Madam Speaker, as I was saying, this green slush fund is about slush, which is effectively a term that describes insiders within government taking taxpayers' dollars and funnelling them to insiders, corporate interests and friends of the government. It is a Liberal green slush fund. It is a program that was put forward by the Liberal government that effectively allowed taxpayers' money, millions and millions of dollars, to be funnelled to private interests without any significant oversight.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, this fund was supposed to promote green energy technology by incentivizing the private sector to step into the environmental arena and come up with innovative solutions to environmental challenges facing not only Canada but the world. On its surface, this program seemed to be suited to our times, and there was a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, let us call it a billion-dollar fund intended to promote green energy.
What happened? Instead of this money going to worthy organizations, it went to Liberal insiders and corporations connected to the government in one way or another. Let me explain how that happened. When we establish a fund like this, typically the government will establish a board of directors and draw from the private sector individuals who have expertise in a particular space, in this case the green, environmental space. These directors have a responsibility to review every application for funding on its merits and make sure that no private interests and no conflicts of interest arise that would allow corruption to sent in.
Instead of doing this, what did the board do? The directors of the board made decisions that caused much of this money, huge swaths, to be funnelled to their own companies. That, by definition, is corruption, especially if directors have not declared conflicts of interest, which they did not on 186 occasions. Directors did not recuse themselves or remove themselves from the process to ensure that the integrity of the funding mechanism was maintained, and now we have this slush fund.
When we as MPs in the House became aware of this, we asked the government to deliver to Parliament all relevant documents relating to this scandal and corruption. That is the least Canadians should expect of their members of Parliament. Instead, the government said no and that these documents are confidential, sensitive and really not in the purview of Parliament. It said, “We are the government. We know best and we are not going to let you see those documents.”
Of course, those of us in the opposition benches in the House got very upset. We said the government had no right to withhold documents that are relevant to a police investigation into corruption at the highest levels of government, so we went to the Speaker. We said we believed there was a breach of privilege here, and we asked him to order that these documents be turned over to Parliament for delivery to our police authorities, in this case the RCMP.
The Speaker of the House, the highest authority in Parliament, said yes, and he ordered the government, the Prime Minister, to turn over these documents to Parliament. That was the order of the Speaker of the House of Commons, the highest authority in Parliament. There is no appeal from that order or decision. The Speaker, who is a Liberal, made the decision to make that order, and what did the Prime Minister do? He defied the order. He said he was above Parliament and above the law and would not turn over those documents, except in redacted form.
For Canadians who do not understand what redaction is, it is simply censorship. What happens is that government bureaucrats, at the instruction of their political masters, will black out huge sections of these documents, then say they turned over some documents. Of course, there is nothing of value to be read because all the relevant information has been blacked out. That is what the Prime Minister did. He refused to divulge and disclose information to the House, the people's House, the House that should be accountable to Canadians. He said he was defying the Speaker, defying Parliament and defying MPs. He placed himself above the law and Parliament and did not give us those documents in unredacted form.