Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to join the debate today.
I will start with the question raised by the NDP member from British Columbia. The whole idea of Parliament is that this is supposed to be a chamber of debate, of conversation. Sometimes they digress, I agree, and I have certainly been in the House for some very long digressions, but what comes out of that can sometimes be quite impressive and actually miraculous.
From having the ideas of different parties, different perspectives and individual backgrounds, all coming together in this wonderful place we call Parliament, we sometimes get to the most amazing conclusions. It is, as Winston Churchill said, the best worst system, but it is certainly our system, and it is the one we have chosen, so I will never apologize for debating an issue. Sometimes I do not like what I hear, but that is okay. When I am being heckled, sometimes I do not enjoy what I am hearing, but even that is okay. That is our right. I am proud to be in a country where we have freedom of speech and where the people have representatives here in Ottawa to defend their interests.
Let us go back in time because I think it is important that we put context around this debate today. We have had nine years, as much as the government members sometimes like to create the impression that they just walked into town, all of these problems already existed, and they are here to save it. Every new Parliament is a complete ignoring of all the previous issues. They will say that those were because of some other guys, that those were because of Stephen Harper. They will say that they did this and they did that. Even nine years later, we still do not see an acknowledgement. I do not think I have once heard members from the other side say that they got something wrong, but they have certainly gotten a lot wrong.
Let us look at the background that this latest Liberal scandal falls against. It was not long into the government's mandate when we already saw the fall from sunny ways. I am not going to cover all the scandals because I only have 20 minutes, and that would take hours and hours to discuss, but I will go over some of them because I think it is important. Not long after the mandate, there was the vacation that the Prime Minister took. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was called the Aga Khan vacation. He claimed he was a friend. However, the ethics commissioner disagreed, and that was his first ethics violation, so we are starting there.
Sunny ways were looking a little dim at that point, but we will continue on. There is many to pick from, but I would say one of the most challenging scandals for the government was the SNC-Lavalin affair. We will hear, and I think this is particularly enlightening in this debate, the other side say that the Conservatives are going to trample judicial independence and the bureaucracy. No, we are not. We are simply asking for documents to be handed over to the RCMP in an ongoing investigation. That does not seem like the trampling of anything.
What was a trampling of the independence of the judiciary, as well as of the bureaucracy, was what was alleged to have happened in the SNC-Lavalin case. The Prime Minister, and if he did not do it, he came very close it, pushed on his then attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould. She, of course, had to resign to avoid this interference with the independence of the judiciary. He was looking for a deferred prosecution agreement, or a get-out-of-jail-free card, in layman's terms, for his friends at SNC-Lavalin.
There we had an actual case of interfering with the independence of the judiciary. This is not that. We have yet another scandal on this journey of corruption, so we will continue down the Liberals' journey of corruption, which has gone on over nine years. Hopefully we will be seeing the end of it very soon. The next one is really not that far off from the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
We would figure that maybe the Liberals would learn. As a small digression, I have the best kids in the world, but, as a 10-year-old and an eight-year-old, they still go off the rails occasionally. I tell them that mistakes are okay, but repeated mistakes are not. They need to learn from these things in life. Clearly, the government is so dedicated to corruption that it will keep going.
Next is the WE Charity scandal. Who can forget this notorious chapter of the Liberal government? We can argue it involved $500 billion or a trillion dollars, depending on the way we look at the numbers, but once again, Liberal insiders were getting rich with Canadian taxpayers' money. WE is an organization that is now, thanks to reporting in the media and the great work of some Conservative members on the ethics committee, troubled, at best. I will put it that way. Liberal insiders got half a trillion dollars of Canadian taxpayers' hard-earned money, and we do not know what it was for. Maybe it was to build another well in Africa or just to rename one again and again. This is the organization that the government sought to give billions of dollars to.
Then there is the “other Randy” affair, a more recent one. I have skipped over a bunch, such as clam scam and a number of other scams. I could go on, but I want to get closer to the present. We have the “other Randy” affair, which is unbelievable to me. I am shocked that this has not progressed into an RCMP investigation. If it has, I am not aware of it. A sitting member of cabinet directed his business in a cabinet meeting. This is unbelievable.
Literally millions of dollars were flowing out the door to Liberal insiders.
Then there is one of my personal favourites: arrive scam. For arrive scam, there were IT guys who said they could probably have created the app for $250,000, but let us be generous and say it would have cost $1 million or $2 million. No, it cost the government $60 million, and we do not even know if that is the full extent. The Auditor General said that the bookkeeping was so bad that she could not even say for sure the amount of resources that were dedicated to this disaster.
Let us go SDTC, which is incredibly problematic. For those not following along at home, the SDTC board was to give out millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. It was funded, I believe, in the most recent funding agreement, with a billion dollars to help the environment, to fight climate change and to modernize our economy. It is important to put a little context around that. Our economy is in dire straits. Our GDP per capita has not grown over the last 10 years. There are a number of issues, most of which funnel back to the Liberal government, as to why we are on such a terrible trajectory and our growth is the worst in the OECD. There is a lack of capital that the government has smothered with overtaxation and over-regulation, but one thing that a lot of folks will point to is Canada's troubling record on innovation.
We produce some of the greatest ideas in the world, and I say “ideas” for a reason. I do not mean intellectual property because, oftentimes, before an idea makes the jump from someone waking up in the middle of the night saying eureka and drawing it on a napkin to it becoming a commercial idea, it has already left the country.
The idea of the organization of Sustainable Development Technology Canada was not in itself a bad one. It was the execution that was bad. It could have had great utility if that capital had been directed to some of the great minds currently in Canada, those produced by our wonderful universities. It could have been directed to our companies and our businesses, which could have had a real lift for the economy. It could have solved one of our productivity issues, in fact, one of our main productivity issues, which is a lack of innovation in our economy. Instead, it was funnelled outside of our economy.
What happened? For those people who are not aware, there is a lot of specific information. If we want to really boil this down, SDTC board's primary job was to allocate capital. That is a fancy term, too. Its job was to take the billion dollars it was getting from the federal government and give it to individuals who would grow our economy by promoting innovation with that capital that was provided to them, which businesses need to start. Oftentimes, especially with tech companies, they can be capital intensive, and it can be years until there is a product. By having that funding operation, it could have added real value.
Let us go over what the Auditor General found to have happened instead. There was up to $390 million that was misspent. I think it is important to categorize the ways that the money was misspent because there was quite a variety. One was ineligibility. Members can imagine that the government gave this billion dollars to SDTC ,and it had a rule book about how the money was to be spent. That makes sense. What did SDTC do with that? It ignored it. Just in the sample that the Auditor General looked at in her report, there were 10 separate enterprises that did not fit the criteria eligibility, but they still got nearly 60 million dollars' worth of projects. That was $60 million where the board members said that they knew what they were supposed to do, as they had it in writing right in front of them, but that they were not going to give that $60 million to the businesses that fit the criteria. Instead, they picked other businesses. I do not think the Auditor General gave the reason for that, but perhaps we can draw our own conclusions.
We have other cases where there was a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest means that someone has an interest in a decision that is being made. A director may have ownership or their spouse may have ownership. That is a normal thing. Tens of millions of dollars went out the door in cases with a conflict of interest. Someone declared a conflict of interest, and the board went through the criteria, but then awarded the money anyway. There were also tens of millions of dollars misspent where they just simply did not follow or abide by their conflict of interest rules. There were hundreds of millions of dollars that left taxpayers' hands to go to, in some cases, Liberal insiders. That is extremely troubling.
Members can look at the scandal that is going on now. It has taken years, by the way, to make its way through, thanks to the great work of our Conservative members at the ethics committee. What will its impact be and where are we right now? The RCMP has come out and said that there is an ongoing investigation. The Conservative Party, supported by other opposition parties, brought forward a motion to produce documents. Unfortunately, we received from the government an incomplete set of documents.
We received piecemeal, redacted documents that did not meet Parliament's criteria. That is troubling not just on the substance of this issue but also on a broader impact as well. Parliament, in itself, is not special. I am not special. The other 337 members are not special. The people who we support and represent are special. Each one of us represents 100,000 people combined of the over 37 million Canadians. Their money was taken.
At the end of the day, over a billion dollars was taken out of the pockets of Canadians. When we look at that, it is Canadians handing over a thousand million dollars. That money could have gone to helping and feeding their families. It is money that could have gone to a down payment on a mortgage or to help individuals meet their rent. That money could have gone to so many good causes.
Instead, the government, as the rightful authority, took the money. However, when government takes money, there is a real importance to accounting for it to the rightful owners, the Canadian people. Those dollars were not generated in Ottawa. They were taken from towns like Colborne in Ontario, from places like Skeena—Bulkley Valley, Toronto and Montreal, and all brought to Ottawa. Sometimes that money is spent very well, like in supporting our women and men in the armed forces, which the Liberal government has woefully neglected. However, when the Liberal government takes a billion dollars and awards it to its friends, it is hurting the economy, Canadian people and those most vulnerable in our communities.
Last, but certainly not least, the government is undermining the authority and the legitimacy of our democratic institutions. When people see scandal after scandal, at the same point when they are paying more money to Ottawa than at any point in the history of our country, they are increasingly wondering what they are getting for those dollars. They know how hard it is to earn. They know that with the Liberal government's record cost of living crisis, record increases in interest rates and inflation, they are having a harder time.
Then to add insult to injury, the government, which is taking more money than ever before in Canadian history and just lighting it on fire, in addition to taking all that money is also running out the credit card. Not only will our families have to pay the Liberal government debt back, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to pay this debt back. What will the government have to show for it, other than a few Liberal insiders getting rich?
It absolutely makes my blood boil when the Liberal government has the audacity to say that Conservatives, by calling for accountability and for the government to not be corrupt, are somehow trampling the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
