Madam Speaker, once again, I rise in the House to speak to the privilege motion. In case anyone at home is confused about this, it is all about why we are debating this motion. Back in June, members of Parliament passed a motion demanding that all documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada be transferred to the RCMP for investigation within 30 days. The government did not do this.
On our first day back in the fall, the opposition House leader raised a question of privilege. The Speaker of the House agreed that the government ignored an order of the House, and it has since ignored the Speaker's ruling. The government will argue that it did not ignore the ruling and did, in fact, table the requested documents. However, what it tabled was 29,000 pages of black ink. The documents were almost completely redacted.
What have they redacted? What are they hiding? My colleagues and I have asked every day in the House for the Liberals to adhere to the orders of the House and turn over all the reports unredacted for the RCMP to investigate. To date, they still refuse. Why? Of course, the government is going to say that the Prime Minister's department, the Privy Council Office, has the right to redact documents. However, the act actually says that if a body such as Parliament were to order the production of documents, the Privy Act cannot be used as an excuse to redact information.
Let us go back a bit. Why did the House demand that the SDTC documents be handed over to the RCMP in the first place? The Auditor General did an audit for five years of SDTC. She sampled only about half of the transactions, 226 transactions, the board approved, and the Auditor General found that 186 of the 226 transactions were conflicted. In other words, 82% of those transactions. This means that only 18% were in good faith. If our kids came home from school with a score of 18%, they would need to do some explaining.
What do these conflicts of interest really mean? They mean the Liberal board members in charge of distributing funds that were meant to help Canadian companies develop and deploy sustainable technologies were funnelling money into their own pockets. Why do I say Liberal board members? It is because the chair of the board was hand-picked by the Prime Minister himself, ignoring any kind of fair hiring process.
Let us start with her. She approved $390 million in funding for projects that had extremely disturbing conflicts. According to the Auditor General, the Liberals' green slush fund handed out $58 million to projects without a promise that the contribution agreement terms were met. Another $58 million went to 10 projects deemed ineligible, as they could not prove an environmental benefit or were not developing green technologies. Finally, there was $334 million in over 186 cases where SDTC board members held a conflict of interest.
Here is an interesting piece of information that my colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets shared previously. The Prime Minister's far-left radical environment minister is profiting from Sustainable Development Technology Canada. One may ask how this is possible. Prior to his election, he was a paid lobbyist for a green technology investment firm called Cycle Capital. Cycle Capital is a venture capital firm that has received investments of over $200 million from the Liberal green slush fund since it was created. Remember that these funds were approved by the Prime Minister's hand-picked board members, including the environment minister's long-time personal friend Andrée-Lise Méthot. Interestingly, Andrée-Lise Méthot was not only hand-picked by the Prime Minister to sit on the board of SDTC but is also the founder and owner of Cycle Capital.
However, it gets even better. During her time on the board, companies in which Cycle Capital was invested received more than $100 million of taxpayer money. These taxpayer dollars inflated the value of Cycle Capital. Since the Prime Minister and his corrupt band of merry men took office, Cycle Capital has grown from $200 million to over $600 million. Let us connect the dots. Who benefits from a company whose value is inflated by taxpayer dollars? It is shareholders, of course. Guess who continues to hold shares in Cycle Capital. It is the far-left, radical, orange suit-wearing environment minister. This is the very definition of a conflict of interest.
As we all know, the tone of any organization starts at the top, and at the top of the Liberal-NDP government, the tone is corruption. As my colleague from Lambton—Kent—Middlesex stated the other day during her intervention, “The government has a pattern of giving its friends hundreds of millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, while shirking responsibility for all it has done to destroy Canadians' livelihoods.” She took us all on a walk down scandal lane and revealed 68 of the Liberal scandals. In my previous intervention, I listed some of them and this morning I will mention a few more. I cannot possibly list all of them, as I only have 20 minutes, but here are a few.
There was the pressure put on the first indigenous justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, by the Prime Minister to get Liberal donor SNC-Lavalin off the hook. He fired her when she refused to the help with the cover-up. There was the “people experience things differently” response by the Prime Minister to groping allegations. There was the WE Charity scandal, for which the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament to escape scrutiny. There was the Prime Minister's assault on an NDP member of Parliament on the floor of the House of Commons. The was export of personal protective equipment to China during a pandemic and giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in ventilator contracts to Liberal Party insider Frank Baylis.
There were the fake charges against Mark Norman, the illegal invocation of the Emergencies Act and the fabrication of reasons to justify its illegal use. The was also the trampling of Canadians with horses and the seizing of Canadians' bank accounts.
There was the Winnipeg lab scandal and the Public Health Agency tracking scandal. There was the rampant abuse of staff in the office of the former governor general, who was appointed by the Prime Minister. There was the Governor General's $100,000 private jet parties and the Liberals' connection to an illegal casino magnate.
There were the vaccine delays, the Prime Minister's racist costumes on an official trip to India, his racist blackface costumes and the mass airport delays and cancellations. The was the decriminalization of hard drugs. There were the over 72 secret orders in council. There was the Liberals' diplomats attending a party at the Russian embassy during the Ukrainian war and the minister who gave a $17,000 contract to a Liberal-aligned media firm. There were also efforts to obtain unwarranted border searches of electronics and restrictions on online free speech.
There was the $11 million in renovations to the Prime Minister's cottage, the $8 million barn built at Harrington Lake and a Jamaican vacation that cost taxpayers at least $162,000. There was the increase of the carbon tax during an energy crisis and the misinformation to Canadians about electoral reform. There was the skipping of the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation so that the Prime Minister could go surfing in Tofino. There was the elimination of mandatory minimums for gun offences while going after law-abiding firearms owners and the Prime Minister's party in Scotland while Canadians were under lockdown. There were the failed reforms of the ATIP system and the contracts awarded to government employees without proper bids, such as those for GC Strategies for the ArriveCAN app, or, should I say, the arrive scam app. There were also the Liberal cover-ups of foreign interference and the compromised Liberal MPs who continue to sit in the House of Commons.
There was the Bernardo and Magnotta prisoner transfer, which is a huge one since there has been a 75% increase in violence against women in this country due to the Liberals' misguided laws. There was the former Nazi scandal invitation and his recognition in the House of Commons, and the delay in recognizing the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
We have skyrocketing debt, skyrocketing inflation, skyrocketing addictions and skyrocketing overdose deaths. After nine years of the Prime Minister, everything is broken. He has skyrocketed the debt to the point where we are spending more on the interest of the debt than we do on health care. He has also skyrocketed the cost of groceries, sending more than two million people per month to food banks.
He has skyrocketed crime with his catch-and-release bail and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for major crimes. Auto theft is up 200%, violence against women is up 75%, and the Prime Minister's legalization of hard drugs has seen the pop-up of drug dens near children's schools and playgrounds and has caused a massive number of overdose deaths.
Now we have the Liberals' attempt to bribe us with our own money in the form of a $250 cheque to those who earn $150,000 net income. I repeat, that is net income, meaning after-tax dollars, but there is nothing for those who truly need supports. Here is what the Liberals forgot to tell us: They will borrow more cash and print more money, which by their own admission will lead to higher inflation and devalue our dollar. More borrowing means interest rates are likely to stay higher for longer. We are already seeing evidence of this in the bond market. Borrowing more means our kids and grandkids will foot the bill. This is simply short-term gain for long-term pain.
If the Prime Minister is so confident in his economic policies, why does he not let the people decide and call an election? He can run on his failed economic ideology, while common-sense Conservatives would run on our common-sense plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Axing the tax would permanently lower the price of gas, groceries and home heating. We would build the homes by axing the sales tax on new homes, sparking 30,000 extra homes built each year and effectively lowering prices. This week the member for Winnipeg North asked why we should listen to “the self-serving leader of the Conservative Party". I really hope the member would take some time to reflect on his own party and the actions of his leader. He may come to realize it is the Liberal leader, the Prime Minister, who is self-serving, as evidenced by the list of growing scandals designed to line his pockets and those of his friends.
It is the Conservative Party that cares about Canadians, all Canadians, not just powerful insiders. Perhaps he and all members on the other side of the House will eventually realize the words coming out of their mouths do not match the actions of their party. They have spent millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on their friends, while Canadians struggle to make ends meet.
I imagine the good that $400 million could have done, the deserving lives it could have changed, and I ask this: Is it not the very definition of self-serving to ignore the ruling of the House to provide documents that could self-incriminate? Once again, the members on that side of the House like to project their character flaws onto us.
As the Liberals' popularity plummets in the polls, they continue to gaslight Canadians. What they do not seem to realize is that Canadians have had enough. Canadians need a common-sense plan that puts Canadians first. Common-sense Conservatives would put Canada first. We would build our military and secure our borders. Canadians want a prime minister with the brains and backbone to stand up for this country, a leader who knows how to play chess, not checkers. In the words of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, “Canada first...and Canada always.” It is time to stop the corruption, axe the tax to help all Canadians and call a carbon tax election today.