Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the residents of Kelowna—Lake Country.
I rise today to talk about what has seized Parliament as more information comes out on what is becoming one of the biggest, and most costly to taxpayers, corruption scandals in Canada. There is a possibility it could be criminal. For Canadians watching, I would like to lay out why this debate is so important and how we ended up here. I am here today to discuss the ruling of the Speaker of the House of Commons with regard to the production of documents ordered by the House on the Liberal scandal involving Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC, or as it has quickly become better known, the Liberals' billion-dollar green slush fund. This agency was created to invest in innovative, environmentally friendly technologies here in Canada, but under Liberal governance and management, it became a hotbed of corruption.
The reason for the debate today is simple: The Liberals refused to follow the will of Parliament after the Auditor General of Canada, the Ethics Commissioner and whistle-blowers uncovered clear and widespread corruption that favoured Liberal insiders. The issues all began in 2018, when the Liberals pushed out the existing chair of SDTC because he was critical of government legislation. This is another example of how the Liberals do not want independent voices around them. They only want their friends.
The Liberal industry minister at the time, Navdeep Bains, chose to appoint a new chair, an entrepreneur who was already receiving government funding through one of her companies. It was revealed that the Liberals were warned internally of the risks associated with appointing an obviously conflicted chair. They were told that up until that point, the fund had never had a chair with interests in companies receiving funding. The Liberals appointed her anyway. The new chair went on to create an environment where conflicts of interest were tolerated and “managed by board members”. This is as described by the Auditor General.
Board members went on to award SDTC funding to companies in which board members held stock or positions. Liberal minister Bains went on to appoint two other controversial board members who engaged in unethical behaviour in obvious breach of the Conflict of Interest Act by approving funding to companies in which they held ownership stakes. Department officials witnessed 186 conflicts at the board, but they did not intervene.
In January 2021, the current Liberal Minister of Industry replaced Minister Bains. In November 2022, whistle-blowers raised internal concerns with the Auditor General about unethical practices they saw at SDTC. In September 2023, the whistle-blowers took the allegations public, forcing the Liberal industry minister to suspend SDTC funding.
In November 2023, the Auditor General started to conduct an audit of the governance of SDTC. Here is how the Auditor General of Canada found Canadian tax dollars were used by the Liberal-appointed members of the SDTC board: Many approved projects were found to be either, one, ineligible for funding; two, a conflict of interest; or, three, both. The Auditor General found that $58 million went to 10 ineligible projects that, on occasions, could not demonstrate an environmental benefit or development of green technology, and that the Liberal-appointed SDTC board approved $334 million, over 186 cases, to projects in which board members held a conflict of interest. This is really quite unbelievable.
The Auditor General found that the Liberal minister did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were given to Liberal ministers. There are a few points I want to make here. 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 itself absurd amounts of taxpayer dollars. The government will say that SDTC was at arm's length, but SDTC was not at arm's length from the government.
The minister recommends board appointments, and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, ISED, has senior department officials sitting in every meeting monitoring the activities of the board. It is unbelievable that a senior department official said nothing while witnessing hundreds of millions of dollars being funnelled to companies in which board members held active conflicts of interest. Are the minister, Liberal-appointed board members, and senior government officials all inept, complicit, corrupt or all of the above?
Another point is that as part of their investigation, the Auditor General conducted a governance audit at SDTC. She did not conduct a criminal investigation, which could explain why no criminal intent has been identified so far. However, the whistle-blower has told the public accounts committee that he is confident that if the documents are turned over to the RCMP, criminal intent will be identified.
Is this perhaps the reason the government has redacted documents and refused to turn them over to the RCMP: to prevent criminal intent from being identified? The Liberals touted themselves before the 2015 election, saying that they would be a transparent government. Why are the Liberals fighting so hard to not bring to light what has occurred? How bad is it and what are they trying to hide?
What makes the actions of the board of directors of SDTC so egregious is that when someone receives a Governor in Council appointment, as a person appointed by the government and entrusted to oversee taxpayer money, they are not to personally profit from their work on a committee, as a Governor in Council appointee, and neither is their family. However, that is exactly what happened, from the Liberal-appointed chair to other appointed board members.
In a five-year period, there were 405 transactions approved by the board. The Auditor General sampled 226 transactions, only about half of them, and found that 186 of the 226 transactions were conflicted. That is 82%, which represents the $330 million. Statistically speaking, if the Auditor General were to look at all 400 transactions, the rest are probably just as conflicted. The 400 transactions at 82% potentially represent $832 million of taxpayer money. Is that why the Liberals are so desperate to not turn over unredacted documents to the RCMP?
This is the level of corruption that brings down careers and governments. All of the revelations of what we know so far confirm what Canadians already know about the Liberal government: It is wasteful with the tax dollars of Canadians. Just look at the Prime Minister's lavish vacations, tens of billions in corporate welfare or the arrive scam. The government prefers to reward Liberal insiders at the expense of everyday Canadians.
Currently, Mark “carbon tax” Carney's conflict of interest is skirting his Liberal advisory position. The Auditor General of Canada says the federal government ignored proper contracting policies and was unable to show contracts got value for money when the government awarded $209 million to contracts to consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
The Liberals present themselves as green crusaders while wasting taxpayer funding on technology that has nothing to do with meeting the parameters of green technologies as laid out to receive government funding. All this is at a time when Canada has slipped to the 62nd place out of 67 ranked countries on the latest climate change performance index.
The Liberals are asleep at the wheel of their own government, allowing corruption, waste and incompetence to fester right under their noses. They continually mismanage files and departments, all at the expense of taxpayers. Multiple ministers across the government have tried to skirt accountability for matters that they are directly responsible for.
The Liberal foreign affairs minister said she was not aware that her department had purchased a $9-million condo in New York City in a neighbourhood known as Billionaires Row. The Liberal minister of immigration said he was alarmed by the number of foreigners entering Canada on student visas, even though he approved of the numbers.
The former minister responsible for passports did no planning for passport renewals postpandemic, which created absolute chaos at passport offices. She has been promoted now to government House leader. The former Liberal public safety minister said he was outraged after his office was briefed and approved the move of a dangerous Canadian serial killer to a medium-security facility.
The minister of industry's response to the Auditor General's report on the green slush fund was given not with clarity but with cover-up. The minister shut the entire agency down, which forced Parliament to step in to ensure that proper authorities could get to the bottom of the corruption. On June 10, the House adopted a motion calling for the production of various documents related to STDC to be turned over to the RCMP for review. It will be up to the RCMP to launch an investigation, but Canadians cannot trust the Liberals to provide the documents to the RCMP, so Parliament ordered them to.
It is a founding pillar of our democracy that Parliament remains sovereign. What the House votes for must happen, and this is what Canadians expect. It is how our system works. However, in response to the motion adopted, government departments either outright refused the House order or substantially redacted documents. Nothing in the House order contemplated redactions. The House has the absolute and unfettered power and authority to order the production of documents. That is not limited by statute; the powers are rooted in the Constitution Act of 1867 and the Parliament of Canada Act.
The House leader of the official opposition raised a point of privilege in response to the failure to produce documents. He argued that House privilege had been breached due to the failure to comply with the House order. On September 26, the Speaker of the House issued a ruling on the question of privilege raised and found that the privileges of the House had in fact been breached.
The current Liberal Prime Minister once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. He certainly is not living up to that statement. The Prime Minister clearly has never believed his own statement, as he seeks sought to cover up corruption from the democratic representatives of the House.
This is not the first time that Liberals have tried to deny the will of Parliament. The Liberals prorogued Parliament in the middle of a scandal investigation of the WE Charity issue in order to prevent that investigation from being completed. The Liberals violated the privilege of the House when Parliament explicitly demanded unredacted documents relating to the firing of two scientists at the Winnipeg lab, the National Microbiology Laboratory, reportedly involving national security concerns. The Liberals even took the unprecedented step of suing their own Speaker to block the release of those documents.
Conservatives are the ones who exposed those scandals, and Conservatives will ensure that the Liberals comply with the order of the House to provide the SDTC documents directly to the RCMP and that they are unredacted so they can be investigated properly.
The conclusion of their own Speaker could not have been clearer: “The procedural precedents and authorities are abundantly clear. The House has the undoubted right to order the production of any and all documents from any entity or individual it deems necessary to carry out its duties.” How will the Liberals choose to respond this time? Will they continue to hold up the work of Parliament by extending the debate into their own violation of House rules when it could be ended immediately by simply providing the documents, as a majority of the House has requested? Will they drag the office of the Speaker to court once again to delay these matters?
They were forced to drop their lawsuit the last time they did this to try to stop documents from being released, but will they do this to delay information coming to light before an election? Will there be a similar scenario to what happened in 2021, when the Public Health Agency of Canada was found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to hand over documents related to the firing of two high-security virus scientists at Winnipeg's National Microbiology Lab over leaks to the regime of China during their time?
Will the Liberals prorogue Parliament, as has been whispered in the halls, to hold off being accountable for the mismanagement of government? Proroguing would wipe not just the current debate; it would wipe the work of our committees studying serious issues like labour, persons with disabilities and housing. It would destroy legislation not passed. As a reminder, the Liberals prorogued Parliament in 2020 to stop the pressing investigation into the WE Charity scandal.
Over the past nine years, for all the secrecy and the extreme lengths the Liberal government has gone to with attempts to hide information and documents on scandals during their watch, the information always seems to find a way to eventually come to light, whether through access to information requests, through whistle-blowers, through arm's-length agencies or through offices like that of the ombudsman, the Ethics Commissioner, the Parliamentary Budget Officer or the Auditor General.
If the Liberals do not trust the current Parliament, there is only one solution: a new Parliament after a carbon tax election to let Canadians decide whether the Liberals' wasteful, unethical mismanagement should continue. Canadians can decide whether they want to continue to pay for an ever-increasing carbon tax. Canadians can decide whether they wish to continue with the revolving door of violent repeat offenders, or a return to jail, not bail for those who terrorize our communities with repeat violent crimes. Canadians can decide whether they want to continue to see more money spent on fewer housing starts, or a Conservative plan to build more homes.
Canadians asked Conservatives to clean up the ethical mess of the last Liberal government and its sponsorship scandal. We will not allow another cover-up of waste, fraud and unethical misuse of taxpayers' money by the Liberals. If the Liberals seek to shut out the proper authorities from investigating their scandals, they will only shred the public confidence of Canadians in the government even further.
I would like to close with a quote from a whistle-blower that brought forth the situation:
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.
