Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac for bringing his words of wisdom into this place. I want to talk to our lobby desk assistant and ask that they please never make me follow the member for Tobique—Mactaquac again. I do not know how I am going to top that. Every time I go to midnight mass now I will be thinking about the speech he just gave. To all the pastors out there who do not have a sermon for midnight mass, I would suggest they just take a clip provided by the House of Commons, which they can then provide their congregation. They will be more enlightened than they were before.
As well, I want to wish a very merry Christmas to all of my constituents, back in central Alberta, of Red Deer—Lacombe. I know they are awaiting my Christmas card and the calendar that often comes with it. I promise them those things will somehow, in some way, someday, get there. In the meantime, I will continue to communicate with them the best way I can.
On to the point at hand, which is the continuation of the debate on the government's mishandling of the green slush fund for Sustainable Development Technology Canada, another institution that has now been, basically, tarnished and, as a matter of fact, disbanded. It is another victim of absolutely abysmal leadership. Never in my time here has one person, the Prime Minister, been such a collection of bad ideas, bad judgment and bad leadership. Never has Canada, I think, had such a pall cast over it and never has the citizenship been this frustrated.
I now rise a third time to address the chamber in this matter relating to the green slush fund. Why? Because the government has refused, and continues to refuse, to turn over documents relating to the corruption at SDTC, as ordered by the House on June 10. With this issue dragging on for months now, it is clear the government has entrenched itself. It clearly has something it wants to hide. There is no majority in this House that is going to let the government off the hook. It is not just the Conservatives. For the time being, I am sure there is a price that somebody can be purchased for. I will save my comments for that time when that day comes.
For now, we are at an impasse. If I do not rise on my feet again before this House adjourns for Christmas, when I return, I will have eclipsed the 19th anniversary of my election to the chamber, and I have never seen anything like this. As a matter of fact, to my knowledge, this is the longest privilege debate in our nation's history. Wayne Gretzky set all kinds of great records. The kind of records this guy is setting will certainly have him remembered for all of the wrong reasons in the history books to come.
For those who are watching, here is a quick refresher on the scandal. Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, was an organization that gave taxpayer-funded grants to companies with solutions to improve Canada's environmental record. As I mentioned in a question earlier, this is something there was general consensus about. SDTC was started up, I believe, in the early 2000s by the then Liberal government, Jean Chrétien and his government. This program survived the former Conservative government. We saw the value in Sustainable Development Technology Canada, despite all of the accusations, which are baseless, that somehow Conservatives do not care about the environment, which is simply not true at all; we are just realistic and practical about the environment, which is what differentiates us from everybody else.
The program was maintained all through the tenure of former prime minister Stephen Harper, until the current Prime Minister and the people he chose to appoint to oversee these things. It was his decision. The Prime Minister decides who is in cabinet. He decides who is going to lead in those portfolios. He is the one who judges their character, their virtues and their competencies and he is the one who is ultimately responsible for this fiasco.
The Auditor General found that SDTC doled out nearly $400 million of a $500-million program to contracts that went in some way, shape or form to the benefit of the very board members whom the minister, under the watch of the Prime Minister, had appointed to the board of SDTC, board members who were clearly Liberal appointments. In awarding these contracts, the board members were found to have breached the ethics rules around contracts not once, not twice, not 10 times, not 50 times, not 100 times and not 150 times, but 186 times. In addition, they funded 10 illegitimate projects to the tune of $58 million. These are projects that could not demonstrate an environmental benefit or that they would help with the development of green technology at all.
Now, not only do we have 186 conflicts of interest, but we are actually doling out money for which the purpose was not even indicative in any of the contracts that were awarded. The scandal was so bad that the government abolished SDTC and rolled the fund into Natural Resources Canada, or NRC.
There is a word that comes to mind when we hear of a scandal of this size and of this magnitude. It has been said before, and it will be said again. It is a commonplace word, said virtually every time there is a Liberal government in this country, and that word is “corruption”. It is corrupt. The word “corruption” comes from the Latin word corruptus, a past participle of the Latin word corrumpere. The prefix cor- means “altogether”, and rumpere means “to break”. In old Greek, the word is synonymous with decomposing, putrid and spoiled.