Mr. Speaker, the first thing to ask today is why we are here and why the House is seized with this matter. It is actually not very complicated. The House ordered documents to be produced that the government has not produced. That is it. I could sit down right now and everything would be done if the government just gave the documents.
There are all kinds of convoluted arguments, like the Conservatives are talking about this too much, but the people who have the answers are all sitting right over there on that side of the House. The Liberals could end this entire thing by producing the documents. These are not documents that the Conservatives have requested, let us make that very clear, but documents that the House of Commons has requested. The government is not doing it and that is why we are here.
It could be over in literally five seconds. A member of the government could stand up right now to say the government is going to produce all the documents that Parliament has requested and we would all resume our normal duties. However, they will not, so we have to ask ourselves why we are here. It is probably because the documents contain many things that the corrupt Liberal government does not want to be released. I do not use the term “corruption” lightly, but when we look at the specifics of this particular incident, we know there was corruption. It is unequivocal.
On June 10, Parliament adopted a motion compelling the production of documents about the green slush fund. Of course, that was supported by all parties other than the Liberal Party, the government, because it has something to hide. The government did produce some documents, that is true, and government members are going to stand up during questions and comments to say that they produces some documents. However, the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, redacted those documents. For those watching who do not know what “redacted” means, it means they took a big black marker and covered up all the juicy parts. For anything that could get the Liberals in trouble, they said, “We better not release that.” That is where we are.
The motion that Parliament adopted did not say that the Liberals could pick and choose which parts of the documents to disclose, nor that the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, could go through them and take out anything that might hurt the government's reputation. The government's reputation is not so good right now, so it must be really bad if they are afraid that the documents would hurt the reputation of the government.
Let us remember that the redactions done by, again, the Prime Minister's department, the PCO, were for a Prime Minister who has been convicted not once but twice of ethics violations. Also, when the PCO was redacting those documents, let us be clear that it was not redacting that fund members met, had a couple of coffees, decided a company was at arm's length and had no conflict of interests, and gave it some funding. That was not what was redacted. What has been clearly redacted are things the Liberals know will be damaging, which is why we are here.
Parliament is supreme, and Parliament does not take on these powers on a whim. As I said before, this was supported by all of the parties, so it is not about one party trying to gang up on another. This is by the will of Parliament. Parliament has said that it wants the documents produced and that it does not want them to be redacted, because that was not in the order of Parliament. Parliament said it wants all of the documents.
We had to fight to get here. It is not as though the Liberal government agreed that the fund did not operate well, that there were some problems and that we should get to the bottom of them, and then provided the documents. No. There was a long, painful process where we had to continuously push and push to get the government to where we are today. It is the Liberals' continuous refusal to produce the documents, whether at committee or any other time, that has led us to where we are today, with Parliament adopting a motion.
Parliament does not take this lightly. We do not do this all the time. It is a rare and exceptional circumstance when Parliament demands the production of documents, and when it does so, the government should respect Parliament to follow the order. The order was not for redacted documents that the Prime Minister's personal PCO chose to redact. It is a flagrant violation of the will of Parliament.
That is why we are here. That is why this is going on, and it could all end in five seconds. The Liberals could just produce the unredacted documents. Members have now been pushing this issue for three days in Parliament. At any time, they could have done that, but they are not, and we have to ask ourselves why. These documents must contain so much evidence of corruption by the Liberal crony-appointed board members who rewarded themselves and other Liberal insiders. These documents must be so bad that they are willing let this debate go on for days and days without producing them. We can get to no other conclusion.
Now that we know the summary of why we are here, let us talk about how we got here and why we are requesting the documents.
This stuff is stranger than fiction. If we tried to make up a scandal, we could not make this up. Way back in the day with the sponsorship scandal, which I am old enough to remember, a bunch of Liberals were handing out money in brown paper bags and $400 million of taxpayer money disappeared, most of it handled by Liberal insiders and given to Liberal insiders. That was nefarious and secret and we can maybe understand how it went on for a while without being detected. However, this is very different. This government program, which I will call the green slush fund because that is what it effectively became, gave away about a billion dollars of taxpayer money. When we talk about taxpayer money, we have to think about who is paying these taxes in a really difficult time in Canada. There are single mothers working two jobs just to make ends meet. Their taxes went into this green slush fund and were abused by Liberal insiders. Let us unpack that.
The Auditor General reviewed 50% of the contracts given out, and of that 50%, 82% had a conflict of interest. When I was in high school and university, I was really happy when I got 82% because that meant I did a heck of a job. This is corruption 82% of the time on half of the contracts. If we extrapolate that, we are looking at 82% of 100%, or pretty darn close, because I do not think it was just a strange coincidence that 82% of half of the contracts had conflicts of interest. Every dollar that this fund spent had to be approved by the board. Who was on the board? It was a whole bunch of Liberal government crony appointees. What did they do? The unequivocal truth of this is that they lined their pockets.
When we think about that, we can think about the million everyday Canadians in Ontario going to food banks and the tent cities we have everywhere because life has become so unaffordable under the NDP-Liberal government. What does that mean? It means that all of this money could have been used for far better purposes. If we told single mothers working two jobs and paying taxes that a bunch of crony capitalism went on worth a billion dollars, they would be absolutely outraged. They would tell us to get to the bottom of this, because this money could have made a difference in their lives and their friends' lives. It could have been used to build housing as opposed to tent cities.
However, this is what happens with Liberal governments. I mentioned the sponsorship scandal, so none of this is new. The sponsorship scandal was about Liberal cronies giving money to other Liberal cronies, all of this insider stuff. Some 400 million dollars' worth of taxpayer dollars evaporated, much of it handed around in shady meetings in brown paper bags. What the Liberals learned from it is that they did not have to hand money around in brown paper bags in shady meetings. They can just appoint a whole bunch of their friends to a board who can approve contracts for themselves and their buddies so that everyone gets rich and it is all legal.
Corrupt Liberal government members do not care about corruption. They told board members to do whatever they wanted while they were on the board, and there were no checks and balances. This went on for years and years. It was not until the hard work of Conservative members of Parliament that this corruption was discovered. Only then did the Liberals start to do a couple of things, but this is what has happened from the Prime Minister's Office appointing Liberal insiders to run a fund where members gave each other money.
Some people are getting an A+ in corruption. An example is Cycle Capital. One member of the board ran Cycle Capital, which got $250 million from the green slush fund. That is outrageous, and Canadians are rightly outraged by it. Imagine someone gets appointed to this board by a Liberal friend and decides they are going to give $250 million to their own company. Why not? The money has to go somewhere, so why should it not go to one of their companies? This is unbelievable.
Did the director declare a conflict of interest and recuse herself from the deliberations on these things? No, she was not going to do that, because then the money would not have gotten to her company. This was all under the watchful eye of the corrupt Liberal government. I use the term “watchful eye” with great derision. There was no watchful eye; the government just let it happen.
The Liberals had to know it was happening because they knew who they appointed. When someone gets appointed, the government looks into that person. The Liberals would have known the interests these people had in various companies. They would have seen the money going out to these companies, so they must have known and just did not care. We cannot draw any other conclusion from this.
Also, this was not a one-off. Let us talk about another incident of this, which involved the former chair of the board, Annette Verschuren, who resigned from the board in 2023 following the opening of the Ethics Commissioner investigation into the agency. Boy oh boy, we know how well companies affiliated with her did. They did exceptionally well. She did not recuse herself from decisions to award money to early-stage companies that were nominated by two institutions in which she was a member. The conflict of interest is unbelievable. During her time on the board, seven out of 25 companies invested in by the venture capital firm Cycle Capital, in which she had an interest, were funded by the green slush fund.
When we listen to this, we have to give our heads a shake. This cannot be possible. How is this happening in Canada? This is the kind of corruption we would see in countries where there are real problems with corruption. The only time we have real problems with corruption in Canada is when the Liberal Party is in government, as with the sponsorship scandal, when everybody was making it rain for Liberal insiders. Now, of course, we have the green slush fund, where, once again, Liberal insiders are getting rich.
Guy Ouimet was also on the board. He is a venture capitalist on the board of Lithion Technologies, which received almost $4 million from the green slush fund.
We can go on and on and talk about this, but the fact is that this is corruption on a massive scale. We have to get to the bottom of it. How do we get to the bottom of it? We get to the bottom of it by the Liberals producing the documents.
One thing I am concerned about is the question of where the NDP is going to be on this. I know the NDP. It talks about fighting crony capitalism all the time. We need the New Democrats to stand strong with us in the demand for these documents. Two days from now will they say that they think we should move on and give up on this? That would be a tragedy. That would be defying the will of Parliament and the Canadians who want to get to the bottom of this, and get to the bottom of it we will. We will get these unredacted documents. I just hope the NDP will choose to be on the right side of this, as opposed to going back into the unholy coalition with the Liberals.
What we will hear from the Liberals is a whole bunch of what I like to call gobbledygook. They are going to say that we are disrupting the normal course of Parliament because of this. When we hear that, automatically remember that this could end if they release the documents. Whenever they say that this is taking up too much time in the House of Commons, we just ask them to release the documents and it will be over. However, they will not, because they know how damaging those documents will be.
The Liberals also say that this will be some kind of charter rights violation and that we should not give the documents to the RCMP. This is also a bait and switch. They are trying to deflect from the fact that they do not want to produce the documents. They are coming up with this grandiose scheme, and we all know this. When we say that they need to do something and they start making up all these gigantic excuses, such as the dog ate our homework, we got caught in traffic, there was a massive pileup on the highway, we start realizing that they are just explaining why they are not going to do something, that they never had an intention of doing it.
We are going to see it in the questions they are going to ask me. They are going to try to make the claim that somehow what we are doing is a charter violation, that the RCMP should not get these documents or that the RCMP already has these documents. It is all smoke and mirrors. It is all just an attempt to deflect from the fact that the Liberals will not produce the documents. No matter how many little circular arguments they try to make, when they try to go through that maze and it goes through 17 different things, trying to explain why we should stop, just remember that if they produced the documents, all of this would stop.
The RCMP does have some documents, the redacted ones. It should get the unredacted ones. We all know why the documents were redacted. Let us think about it again for a second.
Why would the government fight so hard to not release the documents? If it has nothing to hide, the truth is very simple? The truth is very simple on this, and that is to release the unredacted documents. Everything else the Liberals have to say is smoke and mirrors. It is an attempt to deflect. It is an attempt to rationalize their absolutely unacceptable behaviour, their assault on Parliament and the supremacy of Parliament. This is what they are doing. They are going to try to justify it. We are going to hear it in just a couple of minutes. No, produce the unredacted documents. That is where this all finishes, no matter what they say.
The Liberals have been going on a barrage of this. They are all over social media saying that what we are trying to do is outrageous, as if we are in control. They are in control. They should release the documents and the truth shall set them free.
The truth actually feels good. They should just get it off their chest and then beg the forgiveness of Canadians. They should say that the people who they appointed to this board engaged in severe corruption, that they are ashamed of themselves, apologize to Canadians and resign. They will not do that. They should also promise to never to do it again, except they will. It is like the story of the scorpion and the frog swimming across the river. The frog asks, “Why did you sting me; now we're both going to die.” In reply, the scorpion says, “Because I am a scorpion; it's what I do.” Why do they keep doing these corrupt things? They are Liberals; they are corrupt.