Madam Speaker, just to refresh the House, this debate has been going on for a couple of days now, and it might be helpful to return to Mr. Berthold's amendment, which we are debating today.
The motion is:
That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
The amendment reads:
That the motion be amended by adding the following:
provided that it be an instruction to the committee:
(a) that the following witnesses be ordered to appear before the committee separately for two hours each:
(i) the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,
(ii) the Clerk of the Privy Council,
(iii) the Auditor General of Canada,
(iv) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(v) the Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Development,
(vi) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons,
(vii) the Acting President of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, and
(viii) a panel consisting of the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada; and
(b) that it report back to the House no later than Friday, November 22, 2024.
We are now debating that motion to amend, which arose because of some underlying circumstances. I thought I would deal with those first, and then I will return to procedural matters, the question of privilege itself and the merits of the question of privilege a bit later on in my remarks.
I will start by dealing with the underlying issue, which is, of course, that Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC, was found to be egregiously in breach of its mandate on a level that makes even the sponsorship scandal under the Chrétien Liberals look like it was merely dealing with sort of piggy bank stuff. That millions of dollars have been reported by the Auditor General to have been allocated in a way that is a clear violation of basic conflict of interest rules as well as the internal rules for disbursements that SDTC had is really quite striking.
However, an element that was also raised by the Auditor General that has not been discussed, which I will spend the first part of my remarks talking about, is very important. In addition to the fact that members of the board of SDTC were arranging to transfer contracts to companies in which they had an interest as shareholders and, in some cases, primary officers, there is the fact that the results produced by these contracts were spectacularly unimpressive in terms of the stated goal, which is to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. The Auditor General could not look at all of the projects and instead took a representative sample of 18 completed projects. In her report, she stated, “We found that in 12 out of 18 completed projects in our sample, the projected reduction of greenhouse gas emissions were, on average, half of what was presented at the time the project proposals were assessed.”
This raises the very important point that it may very well be the case that one of the reasons for this really extraordinarily poor level of delivery of performance is the way in which these contracts were allocated, who they were allocated to and the criteria that was looked at, which may have been enforced in a very lax manner, because the real purpose of giving out these contracts may well have been to provide income to those who were in fact involved in bidding for those contracts.
Of course, this is a profound conflict of interest. However, one of the things that we see over and over again when we are dealing with conflicts of interest in general is the phenomenon that it is not just that money gets transferred to people to whom it should not be transferred; it is that the end results of which the money has been spent are spectacularly bad. This, in fact, is the whole reason for avoiding conflicts of interest. If people simply handing money to themselves produced spectacular results, we would have no reason to object. However, that never happens. It did not happen in sponsorship and, it appears, from what the Auditor General was able to discover, that it did not happen here.
Was the sample of 18 completed contracts a representative sample? We cannot be 100% certain. That is, of course, one of the things that will be determined when that impressive list of witnesses comes before the procedure and House affairs committee. We will, for example, be able to ask the Auditor General whether she believes that sample was genuinely representative. Were those projects unusually good or unusually bad as compared to the rest? I suspect the sample was representative, but she could confirm that. That is pretty important information to have.
I do want to point out that the government itself clearly thought that this was an issue, although it will not actually admit that because, on June 4, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry announced that the SDTC program would be shut down. Now, the government did make an attempt to say that, nonetheless, it had impressive results. A spokesperson, Janemary Bennigan, stated, as follows:
With respect to stewardship of public funds, SDTC has strong monitoring processes in place to ensure that every project...—every dollar—
I love that “every dollar”.
— is accounted for and has been correctly disbursed to the innovative clean tech projects and technologies that Canada needs to succeed in the new economy.
That, of course, is obviously, on the ground, not true. The program would not have been cancelled if the government thought that. At any rate, that is what they said.
I have to stop and point out just how meaningless this whole exercise will have been, even if these had been successful. Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are not primarily caused by air traffic; by road traffic; by people using old-fashioned, non-electric, gas-burning vehicles; by heating their houses with oil, or, as is the case with many people in my constituency, in rural Ontario, with wood. Those emissions would be small compared to the amount of wood that has been destroyed by fires in this country, fires that, while to some degree were caused by the sources that the government always points to when responding to questions about the fires, were also largely caused and greatly exacerbated, in terms of the amount of carbon put in the atmosphere, by bad forestry practices and bad forest fire management. Those were the responsibility of governments, to some degree provincial governments and to some degree the federal government.
In 2023, fires raged across this country and turned skies orange in places as far away as New York City and the state of Maryland. These fires consumed 184,961 square kilometres. I am not quite sure how the estimate I have here was that precise, but 184,900 square kilometres is a round estimate. That is 18.5 million hectares. It is 5% of Canada's entire forest cover. To give some perspective, Canada is the country that has retained the largest percentage of its forest cover in the entire world. Less than half is being logged, but 5% was vaporized in a single year. That put three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, obviously many times the amount that this program through SDTC would have mitigated by many multiples. In fact, three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is equivalent to four times global emissions from all aviation worldwide. Our greenhouse gas emissions from all other sources, all the stuff we are trying to vaporize the economy to stop, reduce or mitigate—
That is excellent mitigation right there with the lights going off in the House of Commons. Right there, we could probably reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Well done.
Our greenhouse gas emissions from other sources were 708 megatonnes. Just to be clear, that is 708 million tonnes versus three billion tonnes. We became the world's third largest greenhouse gas emitter in that year and put out more than the whole nation would do in this entire decade as a result of those fires. That is 10% of overall world emissions, which were 39 gigatonnes in 2023. This is data, by the way, from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, EDGAR, a well-respected source that even the Liberals cannot accuse of being somehow a front for the groups that they like to accuse of being climate denialists.
I am not saying that the government is responsible for all of this. I am just saying it is responsible for some of it. There is no doubt that the mountain pine beetle destroying forests and turning them into tinder was a significant, highly burnable potential. Tinder was a colossal feature of this and the fact that climate change caused temperatures to rise sufficiently to enable the mountain pine beetle to cross mountain passes that were previously seen as being an impenetrable barrier is unquestionably at the root of a substantial number of the forest fires, at least in the western part of the country.
However, bad forestry practices were also a source of this, allowing forest tinder to burn up and not building firebreaks. Not anticipating led to colossal fire. It is not as if this is the first time, as if we could not have learned from the examples of previous fires. I note that the extraordinarily well-publicized fires in Yellowstone in 1988, which is a lifetime ago, burned 3,200 square kilometres. The reports that came out afterward indicated that the wrong kind of forestry practice of excessive fire suppression, which led to a buildup of tinder, then meant that when a fire occurred, it would be far greater in extent and scope and far more damaging.
Those lessons have been well recorded for decades and were not taken note of. They were not taken note of, for example, in the lead-up to the devastating Jasper fire earlier this year. As we know, the fact that these conditions were in danger of being replicated were noted as early as 2017. Obviously, that gives seven years of lead time in which the government could have done something. That fire put much less carbon into the atmosphere than the ones a couple of years back. The fact is that bad forestry management, this time in a national park, which is exclusively federal jurisdiction and means the Liberals cannot blame the premiers, resulted in a disaster. This is after those fires, so the government literally learned nothing.
We became the world's number three greenhouse gas emitter. We put more carbon into the atmosphere than global airplane emissions for four years, 10% of all emissions, and we learned nothing because the government is fixated on one particular solution, which, in fact, will only nibble at the edges of the problem while ignoring this colossal other issue.
I experienced this kind of danger myself a few years back. I used to live in Australia. The Australian Capital Territory, which is mostly beautiful, forested alpine wilderness, was struck by fires that raged January 18 through 22, 2003. They destroyed nearly 70% of the Australian Capital Territory's pastures, pine plantations and nature parks.
I was not there when it happened, but I was in one of those nature parks. When I lived in Australia, I was dating a girl who lived in Canberra, the capital of Australia, and we would go out. Our recreation was to go on nature walks in the forest preserves around Canberra, which were very beautiful at the time. They call it “bush-walking” in Australia. Fortunately, because of the fire-resistant nature of Australian forests, much of the native foliage has largely recovered from those fires.
At any rate, I remember going to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the hills around Canberra in January 1999, four years before these devastating fires, and arriving at the front entrance to that park. There had been a dry spell. There is an entrance with a gravel road that people have to go through. The park ranger at the entrance had parked her car to block that road, facing the wrong direction, facing out from the park. She said that the park was closed because there was a fire hazard. The reason for the fire hazard was that it was forest fire season. Forest fires are quite common in Australia. On a previous occasion, I had not been able to get to my home because my whole neighbourhood was affected by a fire and shut down. I had to spend the night in a McDonald's.
At any rate, on this particular occasion, the park ranger said that there had been no fires there since 1939 and that the total fire suppression approach had led to, at that point, 60 years of detritus, of debris, building up. This meant that, if there was a fire, it would be extraordinarily severe and fast-moving. She said that, in the event that there was a fire, she would have to run to her car and hope she could drive out faster than the fire was moving; that was why her car was parked facing away from the park.
A few years later, there was another set of fires on the outskirts of Melbourne. They were even more devastating, and people were burned alive in their cars as they tried to escape the fires. The park ranger was quite right to be thinking this way. My point is that this is widespread knowledge. It is widely known, and if the right things are done, the damage can be controlled by the government.
The Liberal government did nothing to control any of this. The result is that it is partly responsible for these massive carbon emissions, and this far outweighs the amount it was ever hoping to reduce in carbon emissions through this program. As we discovered, these programs were, on average, producing half the benefit that was recorded.
In addition, there was a series of abuses of process that arose because this is such a badly designed program. I now come to the reason we are dealing with all of this. Those abuses resulted in a motion that was produced in committee and then sent to the House and concurred in. This was a motion to produce a full reporting of a series of documents for the intention of taking them to our legal counsel, who would then pass them on to the RCMP.
The government withheld some documents entirely and redacted others severely. When confronted about this, it then came back and lectured us. One has to read the government House leader's report to believe it. The government lectured us that the fundamental parliamentary privilege of summoning all and any documents should not be allowed to happen when it might be used in some way that interferes, in the government's opinion, with some worthwhile objective. Effectively, our privilege in this matter has been extraordinarily narrow.
I will just add that the House leader came and made this claim to us not during the debate, but afterwards. This is an outrage in itself. The reasons for this will not seem obvious to someone who is not deeply imbued in parliamentary procedure, but it is an extraordinary thing to say. She was rightly chastised by the Speaker when he made his ruling, in which he said that there was a prima facie case and that we should have this debate. I thank him for that, and I thank all the members who have been participating in this debate.
