Madam Speaker, that is too disappointing. For the members opposite, I will carry on from where I was, so I do not have to repeat some of the stuff we went through at the beginning.
I will remind members that the Auditor General gave SDTC a clean bill of health in 2017. It was only after the Prime Minister's hand-picked Liberal board members were appointed that the fund began voting to give itself absurd amounts of money. In addition, while SDTC ought to have been at arm's length from the government, in practice, it was not. The minister recommended board appointments, and senior officials from the Prime Minister's Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development sat in on every meeting, monitoring the activities of the board. It is simply unbelievable that senior ISED officials who report directly to the Minister of Innovation said nothing while witnessing how millions of dollars was funnelled to companies in which board members held active conflicts of interest.
In response to these damning findings, in June, Conservatives put forward a motion calling on the government to provide documents pertaining to SDTC to the House. The motion included provisions for those documents to be provided to the RCMP so that it could undertake an investigation on whether criminal offences were committed. I will explain why it is necessary for the House to turn over these documents to the RCMP.
As part of her investigation, the Auditor General conducted a governance audit of SDTC. She did not conduct a criminal investigation, which could explain why no criminal intent was identified. The whistle-blower has told the public accounts committee he is confident that, if these documents are turned over to the RCMP, criminal intent will be identified. The SDTC whistle-blower who testified at committee stated:
I think the Auditor General's investigation was more of a cursory review. I don't think the goal and mandate of the Auditor General's office is to actually look into criminality, so I'm not surprised by the fact that they haven't found anything criminal. They're not looking at intent. If their investigation was focused on intent, of course they would find the criminality.
A majority of members in the House passed this motion. In response to the motion, many of the Liberal government's departments either refused the House's order or redacted documents that were turned over, citing provisions in the Privacy Act or Access to Information Act. In response to this blatant disregard for the powers and privileges of the House of Commons, the Conservative House leader brought forward a question of privilege, arguing that the rights of parliamentarians had been breached. The Speaker of the House agreed that the House has the unequivocal right to order the production of papers and found that there was a clear case of violation of the privileges of parliamentarians. Conservatives will continue to seek the truth about the $390 million that has gone to Liberal insiders through this green slush fund. On the other side of the House, the Liberals are opposing the production order for documents to be turned over to the RCMP; it appears that they are not concerned about such a flagrant misuse of funds.
It is shocking and infuriating to me, my colleagues and the great people of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte that the Liberal government feels comfortable wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and will not even allow an investigation into how or why this corruption occurred under its watch.
The misappropriated funds are tax dollars. They are dollars that the constituents in my riding worked hard to earn. People expect the tax dollars that they remit to the Government of Canada to be used wisely; through this appalling misuse of taxpayer funds, the government has broken the trust of these hard-working Canadians whom I represent. People are right to expect answers from the Liberal government and for the Prime Minister to be held accountable.
I want to remind the House that this is not the only Liberal scandal we have seen in the past nine years, when the Liberal government has been in power. However, it may be the costliest.
I will mention a few other examples. In the early days of the pandemic, the Liberal government tried to shut this place down and give itself unlimited taxing and spending powers without the oversight of Parliament for two whole years. I am thankful that my Conservative colleagues and I stopped this.
We also saw the SNC-Lavalin scandal, in which the Prime Minister pressured the former attorney general and minister of justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to give SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement so that the scandal-ridden company executives would not have to go to court and face a trial for their misdeeds. The Prime Minister was found guilty of breaking ethics laws in this case.
We also saw that the Prime Minister was prepared to take the former Speaker of the House to court to prevent the release of the Winnipeg lab documents.
The Prime Minister also prorogued Parliament in the middle of an investigation of the WE Charity scandal to prevent an embarrassing committee investigation from continuing. In this scandal, the Prime Minister gave a $900-million sole-sourced contract to the company, with which he had close family ties.
The former Liberal finance minister, Bill Morneau, ended up resigning over this scandal when it was revealed that he received a $47,000 gift from WE Charity to fly his family on a luxury vacation and that his daughter was employed by the company.
The Prime Minister also had several scandals related to his luxurious vacations. In the first, he broke ethics laws when he was flown on a private aircraft to a billionaire island by a registered lobbyist. There was another incident in which the Prime Minister received a $9,000-a-night gift from a friend, who also happened to be a major donor to his family's foundation. Who can forget the ArriveCAN scandal, in which the Prime Minister gave millions to companies that did no work on an app that did not work. The app actually sent 10,000 Canadians into quarantine by accident.
I mention these incidents because they speak to the broken trust between the Prime Minister and the Canadian public. Time and time again, the Liberal government has shown a careless disregard for ethics laws and for taxpayer money.
Today, we are seeing the same pattern: A scandal occurs, and the Liberal government tries to cover it up. Conservatives will not stop until we get to the truth of this most recent scandal. Each member of the House, regardless of political affiliation, has a duty to ensure that the government is held accountable and that it is spending the money Canadians work so hard to earn in an appropriate manner.
We should not just throw up our hands, sit back and let Liberal insiders line their pockets with Canadian tax dollars. My Conservative colleagues and I are committed to ending this corruption.
I encourage all colleagues, even Liberal members, to stand up and right this wrong. We cannot allow corruption to fester in our government programs and institutions. We must get to the bottom of this issue. The Prime Minister must hand over all documents related to his green slush fund. Canadians deserve answers.