Mr. Speaker, I rise today to deal with the ruling of the Speaker with regard to the production of documents ordered by the House on the scandal involving Sustainable Development Technology Canada, otherwise known as the Liberal billion-dollar green slush fund. The process, for those watching, was that the House ordered the production of the documents around the scandal, to the law clerk, and the documents could then be transferred to the RCMP for investigation.
As we know, the power of the House is greater than any one act, yet the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, decided to execute the order by telling departments to send in documents but redact them. As a result, that was, in our view and obviously in the Speaker's view, a breach of members' privilege, because the order from the House did not say “redact”. As a result, we are here to discuss the issue today, and it has been referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs for further consideration.
In doing this, it is pretty important to understand that there are some objections from the government about some alleged breach of the charter. There is no breach of the charter, and here is why. If criminal activity is suspected in a company someone owns, say they are part of a bank management team and they discover that somebody who works for them has stolen the money of depositors, that company has the right and indeed the obligation to call in the police and to turn documents over to the police. Police are not required to go to court to get access to those documents. The owner of the company, or the management team, can supply the documents to the police to start the investigation.
Why does that matter with regard to this instance? There is a foundation set up in 2001 called Sustainable Development Technology Canada, with the purpose of providing taxpayer financial assistance to green technology companies before they are commercialized. Since the government was elected, the foundation has received a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The result of probing by parliamentary committees is that we found that in 82% of the funding transactions approved by the board of directors during a five-year sample period that the Auditor General looked at, 82% of those transactions were conflicted.
What does that mean? According to the Auditor General, that is $330 million of taxpayer money that was given to companies where the board members who voted to give it to those companies had a conflict of interest. In addition, the Auditor General found that the same board approved another $59 million in projects that they were not authorized to do; they were outside of the mandate of the foundation that the government and Parliament set up. It broke the SDTC contribution agreements, and the directors broke the conflict of interest laws of Canada as public office holders and broke the SDTC act.
How did they break them? What do the two acts say? They say that a Governor in Council appointment, a person appointed by the government entrusted to oversee taxpayer money, is not to personally profit from their work on a committee, as a GIC appointment, and neither is their family. However, that is exactly what happened. In a five-year period where there were 405 transactions approved by the board, the Auditor General sampled 226, so only half of them, and found that 186 of those 226 transactions were conflicted. That is the 82%. That is the $330 million.
If the Auditor General looked at all 400 transactions, statistically that would probably mean the rest are just as conflicted. Those 400 transactions are $832 million of taxpayer money. Therefore the Liberal, hand-picked appointees of the Prime Minister, from the chair on, got themselves into a position to benefit their own companies.
How did they do that and what were their conflicts? Every transaction, every bit of money approved by the billion-dollar green slush fund, every single dollar, had to be approved by the board of directors. The way the system worked was that beforehand, a note would be sent out of what transactions were on the board, and directors would declare a conflict. At the beginning of every board meeting, they would say, “Here is the list of transactions we are considering and the list of which directors are conflicted with which companies, so now let's go to work.”
In some cases, the director would stay in the room, according to the minutes, while they were voting on their own project. In other cases, the director would get up and leave the room while the others voted on it, and then that director would come back into the room, and the next director would get out of the room for their project. It was a nice little tidy conspiracy of conflict of interest to enrich themselves and the value of their companies.
One director was particularly aggressive at this. She was appointed in 2016 by the Prime Minister. Her name is Andrée-Lise Méthot. She runs a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital, in green technologies. Andrée-Lise Méthot's companies, before and during her time on the board, received $250 million in grants from SDTC. Some of that was before, and I will talk about that in a minute, but while she was on the board, $114 million went to green companies that she had invested in.
During her time on the board, the value of her company, Cycle Capital, tripled because getting an SDTC grant is a stamp of Government of Canada approval that allows those companies to raise other funds. The House will never guess who her lobbyist was, her in-house, paid lobbyist for 10 years before he was elected. It was the current radical Minister of the Environment. While he was lobbying for Cycle Capital, the current radical Minister of the Environment got $111 million.
The minister, according to the registration of lobbyists portion of the Lobbying Act, lobbied the Prime Minister's Office and the industry department 25 times in the year before he was elected. For all his hard work, he owns shares in Cycle Capital. He still owns those shares. He has not answered how much the value of those shares has gone up since they have been granted and since the company got this kind of support.
If that were not bad enough, this particular director in 2022 left and went to the Canada Infrastructure Bank board, and the first thing she did was to vote $170 million of infrastructure bank money for a company owned by the chair of the green slush fund, Annette Verschuren. Annette Verschuren also sought $6 million for the Verschuren Centre at Cape Breton University because it was failing. SDTC said no when it went through the process, because there was a conflict.
However, in emails, it said it would help her find money from other government departments. Pretty soon after that, the Verschuren Centre got $12 million from ACOA and the ISET program. Her other companies got $50 million from Natural Resources Canada, and then of course there is the Infrastructure Bank one.
This is the story we hear. Nine directors, according to the Auditor General, accounted for the 186 conflicts. That is why the CFO of the industry department, when the whistle-blower called on him and sat down with him, said that this is way bigger than the Chrétien government sponsorship scandal, which was $42 million of taxpayer money going to advertising agencies and friends of the Liberal Party. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Why we are asking for the documents is that every time there is a witness at committee, every time we ask a question, new information comes out.
The government has opposed us at every step of the way in getting those documents, and we know why. With just a scratch of the surface by the Auditor General, which is a small part, we see that $390 million has gone to Liberal insiders. That is what Liberals are trying to hide. That is why they are opposing this production order, for documents to be turned over to the RCMP. That is why the Prime Minister's personal department, the PCO, defied the order of the House to produce these documents and ordered departments to redact all the sensitive information. Surprisingly, they used a lot of black ink and went through a lot of toner in photocopiers when they printed the documents, because they are all blacked out. What are Liberals hiding?
What they are hiding is more malfeasance and abuse of taxpayers' money. We know the little bit we have seen, the 226 of 400 transactions identified by the Auditor General, is just the tip of the iceberg, and that is $390 million. Apparently, that does not concern Liberals, for some reason. It does not concern them that this happened. It does not concern the Minister of Industry, who has not had a single meeting with the new acting board or the NRC, where he is proposing it.
With the new transparency that the minister talked about in June, Liberals are giving out money again, and not a single bit of information is available anywhere on the website. The SDTC used to put out a quarterly report on every company. It no longer does. It is silent. It is hidden. The corruption of this organization and the nine Liberal directors abusing taxpayers' money in this way is beyond anything I and many members of this House have ever seen.
Mr. Speaker, I will continue in enlightening the House after question period.