Mr. Speaker, I will resume and summarize where we are. We are debating the Speaker's ruling on the privilege motion on the Prime Minister's department, the PCO, redacting documents against the House order to provide documents regarding the Liberal green slush fund to the law clerk to be transferred to the RCMP for investigation.
Where I left off was in the middle of discussing the various conflicts of interest of the various directors. Members will recall I was talking about the director, Andrée-Lise Méthot, who owns a company called Cycle Capital. Her companies have received $250 million, before and during her time on the green slush fund board, and her lobbyist, before he came to the House, was the current, radical Minister of the Environment.
In his time as the lobbyist for Cycle Capital, when he lobbied 25 times in his last year before entering the House, the PMO and the industry department gave over $100 million in green slush fund money to Cycle Capital. Shockingly, the minister still owns shares of that, even though, as a cabinet minister of government, he participated in discussions that gave the green slush fund another $750 million, of which over a quarter has gone to that company. He still owns shares in it. He has not disclosed what they are worth. I know he is familiar with orange jumpsuits, but I think this needs to be explored more by the RCMP, and hopefully the documents will show that when they are transferred.
I will speak also about another board member handpicked by the Prime Minister, Guy Ouimet, who has admitted in committee that $17 million of green slush fund money went to companies he has a financial interest in. He said that it is a small amount of money. It may be a small amount of money to him, but it is not to most Canadians, and that amount of money, he admitted, had gone up 1,000% in value since that investment was made in 2019. It pays to be a Liberal insider.
I will bring our attention to another director, a fellow named Stephen Kukucha from British Columbia. Stephen Kukucha was a political staffer to former Liberal environment minister Anderson, and he was the organizer for the Liberal Party for the Prime Minister in British Columbia. As a reward, they put him on the green slush fund board. Surprisingly, we have another Liberal on the board in whose company he had a financial interest. In his time on the board, the companies he had a financial interest in received almost $5 million from the very board he was serving on. He said they were small amounts of money, but in committee, unlike Mr. Ouimet, he did not have the courage to say how much the value of his investments had gone up. That is why these documents need to be produced and why these directors need to be investigated.
We all know about Annette Verschuren, so let me talk a bit about one of the processes that they established. They established something called accelerators, and those accelerators were outside organizations that the board hired to vet proposals and make recommendations to the board. One of those was an organization called the Verschuren Centre at the University of Cape Breton, which is in the name of and was set up by the chair of the green slush fund.
There is MaRS Discovery District at U of T. Members probably know that. Can members guess who chairs MaRS? It is the chair of the green slush fund, Annette Verschuren.
Companies would be screened through board member-controlled organizations, and shockingly, their companies got recommended to the board for funding. That is just a pure coincidence. With 82% of the transactions that they approved, nine directors were conflicted. These directors do not represent 82% of the green technology industry in Canada, yet their companies got 82% of the funding. It is strangely a pure coincidence with these hand-picked directors from the Prime Minister.
We are debating the issue of systemic conflict of interest and corruption in this green slush fund. We only know right now about $390 million because a forensic audit has not been done by the Auditor General. The Auditor General did a sampling of things.
The Ethics Commissioner has not investigated any of the other directors, other than the one my colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes asked to be investigated. When I asked the Ethics Commissioner if he had the power to investigate anyone who is a GIC appointment, he said yes. When I asked him why he had not investigated the other eight GIC appointments put out in the Auditor General's report as having conflicts of interest, where money flowed to companies they had an interest in, do members know what the Ethics Commissioner said before a committee? He asked what the point would be in investigating GIC appointments of people who are no longer on the board. That is what the Ethics Commissioner of this institution said. I said that because the taxpayers pay him to discover and expose conflicts of interest of GIC appointments, appointments by the Liberals, of featherbedding insiders funnelling money, perhaps he should do his job for a change. He is not doing his job. He was shocked that anyone would ask him that.
Why is all of this important? Every one of us was sent here to be very careful when spending the hard-earned money Canadians make that we are privileged to oversee. That is an essential part of our job. This organization stuffed its own pockets with taxpayer money, yet the Liberals are fighting it. They say it is not their role. Taxpayer money that we oversee was authorized by this Parliament and the Minister of Industry is responsible. For 40 months, he sat there, with an ADM in every meeting, the current Minister of the Environment, and did absolutely nothing until it made it into the press.
This is corruption like we have never seen in Canada. This is why we have asked for the documents, because the Liberals are hiding documents. This is why they are resisting and hiding the documents, because they know there is more corruption there with their hand-picked directors. If we were a private sector institution, we would be turning those documents over to the police to investigate. That is our job. No, it is not just the job of the police to go to the courts to seek that. It is our job to expose the corruption in the things we have authorized money for in this Parliament. It is our job, and it is time the Liberals started caring about it.