Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for New Westminster—Burnaby. I appreciate the opportunity to share my time with him and to talk about this important issue. We agreed with and supported not only the original motion but also the ruling by the Speaker.
It is important because this gets to some of the essence of the principles of democracy and information related to SDTC, which is Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and the misappropriation of funds and information that took place there. In particular, it also brandished some very good companies that are being lumped in with this. I am disappointed in the Conservatives' not focusing any attention on protecting those organizations and companies that did nothing wrong and were sucked into what is basically a patronage system that was set up by the Liberals, along with Annette Verschuren and others on the board of directors.
The focus for the New Democrats has always been on the whistle-blowers; they have taken a hit with regard to loss of employment and loss of pensionable years. We had asked for them to be transferred to any federal public service agency they chose. They are going to an agency, NRC, which has an association and not a union, but at least it is a step forward. However, at the same time, many people have left, and they had to sign waivers and confidentiality agreements. We are now asking the government to rip those up, to make sure that those individuals no longer have that hanging over their employment record in the federal public service. It is unfortunate that this has not happened, and we will continue to request that.
We also want a third party to investigate and review the new model of SDTC, in terms of a working environment, because there has been some good work done there. Quite frankly, what the Conservatives also do not mention in this is that they actually have been the custodians of SDTC in the past, in large part. I would certainly like to see more light shed on what went wrong. Their simple analysis of it is that, basically, the Liberals picked their own people, who did not live up to their expectations. However, I can tell members that I have a long list of Conservative appointments that have never done the same.
What we would rather see is a better process that would actually be more robust and protect against this patronage system that continually rewards Ottawa insiders who have been close to those political parties in particular. It has been a carousel, at times, of appointments that are based upon not the merits of one's contributions to the general public and to an issue but the merits of one's contributions to a political party, in my opinion.
SDTC has fallen into that issue, in the sense that it sucked in a number of different employees and companies that actually do good environmental work. I think there is an edge on this too. However, the Conservatives do have a point, in the sense that there was a motion moved to get the documents. On that, I also want to highlight the difference between the Liberals, the Conservatives and the NDP in all of this. We believe in more open, accessible, transparent government, which is actually coming up across the planet, especially with the other G7 nations that we are part of.
I am talking about Crown copyright, where information, studies and other types of documents are more readily accessible to the public. Our original law was crafted in the early 1900s, and it has not been substantially overhauled since then. Can members imagine if we still drove around in vehicles that were originally crafted in the 1900s and never substantially overhauled to this day? At the same time, the United States and other nations have opened up their information-sharing systems quite significantly differently.
This has allowed us to protect these so-called independent associations, but for the taxpayers, as well as in terms of the Conservative and Liberal strategies on how to deal with these issues, it is important to note how they create these agencies. This one was created to be independent from Parliament and the minister, but the government stocks it full of appointments when they choose. Later, when there is a problem, those in government claim they had nothing to do with it, because it was an independent process. They say this even though the association reports wholly to the federal government and the employees are actually 100% federally funded.
As such, the employees do not get the whistle-blower protection they should. They do not get the union representation they should.
At the same time, when their friends either get sloppy or enter into practices that allow this type of malfeasance to take place, then they can claim that they are at arm's length, which gives them the ability to basically try to punt on this. I will talk a little about a particular number of things that took place at the boardroom of SDCT. There is no reason whatsoever that the Conservatives could not have changed this situation in the past. They had such industry ministers as Maxime Bernier, Tony Clement and others who behaved scandalously as well and who were perhaps not interested in addressing the fact that SDTC had an opening to allow this to take place.
People are wondering what took place at these corporate boardrooms. We can imagine that, if we were in a boardroom of a not-for-profit charity or a municipality, we would have to declare a conflict of interest on things that are financial or personnel matters. There is a very prescribed system. However, what happened is that, a number of times, this was not followed. The Auditor General even points this out.
I asked this of the witnesses who came forward, such as board members, chairpeople and so forth: Were the rules provided? They said that, yes, they were, but at the same time, they were not followed. Nobody could really explain the next part. They do not know why they did not follow the rules; they just did not. Therefore, there was a lazy corporate boardroom culture there.
I asked the following questions of a couple of witnesses but never had a straight answer: Were they socializing together? Were they doing things outside the workplace? I suspect they were. In this country, we saw in the past how many deals were cut on a golf course somewhere at the expense of consumers, the rights of people, and insider business and other businesses that were competing legitimately because they had the inner edge.
In this case, at SDTC, this was very much the case, which is why we are doing this investigation. Therefore, in the motion that was put forth, we requested procurement of more of those documents. We gave a time plan and, in fact, studied and talked about this at committee. I would point out that Conservatives also did so. However, it is hard to understand some of their strategy on this because they have smatterings of it across several committees. It is almost as though they are not even interested at getting at the final, real, good result, because it is being put in three different places. One would suffice to get to the bottom line of all of this at the end of the day, instead of shopping around and having us do different parts here and there.
At any rate, we asked for more documentation to be provided to us because we want to make sure that there is accountability as funds are restored to the program. The program was suspended by the Minister of Industry for a brief period of time and then reinstated. Therefore, there is a legitimate concern about what happens next, especially because we still do not know the full oversight that is going to take place with the NRC and so forth. Thus, we asked for those documents and gave them sufficient time, but we have not received them to the fullest extent. That is why we are here today.
It is important to note that this is unnecessary in terms of House time, which could be spent on other significant issues. There is the Israeli issue with Lebanon that is taking place internationally right now. We also have the issue that I have been working on in committee to try to advance the credit card rates. We are getting a study on that, but the Conservatives brought forward another motion that we had to deal with; if we do not watch it, we are maybe going to lose some time with regards to that study. However, in all fairness, some answers are deserved here, and the motion has merit.
To wrap up, as we send this issue back to committee, we have to be very careful about how we handcuff committees, if we are going to do that. Those are some of the questions that we still have to answer as we go forward. At the same time, we need more open, accessible government. There are better ways to do this. This is a situation arising from a structural flaw in our current Parliament. It has been done before with other issues, for example, the detainees in Afghanistan. Therefore, again, I would call for a better process in Parliament. However, I have a lack of faith at the moment because the two political parties that have been in control of Canada have wanted to control access to information for their own political reasons, depending upon the political time, versus actually exposing it publicly and letting the public come to its own conclusions.
