Mr. Speaker, “call in the cops”. That is the stage we are at in this most recent Liberal scandal. Why are we here? There is evidence that the Liberals have on the SDTC green slush fund. They are refusing an order from Parliament. There is no higher power than the 338 men and women who get sent here to represent the 40 million Canadians. With how our Constitution is written, there is no higher power than the majority will of this space. This space has voted that the Liberals have to turn over the evidence to the RCMP. They are refusing. That is why we are here today.
If anyone is tuning in for the first time and wondering what this SDTC is all about, it is about Liberal insiders getting rich. We are now at the point where they are getting caught, because the evidence is out there. We know that there is a stink around this fund. We know that the chairperson of the fund was caught funnelling money to her own company. We know that the environment minister has funnelled money to the company that he owns as well, which stinks, but it does not shock anybody.
Anyone who has been watching this place knows that, in the end, the Liberals got caught funnelling money to Liberal insiders. When the Liberals got elected, they got rid of the board and appointed members they support, or, more importantly, members who support the Liberals. Then the money flowed. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars. On the scale of all the scandals that the Liberals have been involved in, the $40-million sponsorship scandal, all the other scandals that the government has been known for, this one takes the cake because of the whistle-blowers. This is where, I think, the Liberals are the most concerned about evidence going to the RCMP. We know some of the evidence that has been released, which has been pretty bad.
For the people who are tuning in, we know how corrupt the Liberals are. Some of the people they put in place, obviously, are put there to influence and to enrich fellow Liberals. We then have the bureaucrats out here who are trying their best to minister to the will of the government. It does not matter who is in government. Their job is to minister to the will of whoever is in government or whatever majority decisions come out of here from members. These people have been around. They have been around scandals before. They have been around the town. They have been around Liberals before. It should not shock us but we would not believe what some of these whistle-blowers have been saying about these Liberals.
We have one whistle-blower who said, “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.” When we have whistle-blowers making a statement that the RCMP will find acts of criminal misbehaviour, it is telling. This whistle-blower also said that “if you bring in the RCMP and they do their investigation...they [will] find something”.
That is it. That is what the Liberals have shut this place down over. They cannot hand over any more evidence to the RCMP. That set off alarm bells throughout the Liberal government and party. They were concerned about which of their relatives got rich in this scandal or which minister, while sitting at the cabinet table making decisions on where to spend Canadian taxpayers' dollars, decided to spend it on his own company. How criminally, morally and ethically bankrupt are these Liberals?
Let us hear another quote from people who work closely with the Liberals:
I think the Auditor General's investigation was more of a cursory review. I don't think the goal and mandate of the Auditor General's office is to actually look into criminality, so I'm not surprised by the fact that they haven't found anything criminal. They're not looking at intent. If their investigation was focused on intent, of course they would find the criminality.
We have long-serving servants of government of all stripes in Canada ringing alarm bells on what happened here. This is a pattern where Liberals get themselves into a pickle; they find a solution for their troubles, not for what troubles Canadians; and they utilize their power of position to sweep it under the rug. We have seen this before on foreign influence. We have seen this on other scandals. We are bringing this up because the scandal is $400 million, but it is just the latest of the new scandals. I think of some of the times we have caught these Liberals in questionable activities.
I think of the Liberal WE scandal, where they gave half a billion dollars to a children's charity that turned around and gave half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's mom. This is at the top. This is where Liberals get their lessons on morals and ethics. It is from the Prime Minister. We have a Prime Minister who has been caught breaking the law on conflicts of interest. We all know of his famous trip down to the islands to party it up on the taxpayers' dime.
The Prime Minister is a man who spends his whole day preaching to Canadians on how we have to change our lives for our carbon emissions and we have to change our footprint. Meanwhile, he jet-sets all over the world, exposing his hypocrisy on the emissions of his plane out the rear end of it. It is so hypocritical of him to lecture regular-day Canadians: “How dare you turn the heat up in the middle of winter? How dare you even think you need to feed your family before you pay your carbon tax?”
This is the ridiculousness of what has transpired in Canada over the last nine years. We are a farce of the country that we used to be. There are real problems in our country and our society. I go back to the motion at hand: all this criminality and theft from SDTC. I go back to the purpose of this fund. It was to help with projects around Canada that would bring more sustainable, environmental and technological solutions. I have met with dozens of organizations and projects that would qualify for this, fabulous projects.
I am just going to update the House on a couple of them. Their response from the green slush fund was, “No, you cannot have support for your initiative.” I think of the Calgary Co-op and Leaf. The company Leaf brought to market a consumer bag that has no plastic. It is decomposable just in one's garden. The company brought it to Ottawa. The bureaucrats said, “We cannot have this. It looks wrong. It does not look right for what we are trying to do.” It is not the science, but looks. It is always about looks with these guys.
What did that corporation do? It thought, “Why do we not bring a consumer bag to the market that is biodegradable, that people can use however many times they want, but when it gets wet and thrown in the compost bag, it decomposes?” That is a way that we think we should be tackling some of our challenges in the environment. It is through technology, not taxes. Now, we had a technology fund, SDTC, that should have been funding just that. It should have been funding technology so we got those answers, and instead, it was funding Liberal insiders, who were getting rich. This is what happened in Canada over the last nine years.
I know my time is almost up. I believe I have five more minutes. That is fabulous because we have some more scandals to go over.
Another one was the arrive scam. Why this is important is that these are real taxpayers dollars. Think of the people waiting at a food bank, maybe right now. Maybe right now they do not have the means to provide for their families. We know there are lots out there. Over two million Canadians are relying on a food bank because the Liberals have made the cost of living so expensive in Canada. It did not have to be this way. There are tens of millions, if not billions, of dollars of waste in Ottawa that could be refocused into helping Canadians get through this terrible time we are suffering as a country.
One classic scandal had to do with the $54 million wasted on the arrive scam. That was an app that could have been built in a weekend with under $50,000. That is what the private sector would have done. Do colleagues know what these Liberals did? They had to make sure their Liberal insiders got paid. In that scandal, numerous tech companies did zero work but billed for tens of millions of dollars.
That was just the tip of the iceberg of things we have kind of wasted money on. This goes right to the ministers of the Crown. It has been highlighted how the environment minister secretly funnelled money into his company. We have the international trade minister, who gave over a $16,000 contract, sole-sourced, to a friend, just a friend. “You know what, we will just make that $16,000 payment go to whomever we would like.”
Nickels and dimes make dollars. It all adds up. We talked about $10 million here, $54 million for ArriveCAN and $400 million for the green slush fund. The waste goes on and on.
At committee, we have been studying some of the waste in post-secondary education. We have some silly studies we have funded as Canadian taxpayers. If someone is struggling right now in Canada, they should know their tax dollars went to UBC to study gender politics and Peruvian rock music. That was $20,000. If someone is one of the working poor, barely getting by and wondering why they have to pay all this federal income tax, it is because someone has to study gender politics and Peruvian rock music. Another study is “Reframing Gender and Race in Music Theory and Its Pedagogy”. It is unbelievable that we are spending this kind of money out there.
There is a new study entitled “Suitably Dressed: Finding Social Justice through Distinctions in Modest Fashion for Men, Women and Transgender People”; that is $35,000. If someone is struggling today and wanting to know what is their government is doing, this is some of the stuff it is spending money on. Another one is about large-scale archaeological video analysis, out of the U of C, for $280,000. Here is another one, kind of timely: “Narco-Animalia: Human-Animal Relations in Mexico's Narco-Culture”. That was $9,266.
I see my time has wrapped up. I thank everyone for paying attention and look forward to questions and comments.