Rick Perkins

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the NDP House leader missed the news that his boss, his party's leader, ripped up the deal with the Liberals. He does not need to use the PMO talking points anymore. He can be independent and maybe support the position of the member for Windsor West on this, rather than undercutting his own party's member.

On that issue, why is the member issuing PMO talking points to bury the corruption in SDTC? Why is it that he is deflecting onto other things and will not talk about the issue before Parliament today and the parliamentary privilege breach of the government? The House leader should be concerned about parliamentary privilege breaches. Apparently, he is not. He is more interested in spewing PMO talking points.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the Harper government cleaned this up and put in a new chair, Jim Balsillie; hired a new CEO; and got a clean bill of health from the Auditor General and Treasury Board in 2017. Then the chair, Jim Balsillie, started to criticize the government in public on its lack of action on the surveillance economy. Guess what Navdeep Bains did. He said Balsillie had to go because he would not shut up about criticizing the government.

The Liberals tossed Balsillie out and put in a chair who, they were told repeatedly by SDTC, should not be in the position because she was the first conflicted chair in the history of SDTC. Even a former PMO staffer, who did communications and was in SDTC, phoned her colleagues in the minister's office and the PMO and said this person was conflicted. Guess what former minister Navdeep Bains said. By the way, he is the guy in charge of the highest cellphone rates in the world at Rogers now. Former minister Navdeep Bains said the government would manage the conflict. They sure managed the conflict, with $390 million of taxpayer money going to conflicted directors.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, that is a great question. Two whistle-blowers, in fact, have been very brave individuals who came forward to expose this. A year and a half ago they got absolutely no response from the industry minister but did get a response from the CFO's department saying this was huge. The minister did nothing until it was public. That minister, the current minister, had a senior assistant deputy minister in every single board meeting, where 82% of the time they were voting for money for their own companies.

It is beyond credulity, beyond believability, that the minister claims, in a Hogan's Heroes Sergeant Schultz sort of way, “I know nothing”. He had a senior official in every meeting. That official is obligated to report to the deputy minister and the minister. I do not believe the minister knew nothing. I believe the minister was incompetent and enjoyed the featherbedding of his Quebec colleagues on the board.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, why am I not shocked that the Liberal member for Winnipeg North wants to cover up the corruption by saying it is somebody else's responsibility? It is our responsibility. I know he has spent most of his life in public office, so he may be unfamiliar with how a company works.

A company works like this. When it discovers there has been malfeasance by employees, its job is to turn that over to the police and to let the police investigate. It does not have to go to court; it calls in the police. We own this company, the taxpayers. We funded this company. The member and the Liberals do not seem to accept that it is our job to call in the police when we see corruption with respect to appointments by the Liberals in something that is funded by Canadian taxpayers.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

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.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

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.

[Privilege, September 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has been an active participant at parliamentary committee hearings on this scandal, both at the industry committee and the public accounts committee.

In addition to the respect that we all have for the whistle-blowers who started this process, could he comment a little more about how he felt about the testimony of the chair, Annette Verschuren, in defending the 24 conflicts that the Ethics Commissioner revealed in testimony at committee?

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, that is the most incredible thing I have ever heard. In the incredible defence of $390 million of taxpayer money by Liberal appointees, the government House leader decides to do a smokescreen.

What level of theft of taxpayer money is a breach?

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The government House leader is now questioning the ruling of the Speaker by what she is saying.

[Privilege, September 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, there is a reason we are here, besides the fact that the Privy Council Office defied an order of the House and decided to edit documents, or tell departments to edit documents, which is not what the House had asked for. I would ask the member a question about the SDTC act and the Conflict of Interest Act.

Both say government office holders and their family members cannot personally benefit from serving in that office. The Auditor General found that 82% of the transactions she audited were conflicted, totalling $390 million that went to Liberal appointees' own companies in a conflict and was spent outside of the contribution agreement.

Can the member comment about the criminality aspect of the breach of the Conflict of Interest Act and the SDTC act?