Madam Speaker, I believe the member for Humber River—Black Creek provided the title for this speech: “Corruption, corruption, corruption”. The member for Edmonton Griesbach gave the theme and the reason behind the whole debate, and that is to pay for the consequences of bad actions.
I am pleased to rise on behalf of the industrious and innovating residents of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. Today we are debating a very important motion. The motion would direct the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to study the government's cover-up of the corruption at Sustainable Development Technology Canada. There is really not much actually up for debate. The facts are clear and well established.
The former head of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC for short, told the government that appointing a person who had received money from SDTC to be chair of the board was a bad idea. The government ignored the advice and appointed the Liberal donor anyhow. Then, to absolutely no one's surprise, the board members started handing out grants to companies they had a stake in. Naturally, the employees at SDTC started to feel uncomfortable with the actions of the board. These employees carefully documented the conflicts of interest and followed the proper procedures for reporting to the ministry responsible for SDTC. These employees followed the rules and were granted a meeting with the deputy minister. The employees explained the situation. The deputy minister said it was worse than the sponsorship scandal ad scam. He said that the minister would flip his lid.
Unfortunately, the deputy minister had placed too much faith in the minister. Rather than flipping his lid, the minister tried to put the lid on it. Of course the government wants to cover it up. It was explicitly, directly and clearly warned that appointing this particular Liberal donor to be the board chair was a problem. The government ignored not only the warning lights, but also the warning signs and the warning bells. The Liberals ignored all of it and appointed even more compromised people to the board. That is like warning a bartender to stop selling drinks to minors, and then he starts giving them away for free. According to the Auditor General, this involved at least $400 million of taxpayers' money and 186 conflicts of interest, that we know of.
As I mentioned, this is not really a debate. Those are already the established facts, just like the ruling that the Speaker issued finding the Liberals had violated an order from the House to hand over the documents to the RCMP.
Now the Liberals' junior partner is complaining that all of this is distracting the government from pursuing its socialist agenda. Once again, the NDP is revealing that it does not understand that the role of Parliament is to hold the government accountable. This is our number one job, and it is not just for opposition members. Every member not in cabinet is supposed to hold the government to account. Maybe if the Liberal backbench spent more time doing that and less time spreading conspiracy theories about hidden agendas on social media, the government might not be so badly out of touch.
This motion is not distracting Parliament from its work. This is its work. If the issue were getting legislation passed, then the Liberal cover-up and Liberal corruption are the problem. That, and the NDP enablers. Enabling this corruption is the problem. Not pulling it out at the roots is the problem. Liberal corruption and incompetence is the real problem, and it impacts the lives of Canadians just as much as, if not more, than any single piece of legislation before the House.
The founder of an exciting technology company in my riding has informed me that he may have to move his company to the United States. He will be taking the high-tech jobs it created with them. There we have collateral damage. How much of that was lost that we know of? We have a productivity crisis that is making Canadians poorer every day, yet the NDP socialist coalition is driving away exactly the types of companies we need to tackle this crisis.
The government has spent the last nine years piling straw onto the backs of small and medium-sized business. However, for a particular company in my riding, it was SDTC.
This is why holding the government accountable is so critical. Liberal corruption and incompetence will cost people their livelihoods. It does not matter if someone is 80 kilometres from Ottawa or 800 kilometres. Decisions made here have an impact out there. The Liberals decided to appoint a donor to be the chair of the SDTC down here, and hundreds of jobs are lost out there.
The only person who should have lost his job over the scandal at SDTC is the Liberal minister, whose lid remains firmly unflipped. I can see that calling for a Liberal minister to resign is being met with eye rolls across the aisle, and I know that when Liberals hear a Conservative calling for a minister to resign, they will just dismiss it. They think we are just trying to score points because that is, to them, the point of a parliamentary democracy.
When a government makes a mistake, our job is to point it out. When something goes wrong in a department, the minister is supposed to resign. That way, a new minister can come in and clean house. Not only that, but the new minister is also strongly incentivized to keep a close eye on what is going on in their department, yet I would not wager a single current minister even knows half the programs being run underneath them.
Jean Chrétien tried to kill the idea of responsible government in our country, but the Prime Minister, with his outspoken admiration of communist dictators, took it off life support and smothered it with a pillow. Common-sense Conservatives will resurrect it. We will restore democracy, responsibility and accountability, and those are not just sound bites.
As I mentioned earlier, this scandal has nothing to do with any of my constituents, yet some of them are paying the price for it. Had there been a minister who listened to the advice of the outgoing SDTC president, none of this would have happened. Good governance is good politics.
By demanding the accountability of our ministers, Conservatives get quality ministers. Better ministers are better at passing Conservative legislation and advancing Conservative policies. Bad governance is bad politics, and this motion is all the proof the Liberals need.
None of this would be happening if the minister had done as his deputy predicted and flipped his lid. Everything that transpired at SDTC was not just predictable. It was actually predicted. This is a troubling pattern with these progressives. They are warned that their bad policy will have a predictably bad consequence, and then they accuse the policy critics of spreading disinformation.
They pass the policy, and it goes exactly as miserably as predicted, so they start to gaslight Canadians. Whether it is the streaming censorship act, the news censorship act or the hug-a-thug act, the results are playing out as the critics expected. Less news means less choice, and more crime means more chaos.
Now, thanks to Liberal corruption and incompetence, Canada will have less sustainably developed technology, the kind of technology that saves lives and boosts productivity, developed by the kinds of companies that create jobs and pay the taxes Liberals love to spend. Instead, after nine long, scandal-filled years, all Canada has is more corruption, more debt, more taxes and more crime. Thanks to the carbon tax pushing up the price of food, Canada now has more scurvy too, yet all we hear from the Liberals is that everything is awesome. That may be true for the shrinking Liberal base of support, but for the rest of us, things are far more awful than awesome.
The motion is a chance for the Liberals to turn their sinking ship around. Liberals will ignore this advice, but a little humility goes a long way with Canadians. They can turn over the documents, sack the minister and apologize to Canadians. That is just common sense.
While I promised to be brief, there is one more element to this story. Regular viewers of my Facebook Live streams may recall this from last June. To recap, SDTC gives grants and loans to companies developing green technologies. The Liberals had ignored advice from public servants warning them not to appoint Annette Verschuren as chair of the board of directors, because Ms. Verschuren owned a company that was getting funding from SDTC. Despite the warnings to the Liberals, she was appointed as chair. Shortly afterward, Ms. Verschuren voted to give her company additional money. She was not the only board member who was in a conflict of interest.
Fortunately, employees blew the whistle. The Liberals tried to sweep it under the table, but eventually it was reported to The Globe and Mail. The CBC did several stories on the issue, and it resulted in parliamentary hearings. Ms. Verschuren appeared at the committee, claimed she did nothing wrong and then resigned a few weeks later.
If we search Google, we can find dozens of media stories reporting all the details over several months. The Liberals appointed someone to lead an organization that hands out taxpayer money, and that person gave money to her own business in an obvious conflict of interest. The legacy news media gave it appropriate coverage, Parliament investigated and the Liberal appointee resigned.
The legacy media like to point to this type of reporting and argue that exposing this type of corruption is why the legacy news media is a pillar of democracy and, therefore, should receive taxpayer-funded subsidies. The Liberals listened and have created a whole new slew of funding programs for legacy news media. One of those programs is the local journalism initiative. It gives media outlets money to hire a local journalist. The program is run by the news media lobbyists. The lobbyists selected a panel of seven people to be the judges on who gets the taxpayers' money. The judging panel reviews applications, selects recipients and decides on funding allocations. Of the seven judges, five are in blatant conflict of interest for having approved funding for their own media outlets.
For example, one of the judges, Linda Solomon Wood, is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the National Observer. The National Observer received funding to hire three journalists. Most outlets only received funding for one journalist. Just as with SDTC, we have a group of people in charge of handing out taxpayer money, and these people are giving that money to their own companies. We have identical scandals, but just one news outlet has ever mentioned it. This is Blacklock's Reporter.
The entire legacy media has dropped a cone of silence over this scandal. The reason they are all covering up the Liberal corruption is that, even if they do not receive money from the program, they can profit from it. Part of the program requires that all the taxpayer-provided journalists must share their reporting for free. News outlets can access the database of free articles through the radical far-left outfit called The Canadian Press. By the way, one of the seven judges is also the executive director of The Canadian Press.
Now the government has released an evaluation of the local journalism initiative. The Liberals give themselves an A plus, but that is what happens when we hire our evaluators. More outside consultants were hired by Canadian Heritage's evaluation directorate to evaluate how well the government is doing at giving away taxpayer money to well-connected special interests. Surprisingly, the people getting the government money think Liberals are—