Mr. Speaker, I should have waited for the GST break, I guess, but we had the tree up a little bit before the GST cut's coming into place.
We did some hard work and got the backyard rink ready so we can have a hockey game with the kids and the uncles, who are with us for Boxing Day, when we welcome the start of the world junior hockey championship, which is being hosted right here in Ottawa. I wish good luck to team Canada. It is a family tradition to watch all the junior hockey games, and I am looking forward to that as well.
Let me move on to the SDTC slush fund. I talked about this earlier in my question to my colleague, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, saying that one scandal that took down the Martin Liberals was the ad scam, an advertising scandal that rocked Quebec. It was something that really showed what Liberals do when they are in government.
The Liberals actually, at some points in time, believe that they are above the law. They believe that they have the divine right to govern, and they take every opportunity to enrich their friends and family. We see it time and time again. It is not a flaw of the Liberal organization; it is actually the raison d'être. The Liberals want to be in government so they can enrich their friends and family.
After the Liberals get voted out and the Conservatives have to come in and clean up their mess, their friends and family can give them cushy parachute jobs so they have the opportunity to make money while they wait for their turn to come back into government and wreck everything again, and Conservatives have to clean up their mess.
The SDTC slush fund was a $420-million fund that was set up by the Liberal government. The board was put in place by the Liberal government. The key mandate for SDTC, which was a federally funded non-profit, was to approve and disburse over $400 million to clean-technology companies. Ironically, many of these companies have direct relationships to people in cabinet, and the chair of SDTC actually gave money to her very own company.
My colleague, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, set it up nicely by talking about common sense. Lots of people would say that it would be common sense that if someone is on a board, especially as chair of the board, appointed by the government to give funds to clean-tech companies, they would automatically assume that one's company would not be eligible or, at the bare minimum, they would recuse themself from the discussions. However, none of this happened with the corrupt organization.
Here are the numbers that the Auditor General's audit found: Funding was approved by the SDTC board for 10 ineligible projects. There were 96 cases where conflict of interest policies were not followed, 90 cases where conflict of interest policies were also not followed for projects without ensuring contribution agreement terms were met, $19.5 million for seed projects and $38.5 million for COVID relief payments. The funding in overlaps was $62 million, for a grand total of $390 million that was given out to ineligible projects or to projects that were found by the Auditor General to be in conflict of interest.
This is something that has rocked the Liberal Party of Canada and its junior partner, the NDP. These documents are so bad. This is why we are seized with this debate, day in and day out. Liberals and their NDP junior partners are terrified to see what is in these documents. They have no idea how bad this is going to get, so they do not even want to look at what has happened in this case.
I remember the 2015 campaign, the member for Papineau was running around the country saying “sunny ways” and that there would never be a more open and transparent government in the history of Canada than the one headed by the member for Papineau. What an absolute failure.
There have been over 70 scandals by the current government, and at the head of these scandals is the current NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, who himself has been in a conflict of interest, not once but twice. I once heard a very good quote from a fine football movie called Remember the Titans: “Attitude reflects leadership.”
We see that within the Liberal and NDP caucuses. Their leaders have the attitude of “rules for thee but not for me.” That comes straight from the Prime Minister's Office. They believe they are above the law and that taxpayers' dollars are there for them to spend as they please, conflict of interest be damned. It does not matter to them. They are very much entitled to their entitlements, which I think came from one of their members a few years ago.