Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to a privilege motion that is very important to me because the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, of which I am vice-chair, is right in the middle of its study on Sustainable Development Technology Canada, following the Auditor General's report.
I will start by putting my cards on the table. Over the past few days, people have said that there was obstruction going on in Parliament and that this privilege motion was just a way to keep the government from moving forward or doing anything. I just wanted to mention this. This is not just about the primacy of Parliament. For starters, even if the government had a majority, it would have been wrong, because it is the duty of this Parliament to keep an eye on what the government is doing. There is a clear separation of powers. Parliament must be able to deal with important issues. I will delve into some aspects of that. Parliament must be able to ensure that the government is governing effectively, in the best-case scenario, or at least that there is no corruption. In this case, there appears to have been corruption.
This not just a question of the primacy of Parliament. Democracy is based on trust. The government has repeatedly demonstrated that people should not necessarily trust its work. Since it refuses to hand over documents to Parliament, it appears to have something to hide. What does the government have to hide? It is all well and good to shelter behind the virtue of keeping the RCMP and the Auditor General independent. Of course, no one questions that. However, it is important for our duty as parliamentarians that all the requested documents be given to the law clerk and parliamentary counsel.
At this point, the Liberals seem to be trying to hide potentially damning evidence. Some will say that the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry acted quickly and SDTC was abolished. In fact, SDTC, which was created in 2001, was abolished because the Auditor General's report had identified so many problems that it was better to scrap SDTC altogether. Excellent.
The minister also arranged to have the board of directors changed completely. Now there are only three people on the board. I should point out that one of them appeared before the committee yesterday. Despite her $1,500-a-day salary, she was unable to answer any questions clearly and precisely. However, she has been in the position for four months. It took several points of order and reactions from the committee chair for the witness to simply say that she did not know the answer or to finally agree to answer parliamentarians' questions.
The SDTC executives were not affected. The Auditor General's report identified some issues, but so far, not much has happened in committee. However, a lot of things were identified in that report. The executives were not affected, but the former president and CEO resigned at the end of 2023. Apparently, she is now enrolled in a very expensive program at Harvard.
I will give some examples of very problematic matters that are tied to this former president and CEO that the House should also be seized with. Other executives who are implicated in the Auditor General's report still have not appeared at committee because they are on sick leave. We respect that, but it is preventing us from moving forward with our study. What we are asking for in exchange for the fact that we cannot receive key witnesses is the government's co-operation. However, the government is still refusing to provide Parliament with the documents that would enable it to be fully informed when it deals with the matter.
The government tells us that we must look ahead and consider everything that has been done. However, when a board member who is meant to oversee the transition is incapable of answering parliamentarians' questions, we have serious questions about that transition, the reasons for the transition and the government's willingness to actually recover this money and invest it in projects that are genuinely eligible.
Here is an example of a question the board member was unable to answer yesterday. It had to do with SDTC's response to one of the recommendations in the Auditor General's report. No, SDTC did not agree with all of the recommendations. There was just one recommendation that it partially agreed with. It was this:
Sustainable Development Technology Canada should reassess projects approved during the audit period to ensure that they met the goal and objectives of the Sustainable Development Technology Fund and all its eligibility criteria.
This recommendation seems quite clear, yet it has only been partially accepted. Why is that? It is because SDTC hires consultants to come in and review all projects. Yesterday, the board member was unable to assure me that, if the Auditor General had designated a project as ineligible, it would remain ineligible. I was told that if consultants then came in and said the project was eligible, they would probably win that one. That means that SDTC is not even in a position to accept all the Auditor General's recommendations and agree that certain projects deemed ineligible by the Auditor General of Canada are in fact deemed ineligible.
There is more. The contracts have been drawn up so that they cannot be broken unless the company commits fraud. This means that, in the case of the ineligible project I just described, the company simply applied. It was told that there was money in the fund and that all it had to do was apply. The company did not commit fraud. It was SDTC that accepted ineligible projects, even in cases of conflict of interest. People were friends with company representatives. No problem, the company gets money. However, the contract cannot be broken. This means that projects deemed ineligible by the Auditor General, and which could be deemed ineligible by the consultants, will continue to receive public money. These are ineligible projects, projects that do not comply with the contribution agreements.
That means things are worse than we thought. Not only are they unable to get back funds from ineligible projects, they stopped funding a lot of projects. Incidentally, the board member was unable to confirm for me that not a single penny of SDTC funding had been allocated to companies since the start of the year, despite her $1,500-a-day salary, I would remind the House. There is more. Since the government cannot break its contracts with these ineligible companies, it has to keep funding them. That is highly problematic. Ineligible companies will keep getting funding.
Here is another example. Consider SDTC's more recently created ecosystem fund. It was a secret fund that was never announced or mentioned even on the website. Certain apps can trace websites over time and reveal what they looked like before. We took a look.
It was not a publicly available fund. I assume that only businesses contacted by certain members could receive funding. One example is ALUS, which received $5 million. As we know, and as various witnesses said several times, that company was not eligible, mainly because of problems related to financial standards, but also, as we heard, because it did not fund or support the development or demonstration of new technologies. Nevertheless, that company received $5 million from a secret fund.
This company had something special, and her name is Aldyen Donnelly. According to the former CEO, Ms. Lawrence, whom I mentioned earlier, she is a very good friend and they have known each other for 20 years. Yes, that is what she said when she appeared before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Ms. Donnelly stood to make quite a tidy sum as a subcontractor for ALUS. Now she works for that company, which received $5 million in public money even though it did not meet any of the criteria. That is great.
If money is still owed, these companies will continue to receive public funds. I am repeating that because it is really very problematic for me. ALUS may be one of them. If that company is still owed money, it will be impossible to get the money back or break the contract, because the company itself did not commit fraud. If the company is still owed money, the fund must pay it, or the government will be sued.
What firm helped SDTC write its contracts? Osler, apparently. Yes, that was the very same firm that advised Ms. Verschuren on conflict of interest issues and told her that she did not need to recuse herself from decisions. It was the very same firm that told SDTC it could approve projects by the dozen, without having the board review each one, during COVID-19. Yesterday, the board member confirmed that Osler is still advising SDTC. There is no clear break. There is no good faith there.
Here is another example. Osler advises a fund called Active Impact. This fund, advised by Osler, has a portfolio that somewhat resembles that of SDTC. Osler advises SDTC on the eligibility of projects, on how to approve projects, yet Osler also advises a fund that will invest in the same companies that SDTC invests in.
All the examples I am providing cannot be set out in an Auditor General's study, because they go beyond the scope of what the Auditor General can audit. On the other hand, they are exactly what this Parliament needs to address. I have plenty of examples like that.
Tomorrow, we will be hearing from the former industry minister. We have a lot of questions for him, and I would rather save them for tomorrow. That said, there are still many things about SDTC that are dubious. Each stone we turn over reveals a new element that interests us and that should interest the entire House and the Quebeckers and Canadians who are listening to us.
I gave many examples, including the case of the current director who refused to answer questions and repeated the same talking points even after the committee chair asked her several times to answer parliamentarians' questions.
Finally, we have to wonder who is doing the obstructing. Is the opposition obstructing Parliament with this privilege motion? Is it not really the government that is obstructing Parliament by refusing to answer parliamentarians' questions? Even people appointed by the government are refusing to answer questions in committee. Furthermore, in the House, the government is refusing to answer questions and accusing the opposition of being short-sighted and trying to obstruct Parliament. The Conservatives may have a slight inclination in that direction, but I can assure my colleagues that we do not. I do not think it is necessarily the case for the NDP either.
What we want is answers. With all the information I just mentioned, some of which was sent to me by the whistle-blower, we need to get to the bottom of things. Yes, it was the whistle-blower at SDTC, someone not yet protected by our legal system, who shared that information with me, all of which was validated by my team. We have to look into this, and there must be consequences.
As I said, there is no point in asking the Auditor General of Canada to look at these issues again, because it exceeds her authority under the Auditor General Act, which determines the scope of the files she can look at and where she can go to audit. She cannot necessarily go and check the financial standards of the companies that have received funding. In this case, she simply looked at a sample of an SDTC project over a number of years. However, what the Office of the Auditor General found was serious enough for the fund to be abolished. Again, the fund had existed for 23 years. It was a success. It would appear that the Liberals have something to hide, and this may be one of the reasons why they refuse to hand over all the requested documents.
It is also important to point out that one of the reasons the Bloc Québécois supports this question of privilege is that we recognize that this fund was useful and that the funding granted by SDTC was useful in most cases. Most of the small and medium-sized businesses that received funding had nothing to do with the examples that I gave of conflict of interest or ineligibility. They had nothing to do with that. On the contrary, they need that money to operate. The federal government finally had a useful fund that was financing a number of projects. In my riding and in the ridings of some of my colleagues, there are some wonderful companies with great ideas and new clean technologies that we will need if we are to make a green transition. However, the Liberal Party has just shown us what it does best, and that is taking good ideas and ruining them. That is what it did with SDTC. It ruined a great fund.
Here is another example of a question the board member was unable to answer yesterday. What will happen to the funds that SDTC has not used? Several hundreds of millions of dollars have not yet been allocated to companies. That money is in SDTC's coffers and will be transferred to the National Research Council of Canada, then to a Crown corporation that will distribute the funding. Neither the Privy Council nor the board member who was appointed four months ago were able to tell me whether these funds will be used to meet the same objectives, namely sustainable development objectives. No one is able to answer me, neither the Privy Council nor the current SDTC board of directors.
No one can say whether the funding that was allocated for clean, green technologies will be knowingly used for such purposes. We do not know, so we are still in the dark. What a great transition, eh? We do not have any answers to questions, we are not being given the documents, and no one can answer such simple and well-meaning questions as this: “What will that money be used for from now on?” Actually, we do know what it will be used for. If the Conservatives take power, then it is possible that the money will not be used for clean technologies but may instead be used to buy more pipelines or to subsidize western oil. That is why the Conservatives and the Liberal government agree on one thing, that it was a good idea to abolish the fund, even if it is for different reasons. For some, it was to get rid of evidence, while for others, it was to get rid of a green fund. It is that simple.
Despite all this information coming to light by the day, I would still like to mention one thing. We do not dispute the independence of the Auditor General of Canada, and I think that the original motion was flawed in that regard. It is not up to us, in Parliament, to hold the Auditor General of Canada to account. However, and this is why I am rising in the House today, it is of the utmost importance that, when we ask the government for documents, it provide them to us in a timely manner and unredacted. Not only is this consistent with our parliamentary standards and responsibilities, it is also the government's duty to provide us with such documents. The truth is sorely needed in this matter. I will therefore address my comments here through the Chair to the government.
If it is going to lose the next election, then let it lose with its head held high. The government should end on a good note by getting to the bottom of the SDTC affair. We need this, and a lot of questions have been raised. Let it finish with its head held high.
