Mr. Speaker, I will begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the member for Drummond. I hope his speech is good. It usually is. I will listen to it closely.
On June 10, the House was clear when it gave the government the order to submit a series of documents to the law clerk of the House so that he could hand them over to the police. Why did it do that? That is the question.
The Liberals get all worked up, saying that it is crazy, that we cannot hand over documents to the police, that we cannot do their job for them. The Conservatives say that it is crazy, that the Liberals across the aisle are corrupt, that they do not want to hand over the documents.
In fact, the answer may be somewhere in between, because we still do not have enough information, so we cannot yet say whether they are corrupt. Neither can we say whether the documents should be given to the police. What we can say is that this whole thing smells, that money was mismanaged, and that, for that reason, we are justified in asking for access to the documents to see what really happened. That is why we support this motion.
It all began at the end of 2022, when whistle-blowers informed the Office of the Auditor General of Canada and the Privy Council, in other words the government, that they were uncomfortable with the way that Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, was being managed. In 2023, things took off. An audit conducted by Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton appeared to confirm what the whistle-blowers had said.
At that time, the government appeared to be stalling. The whistle-blowers grew impatient, disappointed at the government's failure to act. We began seeing leaks in the media, which increased the pressure. Then, the president and CEO resigned, followed by the chair who managed the fund.
On June 4, 2024, a bomb went off, figuratively of course, when the Auditor General decided to investigate the fund because she, too, had been alerted. She looked at 58 out of a total of 420 projects. That is a substantial number of projects, but she did not look at them all. In the 58 projects she looked at that spanned from April 1, 2017, to December 31, 2023, she mostly found serious governance issues. Conflict of interest management was sorely lacking. Some directors voted for the allocation of funds to businesses in which they had a personal interest. That is the sort of thing that does not usually happen. It is basic good judgment. Usually, directors with a personal interest recuse themselves. It appears, however, that the people around that particular table did not possess good judgment.
The Auditor General found 90 cases of conflict of interest amounting to $76 million. Obviously, we do not have the details, but we would like to. She found 10 ineligible projects with funding that totalled $59 million. She only looked at 58 projects out of 420, but she discovered all that. Imagine if she had reviewed all 420 projects.
We do not have all the details. That is why on June 10 the House asked for access to the documents. We are now into October, and June 10 is starting to feel like ancient history. Five months have gone by, but the government has not responded to the House's order yet. When the other side of the House claims that this question of privilege is not justified, I would reply that there are limits. This question of privilege is totally justified. The Liberals may not like it, but it is not up to them to decide how the House votes. They do not hold a majority; they are the minority. They are not above Parliament, but beholden to it. There is a difference.
The only limit on the House's ability to demand information is the House's good judgment, not the government's willingness to comply. The government must honour Parliament's orders. It is not a choice or an option; it is an obligation. If the Liberals are unhappy with the composition of Parliament, all they have to do is call an election. We will see whether they are happier with that result.
In fact, that is the principle behind responsible government. It was the main demand of the Patriots. People died for that. The British Crown burned down villages and put people in prison. Some were deported, while others were hanged. Ten years later, the people had responsible government. Almost two centuries later, I hope that the Liberal government will have the courage to honour this principle, the legacy left by the Patriots.
As for Sustainable Development and Technology Canada, SDTC, I have my own little story. In 2019, I was the economic development and industry critic. Navdeep Bains was minister of industry at the time. Good student that I am, I looked into the portfolios assigned to the minister to see how money was being spent under his watch, and I discovered the existence of the famous fund managed by SDTC. I wondered what the purpose of the fund was, so I looked into that as well.
I found that the fund's mission was to “support Canadian companies with the potential to become world leaders [in clean technology]”. That was interesting. I wanted to know which companies and consortiums had benefited from funding. Names like Shell Canada, TransCanada Pipeline, Suncor Energy, Colonial Pipeline Company, Enbridge and Pipeline Research Council International came up—all nice French names by the way. It seems to me that when we talk about world leaders in clean technology, these are not the companies we think of.
In 2016, the fund gave a $5-million grant to a Calgary-based company to test and market a technology that would make it possible to exploit deeper or hard-to-reach oil sands deposits. Money was taken from a fund for green technologies to help get more oil out from deeper in the ground. That is what the money was used for. Money for green technologies was literally diverted to benefit the oil companies. I was scandalized. We were paying the polluter, which made no damn sense. In fact, only the Bloc Québécois condemned this at the time, not the NDP or the Liberals, and especially not the Conservatives. It made the front page of the Journal de Montréal, but that was not enough to change anything. I could understand the Conservatives, who wake up each morning and check the oil share prices but, in the case of the other parties, we have a problem.
More specifically, I analyzed the years 2011 to 2015 to compare what happened with the green fund under the Conservatives and under the Liberals. Under the Conservatives, between 2011 and 2015, $50 million from the green fund went to companies connected to the oil and gas sector. Between 2015 and 2019, it is the same story: $50 million was misappropriated by the Liberals to the benefit of oil and gas companies. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Oil companies have already loaded up on taxpayer money to the tune of billions of dollars, but I guess that was not enough. They had to steal money from the green fund too. If we scratch the Liberals' green veneer, it will soon be apparent that it is completely brown underneath.
The Liberals promised us they would change, that they would bring a halt to oil company subsidies. They have since changed their vocabulary and no longer talk about this. They talk about ending inefficient subsidies. Not quite the same thing, is it. I would like to know what an efficient oil subsidy is. The fact is that they promised to reduce subsidies to oil companies, so the Bloc members put two and two together.
We told ourselves that things were not going well for the Liberals and that they would get smoked if an election were held. Basically, we wanted to give them a chance by giving them the opportunity to keep their promises. We were prepared to forestall an election call for now and let them enjoy their holidays. In exchange, though, we proposed something that would even have helped them keep their promises. To me, helping them keep their promises is not that bad.
As we know, seniors have been hit hard by inflation. The Liberals created two classes of seniors, and those aged 65 to 74 got nothing at all during this time. Our proposal was simple: Funding pensions by cutting oil subsidies a bit. Last week, believe it or not, they said no. They are unable to take money earmarked for oil companies and spend it on seniors instead, but they are able to take money from the green fund and hand it to oil companies. They do not have money for seniors, but for oil companies raking in billions of dollars a year, it is an open bar.
When the Liberals complain about all sorts of things, I have zero sympathy for them. Ultimately, when they do not want to hand over documents or give the public what it needs, we will not stand alongside them. We will continue working to ensure that Quebeckers get their money and that the documents will be made public.
