Debates of Oct. 4th, 2024

The House resumed from October 3 consideration of the motion, and of the amendment.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Madam Speaker, just to refresh the House, this debate has been going on for a couple of days now, and it might be helpful to return to Mr. Berthold's amendment, which we are debating today.

The motion is:

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:

That the motion be amended by adding the following:

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 Development,

(vi) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons,

(vii) the Acting President of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and

(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.

We are now debating that motion to amend, which arose because of some underlying circumstances. I thought I would deal with those first, and then I will return to procedural matters, the question of privilege itself and the merits of the question of privilege a bit later on in my remarks.

I will start by dealing with the underlying issue, which is, of course, that Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC, was found to be egregiously in breach of its mandate on a level that makes even the sponsorship scandal under the Chrétien Liberals look like it was merely dealing with sort of piggy bank stuff. That millions of dollars have been reported by the Auditor General to have been allocated in a way that is a clear violation of basic conflict of interest rules as well as the internal rules for disbursements that SDTC had is really quite striking.

However, an element that was also raised by the Auditor General that has not been discussed, which I will spend the first part of my remarks talking about, is very important. In addition to the fact that members of the board of SDTC were arranging to transfer contracts to companies in which they had an interest as shareholders and, in some cases, primary officers, there is the fact that the results produced by these contracts were spectacularly unimpressive in terms of the stated goal, which is to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. The Auditor General could not look at all of the projects and instead took a representative sample of 18 completed projects. In her report, she stated, “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.”

This raises the very important point that it may very well be the case that one of the reasons for this really extraordinarily poor level of delivery of performance is the way in which these contracts were allocated, who they were allocated to and the criteria that was looked at, which may have been enforced in a very lax manner, because the real purpose of giving out these contracts may well have been to provide income to those who were in fact involved in bidding for those contracts.

Of course, this is a profound conflict of interest. However, one of the things that we see over and over again when we are dealing with conflicts of interest in general is the phenomenon that it is not just that money gets transferred to people to whom it should not be transferred; it is that the end results of which the money has been spent are spectacularly bad. This, in fact, is the whole reason for avoiding conflicts of interest. If people simply handing money to themselves produced spectacular results, we would have no reason to object. However, that never happens. It did not happen in sponsorship and, it appears, from what the Auditor General was able to discover, that it did not happen here.

Was the sample of 18 completed contracts a representative sample? We cannot be 100% certain. That is, of course, one of the things that will be determined when that impressive list of witnesses comes before the procedure and House affairs committee. We will, for example, be able to ask the Auditor General whether she believes that sample was genuinely representative. Were those projects unusually good or unusually bad as compared to the rest? I suspect the sample was representative, but she could confirm that. That is pretty important information to have.

I do want to point out that the government itself clearly thought that this was an issue, although it will not actually admit that because, on June 4, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry announced that the SDTC program would be shut down. Now, the government did make an attempt to say that, nonetheless, it had impressive results. A spokesperson, Janemary Bennigan, stated, as follows:

With respect to stewardship of public funds, SDTC has strong monitoring processes in place to ensure that every project...—every dollar—

I love that “every dollar”.

— is accounted for and has been correctly disbursed to the innovative clean tech projects and technologies that Canada needs to succeed in the new economy.

That, of course, is obviously, on the ground, not true. The program would not have been cancelled if the government thought that. At any rate, that is what they said.

I have to stop and point out just how meaningless this whole exercise will have been, even if these had been successful. Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are not primarily caused by air traffic; by road traffic; by people using old-fashioned, non-electric, gas-burning vehicles; by heating their houses with oil, or, as is the case with many people in my constituency, in rural Ontario, with wood. Those emissions would be small compared to the amount of wood that has been destroyed by fires in this country, fires that, while to some degree were caused by the sources that the government always points to when responding to questions about the fires, were also largely caused and greatly exacerbated, in terms of the amount of carbon put in the atmosphere, by bad forestry practices and bad forest fire management. Those were the responsibility of governments, to some degree provincial governments and to some degree the federal government.

In 2023, fires raged across this country and turned skies orange in places as far away as New York City and the state of Maryland. These fires consumed 184,961 square kilometres. I am not quite sure how the estimate I have here was that precise, but 184,900 square kilometres is a round estimate. That is 18.5 million hectares. It is 5% of Canada's entire forest cover. To give some perspective, Canada is the country that has retained the largest percentage of its forest cover in the entire world. Less than half is being logged, but 5% was vaporized in a single year. That put three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, obviously many times the amount that this program through SDTC would have mitigated by many multiples. In fact, three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is equivalent to four times global emissions from all aviation worldwide. Our greenhouse gas emissions from all other sources, all the stuff we are trying to vaporize the economy to stop, reduce or mitigate—

That is excellent mitigation right there with the lights going off in the House of Commons. Right there, we could probably reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Well done.

Our greenhouse gas emissions from other sources were 708 megatonnes. Just to be clear, that is 708 million tonnes versus three billion tonnes. We became the world's third largest greenhouse gas emitter in that year and put out more than the whole nation would do in this entire decade as a result of those fires. That is 10% of overall world emissions, which were 39 gigatonnes in 2023. This is data, by the way, from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, EDGAR, a well-respected source that even the Liberals cannot accuse of being somehow a front for the groups that they like to accuse of being climate denialists.

I am not saying that the government is responsible for all of this. I am just saying it is responsible for some of it. There is no doubt that the mountain pine beetle destroying forests and turning them into tinder was a significant, highly burnable potential. Tinder was a colossal feature of this and the fact that climate change caused temperatures to rise sufficiently to enable the mountain pine beetle to cross mountain passes that were previously seen as being an impenetrable barrier is unquestionably at the root of a substantial number of the forest fires, at least in the western part of the country.

However, bad forestry practices were also a source of this, allowing forest tinder to burn up and not building firebreaks. Not anticipating led to colossal fire. It is not as if this is the first time, as if we could not have learned from the examples of previous fires. I note that the extraordinarily well-publicized fires in Yellowstone in 1988, which is a lifetime ago, burned 3,200 square kilometres. The reports that came out afterward indicated that the wrong kind of forestry practice of excessive fire suppression, which led to a buildup of tinder, then meant that when a fire occurred, it would be far greater in extent and scope and far more damaging.

Those lessons have been well recorded for decades and were not taken note of. They were not taken note of, for example, in the lead-up to the devastating Jasper fire earlier this year. As we know, the fact that these conditions were in danger of being replicated were noted as early as 2017. Obviously, that gives seven years of lead time in which the government could have done something. That fire put much less carbon into the atmosphere than the ones a couple of years back. The fact is that bad forestry management, this time in a national park, which is exclusively federal jurisdiction and means the Liberals cannot blame the premiers, resulted in a disaster. This is after those fires, so the government literally learned nothing.

We became the world's number three greenhouse gas emitter. We put more carbon into the atmosphere than global airplane emissions for four years, 10% of all emissions, and we learned nothing because the government is fixated on one particular solution, which, in fact, will only nibble at the edges of the problem while ignoring this colossal other issue.

I experienced this kind of danger myself a few years back. I used to live in Australia. The Australian Capital Territory, which is mostly beautiful, forested alpine wilderness, was struck by fires that raged January 18 through 22, 2003. They destroyed nearly 70% of the Australian Capital Territory's pastures, pine plantations and nature parks.

I was not there when it happened, but I was in one of those nature parks. When I lived in Australia, I was dating a girl who lived in Canberra, the capital of Australia, and we would go out. Our recreation was to go on nature walks in the forest preserves around Canberra, which were very beautiful at the time. They call it “bush-walking” in Australia. Fortunately, because of the fire-resistant nature of Australian forests, much of the native foliage has largely recovered from those fires.

At any rate, I remember going to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the hills around Canberra in January 1999, four years before these devastating fires, and arriving at the front entrance to that park. There had been a dry spell. There is an entrance with a gravel road that people have to go through. The park ranger at the entrance had parked her car to block that road, facing the wrong direction, facing out from the park. She said that the park was closed because there was a fire hazard. The reason for the fire hazard was that it was forest fire season. Forest fires are quite common in Australia. On a previous occasion, I had not been able to get to my home because my whole neighbourhood was affected by a fire and shut down. I had to spend the night in a McDonald's.

At any rate, on this particular occasion, the park ranger said that there had been no fires there since 1939 and that the total fire suppression approach had led to, at that point, 60 years of detritus, of debris, building up. This meant that, if there was a fire, it would be extraordinarily severe and fast-moving. She said that, in the event that there was a fire, she would have to run to her car and hope she could drive out faster than the fire was moving; that was why her car was parked facing away from the park.

A few years later, there was another set of fires on the outskirts of Melbourne. They were even more devastating, and people were burned alive in their cars as they tried to escape the fires. The park ranger was quite right to be thinking this way. My point is that this is widespread knowledge. It is widely known, and if the right things are done, the damage can be controlled by the government.

The Liberal government did nothing to control any of this. The result is that it is partly responsible for these massive carbon emissions, and this far outweighs the amount it was ever hoping to reduce in carbon emissions through this program. As we discovered, these programs were, on average, producing half the benefit that was recorded.

In addition, there was a series of abuses of process that arose because this is such a badly designed program. I now come to the reason we are dealing with all of this. Those abuses resulted in a motion that was produced in committee and then sent to the House and concurred in. This was a motion to produce a full reporting of a series of documents for the intention of taking them to our legal counsel, who would then pass them on to the RCMP.

The government withheld some documents entirely and redacted others severely. When confronted about this, it then came back and lectured us. One has to read the government House leader's report to believe it. The government lectured us that the fundamental parliamentary privilege of summoning all and any documents should not be allowed to happen when it might be used in some way that interferes, in the government's opinion, with some worthwhile objective. Effectively, our privilege in this matter has been extraordinarily narrow.

I will just add that the House leader came and made this claim to us not during the debate, but afterwards. This is an outrage in itself. The reasons for this will not seem obvious to someone who is not deeply imbued in parliamentary procedure, but it is an extraordinary thing to say. She was rightly chastised by the Speaker when he made his ruling, in which he said that there was a prima facie case and that we should have this debate. I thank him for that, and I thank all the members who have been participating in this debate.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Madam Speaker, I was actually looking forward to the speech by this member. In my view, he has much knowledge of the constitutional aspects and of how the House of Commons should operate. However, I was surprised to find that, while a portion of his speech was about SDTC itself, quite a large portion, the bulk of his speech, was about firestorms. I did gain some knowledge from his observation on firestorms.

The member obviously knows that, under our system of government, the legislative, the judiciary and the executive have their own responsibilities and powers. The RCMP has written to the law clerk of the House of Commons to say that it cannot use these documents for its investigations.

Does anything prevent the RCMP from getting any records on its own through a proper legal process?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think that two issues are being conflated here. The separation of the executive, judiciary and legislative functions is less formalized here than it is under the United States Constitution. People often regard these as being much more systematic silos here than they actually are. What I think is really going on here, to the extent that it is legitimate, is an issue of what we would call the sub judice convention. This is the idea that when a matter is before the courts, it ought not to be discussed here. That is a convention. It is not a hard and fast rule of law.

None of this stuff is actually before the courts now or before the courts yet. The RCMP might choose to lay charges at some point. The thing about this right now is that the motion calls for these documents to be submitted to the House of Commons, not for the purpose of making them public but for the purpose of having them go directly to the law clerk.

Once they were in the hands of the law clerk, there would be about 30 days for the law clerk to go through them and determine what should be released to the RCMP. I believe that is what the motion states. The RCMP would be in a position to co-operate with the law clerk to confirm that, yes, this should be excluded or, no, that should not. This would be based upon the investigatory parameters that they are going to face and the restrictions that might be placed on wrongly obtained evidence being used in a trial. That can only happen if the materials are submitted. Withholding them is depriving the law clerk and the RCMP of their ability to do their job.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to take my colleague back to 2005. Sheila Fraser, who was the auditor general at the time, published a scathing report on foundations. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Liberal government created some fifteen foundations. As early as 2005, the former auditor general found that $9 billion had been transferred to these 15 foundations between 1998 and 2002. That is equivalent to about $17 billion today. She also found that the government had very little control over these foundations.

Should action not have been taken at the time to do away with this type of arm's length foundation that manages taxpayer money?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Madam Speaker, that is a good question.

Those foundations are a sort of quasi-government creature. They also exist in the United Kingdom in the form of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations.

The United Kingdom was experiencing the same problems we have here. I think that the changes that were made in the U.K. to improve the issues with quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations could be used as a model here.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston for his very thoughtful words and address. He has identified something without putting a label on it, so I want to ask him about the label.

I am not quibbling with the member, because there was a massive amount of greenhouse gases emitted from the fires that occurred in Canada in 2023. The figure I found from NASA was 640 million metric tons. He is right, it outstrips the emission of an industrialized country for a year.

He is quite right that the mountain pine beetle epidemic was brought about by warming winters, which meant that we no longer got the cold snap that stopped the pine beetle. British Columbia lost an area of forest two times the size of Sweden. Ironically, in British Columbia, that led Gordon Campbell, who was pretty much known as a right-wing premier, to develop North America's first carbon price and put a tax on carbon in B.C. at that time. He was trying to get ahead, bend the curve and reduce greenhouse gases.

The name for the thing he is talking about is a “positive feedback loop”. As the climate warms, certain natural processes accelerate. We get drier, hotter conditions that lead to a fuel load in the forest. The insect outbreaks that would normally be knocked back are not. The melting permafrost is the big kicker of a positive feedback loop, with a vast risk of mass amounts of methane reaching the atmosphere.

Does my hon. colleague believe that we should have a proper discussion in this place about the science of the real risks we face in the climate crisis?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Madam Speaker, there are several different things to unpack in that question. I know the next speaker is going to be this very same member; she knows a great deal about this topic. I hope that, if she does not mind veering away from the prepared text she had, she will share her thoughts on the subject.

With regard to the issue of methane gas, in general, I heartily agree with her that trapped methane gas is very much a real issue. There is a formula that gets tossed around: Methane gas is 21 times as problematic as carbon dioxide. I am never quite sure exactly what that means, but clearly, molecule per molecule, it is a very serious issue.

If we look at human-caused climate change, the cause from humans emitting methane is much more serious than one would think from listening to the popular discourse. There is a very interesting argument to be made. There is a book called Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum. I do not know whether the member has read it, but if she has not, I know she would find it fascinating. The author argues that humans have been causing greenhouse gases to release for far longer than we think, and it started with human rice cultivation, which caused an enormous amount of methane through the creation of artificial swamps.

This is a good area to study for sure. I am out of time to talk about the positive feedback loop, but maybe the next question will deal with that.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Madam Speaker, before I ask a question, I just want to take a moment to wish my son Henry a very happy birthday today. I just like to get it on the record so that he knows I am thinking of him when I am not with him.

My question is procedural. The member and I both spent time in the procedure and House affairs committee. During Harper's reign, there was a very clear example of this happening before; he was held in contempt of Parliament, and there were these sorts of discussions.

How long are we going to keep this in the House, and when can it finally go to the place that it belongs, the procedure and House affairs committee, to get the work done so that the House of Commons can do its work? Does the member have any thoughts on that?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Madam Speaker, first of all, happy birthday to Henry. Since we are on that trend, on October 10, it will be my brother's birthday, so happy anticipated birthday to Blake. As usual, he will be getting a book on flying for his birthday gift. My brother is a pilot; in fact, he flew over Parliament Hill as the lead aircraft in the July 1 Canada Day celebrations in a 1928 De Havilland DH.60. I have no other way of getting that on the record, so there we are.

There was a finding of contempt. It was brought forward via the procedure and House affairs committee. It never actually made it to the House. I know this because I was still debating it in that committee. I had the floor when the bells started ringing for us to come out for a vote of confidence in the government. In 2011, the intention was to introduce a motion that would bring down the Harper government on a finding of contempt from that committee. As members can guess, I was dissenting in that report, so I did not agree with it. The actual motion that came before the House was simply to find no confidence in the government, with no explanation. It was very similar to the first of the non-confidence motions that the current government faced about a week ago.

I do not think I actually answered the member's question; I guess I did. Yes, this should be going off to the procedure and House affairs committee as soon as it can.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

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.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Madam Speaker, I agree with almost everything the hon. member has said. She did classify the corruption into three categories, which was very well put. I also share her thoughts on the carbon capture and storage thing that is going on. The systemic failure she mentioned is a matter of real concern.

The RCMP has written to the law clerk of the House of Commons stating that the records they would obtain through this process could not be used in the investigation. I would like to know if there is anything that prevents the RCMP from getting the same records, the same documents, through a proper legal process.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Nepean for his commentary, particularly on carbon capture and storage, which is another fake solution to climate change. My concern with this argument is that Parliament has the right to ask for documents. The Speaker has said we have the right to ask for those documents. We do not know that there is any criminality involved here. If it turns out that the documents we get cannot be used in a criminal investigation, so be it. The RCMP can decide, after it looks, there is nothing there, and we can move on. Nothing is violated in anybody's rights. Parliament has a right to ask for documents. Those documents should be produced.

I really hope that my friends on the other side will realize that we have had enough of this debate now. Can we please get back to the business of the House and do the work the people sent us here to do?

I ask the government to be transparent. When the House asks for documents, the government should give them all to us. If the documents cannot be used in a criminal prosecution, that is what it is. To my colleague, it is not an illegitimate process. It is not that it fails to be a proper legal process. It is just the right of the House to ask for documents.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, I was asked yesterday during debate about what could be done to prevent something like this from happening again. One thing that I think is missing is the will of the government to demand that the taxpayer be made whole. There seems to be a lack of a penalty for people who are caught furthering their own personal interests when they are put into these positions of trust at these board levels.

I am just wondering if my colleague would share that same view that there needs to be tougher penalties for people who are found to be furthering their own interests and that the government should be demanding the taxpayer be made whole.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, we have a number of cases that have come before us recently, and one that is more egregious is that of GC Strategies and the money given to an individual for work that we could say was really not done.

By the way, I would love to sue IBM for the Phoenix pay system. That was a big amount of money for something that completely failed, and it cost Canadians and individual civil servants who did not get paid properly. There is no accountability.

How do we get accountability when we are dealing with third-party contractors, whether it is McKinsey, Deloitte, GC Strategies or IBM? I used to practise law, so my first impulse is always to sue the bastards.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands for her speech. Along that same line, I would like to ask her a question about the use of third parties, whether they are foundations or subcontractors. It seems to me that the government resorts to this kind of practice far too often, at the expense of civil servants. They are the ones with the expertise and, more importantly, they can be be held to account more easily when there is a problem, with spending, for example.

That said, it is not just about purely financial or, worst-case scenario, quasi-illegal situations. This practice also creates other problems. For example, in some cases, third parties are not required to comply with the Official Languages Act. Is too much distance being put between the government and those who provide the final service? The result is that, ultimately, the government is no longer accountable for anything.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, accountability is at the heart of this debate. It is also about the role of our public service relative to that of independent third parties who carry out contracts for large global corporations like McKinsey.

I think it is essential to build a stronger system for public servants. At present, our public service system is weaker than in the past. We have to make an effort to improve the situation and give support to our civil servants, not global companies like McKinsey, which make big profits.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, here we are debating documents, again, and I know my Conservative friends want to forget about the Afghan detainee documents that drove the House to a similar situation. To the member, talking about accountability and public service is really important, but one of the tools we need is to update our Crown copyright laws. Crown copyright in Canada was brought in, I think it was 1901 or 1911, and it has not changed very much since that time.

This refers to the release of documents for studies, to the business sector, to the not-for-profit sector, to general Canadians, and it would also provide a solution to some of the problems we face here in the House. I would like to know the hon. member's thoughts. The Liberals had some interest in this with the former member for LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, who they then removed as a justice minister and has now left this place, who had an interest in updating Crown copyright because the United States, U.K. and Australia, basically anybody left on the planet, has Crown copyright in a democracy such as Canada.

When are we going to update that so we have more public documents, which the taxpayers paid for, accessible to businesses and not-for-profit organizations in parliament?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, believe it or not, I was not here in 1911, but the hon. member is right. He is absolutely right, and Crown copyright law needs to be updated. I also recall, and I can say his name out loud because unfortunately he is not here anymore, that David Lametti was keen on this. We do need to pursue it.

I remember a lot of my friends in the law community, and we used to talk about this, would refer to Canada's freedom of information law as being freedom from information, a system of no disclosure tempered by leaks. It is time to improve the Crown copyright laws, modernize them and make sure we do get to the place of documents and information being public by default.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said that she was hoping we would be able to get on with the regular course of business here in the House of Commons, but is it not up to the Liberal side of the House to comply with an order from the Speaker? It is pretty clear, and I am reading from his decision, “the Chair cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established.”

Is it not up to the Liberals to comply with that order so we can get on with the ordinary course of business?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, that is one route. Another route would be a discussion among House leaders about a way to move forward and get the documents to take on the undertaking that they would be at the committee in time. The member for Langley—Aldergrove is not wrong, I just think the House and the Canadian public would be heartened to see us work together more so we could get on with some bills that need to be passed, but I do not disagree.

That is absolutely one way this would end, so too would be a decision between the official opposition, the government and other parties in this place to find a way to move forward. A case of privilege was made. We have had the debate. We need to continue to dig into this matter. For that, we need the documents.

The Economy

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to make a few points on the current status of our economy.

First, the Canadian consumer price index is at a 22-month high. A study commissioned by Bloomberg and conducted by Nanos Research shows consumer confidence is the best it has been in about two years. Second, inflation has come down to 2% and has been in the target range the Bank of Canada wants for the last eight months. Third, the interest rate is now 4.25%, and I expect it to go down by a further 50 basis points this month. I expect it to come down to 3.75% by December and further down to 3% by July of next year.

The other point I would like to make is on the cost of living. It is still a matter of concern to most Canadians, but it has been falling in terms of percentage. It has already fallen by 7%.

Hopefully, with inflation falling, interest rates falling and consumer confidence increasing, we should see it get eliminated.

Arson

[Marc Dalton, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to an Ethiopian couple who tragically lost their lives in an arson attack at the House of Covenant International Church in Winnipeg last month.

Geda and Zenabu recently came to Canada with hope but instead were met with horror. They were living above their church, which provides affordable housing for newcomers. In the middle of the night, a heinous act of arson consumed the church, and the couple trapped above were killed.

This is not an isolated incident. The government recently revealed that nearly 600 places of worship have been burned. Canada needs to protect places of worship from arson.

I have introduced Bill C-411, the anti-arson act, to address attacks against our churches, mosques, gurdwaras, synagogues and mandirs.

I extend my sincerest condolences to the family of the victims and members of the Ethiopian Society of Winnipeg, who continue to grieve at this time.

Spinning Wheels Relay to End Parkinson's

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Madam Speaker, on Saturday, I had the privilege of welcoming to Parliament Hill, alongside my colleague the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, dozens of cyclists who participated in the Spinning Wheels relay to end Parkinson's.

Three teams of cyclists completed a combined 10,000 kilometres across Canada. They travelled through all 10 provinces and through two territories, including remote northern regions and indigenous communities. Their mission was to raise awareness about Parkinson's, show the benefits of exercise in alleviating the symptoms of the disease, connect with others and build a community.

It was no easy journey. Over two months, these cyclists laughed, cried, became both physically and emotionally drained, and dealt with emergencies, but ultimately rode on. They are an inspiration to us all, and I invite everyone in the House to join me in applauding their tremendous accomplishment.

Hazardous Material Transport

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, recently Michigan approved an American billionaire's desire to ship hazardous material across the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. With this change taking effect in less than two weeks, the federal government and the Province of Ontario have been silent. It seems they simply do not care, even though the City of Windsor is opposed, as are the fire department, police association and many others.

Residents of Windsor are in a state of uncertainty and fear. We are allowing the profits of a U.S. billionaire to risk our water and our jobs. The lack of consultation, background studies and a clear safety plan is unacceptable. Our community deserves to know which neighbourhoods will be affected and what protocols are in place should an accident occur.

The Liberals are sacrificing our sovereignty and risking an environmental and economic disaster. The time for action is now.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge is opening up in months with a solution to this issue. Why the corrupt process right now?