by pointing fingers elsewhere is nothing new. It has been happening for years across all political spectrums, but under the Liberal government, it seems to have sunk to a new low. It is a strategy deployed to muddy the waters and confuse the public. Why talk about real problems when we can play the blame game instead? Why address policy failures when we can just drag our opponents into the mud with us?
We stand here today once again facing a Liberal government that will do everything humanly possible to avoid transparency. The Liberal government's pattern of withholding crucial documents and hiding from parliamentary scrutiny is not just a betrayal of democracy. It is an outright assault on the accountability that every Canadian citizen deserves.
The present case involving Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or the green slush fund, serves as only the latest example of a long series of manoeuvres by the Liberals to avoid accountability. Here we have a Speaker of the House ruling that the Liberal government violated the powers of the House by refusing to provide documents related to this fund. This blatant refusal to cooperate with Parliament represents an alarming trend of deception. What is the government hiding? What could possibly be so damning in these documents that it would rather violate the very principles of parliamentary oversight than let the truth be seen?
The arrogance of this behaviour cannot be overstated. Time and time again, when faced with tough questions, the Liberals shift the goalposts, stonewall or, when absolutely cornered, throw up their hands and give vague, non-committal responses. They have forgotten that they serve the Canadian people, not their own political interests.
What makes this evasion all the more ridiculous is the government's attempts to put a green spin on it. Sure, it grossly mismanages public funds to shovel money to its friends. Sure, it was involved in corruption. However, at least it was green corruption. That seems to be its argument: At least it was some nice environmentalist who got away with the cash. The absurdity of this argument is lost on no one, yet somehow the Liberals seem to believe that this passes as an acceptable response.
Despite how laughable and immature the Liberals' whataboutism is, they are unrelenting in their use of it. We have seen Liberal speaker after Liberal speaker stand up this week and waste the House's time with history lessons and other distractions that have nothing to do with the issue we are dealing with here and now. Their response has turned this debate into a competition of who did worse rather than who can do better.
Their attitude is not just disappointing; it is dangerous. It promotes a culture of deflection where no one is held accountable because someone else did something bad too. It undermines trust in our leaders and institutions, because it suggests that as long as someone else is doing worse, then nothing needs to change. What a sad state of affairs for the Liberal Party. The party that waltzed into government with fine slogans about sunny ways and running the most transparent government in history now hides and cowers behind the excuse that at least the other guys were worse.
What makes that attitude so much sadder is that it is not even true. By any metric we choose, like the taxpayers' dollars wasted, the length of time these schemes were running or the number of ethics violations incurred, any metric we come up with, the level of corruption by the Liberal government is in a shameful class all by itself.
When the government first came to power, one of their slogans was “Canada is back”, a slogan that reflects the typical entitled Liberal Party attitude that the nation of Canada and the Liberal Party are the same thing and the Liberal Party is Canada's national governing party. If we go through life with that attitude, it becomes easy to rationalize stealing from the public purse. Why not use taxpayers' money for our own benefit? To put it another way, as far as the Liberals are concerned, taxpayers' money is the Liberals' money
Nowhere has the Liberal attitude of entitlement been more obvious than in the present issue of the Liberals' green slush fund, so let us take a closer look at this most recent incarnation of Liberal greed, corruption and insider cronyism.
Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, is a program that was supposed to be about protecting our environment, fostering innovation and creating a sustainable future. However, what has it become? It has become the Liberals' green slush fund.
The Auditor General's report, released earlier this year, is a damning indictment of SDTC and the entire Liberal government's mismanagement of public funds. Some $334 million over 186 cases went to projects in which board members held a conflict of interest, and a staggering $58 million was handed out to ineligible projects. What were these projects? Some of them did not develop a single new technology. Others made outlandish claims about their environmental benefits that could not stand up to the slightest scrutiny, yet they were funded anyway.
Let us not forget that the Auditor General looked at only a sample of SDTC transactions. She looked at roughly half of the transactions and found that 82% of them were conflicted. We can easily surmise that the remaining cases were just as conflicted and that the sums of money involved were hundreds of millions of dollars more.
This is about more than just paperwork errors or poor oversight. This is about a culture of corruption that has seeped into the highest levels of the Liberal government. This is about a Prime Minister who promised transparency but instead gave us secrecy, a Prime Minister who said that his government would work for all Canadians but instead has set up a system where only his friends and Liberal insiders get ahead. Liberal insiders at the trough is what this program is all about.
How could this happen? How could a program designed to fund innovation and environmental protection be so utterly corrupted? Unravelling those questions starts by looking at the person at the centre of this scandal, Annette Verschuren, the chair of the SDTC board who oversaw much of this disaster, a person who voted to give millions of dollars to her own companies. Why would she not recuse herself? Someone with such a long history of corporate governance must have had at least some glancing knowledge of the concept of conflict of interest.
The Ethics Commissioner himself called out this blatant conflict of interest for years, but, unfortunately, it went unpunished. We now know that Verschuren's company NRStor directly benefited from these funds. This is not a one-off event; it is a symptom of a system that has been so utterly compromised by greed and self-interest.
When whistle-blowers tried to bring these issues to light, what did they get? Some of them got fired, some of them got silenced and some of them got a toxic workplace environment where honesty is punished and corruption is rewarded. Let us review some of the whistle-blower testimony from committee, “Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.”
In other statements, the whistle-blower said:
The true failure of the situation stands at the feet of our current government, whose decision to protect wrongdoers and cover up their findings over the last 12 months is a serious indictment of how our democratic systems and institutions are being corrupted by political interference. It should never have taken two years for the issues to reach this point. What should have been a straightforward process turned into a bureaucratic nightmare that allowed SDTC to continue wasting millions of dollars and abusing countless employees over the last year.
Finally, the whistle-blower went on to say:
I think the current government is more interested in protecting themselves and protecting the situation from being a public nightmare. They would rather protect wrongdoers and financial mismanagement than have to deal with a situation like SDTC in the public sphere.
Is that not the truth? Is that not exactly what we have seen and heard from Liberal members opposite with their incessant whataboutism? One of the pieces of testimony from the ethics committee from last year that I found quite puzzling came from Doug McConnachie, an assistant deputy minister at Innovation, Science and Economic Development, ISED, who saw the handling of the whistle-blower complaints against SDTC.
In a recorded conversation with the whistle-blower, Mr. McConnachie stated, “There's a lot of sloppiness and laziness. There is some outright incompetence and, you know, the situation is just kind of untenable at this point.” In the recorded conversation, he went on to say, and this comment coming from a senior experienced civil servant was especially relevant, “It was free money. That is almost a sponsorship-scandal level kind of giveaway.”
Then, in committee, after the Liberal bosses had talked to him and provided him with his new talking points, Mr. McConnachie made the following statement that I found both surprising and sad, “I was too transparent, too trusting, and I deeply regret any impact that this has had on the government, SDTC and ISED.” He said he was too transparent. Apparently, by the standards set by the Liberal Party, the government should be transparent only to a point. Its attitude seems to be that it will make a bit of a show of being honest and open, but it will not get carried away.
Let us be clear that this is not just an accident. This is not a bureaucratic mistake. This is an apparatus of greed built to serve Liberal insiders, their friends and allies. What about the real innovators? What about the hard-working Canadians who play by the rules and try to get ahead through hard work and good ideas? They are left out in the cold, watching as Liberal friends get their snouts in the government trough.
Since its inception, SDTC received $2.1 billion in federal funding. Under the present Liberal government, the most recent agreement outlined $722 million in funding through 2028. However, instead of using the money to build cleaner, greener futures, the Liberals used it to line the pockets of their wealthy friends and business associates. At the end of the day, after all of their carbon taxes, all of their anti-oil and anti-gas policies and all of their environmental rhetoric, the only things greener are the wallets of their friends.
Let us go over the numbers again to try to keep things in perspective; $58 million that we know about was given to ineligible projects, and $334 million that we know about was in blatant conflicts of interest. Those are the facts, the shameful, appalling, caught-red-handed, hand-in-the-cookie-jar facts. Nonetheless, we have not even heard a single Liberal member across the aisle offer to the Canadian people anything that even remotely resembles an apology, not so much as a syllable of accountability or regret but just an endless stream of excuses, evasions and whataboutism.
This is the very definition of Liberal insiders at the trough. This is how they operate and think. They take care of their own. They make sure that Liberals get rich while ordinary Canadians struggle to make ends meet. Then, when they get caught, what do they do? Almost like a reflex, they bring up one or two mistakes made by Stephen Harper from 12 or 15 years ago. Canadians deserve better. The Liberals' response has been unacceptable, especially when we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money thrown away on projects that should never have been funded in the first place.
The green slush fund scandal is about more than just money; it is about integrity. It is about a Liberal government that has lost its way and has forgotten whom it works for. We need real accountability. We need a government that works for the people, not for the insiders, not for the lobbyists and not for the rich and well-connected.
The Liberals will tell us that it is all just a misunderstanding and that the issues are being fixed, but we have heard that before. We heard it after the SNC-Lavalin scandal, after the WE Charity scandal and after the ArriveCan app scandal, and we are hearing it now. This is a pattern of corruption and greed, a pattern of Liberal insiders at the trough taking whatever they can get and leaving the rest of us to pay the bill.
Canadians have had enough. It is time for a change. It is time for a government that puts Canadians first, that makes Canada work for people who work, and that believes in fairness, transparency and accountability. We cannot allow the culture of corruption to continue. We cannot allow the Liberals to keep putting their friends and insiders ahead of the Canadian people. Let us send a message to the government that enough is enough. Let us take back control of our tax dollars. Let us demand accountability, and let us make sure that the next time there is a program like SDTC, it is working for the people, not for insiders at the trough.