Madam Speaker, I would like to begin with a slight indulgence of the House. This is a remarkable day in history, the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just wanted to share a brief story because we probably all have family members who, in one way or another, have a connection to World War II.
My mother's cousin Everett Borgald, my second cousin, from Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, signed up like a lot of young men did in 1942. He ended up landing in Normandy a month after D-Day, in July 1944. He was a tank trooper. He went inland and fought in the brutal battle of the Falaise gap, which the allies won on August 21, 1944, one month after he landed.
Two days later, in the subsequent pushing back of the German army, his tank was attacked by two 75-millimetre shells that pierced the turret and mortally wounded my second cousin. His best friend, who happened to be part of the crew, pulled him out of the tank, but unfortunately he did not survive. He passed away on August 23, 1944. Like many others, I am thinking of family members who made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom we have, and I just wanted to acknowledge that.
Today we are debating a motion to have the Liberal government produce SDTC documents and send them to the RCMP. SDTC is a foundation set up 20 years ago by a Liberal government to invest in pre-commercialized green technology. The organization was doing good work. In fact in 2017, the Auditor General did a governance audit and found that it was complying with all of the best practices.
Unfortunately, after that, the chair of the board at that time started to criticize the government publicly around the breaches of data and weak privacy policies, appearing before a parliamentary committee. Former minister of industry Navdeep Bains and his office phoned the president of the green slush fund, as it has become known, and asked them if they could get the chair to stop criticizing the government.
The chair was not taking orders from the government and continued to criticize it. After an appearance at a parliamentary committee two days after that, the former minister's office phoned and said, for some reason, it was going to change the chair, and gave two names. The minister's office told the president to check it out. Former minister Navdeep Bains phoned the president personally and said that they were changing the chair because he was saying things they did not like. They had not been able to keep him quiet, so they gave two names and asked that they be checked out.
The president, Leah Lawrence, testified in industry committee that she checked the two names out. The first person declined because they had a conflict. The second one said they were willing to do it even though they had a conflict. The president advised the assistant deputy minister, Mr. Noseworthy, who was the liaison who sat in the board meetings, that it was an inappropriate appointment of a chair because the appointee was conflicted. She was conflicted because the green slush fund was already doing business with her company.
However, Ms. Verschuren had no problem with being in a conflicted position, because she was doing the same thing at an organization called MaRS in Toronto, which I said also helps with the finance. The former minister came back through the ADM a couple of weeks later and said they were changing them. They phoned the then chair, Mr. Balsillie, and told him he was out. Three days later, Annette Verschuren was in, over the stringent objections of the organization. This included its head of communications, who, only a few months earlier, was working in the Prime Minister's Office, and they phoned the former minister's office to say that this was inappropriate. This is all in testimony.
What happened? It was the fourth or fifth appointment that the then minister Bains had made. It is quite a record of insider dealing and trading, the billion-dollar slush fund. The Auditor General audited a small portion, only five years' worth, and released a report this week. The AG found that board members voted to give companies money, and in 186 of the transactions, board members had an ownership interest in the companies. The Auditor General pointed out that in 90 of the transactions, board members did not even declare the conflict of interest, and that money alone totalled $76 million. The situation led whistle-blowers to go to the government a year and a half ago to seek help and to stop the corruption.
The CFO from the industry department is quoted as saying that this is the biggest scandal since the sponsorship scandal. Actually, that was a Liberal scandal as well, in a previous government. The current scandal is huge in terms of dollars, compared to the earlier one. Almost half of all the transactions in the period of time that the Auditor General audited were transactions in which the board voted money to companies that they owned, almost half of the billion-dollar slush fund went to them, feathering their own interests.
Public office holders have to comply with the Conflict of Interest Act, which says that public office holders cannot financially benefit from any job they are appointed to by the government. The SDTC act, an act of Parliament, says that individual board members cannot participate in and benefit from, for them or their families, any decision that financially makes their situation better, yet the directors did it 186 times while the senior departmental official sat in the meeting. The departmental official briefed his deputy minister at the time, who I am sure briefed the minister, former minister Bains, who did nothing for 46 months. The current minister, over the 46 months this was going on, did absolutely nothing until the whistle-blowers went public.
To give the House some idea of the graft and corruption, Andrée-Lise Méthot, a director appointed in 2016 by former minister Bains, while she was on the board, her companies that she has an equity investment in, received $42.5 million from the green slush fund. Before she was appointed to the board, her companies received $143 million from the green slush fund. She should never have been appointed to the board. She had an immediate conflict of interest. It was in breach of both the Conflict of Interest Act and the SDTC act to appoint her.
Annette Verschuren was the chair. We went through that. She has a company called NRStor, which was receiving government money. She was appointed to the board and should not have been. Guy Ouimet admitted in committee that he sat in committee and voted $4 million to his own company, which he owns equity in, and nobody in the government stopped it. That was a direct conflict of interest. Stephen Kukucha, the organizer for the current Liberal leader in British Columbia and a former Liberal staffer to an environment minister, was on the board, and while he was, his companies received almost $25 million.
This is massive corruption and fraud on a scale not seen in Canada in my recent memory, which is longer, I think, than that of some of the people here; at least, I am told that frequently.
What we have is a situation where last night we actually summoned, and it was the only way we could get him, former minister Navdeep Bains to the industry committee. He now works for Rogers, the largest and most expensive cellphone company in Canada, or the most expensive in the world. He was the minister who was supposed to reduce cellphone prices but actually ended up selling out and joining the most expensive company in the world in the last two years.
I think Mr. Bains was actually zooming, but it looked more like he was some sort of avatar that was programmed with only two answers: that it is a public and open process and that he had nothing to do with it. Obviously, if the former minister had nothing to do with it, then he was directed by the PMO to appoint the Liberal hacks, cronies and swindlers to the board.
He betrayed and said he does not have anything to do with it. His chief of staff said that he himself did not have anything to do with it either. They played the Hogan's Heroes Sergeant Schultz card and said, “I know nothing. Talk to somebody else.” It is typical of the government, and everybody in the government. It is never the fault of the person who made the appointment. It is somebody else's fault. It is the “the dog ate my homework” government.
We are asking the House to pass a motion saying that the corruption has to end, and that not only does it have to end but it has to be investigated by the RCMP now that we have the Auditor General's report. I would ask and encourage all members to please show the ethics necessary for us and for Canadian taxpayers, and ensure that any illegal activity is dealt with by the police.
