Mr. Speaker, once again, I rise in the House to deal with this privilege motion. For those watching, just to help us understand where we are, the House, with a majority of MPs, passed a motion in June. It demanded that all documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada, otherwise known as the Liberal billion-dollar green slush fund, be tabled with the law clerk of the House of Commons and be transferred to the RCMP for investigation.
It gave the government, the Liberals, 30 days to do this. They did not comply. As a result, on the first day back in the fall, the opposition House leader raised a question of privilege. The Speaker agreed that members' privileges had been breached and that the government had ignored an order of the House. The government decided, yet again, to ignore a majority of MPs of the House, representing a majority of Canadians. Why did the Liberals ignore this?
It is true that they have tabled 29,000 pages of documents, as the government House leader said yesterday; most of them are what is called redacted. What that means is that they are censored, 29,000 pages of black ink. There was so much black ink that the government had to commission the printing presses at the Toronto Star to black out all the secrets they are trying to hide about Liberal insiders who funnelled $400 million of taxpayer money to companies they had a financial interest in.
We have been extensively asking questions in the House and in committee, and the government and Liberal members have been trying to cover it up. They continue to do so. In fact, yesterday, I asked a question in the House about the interest of the radical Liberal environment minister in profiting from the Liberal green slush fund.
I asked that question, as did my other colleagues on other Liberal scandals, and the Liberal MP who occupies the Chair in question period thought that the language we were using offended Liberals. I can tell everyone that Canadians are offended by the corruption and by the obstruction of justice by the government.
For six months since that order, the government has refused to table the unredacted and uncensored documents, the 29,000 pages of hidden Liberal secrets. It must be really bad. I asked questions about the particular individual who sits in cabinet, the Liberal Minister of Environment.
Prior to his election in 2019, the Minister of Environment was an in-house lobbyist for a venture capital company in Quebec called Cycle Capital. In the four years prior to his election in 2019, he lobbied the federal government; the Prime Minister's Office; the Prime Minister's principal secretary, Gerald Butts; the industry department; the industry minister's office; and many other government departments. He did this 47 times.
What was his reward for that? The owner of Cycle Capital gave him shares in the company. How do we know that? We know that because the Minister of Environment declares on his ethics reports that he owns shares in Cycle Capital. The owner of Cycle Capital was appointed to the board of the Liberal green slush fund by former Liberal industry minister Navdeep Bains.
We remember Navdeep Bains. He is the one from industry who left government early and is now an executive at Rogers Communications, the most expensive cellphone company in the world. He was in charge of reducing cellphone bills while minister of industry, and his reward for seeing cellphone bills escalate was a nice, cushy, fat corporate job at Rogers. If that is not an ethical challenge for people, the Minister of Environment's ownership of these shares as a reward for his lobbying for Cycle Capital is. The owner of Cycle Capital was on the board in 2016.
During the Minister of Environment's career prior to politics, when he lobbied the government, companies owned by Cycle Capital received over $100 million from the Liberal green slush fund. They received money from the BDC. They received money from EDC in what is called fund of funds. They were investors in these funds. The Minister of Environment was rewarded with these shares. He has refused all invitations by parliamentary committees to come and explain himself.
I raised the question yet again in the House, which offended many Liberals. I can tell members what offends Canadians. It is the graft and corruption that goes on with the Liberal government. The government seems to accept it and think it is just fine. The Liberals think it is okay to give $400 million of green slush fund money to people appointed to the board by the government, and they voted to give that money to companies they own. That is okay for them. They can just cover it up.
The privilege motion was agreed to by the Speaker on September 26. We are about to be in December, and then into next year. It would be a nice Christmas present for Canadians for the Prime Minister to come clean, stop censoring the documents and release the documents. He will not do that. However, he stands in the House, as he did today, complaining that the important work of the ineffective programs the Liberals are proud of, such as the housing decelerator program, is being held up because Conservatives continue to press for honesty, for integrity, for the government to not put itself above the House of Commons and for it to obey the order of the House. It refuses to do so.
From September to December, it will have been four or five months in which the House has debated this. It will go on. The way to stop this is for the government to actually obey the order of the House, the Conservatives, the Bloc and the NDP. The majority of members of Parliament voted for the release of these documents. It has not received much media coverage. We had $16 glasses of orange juice receive much more media coverage than this. The mainstream media are not covering this, although online media are covering it.
Shockingly, yesterday, The Globe and Mail wrote an editorial on this. I will quote what it said. I will not read the whole thing, because I know that Liberal members read it intently and then quietly kept their heads down in question period, hoping no one would notice. Here is what The Globe and Mail said is the actual cause of what is going on here in the House. It said, “But the actual cause is the Trudeau government's contemptuous refusal—