Mr. Speaker, I caught your eye right away so that I could rise and speak to this issue once again and raise matters that are of great importance to the residents of my riding, Calgary Shepard. They care about government accountability and the efforts of the government to continue to hide nearly 30,000 pages of blacked-out, redacted documents that the House and a majority of members of Parliament have ordered the production of and that everybody agrees should be given to us. This is why Parliament is now paralyzed: The Government of Canada and the cabinet ministers who sit in the front benches over there continue to refuse to provide these essential documents, which should then be passed on by the law clerk to the RCMP.
Again, I want to reiterate the point that it is a great privilege and an honour to rise and speak on behalf of the residents of my riding. It has now been over three years that they have given me the privilege of representing them in Parliament. I assured them when I was first elected that government accountability would be my top priority. I did not know at the time, though, that the openness of government and open government by default would be the slogans that the Liberal government would use. In fact, the Liberals even produced an entire document saying just that. It was first released in 2015; it was then updated this year to ensure accessibility. I will be quoting from it extensively to remind the cabinet ministers of their mandate letters, of the document they all signed on to when they took the oaths of office and became ministers. This is the document that the government, from 2015, sloganeered incessantly on for the first four years it was there.
Now we are at a point where the government is refusing an order of Parliament to produce documents that it has in its possession, which we all agree we should have. This is not just happening here on the floor of the House of Commons. It is also happening in parliamentary committees. We saw this during multiple other scandals, including the WE Charity and the SNC-Lavalin scandal. This is a repeat performance by cabinet ministers. What document protection they are doing is to protect their own political hides, rather than doing what is right by taxpayers and citizens of this country and just giving over the unredacted documents. If there is nothing to hide, they should just hand everything over.
The green slush fund is the term we have been using to describe this. An Auditor General's report slammed how the fund performed after the Liberals removed all the previous persons involved on the board of directors and replaced them with their own cronies. Its original name was the SDTC fund, the Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund.
Up until 2017, when a previous Liberal cabinet minister started to muck around with the board of directors, SDTC actually had a clean bill of health. If we go back to the Auditor General's reports over multiple years, it had a clean bill of health in those audits. Starting in 2017, though, multiple problems began to appear. This has now been the issue at hand for weeks and months now. Parliament has been paralyzed because the Government of Canada and cabinet ministers refuse to follow through with that order, as I mentioned. When the Auditor General did the review, it was found that almost $400 million was misspent, corruptly spent. That is just on a sample. That was not all the projects.
Actually, the Auditor General has not had a chance to go through every single project to find out if money was spent corruptly in those situations. In one of the samples, 10 out of 58 projects were audited. The Auditor General found $59 million of payouts that failed to meet even SDTC's own eligibility requirements. If we go through some of those emails that were being shared between the board chair and persons operating within the fund, the board chair was bringing projects of her own, so there were conflicts of interest involved. While it was found that those payouts did not qualify for that particular fund, the emails indicated they would find another fund to get the money that was being asked for. In fact, they did. There was a situation of corruption in that particular case.
There was another case of $76 million that was awarded despite the fact that there were clear conflicts of interest. That was on top of the fact that there was a senior assistant deputy minister who sat in every single one of those meetings. That should have been an immediate red flag. That person should have gone straight to the minister's office to inform them of what was going on.
I do not believe the minister at the time, Navdeep Bains, and the minister now can claim that everybody was asleep at the switch and, gosh darn it, they did not know what was going on. They are kind of like a crew that comes upon an accident scene and says they cannot believe the accident happened when they are the ones who caused it. Liberals are the ones who created the situation by inviting corrupt behaviour, inviting misspending and inviting people to take advantage of the taxpayer. That is what they have done.
There was a previous chair of the SDTC board, the green slush fund board, when it was not the green slush fund yet because it was getting clean audits by the Auditor General. I believe it was Jim Balsillie. Jim Balsillie has a reputation for speaking his mind. He is well known among Canadians as a gentleman who has had a great career in finance and technology, and he speaks his mind. He freely attacks all sides of the House, I would say, whenever he sees things that do not match up with his beliefs. That just did not fit with the views of the minister at the time, so he fired him and replaced him with Annette Verschuren.
In fact, the same Annette Verschuren confirmed before committee that she has never applied for a job and never had to. In contradiction, the minister at the time, Navdeep Bains, claimed the Liberals hired her from the people who were applying and that is how she got the job as chair. She specifically said she never applied for that job. The job was posted, then the job was taken down and she was awarded that particular position. He recruited her. He called her twice to personally recruit her, despite the fact that she reminded him she had conflicts of interest.
Those same conflicts of interest then came up during the decision-making, because she was at the table making the decisions that the Auditor General later found were corruptly made. This is where we find ourselves. A fund that used to function properly, because it was getting clean audits from the Auditor General, does not exist anymore. This is how bad it is. This entire fund was completely shut down and rolled into the NRC, the National Research Council, because that is how fast the Liberals wanted to run away from it. They thought that would be enough, to simply sweep it under the rug, “nothing to see here”, mistakes were made.
It is like one of those old episodes of Yes, Minister from the 1980s. I highly recommend them to anyone in the House. Sometimes I will get that whiplash experience, where I will say, “I have experienced that.” I can say we are experiencing it right now. On this comedy series, there is one of those private secretaries at a U.K. committee who says lessons were learned, we will never do it again, or mistakes were made, but it was an interesting pilot project. There was some corruption, but there is nothing much to see here and we should just move on. They admit to it and then shut down the fund completely. It is, indeed, the green slush fund when close to half of the money was improperly spent.
The arguments I hear from one particular member on the other side of the House, because it seems nobody else wants to, or is allowed to, rise to defend this, is that there are charter implications, the RCMP does not want the documents and the law clerk has problems with it. Those are all arguments that should have been made in June when we first voted on the matter and a majority of parliamentarians decided the minority was wrong. At the time, the Bloc, the New Democrats and the Conservatives all agreed that these documents should be made available to the public and then passed on to the RCMP.
In fact, the law clerk even confirmed it. I have the sessional paper here, from the law clerk to the House Speaker, saying the law clerk will comply. The law clerk said that “the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel shall provide forthwith any documents received by him, pursuant to this order, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police”. The law clerk has no problem, will dutifully do the job he is here to do, and will then simply pass everything on to the RCMP.
Then in the same letter from Michel Bédard, dated November 18, he goes on to say, “All three government institutions provided documents containing redactions and/or withheld some pages purportedly relying on the Access to Information Act. A copy of the letters I received are reproduced in the annex.” We know there continues to be documents that government agencies and institutions refuse to provide us. One of them is ISED, which continues to refuse to comply with the motion from Parliament that compels it to provide all of the information.
We know this from past rulings by the Speaker and from government documents, and there is a terrific manual that members of Parliament should be using from a former Liberal MP, Derek Lee. The House has an absolute right to documents. The taxpayers and citizens pay for these documents to be produced. They have paid already, so now they have a right to see them.
Orders to produce documents are not common. I would say they are rare. In rare situations, there is an order to produce a document. In this situation, while the government has produced some of the documents, it has chosen to redact 30,000 pages of them and to not see them handed over to the RCMP.
I will note too that a common argument being used by the opposite side is that the RCMP does not want the documents, which is absolutely false. The RCMP has not said that. In fact, the RCMP commissioner, when exiting the Hogue inquiry room, was scrummed by reporters. When he was asked the question of whether he had received the documents, if the RCMP had received the documents, he said that the RCMP did, that they had them, that it would take them and that it is up to the RCMP whether it wants to use them.
At no point does the order of the House tell the RCMP how to use these particular documents. The order does not instruct that the RCMP must use them. I will also add that in the documentation provided by the RCMP, in the letter that was sent to the committee on July 26, it also distinctly states, and this is directly from the letter:
The RCMP has also reviewed the implications of the Motion in a potential criminal investigation.... The Parliamentary production order does not set aside these legal requirements.
The legal requirements being referred to are about privacy. The letter goes on to say:
For the reasons set out above, the RCMP's ability to receive and use information obtained through this production order and under the compulsory powers afforded by the Auditor General Act in the course of a criminal investigation could give rise to concerns under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is therefore highly unlikely that any information obtained by the RCMP under the Motion where privacy interests exists could be used to support a criminal prosecution or further a criminal investigation.
That is not saying that the RCMP does not want it. It is not saying it cannot use it. It is saying in a “privacy interests” matter. Nowhere I note is it said that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was intended to be used as a shield against government corruption. That is nowhere. It was never the intention of the original founders of that document to use the charter to protect government cabinet ministers from accusations of corruption in a potential criminal investigation by the RCMP. That is the lead argument the government is making today.
Therefore, let us go back to what the cabinet ministers have all agreed to do. In past mandate letters, there has been a common reference, even in the latest one, about open and accountable government. I will note this reference is to a public document that is available on the website of the Prime Minister: “Open and Accountable Government”, 2015.
At page 34, under “Public Access to Information and Privacy”, it states, “The government is committed to ensuring that government data and information is open by default, in formats that are modern and easy to use.” The 30,000 pages of blacked out ink in the documents are not easy to use. It goes on to say, “When producing papers in Parliament, Ministers are expected to ensure that requests for information...are met. Matters related to the production of papers in Parliament are coordinated with the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons.”
Now Liberals have refused to comply with one of the very first initial government documents they all signed on to. They all agreed to do this. They had no problems at the time to sloganeer and claim that they were going to be the most open government in the history of Canada, and they would never, ever, in a million years, dare to even think about keeping something from the public.
Then we had the SNC scandal. Then we had the WEF scandal. Then we had ministers fired because they did not want to do whatever the Prime Minister ordered them to do and to hide information from the public. We have learned our lesson as Canadians, as parliamentarians, to distrust everything the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's Office or PCO has to say.
Much of this is at, I will say, the direction of the Prime Minister's Office and PCO to continue to hide documents. This is intentional. The paralysis of Parliament is intentional by the Liberal government, because its members know darn well if they just give the 30,000 unredacted pages, this all ends and this all stops. For every single private member's bill on the Conservative side, on all the opposition sides, we have lost all of those slots.
This is my opportunity to remind the Speaker how low in the private member's bill draw he drew my name; I think I was third from the bottom when he did the draw. This is my gentle admonishment of the Speaker, for drawing me so low and not giving me the opportunity to have a private member's bill—