Madam Speaker, I am glad I caught your eye so I could rise again to speak on this amendment.
We are in a situation now where Parliament has been paralyzed for multiple weeks because of the Liberal government's unwillingness to release all of the unredacted documents to the public. I spoke to the original main motion and the subamendment on this matter. I then told my constituents about the depth of the issue before the House, that the government was refusing to disclose documents that my constituents as taxpayers had already paid for, documents that by all rights they should obtain, because as taxpayers they have a right to know what their government is doing with both funds and documentation.
We are talking about almost $400 million that was misappropriated, misspent and, as the Auditor General has indicated, corruptly sent to the crony friends who ministers of the Crown had appointed to the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC, which we have labelled as the green slush fund.
I heard a lot from my constituents who replied. They were very happy to see that all opposition parties, way back in June, voted as a group against the Liberal government, demanding that the documents be given to the House of Commons law clerk, who would then give them to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP.
My constituents were pleased to see that, because they are just as worried as I am that close to $400 million had been corruptly spent, corruptly sent to companies. In some cases, as the Auditor General discovered, about one in five or one in six companies that made applications and were given money had nothing to do with financing and supporting green technology, innovation and commercialization in Canada.
I tell my constituents about examples like that. How do we get to billions of dollars of deficits and new debt that is accumulated on the national Treasury that all citizens, all taxpayers, are responsible for? Well, it starts with millions and then it becomes billions. This is a perfect example: almost $400 million that could have been spent on anything else, or it could have been saved. We could have had a lower deficit in a particular year.
Many Conservative members have asked what we could have done with the close to $400 million that was corruptly spent by SDTC's board, by board members who were appointed by a now former industry minister. Again, as I recounted in a prior debate, this fund had a clean bill of health right up until the Liberals decided to muck around in the board, the individuals who were involved in decisions on which projects would be funded and which ones would not be funded.
First, the Liberals replaced the board chair. Jim Balsillie, a well-known entrepreneur in Canada who has had a lot of success in business, was really inconvenient for them, because he was criticizing government policy-making and government decisions. The government replaced him with a different board chair, Annette Verschuren, and then other board members started getting replaced.
This is where the issues began to accumulate, and this is why we find ourselves now considering the issue before the House of the government still refusing to hand over the documents. The House order that was passed back in June, which the government has refused to comply with in the time span that was given to it, was very direct and clear.
Any documents to do with SDTC or the green slush fund were to be given to the law clerk's office. The law clerk, who we all trust as parliamentarians, often works with different parliamentary committees when there are issues of documentation and redaction of documents. The House has an absolute and complete right to get unredacted documents of whatever type. We trust the law clerk to look at them carefully and decide which documents should be made available to parliamentarians.
In this situation, the House basically passed the motion, by majority vote, that the documents are to be given to the law clerk and then to the RCMP.
I have listened to the debate over the past few weeks from different Liberal caucus members, members of the government caucus, and an excuse they are giving is that some of these documents may infringe the charter rights of some Canadians. I would say that argument is specious. It is a ridiculous argument to make. The Liberals have never actually said which charter rights would be infringed.
The charter cannot be used as a shield for Liberal government corruption. That was never the intention when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was ratified in the Constitution, for it to be used later by a government to say it cannot release documents because what may be seen in them could infringe on some types of rights. That was never the intention. It is a bad argument to make.
In the case of my constituents, based on the replies I have received to the newsletter I sent out, which contained more information on exactly what is going on and which types of documents we are requesting to see, they responded by saying they agree. It cannot be the case that a government could argue that the charter protects it and, therefore, it cannot release any documents.
Many of the documents the government has released were redacted, had portions blacked out, which is a frustration I have had for many years here. I see it being done at parliamentary committees and see it done literally in the House of Commons. We have made it very clear that if we had wanted redacted documents or to give that option to the Government of Canada, to the Liberal government, we would have said that in the motion.
The motion said we give some latitude to give redacted documents when it is, say, provincial-federal relations or private information, which are sections of the Access to Information Act that allow for redactions. We would have said, for machinery of government, government operations or cabinet confidences, the government did not need to give us those unredacted. We would have referenced parts of the ATIP act, but we did not. The motion just said to give all of the documents over.
The documents must be really bad. There must be something truly terrifying there for Liberal cabinet members and especially for the industry minister, because it was partially under his watch that decisions had to be made. The Liberals have run away from this fund. That is how bad it is.
The fund has basically been rolled into the National Research Council, and the Liberals have washed their hands of it and pretend as if they were not actively participating in what was going on. There were government officials in those meeting rooms with the board members. Again, these documents must be really awful to paralyze all of Parliament, where we have been debating this for weeks on end.
Back to my original point, I always tell my constituents why we want these documents. We want these documents because we need to get to the truth of what happened to the close to $400 million that was corruptly allocated to companies. The Auditor General found 186 cases out of 400 cases where the conflict of interest rules were not followed, for a fund that, pre-2017, had a clean bill of health.
The only thing that really changed between when the fund was originally created, in the 2000s, and 2017 is that this particular cabinet took over, and then the Liberals decided it would be okay to start finagling and making decisions that were wrong. The people they appointed made these corrupt decisions. The Liberals are responsible to the taxpayers, to the citizens of Canada, for releasing those documents to show us exactly where the money went.
After the rebate, the carbon tax is still costing the average Alberta family $911. How many Alberta families could have their carbon tax covered for close to $400 million? It is a huge number of people. I think the entire population of Alberta could have had their carbon tax paid for almost an entire year. It is real money. It would have a real impact on people in my riding. The carbon tax has had a real impact.
Canadians know they do not get all of the carbon tax back. They feel it in their pocketbook. They feel it at the end of the month when they are paying their bills. They feel it when they see how much income tax is deducted on their T4. They feel it when they are told the government is missing its budget forecast by $7 billion to $8 billion, because that is what the government has done here. That is about a 20% miss.
The deficit was closer to $47 billion or $48 billion for the last fiscal year. Then the Parliamentary Budget Officer added $400 million to that, saying it was mismanaged. Then we add in this $400 million, which was not just mismanaged, but corruptly directed to, sometimes, the board members of SDTC, the green slush fund, who would be a board member or a corporate officer of the company that received the money.
I remember my time at the Chamber of Commerce. This is corporate ethics 101 of the stuff we just cannot do under any circumstances. We are supposed to recuse ourselves from the decision-making process when we have situations where there is either a real conflict of interest or, even worse, a perception of a conflict of interest. This is a situation where those people appointed by the Liberal cabinet made those corrupt decisions. That is why taxpayers and citizens have a right to know how deep the rot goes.
This is from a newsletter that I sent to my constituents. In a prior speaking opportunity on the main motion, I related it back to my founding experiences as to what made me a Conservative. Why did I choose the Conservative Party of Canada as the vehicle for my ideas? I always describe it that way. There are lots of different political parties. They organize our passions. What are we passionate about? What are our priorities? I became a Conservative partially because of the 1995 referendum in the province of Quebec. Then the second major founding event in my life was the sponsorship scandal. The sponsorship scandal was another fund, not quite the same size with about a tenth of the money being corruptly spent, that was given to the advertising buddies of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Every single time there is a major corruption scandal in Canada, we somehow have a Liberal government in charge. It has been almost every single time. That to me was a very foundational event in my life. That is what led me become a Conservative, more philosophically, because corruptly assigning money that is taxpayers' cash to the Liberals' friends and buddies is just wrong. It is plain wrong.
That should have been known by the people making these decisions. The Auditor General has basically indicated that. As she went through her audit, she explained, line by line, every single issue that existed with the green slush fund, but this has not been the only scandal. We also had SNC-Lavalin.
Every single time a scandal comes up, there is a sort of arc, where at first the Liberals deny that anything has gone on. That was the case with SNC-Lavalin and the deferred prosecution, which caused the firing of the first indigenous justice minister and attorney general in the history of Canada. She was fired, undeservedly fired. Then the former president of the treasury board was summarily fired. Both of them were expelled from the government caucus. That was the SNC-Lavalin scandal. At first, the Liberals denied it. They denied that the Globe and Mail story was true. Then they said the story is true, but not what we are pretending that it is. Eventually they said this is exactly how it happened. There was a recording that was released as well.
To me, the whole story, or arc, is happening again. The government, at first, insisted there was nothing to see here. It said there was nothing going on. Liberals got up in question period, answered questions and denied that anything went on as ardently as they possibly could. Eventually, the Auditor General's report said that the situation was untenable. There was not just corruption, but very deep corruption that went back to 2017, when decisions on who could make those decisions about how the money would be allocated by these board members were made by the cabinet.
In the case of Annette Verschuren, she even had $200,000 given to one of her companies. These again are public documents. When she emailed some of the staff, they promised to find other funds in government from which her company could gain access to additional monies. The Government of Canada is not a piggy bank for Liberal crony friends. It is not a piggy bank for any of them.
Citizens in my riding, taxpayers, are young and old. They are not just 18-plus-year-olds who pay personal income tax. Teenagers are paying GST every single time. They are just as much taxpayers as anybody else. Now we have a situation where their money was corruptly spent. Their money was corruptly directed.
We find ourselves here again looking at another Liberal scandal. This one is not so new. It is several weeks old now because the government is in contempt. That is what the Speaker basically ruled. The government is in contempt because of its refusal to give over documents. That is, to me, the textbook definition of contempt.
The Liberals are refusing to abide by an order that a majority of MPs in the House voted for. Many of the arguments they are now using when they get up at different times are that, well, it would be unwise to release them, it would be unfair to release them, or that it might violate some type of charter protections to release them. However, those are all arguments they should have made back in June to try to persuade parliamentarians that the original wording of the motion should not have passed, but that failed. The decision was made to have all of the documents released and to give all the documents over to the law clerk and to the RCMP.
Now, I have also heard the argument made by members on the opposite side that the RCMP does not want the documents. However, I would insist that they reread the letter because that is not what the RCMP said. It was very clear that, if the RCMP got the documents, it would look at them and then decide what to do with them, which is exactly what we have been saying all along. The RCMP will decide what to do with them. Nobody is directing the police forces here to do something in particular. It is not what the motion originally called for with the production of documents. The motion simply said that they should go from the law clerk to the RCMP. The Liberals need to just hand over the documents.
As well, it is difficult to subpoena or ask for the production of documents if we do not know that the documents exist. As an avid and enthusiastic user of the access to information laws in this country, I invite any member to look at my office expenses and see how often I expense ATIPs, which are five dollars each. It is some of the best money an opposition parliamentarian can spend, and I do a lot of them. However, I often get frustrated because I sometimes do not know the title of a document, and sometimes I have people tell me that the documentation does not exist.
As always, I have a Yiddish proverb. I was saving this one for last, and I know that members are waiting for it. A favourite one that I often use is, “Words should be weighed, not counted.”
My contribution today, which again reiterates the points we have made over the last several weeks, is that the arguments being advanced by the Liberals that they cannot simply give the documents because of the charter and freedoms are specious. They do not apply here and cannot be used to shield the Liberal government from corruption charges. It just does not make any sense.
It must be truly horrifying. How could the Liberals explain to Canadians how they misspent, corruptly misspent, almost $400 million, and that almost $60 million of the funds that went out had nothing to do with green technology spending? It is not me saying this, but the Auditor General of Canada saying it. She could not find in the eligibility criteria where that matched up with anything, but somehow that money still went out, corruptly. Also, the AG's report, which went up to $400 million, is just a sample size. She did not look at every single project, which is why we want these documents from all the projects and all departments so that we know everything on this particular issue.
To conclude, I move, seconded by the member for Brandon—Souris:
That the amendment be amended by replacing the words “Friday, November 22, 2024” with the following: “the 30th sitting day following the adoption of this order”.