:
Mr. Speaker, I have gone through a very extensive illustration of exactly how corruption has been part of the Liberal government as long as I have been in this Parliament, for five years. At the end of the term here it will be six years.
We have gone through the ad scam, and it was the Paul Martin government that fell for that, recognizing it fell over a $4-million scandal. Now, $4 million is a heck of a lot less than a $400-million scandal. However, the government fell in 2004, almost 20 years ago, over a $4-million scandal, where it was proven that the government had actually given money to companies or money had been funnelled back to the Liberal Party, so money was given to insiders.
At the end of the day, the Gomery commission proved that a lot of that money ended up back in the Liberal Party's hands. It was atrocious. Canadians punished the government for that, sent them packing and sent in a new government in 2006, for good reason. The government was long in the tooth and was effectively paying a lot of money to their friends. The Gomery commission obviously found enough information, on $4 million worth of government graft or corruption, that it acted according to the way it should have.
I have spoken about this and I have spoken about the various other scandals that have happened in the Liberal government. We have talked about SNC-Lavalin. That was in 2018. That effectively tarnished Canada's reputation on the international stage because our largest engineering company was involved in corporate corruption around the world. That means that a lot of Canadian companies were not able to bid on international contracts. That is a huge cost to the country, if we think about how many Canadian companies could not participate in international bids from international organizations because of one bad apple that was in the pockets of the Liberal government.
At the end of the day, the more or less threw one of his ministers completely under the bus in order to get what he wanted, a deferred agreement with SNC-Lavalin and getting the Attorney General to acquiesce to that. This was deemed to be and ruled to be corrupt. It should never have happened.
We know what happened in the Winnipeg labs. The Liberal government ended up calling an election rather than facing the consequences, in front of this House, of an order to produce the documents from the leaks of the Winnipeg labs. Incidentally, that was in 2021, when a civil servant was at the bar in this House, effectively saying that he had some privilege and did not have to provide them. Your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, ordered him to provide the documents.
The government took your predecessor to court in order not to produce those documents. That had never been done before in Canadian history, where the government takes the Speaker, the representative of this Parliament to court, legally weaponizing against this Parliament.
Parliament is supreme. The government is not supreme. The government answers to Parliament. This is our role here as elected officials, to oversee the government, not to just do what the government says. Mr. Speaker, you have been very good at that, as far as making sure the government is held to account. I applaud the Speaker's order here, requiring them to produce these documents. The Winnipeg labs situation was one thing. Incidentally, I wanted to point out that in 2024, the government actually produced 600 pages of documents regarding the leaks at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Now, that was three years later than they were asked for by Parliament.
I want to really expose the lengths the government went to to avoid that. The government called an election in order to dissolve Parliament so it would not have to disclose what had happened, and what it was complicit in allowing to happen, at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. It was scandalous that the government got away with this.
I have gone into the WE Charity in detail but, once again, it was senior members of the government working hand in hand with their friends, with money going back and forth and who is getting paid for what. There was lots of money going to Liberal pockets. It was scandalous and as corrupt as anything I have seen in the government. Luckily, we exposed that. It was one of my first years in Parliament. I recall bringing some of my skill set to the floor at that point in time, because I was looking at the financial statements, looking at one year versus the other years, and saying they were not right. We were actually looking at WE Charity, which was hiding some information. That is an in-out scam if there ever was one.
We have gone through the arrive scam in detail as well. The arrive scam was a lot of money going to two people working in the basements of their homes, money being shovelled out the door. Canadians know all about it. Again, we had one of them at the bar here in Parliament. We had somebody actually answering to parliamentarians about what was going on in their company and how they used a lot of influence with their Liberal friends and government friends in order to get a whole bunch of money shovelled into their bank accounts.
This is corruption. This is lack of oversight. I know that my colleagues on the other side of the House, the government side of the House, are saying that is just incompetence on the government's part, that it is nothing to do with them here and that we cannot tell them to be accountable. The government is supposed to be accountable. Every one of the ministers is supposed to be accountable for their departments.
What was quite clear in the ruling the Auditor General gave when they looked at the green slush fund, which we are addressing here today, was that the did not oversee the contracts with the conflicted Liberal insiders at all. I want everybody to address that here in the House of Commons.
The did not oversee those contracts at all. I call him the minister of writing cheques, because that is all he does. He thinks he is there to bring in business to Canada and write billions of dollars' worth of cheques to all kinds of industries, many of which are long-shot gambles. This is Canadian taxpayers' money that he is throwing out without any accountability whatsoever.
We need not just accountability for the money, but also accountability for the contracts, accountability for the people involved, and accountability in making sure we are getting value for money even if the contract is a terrible contract. Does it measure up? The is clearly not being accountable for that. He should be held to account in this House at the soonest possibility.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars funnelled to Liberals and Liberal friends through the green slush fund. All of a sudden, we were asking for those documents. The Auditor General had found some malfeasance there. The documents came back and they were completely redacted. As my friend, the member for , said, the 's Office could have run out of toner as there was so much black ink on the page.
I have spoken of various scandals here, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We have spoken about a number of these issues. Let me ask this question: Is this criminal? We do not know yet. We are trying to get these unredacted documents into the hands of the police, so the police can determine if there are criminal charges to be laid here.
We are being held up by the government. Will it be three years like the Winnipeg microbiology lab? Is it going to hold us up for three years to try and shove it under the rug and say nothing happened here? Three years down the road it will say something happened, but not worry about it. It was so long ago, we do not need to worry about it anymore. That is not the way this Parliament works.
We are asking for these documents. We are asking for these documents to be unredacted and provided to us so we can oversee this process and make sure there is accountability built into it. I am going to ask this question as well: If this is criminal, is what is happening in this House right now a cover-up of criminality? I am asking the people on that side of the House, the people on the government benches. Is this a cover-up of criminality?
If so, once it is determined that this is criminal, how do the Liberals think their complicity in this is going to be looked at by the Canadian public, but also by the police? They tried to hide this evidence from Parliament, which legitimately and legally asked for it. The Liberals decided they were not going to provide it, in a first iteration since Confederation, where the government has repeatedly provided not enough information to this Parliament.
I admit that COVID changed a lot in our country. It was not supposed to change democracy or the way we handle democracy in the House of Commons. We are supposed to practise democracy as if the House of Commons holds the government accountable for its actions, especially its actions in spending Canadian taxpayer money.
I have heard the deputy House leader talk about the charter. This is nonsense. The charter was not designed, there is no foresight at all to have the charter interrupt Parliament's role in holding the government to account. That is completely made up. It is a fabrication and should not be entertained here at all. If any official at the Department of Justice is putting that forward as an argument, that name should be put forward, because the person should be disbarred very quickly here and should not be practising law in Canada, let alone for His Majesty's government.
This, again, is a ruse put forward by the government in order to not be accountable to this Parliament. The government needs to be accountable to Parliament. Our job here, as His Majesty's loyal opposition, is to hold he government accountable and it is doing its best to obfuscate, confuse and try not to provide the information that is required for us to do our job here as His Majesty's loyal opposition.
Could the Speaker please enforce this as much as he can, as he has done to this point in time, continue to hold those people to account, as we do here today, and continue to enforce his rules as the representative of Parliament, ensuring the rules in the House are upheld and the government is held to account for its abuse of taxpayer funds?
:
Madam Speaker, it is a delight to see you in the chair. I was hoping you would be the chair occupant during my intervention on this issue because you and I share something in common. In my formative years, I went to school on the south shore of Montreal and grew up in Brossard. You are the member for that region and you will know my elementary school, Harold Napper. Many people went there, including one of your predecessors, whose wife was the director of the school.
Another thing we have in common is that we both survived the 1995 referendum, and you lived through the sponsorship scandal. That is where I want to begin, because those events, the 1995 referendum and the sponsorship scandal, made me a Conservative. They convinced me that the Liberal Party of Canada was corrupt and would be infinitely corrupt. I remember the table talk with my parents, my friends and people I knew. It became the common, accepted wisdom that the Liberal Party of Canada would always be corrupt and there was no way to save it.
I find myself now, in this chamber, privileged by the people in the riding of Calgary Shepard to be sent here to speak on their behalf, and it is happening all over again. However, this time, instead of the sponsorship scandal, it is now the SDTC scandal, and it is eight times larger than the sponsorship scandal. We are talking close to $400 million that was corruptly awarded to friends of the Liberal Party. Taxpayers work incredibly hard to earn a living in this country to pay their taxes and they have seen them awarded corruptly.
There are two parts to my intervention today. The first part is to talk about the Speaker's ruling on this matter, and the second part is the content of the documents that have led us to this moment and why the governing party is blocking the work of Parliament and not allowing us to proceed.
This could all end if the Liberals would just release all the unredacted documents to the parliamentary law clerk. It would end right there. We trust the law clerk. In this situation, I am fine with the RCMP looking at the documents; it has already put out a statement. If it finds nothing of value in the documents, the matter ends there. It is quite simple. There is no reason to hyperventilate and make up judicial opinions on the floor of the House of Commons or make up arguments about why the charter or the Constitution shields the Liberal Party of Canada from releasing the documents in its possession so we can see how bad the corruption is.
The Auditor General has already said there was corruption. The Auditor General has already ruled on this and so has the Speaker. The House ordered these documents to be produced June 10 with a vote of 174 to 148. No individual member of Parliament has the absolute right to obtain any document that he or she wants, but as a House, as a group of parliamentarians, a majority here represents a majority of the Canadian public and a majority of Canadian taxpayers. The Canadian taxpayer has been defrauded of close to $400 million. The exact number in question is $390 million.
The Speaker's ruling said, “In some instances, only partial disclosures were made, owing either to redactions or the withholding of documents.” That means entire documents were not provided. It goes on to say, “In other instances, the House order was met with a complete refusal.” The Government of Canada, all of the cabinet ministers and every single department do not have the right to refuse an order of this House. The Speaker goes on to say that whether it is wise or not to do so is beyond the point. The House has an absolute right to government documents.
The majority of members of Parliament approve spending. The government exists because Parliament approves spending, so we own these documents; these are ours. When we request them, when we call for them, when we demand them to be given to the law clerks, the government has to give them to us. We are not saying to give us all the documents across all of the Government of Canada. We are saying to give us the documents specific to SDTC, the green slush fund scandal. However, the Liberals have continued blocking the work of Parliament because they refused to give them. There were documents that were redacted, and there were documents that were completely withheld.
In the early interventions that led to the Speaker's ruling, the member for argued, as noted by the Speaker, that the “order for the production of documents should be respected”. The New Democrats were absolutely right. He also noted that the Bloc member of Parliament for “contended that the government may well have reasons not to meet its obligations, but that the privileges of the House are well established and the order was clear.” It was very clear to all of us when we voted on it.
The time for debate was then. At the time, the should have made the arguments that are being made now by different Liberal Party members and parliamentary secretaries. However, they did not make those arguments. I went through the record and they were not the arguments they were making.
House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, at page 985, confirms the procedural and constitutional understanding that is well understood by all of us:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers....
The reason for that is simple: We own those papers on behalf of the people of Canada. That is who we are doing this work for. They have a right to have the documents sent to the law clerk and then given to the RCMP. Then the RCMP can do whatever it wants with them. The order of the House does not tell the RCMP what to do. It does not say how the documents should be used or distributed within the RCMP. That is entirely up to the RCMP.
Going back to the ruling, the Speaker said, “The procedural precedents and authorities are abundantly clear.” He further stated, referring to Speaker Milliken's ruling from April 2010 at page 2043 of the Debates, “procedural authorities are categorical in repeatedly asserting the powers of the House in ordering the production of documents. No exceptions are made for any category of government documents”.
I do not understand why the government keeps insisting that Speaker Milliken is wrong. Speaker Milliken, I think we can all agree, in the modern history of our Parliament, is probably the best Speaker we have ever had. If we go through his rulings, we see that he was a wise Speaker, indeed. He was a member of my political formation. He is a man I think many of us would lean on when it comes to procedures of the House. I cannot believe that the Liberal Party of Canada is rejecting the words he said in this House on the production of documents.
Going beyond the powers of the House of Commons, which is an argument the made, the Speaker respectfully said, “these concerns ought to have been raised prior to the motion's adoption.” He goes on to state:
The House has clearly ordered the production of certain documents, and that order has clearly not been fully complied with. The Chair cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established.
He basically said that the government is in contempt of an order of the House, in contempt of Parliament.
It is simple. This all ends when the Liberals give all the documents to the law clerk. We are not saying to give them to the or to me, but to the law clerk of the House of Commons, appointed by the government, who will see the documents unredacted and transfer them to the RCMP. There are no great complications here.
One of my favourite lines, heard in debate, is this: When someone breaks into a house, do we call the police or do we call a committee? I would call the police. They are the people I go to when I have a problem. No committee can fix the problem of someone breaking in. There is almost $400 million from Canadian taxpayers at stake here, and Canadian taxpayers were bilked out of it.
It is not that this is a recent thing. It is not that it just came about and was discovered later on. It started in 2017. SDTC has existed since 2001 and spent almost 16 years with a clean bill of health from the Auditor General. Then certain Liberal cabinet ministers began appointing their friends and then appointed more friends, and those friends saw friends with companies that needed money and they fleeced taxpayers. Then everything came apart and we had a bizarre kabuki theatre, where the minister abolished the fund and rolled it into something else. The Liberals said that it was all good, that they were moving on, that there was nothing to see here and that it was such a terrible shame that all this money went missing, $390 million. A billion dollars per year was spent and there were no problems whatsoever, but they could not help themselves and reached into the pockets of the taxpayers and gave money to their friends.
Let us look at exactly what happened with SDTC. The Auditor General found that hundreds of millions of dollars were not just misspent but also corruptly awarded, sometimes to companies of board members who were making the decisions at board meetings. There were 82% of the funding transactions approved by the board during a five-year sample by the Auditor General that were found to have conflicts of interest.
I cannot imagine an instructor, a professor or a teacher who is teaching corporate ethics who would look at that and say, “That's okay, we should just roll things under the rug and move on. Mistakes were made, but it's not so bad.” The findings were from the Auditor General's five-year sample. She did not even have the opportunity to look at all the cases of all of the awarding of money.
In her report, the Auditor General said that the same board approved $59 million in projects that it was not authorized to. The Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund was meant to fund green-energy projects, but the $59 million was approved to go to nothing related to the fund, so it was illegally given. I would hope that we would all agree that $59 million is a huge sum of money. Taxpayers have a right to know where the money went and why the decisions were made.
There were people on the board who were awarding cash to each other's companies, which is an obvious conflict of interest. There were Government of Canada officials who sat through the board meetings, so how could the claim that he could not have known about it? How is it possible that there are no documents worthy of being given over to the parliamentary law clerk and to the RCMP to investigate and determine how exactly the decisions were made? They were completely in contravention of the conflict of interest laws of Canada, the public office holders rules and SDTC's own act.
I would think that when we appoint people to a board, they would read the act that governs their behaviour, but obviously that did not happen in this case. There were 405 transactions, and 226 transactions were the sample. In 186 of those 226, at least 82%, over $300 million, was corruptly given out. The fund had $832 million that was given out at the time.
There are individuals specifically involved who were on the board and who were involved with a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital. The member for brought this up. Do members know who the lobbyist was for a few years for Cycle Capital? It was the before he became the minister. He was a paid lobbyist and had to register, which is how we know that he lobbied for the company; it is all public information. When he was lobbying for Cycle Capital, that company got $111 million. That was so fortunate for them. How lucky are they?
There are documents that would show which meetings were held, what documents were exchanged and what was talked about. I am sure that there would also be diary notes from public servants in the meetings on how decisions were being made or what was being said. There were 25 times in the year before the was elected that he lobbied, which is quite quite surprising. I wonder when he became the nominated candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Others who participated were told at different points that some projects were rejected because they did not meet the funding requirements. They were told, in emails that we know of because they were released by the whistle-blower and by others at parliamentary committees, that they would be helped to find money from other government departments. Soon after that, the former board chair got $12 million dollars from ACOA and the ISET program. Therefore, even in some situations where it is quite obvious that, for conflict of interest reasons, a program could not get money, the money was given out through another fund.
Nine directors, according to the Auditor General, accounted for the 186 conflicts. The nine directors were individuals appointed by the government, by cabinet, to sit on the board and make decisions, and they did make decisions.
The sponsorship scandal was around $40 million, as I remember it. I am sure that with an inflation adjustment it would be a bigger number now, but $40 million is still a lot of money. It is still an incredible amount of money for the taxpayer. We are talking about close to $400 million in this particular case, which is a much bigger sum.
The said in June that there would be new transparency rules. New transparency measures would be introduced. Now the Liberal government is giving out money again, but not a single bit of the information has been made available anywhere on the new website. SDTC used to put out a quarterly report on every single company. The new fund, or whatever it has been rolled into, does not do that anymore. It is silent; the information is hidden. There is no more information being given out.
We are supposed to believe that the issue was only the nine directors who were directly appointed by the government. In 2017, the government went out of its way. It replaced the board chair because he was inconvenient. The government appointed its own person into that particular role. That person participated in some of the conflict of interest decisions, sometimes to give even her own company some of the taxpayers' own dollars, when they should not have at all. This goes on and on.
As other members have mentioned in the House, this is not the first time that the Government of Canada, the Liberal cabinet, is refusing to disclose documents. The government actually took the then Speaker to court to stop the release of detailed documents from the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab. We have even gone through two parliamentary committees to try to extract the documents. The government even called an election to avoid having to release them.
There was the SNC-Lavalin scandal, during which the claimed on live television during a press conference that there was nothing to see and that nothing was going on. There was the WE Charity scandal, and there were foreign interference campaigns. Again, in every single situation, at first the government refused to release the documents.
As I often do, I have a Yiddish proverb. I feel that the whole situation is like a bridge. I want to read the proverb into the record in its original Yiddish. I am going to practice.
[Member spoke in Yiddish]
[English]
I will translate: If his, that is, the government's, word were a bridge, I would be afraid to cross it. If we are to believe the government's argument right now that for charter reasons, for constitutional reasons, it cannot release the full documents that the Speaker has ordered released, based on a majority vote in this place of all the MPs, and it is making a bridge out of it, I would not cross it. I would tell every single person in my riding of Calgary Shepard that they cannot trust the government's words. If it has built a bridge out of its words, we cannot trust it. It is old Yiddish wisdom, and it applies right here.
This all ends when the government releases all of the documents; it is really that simple. Then we can get back to the normal work of the House.
There is actually, I believe, another question of privilege coming up after this one, involving “the other Randy”, who, I am told, has also done things in a corrupt way. We are also trying to figure out what is there.
In anticipation of a question I am very likely to get, I do want to remind the other side about two times the made comments about the RCMP's laying criminal charges. One is from a February 2018. The Prime Minister said in a town hall meeting that the police investigation of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman will “inevitably” lead to “court processes”. In April 2017, he had told reporters at a press conference that Norman's case “will likely end up before the courts.” That was about criminal court charges in that case.
The government ran through the mud a senior, decorated vice chief of the defence staff to suit its own goals, and now it claims to us that it cannot tell the RCMP what to do, when it has done it themselves. I do not believe the Liberals. Do not walk across that bridge. They must give us the documents.
:
Madam Speaker, it is always a wonderful opportunity and a true privilege to stand in the House of Commons and represent my amazing riding of Peterborough—Kawartha.
Here we are, and what are we doing today in the House of Commons? I often think the folks at home watching must feel like they are just watching an episode of The Young and the Restless. In the three years since I have been elected, they could turn on ParlVU or CPAC, turn it off for a couple of months or a year even, turn it back on, and here we are, still talking about incompetence and corruption, a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency and division in our country that has never reached this level in my lifetime of 45 years.
What has happened here in the House of Commons is that Parliament has basically been brought to a halt, because the Liberals are refusing to turn over documents, and the Conservatives are demanding they do. What are these documents and what are we talking about? It is called the green slush fund. It is based on Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC.
This is a green slush fund, and it is supposed to be for companies to apply to. It is a billion-dollar fund to invest in green technologies or green businesses. What does that mean? A whistle-blower came before committee, and I think this is a really important piece of this discussion. Many bureaucrats and many people have to go to work, and maybe they are privy to some very important information there. At the end of the day, and our job is really no different, people have to put their head down on the pillow and be comfortable, by their moral compass, with what they are actually doing.
The bureaucrats working under this fund, and under the , could not do that any longer, so they came forward to committee. They are what are called whistle-blowers. They said serious corruption was happening. I am going to read some of the testimony that was put forward:
I think the Auditor General's investigation was more of a cursory review. I don't think the goal and mandate of the Auditor General's office is to actually look into criminality, so I'm not surprised by the fact that they haven't found anything criminal. They're not looking at intent. If their investigation was focused on intent, of course they would find the criminality....
I know that the federal government, like the minister, has continued saying that there was no criminal intent and nothing was found, but I think the committee would agree that they're not to be trusted on this situation. I would happily agree to whatever the findings are by the RCMP, but I would say that I wouldn't trust that there isn't any criminality unless the RCMP is given full authority to investigate....
Again, if you bring in the RCMP and they do their investigation and they find something or they don't, I think the public would be happy with that. I don't think we should leave it to the current federal government or the ruling party to make those decisions. Let the public see what's there.
Here is another quote: “Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.”
We are demanding that documents be handed over. The Speaker has ruled in favour of this. The opposition parties alongside us, everyone except the Liberals, have agreed with what we have asked for. These are documents that outline what corruption has happened. This is critical because it is the money of the people watching at home.
The government does not have its own money. It has taxpayers' money, and there should be a pretty strong understanding and agreement that whoever is in government is not abusing that money, wasting that money or giving it to their friends and family for them to get rich and not actually do any work.
It is a very simple ask. I want to read a couple of things into the record here, but first there is something I would ask people at home to really think about. This is a lot of procedural conversation about parliamentary privilege and this and that, but the question they need to ask themselves is, why do these documents exist in the first place? Why do we have a government in power that would not just misuse money but also give taxpayer money to its friends and family? Why are we even having this discussion? That is the biggest question I would have.
If the Liberals were innocent, if they were truly here to represent people, elected to ensure transparency and accountability, they would hand unredacted documents over to ensure accountability and transparency. Why do these documents exist in the first place? What are the Liberals hiding? How did we get here? How did we get to a level of corruption where we have hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that has not gone to improving our lives and, in fact, has made it significantly worse? That is the question that needs to be asked today.
The Auditor General of Canada found that the turned the Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. In this report specifically, the Auditor General found that $59 million was awarded to 10 ineligible projects that, on occasions, could not demonstrate an environmental benefit or development of green technology. That amount, $59 million, sounds a lot like the arrive scam app number.
There was $334 million sent to over 186 projects in which the board members had a conflict of interest. The Auditor General did not even do all 400 cases. Can people imagine how many more there are? Let us not imagine. Let us get the documents and let us see. The Auditor General made it clear that the blame for this scandal falls on the 's , who did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were given to the Liberal insiders. This is obviously very serious.
I think it is important to go back to how we even got here. I want to read a quote into the record. I want people at home to guess who said this:
Political leadership is about raising the bar on openness and transparency....
As a Member of Parliament, as a Leadership Candidate, and now as Leader of my Party, I have taken every opportunity to raise the bar when it comes to openness and accountability...As Leader of my Party, I made raising the bar on transparency and openness my first major policy announcement, so that Canadians can better hold their leaders accountable.
For me, transparency isn’t a slogan or a tactic; it’s a way of doing business. I trust Canadians. I value their opinions. And now that I’ve heard them, I’m going to act.
That was from June 2013. Are there any guesses as to who said that? It was the . Oh, how the tides have turned.
I want to read another one because they are just so good. Get some popcorn, folks, because we are here for a while. He said, “I think we're going to have to embark on a completely different style of government”. We could interpret that a lot of ways. He said:
A government that both accepts its responsibilities to be open and transparent, but also a population that doesn't mind lifting the veil to see how sausages are made. That there is a dual responsibility, in changing towards more open and transparent functioning, that really will go to a deep shift in how government operates.
Are there any guesses as to who said that? It was the same guy, the , in April 2015. I have another quote from April 2015: “Once I look at the trend lines in democracy, the empowering of citizens and activists, I know that the government of the future is going to be very, very different than governments of the past”. It sure is different. Since I have been here, it has been another day and another scandal. I have never seen the country in the state it is now in.
People ask me why Conservatives have to be so hard on the . It is because the opposition's role is to ensure that the government is doing the best for the people of Canada. It is to bring balance to this place. The Prime Minister has shown that he is incapable of balance. He has shown that it is rules for thee, but not for me.
I want to go through the list of scandals. Again, people should grab some popcorn because there are a lot of them. There is the McKinsey scandal. The Auditor General of Canada report criticizes the and the government for awarding $200 million in contracts to McKinsey without proper guidelines; 90% of contracts were awarded without clear justification, with many lacking defined purposes or outcomes. In some cases, the Canada Border Services Agency altered requirements to allow McKinsey to qualify; 70% of contracts were sole-sourced, with no explanation for bypassing competitive processes. McKinsey operated without necessary security clearances in 13 out of 17 contracts. The firm's past failures include involvement in the Canada Infrastructure Bank and contributing to the opioid crisis, which has killed 42,000 Canadians since 2015. The Liberals paid $600 million in damages for this.
Then we have the trip to Jamaica; the 's $84,000 holiday vacation was a gift from family friends. Again, we have rules for thee, but not for me. Then he went to Montana for $228,000, not including the salaries of the RCMP officers. I am not done yet. There was another trip to Jamaica in April. That one was $162,000. Who can forget arrive scam? I know my friend from sure does not forget that one. We had to bring forward a government agency, GC Strategies. Does anybody know what “GC Strategies” stands for? It stands for “Government of Canada Strategies”. There was $60 million that went to a company that does not even exist and that two guys were able to build in a weekend for under $250,000 of taxpayer money. Does anyone want to know why the cost of living is out of control? We do not have a revenue problem in this country. We have a Prime Minister with a spending and corruption problem.
Let us not forget about the $6,000-a-night hotel room, where the burst into song at the Queen's funeral. Who could ever forget the WE Charity? The Prime Minister announced that the WE Charity would manage the $912-million Canada student service grant, and the Ethics Commissioner initiated an investigation into that decision on July 3, 2020.
Probably my favourite scandal that stands today is SNC-Lavalin; it really speaks to the character of what we are dealing with and the sort of rot we have seen in this country. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Mario Dion, investigated allegations that the Prime Minister's Office pressured former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould regarding SNC-Lavalin. Raybould resigned from cabinet and principal secretary Gerald Butts denied the claims before resigning. Jane Philpott also resigned in protest.
In August 2019, the commissioner found that the and his officials had breached ethics rules by attempting to undermine the federal prosecutor's decisions. SNC-Lavalin has been charged with fraud and corruption in connection with payments of nearly $48 million to public officials in Libya under Moammar Gadhafi's government and allegations that it defrauded a Libyan organization of an estimated $130 million. Two Liberal ministers took the fall for that one; they were female, I might add. That is another one of these classic things. I cannot wait to see who is going to take the fall for these documents. They will be turned over because we are not going to stop. Let us have that on this conversation.
To put this into context, can we imagine if somebody from CRA phoned and said, “We think you have violated the tax law and we need you to hand over documents”, and we said no? What would happen? Would the official just leave and say it was no problem? Let us say someone handed over documents but had blacked out everything important that CRA wanted to know. Would CRA be okay with that? The general public has to follow every single rule that the government imposes on them while it taxes them into poverty, but the government and the say, “No, not us; we are not responsible for following any rules”.
This mentality bleeds down into the entire front rows and benches, and not just that but into society. We have a societal blister in this country of a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency. It bleeds into our public safety when criminals have no consequences and crime is rampant; it is all over the place. Then, there is the erosion of trust in institutions. When we erode trust, we create chaos because there is no relationship. It is the most detrimental thing we can do, and the people do not trust the government, nor should they. I am not even done reading half the scandals, and the has only been in power for nine years.
The other important piece to talk about in this is the green slush fund and, in itself, what it truly is. As we found out today, the PBO has now said that the carbon tax is just this big scam. Conservatives have been saying this from day one. It is driving up the cost of everything. Canadians are paying more out than they are getting back, and the PBO confirmed this yet again. Truckers testified in committee that they are paying $20,000 in carbon tax. What do they think is going to happen to the cost of food? Why has housing doubled under the current ? That is what I would like to know. The green, environmentally friendly initiative that the Liberals stand on all the time is a facade. They tout themselves as the most environmentally conscious party, but this is pandering. That carbon tax is not an environmental plan; it is a tax plan.
We literally had the stand up in the House and say that we wanted the planet to burn. Later, we found out that the prevented 50 firefighters and 20 fire trucks from fighting the fire in Jasper while it burned. That is the gist of what we are talking about.
I want to end with this: The undercurrent of all of this is that the government wastes money. I used to worry about how we were going to make this money work. Well, I just found $400 million. The Conservatives would make life more affordable for Canadians. We would restore hope, and we would make housing, food and groceries affordable again.
:
Madam Speaker, my colleague asked a question for those watching out there today. Many have heard about this. What is this green slush fund and why are we here today?
The Liberal government is obstructing justice by refusing to turn over documents to the RCMP showing that Liberal-appointed managers used the green slush fund to pay nearly $400 million to companies that they owned. There is so much scandal with this particular NDP-Liberal government that it is hard to keep track, and we just get desensitized to it, even in this place. There is so much of it, as my colleague mentioned. She did not even get through the full list of the scandals. We are here today because Canadians deserve transparency and a full investigation into this scandal. This is a big one. It is $400 million as it stands, and further investigation needs to happen.
I think we also need to highlight that while the NDP-Liberals have their carbon tax and are bleeding money from Canadians to pay into their carbon tax schemes, this is where the money is going. While people are literally turning down their thermostat or buying noodles for a dollar a package at the grocery store just to survive, these guys are filling their friends' pockets with literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
I will make one additional point here. In relation to northern B.C., I was in the House a few weeks ago and talked about how we have just lost two mills in the area. Why have we lost those two mills? The costs are so exorbitant just to get timber now that some of these companies have said that they cannot afford to do it anymore, a direct attribution to the carbon tax and its costs.
I am going to talk about the basics and then I am going to get into it. It is going to take some time, but I think the folks out there want a deeper dive and want to know a little bit more. What are the basics of the scandal? At least $390 million has gone to Liberal insiders and this is what the Liberals are trying to hide, obviously. That is why they are opposing this production order for documents to be turned over to the RCMP. Obviously, it is better to cover it up, and we have seen the examples of where they do it all the time. That is why the 's personal department, the PCO, defied the order of the House to produce these documents and ordered departments to redact all sensitive information.
This is a delay tactic. We want the documents. They gave us some black sheets of paper and that was supposed to pacify us in this place, but we had some pretty sharp members that caught it, and we are standing up to say that this will not cut it.
How bad is it? This is from my colleague from , who has done yeoman's work on this: “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”.
That is pretty obvious. We call it a conflict of interest in this place. We all know the rules. These folks did not just break the rules but they did it in abundance. Again, in terms of the rules that were set up before, when we were in government, the NDP-Liberals are pushing the boundaries of any limits that were set for any of us in this place.
“In a five-year period where there were 405 transactions approved by the [Sustainable Development Technology Canada] board, the Auditor General sampled 226, so only half of them, and found that 186 of those 226 transactions were conflicted.” One would be bad enough, but there were 186. “That is the 82% and that is, again, the $330 million”, as my colleague had said.
Those numbers are massive, but they are still a little bit unclear. It gets vague when you get past the $100-million mark. What does that actually mean?
Let us talk about Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It was established in 2001 by the Government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology Act to fund the development and demonstration of new technologies that promote sustainable development, and it did some good work. Prior to these guys forming government and some of their ministers getting involved, it was actually doing okay.
SDTC is a federally funded non-profit that is supposed to approve and disburse over $100 million in funds annually to clean-technology companies. Executives awarded projects in which they held conflicts of over $330 million in funds.
In 2019, former Liberal industry minister Navdeep Bains began appointing conflicted executives to the board of SDTC. I will later get into what some of those members have done.
The -appointed board began voting companies in which executives held active conflict of interest SDTC funding. Members were being put on the board that they actually knew were in conflict. They were already getting money from this board, yet they were still appointed to it. It is unbelievable. Governance standards at the fund deteriorated rapidly under the leadership of the new chair, Annette Verschuren. The Auditor General and Ethics Commissioner initiated separate investigations after whistle-blowers came forward with allegations of financial mismanagement at the fund.
I think I want to get into some of these individuals and what the story is. We will talk about Annette Verschuren. She was the chair of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, so she was the head of it. This is from The Globe and Mail:
What’s mind-boggling is that SDTC was already funding an NRStor project in 2019, when Ms. Verschuren was appointed as chair. The Liberal government chose her to oversee an agency that had a funding contract with the company she ran. [Red flag.] ...Last week, SDTC’s former chief executive officer, Leah Lawrence, told a parliamentary committee that she warned an assistant deputy minister at Innovation Science and Economic Development, Andrew Noseworthy. “I expressed concern there was a potential for both conflict of interest and the perception of conflict of interest,” Ms. Lawrence said. “I expressed concern that Ms. Verschuren and SDTC could potentially be damaged by the appointment.”
For her to be still there as a board member is unbelievable. From my colleague from :
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 the 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....
That is a good thing to highlight. There are so many other entities and companies they could have picked, but they just happened to pick 82% that are part of this particular board. It is unbelievable.
It is strangely a pure coincidence with these hand-picked directors from the Prime Minister.
If that were not bad enough, this particular director [Andrée-Lise Méthot] 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.
It is absolutely unbelievable. This is one that is less money, but it is just so obvious that I have to say it.
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.
From a government document, these are some of the numbers that Annette Verschuren was approved in conflict: $332,500, $698,250, $98,000, $102,000, $111,000, $150,000 and it goes on. That is just one of these members of the board who was in conflict.
The next person is Stephen Kukucha. I will quote my colleague again, and he spoke of:
...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.
This is another conflict. I have some examples of the expenditures listed here for Stephen Kukucha. One is $157,000. Another one is $151,000, and one is $1,033,771. This is all funding approved by the absolutely corrupt board.
We have more. The next member was Guy Ouimet. My colleague said:
...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 [definitely] pays to be a Liberal insider.
He says $17 million is a small amount of money. I do not know what world this guy comes from, but $17 million, to most Canadians, probably 99% of Canadians, is a lot of money. He has an amount in an approved conflict list that actually says $17 million. There is another amount that says $157,000 and another one for $151,000. It is just unbelievable. It just keeps going. It is endless.
We will move on. This is the last one I will mention. This is the one with direct ties to the current radical . This particular board member's name is Andrée-Lise Méthot. As my colleague said:
One director was particularly aggressive.... 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 the SDTC.
That is a quarter of a billion dollars, folks, and that name of Cycle Capital will come up again. My colleague continues, “while she was on the board, $114 million went to green companies that she had invested in.” I already made reference to the connection between this person on the board and the current radical , the same environment minister who is causing mills to close in my riding, is limiting oil and gas development in my riding, and is limiting mining investment in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.
That same radical minister is having an effect. He wants Canadians to pay the carbon tax so he can get more money and give it to his friends. As my colleague said, “her in-house, paid lobbyist for 10 years before he was elected...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.” That is what he went to work for. He made money for this company. He brought that kind of money in before he was a minister.
This is the radical . In his time as lobbyist for Cycle Capital, for which he lobbied 25 times in the year before his entering the House, the PMO and the industry department gave over $100 million in green slush money to Cycle Capital.
What is even more shocking is that the is a member of the House right now, but he still owns shares in that particular company. The question is that we are not sure what the value of those shares is. He has not declared that. That is, again, what some of these documents will disclose, and we will hopefully find out how much that is.
I will read on. My colleague said, “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.” This is the cabinet who has given the money to the same group to spend because he figured he could help out the Liberals' friends by dumping money into this thing, so he funded the fund with another three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The has given money to a company he has direct ties to and has shares in. It is hard to argue that it is not going over there. We hope the documents will be forthcoming so we can actually see it. As my colleague from said, “He still owns shares in it. He has not disclosed what they are worth.” He then makes reference to the minister having previous experience wearing an orange jumpsuit.
I think what bothered me the most when I saw some of these numbers is that we are the ones who go up to the northern communities, and I face this every time I go to Fort St. John and other northern communities in my riding. There, this is the issue that folks are dealing with. I will use an example. The carbon tax bill for a person in Fort Nelson living in a 1,500 square foot mobile home was over $500. This was in the spring, by the way, and over half of that bill was pure carbon tax. This person, who probably cannot afford much, is trying to stay warm in the north in a mobile home, and the radical is saying that this person can afford to pay a bit more. It would be one thing if it were going to a good cause and was for a good reason, but now we see evidence that it is going to line the pockets of his Liberal friends. That is even more of a travesty in what is happening here.
We have used what maybe some would call a slogan, but people are genuinely struggling to feed themselves, stay warm and house themselves. Some people in these homeless encampments just cannot afford to live in an apartment anymore. They have nowhere else to go. They ran out of money or have lost their job in the natural resource sector for some reason, again because of the radical 's policies.
What do we know in conclusion? The Auditor General of Canada found that the had turned Sustainable Development Technology Canada into a slush fund for Liberal insiders. As my colleague pointed out, “A recording of a senior civil servant slammed the ‘outright incompetence’ of the [Trudeau] government, which gave 390 million dollars' worth of contracts—
:
Madam Speaker, it is another day and another Liberal scandal. Canadians have watched Parliament grind to a halt because of the government's green slush fund scandal, and now that the Liberals have been caught, the is preventing Parliament from moving forward in order to cover up the truth. Members of the House fully understand that Parliament has ground to a halt because the Prime Minister is refusing to hand over documents relating to Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
Sustainable Development Technology Canada, also known as SDTC, was created by the government to fund new technologies that would reduce emissions. However, Canadians have discovered that SDTC has turned into nothing more than a Liberal slush fund rampant with corruption and conflicts of interest. Ever since the Liberals began appointing new executives to the board in 2019, executives were awarding money to companies that they held an active conflict of interest in.
The Liberals would have gotten away with this corruption had it not been for the brave whistle-blowers who came forward to sound the alarm on the financial mismanagement of the fund. Since then, both the Auditor General and the Ethics Commissioner launched separate investigations into the Liberal green slush fund. What did they find? The Auditor General's investigation revealed that $390 million in funding was awarded to projects that should have been totally ineligible or was awarded to projects in which the board members were conflicted. The Auditor General found SDTC awarded $58 million to 10 ineligible projects that at times could not prove an environmental benefit or a development of green technology, $334 million over 186 cases in which board members held a conflict of interest and $58 million for projects without guaranteeing that terms and conditions were met. Liberal insiders were caught padding the pockets of companies that they were invested in, and they were doing this all with Canadian taxpayers' money.
Although the Auditor General exposed this corruption, there are many reasons to believe that this is far more than just financial mismanagement. Canadians are asking if this is criminal, and rightly so.
The same whistle-blower who exposed the Liberals' green slush fund is confident that an RCMP investigation would find criminality. The whistle-blower stated at committee, “Just as I was always confident that the Auditor General would confirm the financial mismanagement at SDTC, I remain equally confident that the RCMP will substantiate the criminal activities that occurred within the organization.” When asked if the Auditor General's investigation was sufficient enough, the whistle-blower said:
I think the Auditor General's investigation was more of a cursory review. I don't think the goal and mandate of the Auditor General's office is to actually look into criminality, so I'm not surprised by the fact that they haven't found anything criminal. They're not looking at intent. If their investigation was focused on intent, of course they would find the criminality.
That is why the House of Commons ordered that the documents on the green slush fund be handed over to the RCMP. How will we ever get to the bottom of this corruption if the RCMP does not have all the information needed to fully investigate the criminality of the slush fund?
Although the Liberals voted against the document production order, the House of Commons adopted the motion. However, instead of respecting the will of Parliament, the Liberal government refused to release the documents ordered by the House of Commons and therefore breached the privileges of Parliament. This is a very serious offence. How can we represent Canadians if the fails to respect the House of Commons? How can we represent Canadians if the Prime Minister disregards the powers of Parliament? How can we represent Canadians if the Prime Minister turns a blind eye to democracy? The answer is simple: We cannot.
What we are seeing from the is a full-scale cover-up to hide the massive corruption. The Prime Minister does not care about accountability. He does not care about transparency. He does not care about justice. The only thing the Prime Minister cares about is protecting his government and the Liberal insiders who got rich from taxpayer dollars.
It is not just me who is saying this either. While testifying at the committee, the SDTC whistle-blower stated, “I think the current government is more interested in protecting themselves and protecting the situation from being a public nightmare. They would rather protect wrongdoers and financial mismanagement than have to deal with a situation like SDTC in the public sphere.” I could not agree more. It has become very clear over the last nine years that the Canadians who do best under the government are well-connected Liberal insiders.
The Liberal government has displayed a constant disregard for Parliament and the work of parliamentarians. This is not the first time the Liberals have failed to adhere to document production orders, especially regarding their failed environmental programs. For months, the environment committee ordered the environment minister to release proof that the carbon tax reduces emissions. In fact, the committee ordered the production of these documents on three separate occasions. We ordered this information on November 30, 2023, on March 21, 2020, and again on April 9, 2024.
Each time the committee ordered these documents, the environment minister disregarded the will of parliamentarians and refused to provide them. I wonder why. Maybe it was because the environment minister admitted that his government does not track the emissions directly reduced from the carbon tax. Maybe it was because emissions have gone up under the . Maybe it was because Canada's independent environment commissioner said that the Liberals would not meet their own emissions reduction targets. The point is that the environment minister's defiance of Parliament was an insult to Canadians. Unfortunately, the NDP and the Bloc refused to refer this matter to the House of Commons at the time.
With regard to the carbon tax, it is important to note that just this morning, the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer once again confirmed that the carbon tax will cost the average Canadian family more than they get back. According to the PBO's report, which was just released this morning, “taking into consideration both fiscal and economic impacts, PBO estimates that the average household in each of the backstop provinces will see a net cost”. It it no wonder the Liberals were hiding the carbon tax documents from the environment committee.
This was not the only time this year that the Liberals refused to hand over documents on their failed environmental programs. Although we are discussing a billion-dollar green slush fund today, I am confident that we will soon be discussing another one very soon in the House of Commons. That is because earlier this year, the environment commissioner released a damning report on the Liberal government's $8-billion net-zero accelerator fund. The vast majority of Canadians have never heard of the net-zero accelerator fund, which I find very surprising given that it is costing taxpayers $8 billion.
Usually when a government spends this much money, its members travel across the country, talk about what the money was used for and how it will help Canadians. However, that is not the case with the net-zero accelerator fund. Thanks to Canada's environment commissioner, we now know why the Liberals do not want to talk about it. In a damning report tabled in Parliament, Canada's environment commissioner revealed that the $8-billion net-zero accelerator was nothing more than another Liberal slush fund. The audit found that over 70% of the funding agreements had no commitment to reduce any emissions. The whole point of this fund was to reduce emissions, but now we know that this was a complete lie. Does this sound familiar? It sure does. This is very similar to the corruption we are debating today on the Liberals' billion-dollar green slush fund.
Canada's Auditor General found that 10 projects funded through the green slush fund did not even produce green technology or contribute to emissions reductions. In fact, $59 million of the green slush fund was spent on ineligible projects. This is the same type of corruption that was revealed by the environment commissioner on the Liberals' net-zero accelerator fund.
The commissioner testified at committee on this scandal. He stated that “the department did not always know to what extent GHG emissions had been reduced by those companies that took part in the initiative, or whether the funding provided would lead to reduced emissions.”
When I asked the commissioner how many emissions had been reduced by this $8-billion emissions reduction program, he stated, “I can't say how many yet.”
It is unbelievable. When I asked the commissioner if the government was tracking the value for money from the net-zero accelerator, he replied, “Not in a public way.... We've made our own calculations of the value for money that we could, based on the data they have, but we have seen no public reporting on the value for money, no.”
Not only did the environment commissioner reveal that the Liberals were handing out money without any commitment to reduce emissions, but the commissioner also revealed that the emissions reduction target of net-zero accelerator was being protected under cabinet confidence.
According to a written response from the government's industry department, the government is “not in a position to disclose the [emissions reduction] targets, as they are protected under Cabinet confidence”. This is coming from the same department that was responsible for the green slush fund that we are debating today.
The Liberals are charging taxpayers $8 billion for a government program that is supposed to reduce emissions without telling them the goal of the program. That means no one will ever know what the money is achieving, if anything.
Who got the money? In typical Liberal fashion, the government was keeping this list a secret from Canadians. The lucky recipients of $8 billion in taxpayers' money could not be found anywhere.
That is why Conservatives on the environment committee ordered the government to release this list of recipients. We found that billions of taxpayer dollars were given away to non-Canadian companies.
The Liberals refused to provide this list to Canadian taxpayers, so I will read the recipients of the money into the record: $200 million to Algoma Steel, $400 million to ArcelorMittal, $49 million to Heidelberg Materials, $514 million to Stellantis, $96 million to General Motors, $40 million to CAE, $61 million to Pratt & Whitney, $222 million to Rio Tinto, $15 million to Volvo, $350 million to INSAT, $300 million to Air Products, $27 million to E3 Lithium, $15 million to AVL Fuel Cell Canada, $204 million to E-One Moli, $25 million to Svante, $48 million to Moltex, $500 million to NextStar Energy, $700 million to PowerCo, $551 million to Umicore Canada, $27 million to Westinghouse, $50 million to Lion Electric, $37 million to Vale Canada Limited and $148 million to POSCO.
I doubt the Canadian taxpayers will ever get a thank you from these megacorporations. Taxpayers should be furious. I am furious. I cannot imagine hearing this and knowing that $8 billion went to foreign companies, very well-off companies, in the name of net zero, in the name of “we are going to reduce emissions and we all have to put our shoulder to this”.
What did we get out of this? Someone's pockets were lined, but it certainly was not the Canadian taxpayer.
Canadian taxpayers should be disgusted with the Liberal government as it continues to spend their money without any transparency or accountability. That is why the environment committee ordered that those net-zero accelerator contracts be released, so Canadians could see the details, but the government is once again refusing to respect a documentation order. It has been over 150 days since we ordered these documents on behalf of Canadians, yet the Liberal government refuses to show Canadian taxpayers what it is charging them $8 billion for.
It gets worse. This is unbelievable. Earlier this week, at the government operations and estimates committee, the environment commissioner revealed the Liberals have created a fast-track lane for this $8-billion taxpayer-funded program. According to the environment commissioner, megacorporations can fast-track their applications for billions of taxpayer dollars by simply writing a letter. Guess who that letter is supposed to be sent to: the .
According to page 8 of the environment commissioner's report on the net-zero accelerator fund, “A project of more than $50 million also requires Treasury Board approval, concurrence letters from ministers of other concerned departments, and Cabinet approval”. It then states that net-zero accelerator projects “can be fast-tracked with a letter to the Prime Minister.”
The Liberals are giving special access to billions of tax dollars with a simple letter to the . We cannot make this stuff up. This is absolutely absurd. If Canadians thought the green slush fund was the damning scandal, wait until we uncover the truth about the Liberals' $8-billion net-zero accelerator slush fund.
Parliament has the privilege to compel the production of papers. The privilege allows us to properly represent Canadians who elected us to serve them. However, as the Speaker ruled, the privilege was breached by the Liberal government and the Liberal . Let us not forget that. The Prime Minister is blocking everything. We can all dance around this and we can all say what we want to say, but the Prime Minister is ultimately in control of this, and he does not want to have anybody see these documents.
On June 10, the House of Commons passed a motion that ordered the production of documents relating to the government's green slush fund so they could be turned over to the RCMP. In response to this motion, the government either outright refused the House order or redacted the documents that were turned over, basically making them useless so no one could do a full investigation. It would ultimately end up at committee just like we are right now. That is why Conservatives raised the question of privilege.
The Speaker then ruled on this question of privilege. He stated, “The House has the undoubted right to order the production of any and all documents from any entity or individual it deems necessary to carry out its duties.” The Speaker then added, “The House has clearly ordered the production of certain documents, and that order has clearly not been fully complied with.”
It is no wonder that Canadians have lost confidence in the government. Time and time again, we see the Liberal government cover up its wrongdoings. It is a pattern of behaviour that has resulted in anger among Canadians. Every time the Liberal government is caught doing something wrong, it does everything it can to cover up its wrongdoings. This approach is dangerous to democracy because it suggests the government can get away with anything. It sets a precedent that rules do not apply to the government of the day.
After nine years, this is more proof that the Liberals are not worth the cost, crime or corruption. The Speaker has ruled that the Liberal government has violated Parliament's order to hand over evidence to the police for a criminal investigation into the Liberals' $400-million green slush fund scandal. Instead of respecting the will of Parliament by handing over the documents, the has instead chosen to paralyze Parliament. As such, the Prime Minister has made it impossible for members of Parliament to address the issue that matters most to Canadians. We cannot address the doubling of—
:
Madam Speaker, integrity, character and trust are what I ran on in my first election in 2014 and what I have run on in every subsequent election. Nothing means more to me than protecting my integrity and character and ensuring that my constituents in Foothills have their trust in me.
I have to question how my Liberal colleagues will go home for the Thanksgiving constituency week and look their constituents in the face and say they can still trust them and they have integrity and character, when they know there is a green slush fund of more than $400 million that the is doing everything he possibly can to hide from Canadians. That is a big number. There is no question about that. However, in my opinion, the size of the corruption in a scandal does not matter as much as what it says about the person involved in it, who is the .
He campaigned in 2015 about wanting the most accountable and transparent government in Canadian history, and he has certainly fallen well short of that goal. The epitaph of the government, when it falls in a very short amount of time, will be “Promises made, promises broken”, or perhaps “Here lies a government that took care of its friends despite the needs of its constituents”. I am not exactly sure if that is a legacy I would want my constituents to see in me.
The role of Parliament and all parliamentarians is to hold the government to account and oversee government spending. By refusing to comply with the Speaker's decision to produce documents, the government is undermining the principle and integrity of this House and is setting a very dangerous precedent for what I think Canadians expect from all of us in the House of Commons. Parliament is the House of the people, the people in our constituencies across this country who trusted and elected us to represent them, be their voice and ensure that we are good stewards of every single one of their tax dollars. Canadians, perhaps more than ever, as they struggle with the cost of living crisis and try hard every day just to put food on the table and pay their mortgage, deserve to know that their tax dollars are being spent prudently and on programs that will impact their lives in a positive way.
I often give constituents or stakeholders tours of the House of Commons and Parliament. We have a running joke, as my constituents have elected me as a Conservative member, to watch their wallets and hold their purses tight, because if they pass by a Liberal, they may ask for a donation or pick into their pockets. We do that as something fun, in jest, to have a little laugh, but unfortunately, the joke has turned into reality, as the government is reaching into the pockets of every single Canadian to fill the pockets of Liberal insiders and their friends.
Honestly, the level of this scandal is, in no uncertain terms, disgusting. It is enough to make most Canadians, and certainly the Canadians in my riding, quite sick to their stomach. Canadians deserve better. They deserve an honest, accountable and hard-working government that does not abuse their hard-earned paycheques, that fights for the people, that respects voters, that follows through with the promises it has given to protect and govern this prosperous country and that leaves it in a better condition and shape than when it got there. However, what is happening here flies in the face of what I think most Canadians would expect a government to do and steward forward for them.
The RCMP commissioner said quite clearly that the directors of this green slush fund, who were hand-picked by the , were abusing Canadian tax dollars at an unprecedented level. I would love to say that this is unusual for the Liberal government, but unfortunately, this is just the latest on the list of scandals the has wreaked on Canadian taxpayers.
The level of this corruption has Canadians outraged and disgusted because the Liberals have taken advantage of their position of power to enrich their friends to the detriment of Canadians. I would like to say that this level of scandal is unprecedented, but I cannot, and that is unfortunate. Scandal and corruption have become a habit with the . This is not a one-off.
Two million Canadians are going to food banks every single year and food insecurity is up 111%. That means millions of Canadian families are unable to feed their children and struggle from meal to meal. A quarter of Canadians are skipping meals just to make ends meet. At a time of very extreme financial difficulty, the Liberal government seems to have no problem pilfering the pockets of Canadians and wasting tens of millions of tax dollars just to ensure that political friends and insiders are well taken care of.
Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which was supposed to be managing a green energy fund for the benefit of Canadians, has abused Canadian tax dollars. What is interesting is that this did not happen once; it did not happen twice; it did not even happen three times. This has happened 186 times in just this one program. If there are 186 conflicts of interest in one Liberal program, imagine what else is out there. I think the Liberals are scared to table these documents because the level of scandal that will be uncovered is something Canadians have never seen before.
Let us go back in time. When I talk to my constituents about this issue and in the emails and letters I am getting, they compare it to the sponsorship scandal, which brought down the Chrétien-Martin government. The one similarity is they were funnelling tax dollars to enrich their friends and political allies. The difference is that the SDTC scandal is five times bigger, given the amount of money we are talking about, than the sponsorship scandal. If that scandal brought down a government, I hope Canadians will demand the same thing with the SDTC scandal.
We need to emphasize that this is not Liberal money. This is Canadian taxpayers' money. This is money that taxpayers have worked hard to earn. When they pay their taxes to the government, they expect those taxes to go to building bridges and roads, paying for hospitals and schools, hiring doctors and teachers and building important infrastructure and social programs, not to Liberal insiders. We know it involves $400 million, but it could be even higher. How many hospitals would that build? How many roads, ports and bridges would that maintain? How many meals would that serve? How many schoolteachers would that hire? How many people would that feed?
The former chair of SDTC, Annette Verschuren, who is the face of this disaster, was hand-picked by the despite warnings from a previous chair of her conflict. She tried to get $6.8 million for the Verschuren Centre in Cape Breton through the slush fund. She also tried to use her influence on the green slush fund to get a further $10 million for the centre from Industry Canada and ACOA. This is just one example of the many levels of corruption the Liberals are trying to hide from Canadians.
The 's appointees were doling out taxpayer monies to companies that the board of directors of this fund owned. They did not think twice about abusing this program 186 times. However, despite warnings that the chair was in conflict, the Prime Minister, as always happens, got his way. Ethics and conflict be damned, he put this person in that role, and he is trying to hide the level of that scandal by withholding documents from the House.
As they always like to do, the Liberals are saying that there is nothing to see here. However, there is something to see here; there is a scandal of 400 million taxpayer dollars stolen from Canadians and given to Liberal insiders.
I was thinking about this a bit, and I know that some of my colleagues have been doing that as well. I find myself, now and again as we are discussing Liberal scandals and corruption, saying a lot of “Oh my gosh, I forgot about that one” and “Oh my God, there was that one.” I kind of get the feeling that the Liberals bring up another scandal as often as possible so we have to forget about the ones that happened in the past.
I do have to give the Liberals a bit of credit; I do not know how they manage all of these different scandals, keep them in line and remember which one is which, whacking this mole and that mole. I have to give them credit because I do not know how they keep track of the bag men. They are removing tax dollars from one friend in one alley and from one company to another. That has to be a lot of logistics. If the Liberals only put that effort into actually governing the country, imagine where we would be, but that is not what they are doing.
Maybe if I have time I will list off the incredible collection of greatest hits that the has had of the scandals under his watch. It is a very long list. However, I thought of something else. I mentioned earlier in my speech that the Prime Minister campaigned in 2015 on having the most transparent and open government in Canadian history. I will share some of the greatest hits of his quotes. He said, “I think we're going to have to embark on a completely different style of government. A government that...accepts its responsibilities to be open and transparent”.
In 2013, our Prime Minister claimed:
We will be coming out shortly with a way to open up and be more transparent about all our expenses in a way that will restore Canadians' confidence and trust in holders of public office....
We will certainly offer a level of transparency that hasn't been seen before.
Maybe it is our fault as Canadians, but when he said that we will have a level of transparency and accountability like we have never seen before, I was thinking the other way; however, what has happened is that he has kind of gone the opposite direction, and he has slammed the door shut on accountability and transparency when it comes to accountability for Canadian tax dollars.
Let us go back a bit further in time. I find this one very ironic. When the member for was just a sitting member of the third party, his first private member's bill as an opposition MP was a transparency act. He offered bold promises to revitalize the access to information system. Where is that wide-eyed parliamentarian now? He came in with all this gusto, saying that he was going to shed sunlight on the House of Commons. I guess he was practising very early on the idea that promises are made to be broken. He started trying to fool Canadians in 2013, but Canadians are not fooled anymore.
Even in a recent podcast with his Liberal colleague, the admitted that he courted the fair-vote folks, who are usually NDP supporters, promising them that he would change the electoral system, have electoral reform and make sure proportional representation was part of the discussion. Then he admitted in the podcast that he had no intention of ever entertaining proportional representation. He had only said that to win over NDP voters, and then when he got elected, it was pushed to the side and long forgotten. It was a promise made and a promise broken.
In 2015, after he was elected, the said, “Canadians voted for change, and we are committed to delivering that change. We are committed to being an open, honest, transparent government....all ministers, including the Prime Minister, [will] be held to greater account.” He is the same Prime Minister who is doing everything he can to skirt the rules on transparency and accountability just to hide his scandalous actions.
In 2016, the said, “Canadians can be reassured that we have always followed all the rules, and we always will, as well as upholding the principles and values under which Canadians have confidence in their government, principles like accountability, transparency and openness.” Ya, right.
He said:
The reality is that this system requires a high degree of openness, transparency, and accountability in order to maintain Canadians' confidence in our democracy and system of government.
I can assure Canadians that our party always follows all the rules and that it also supports all the values and principles associated with those rules.
He said, “The fact is, the Liberal Party is always following all the rules and the values that Canadians expect in terms of openness, transparency, and accountability, and we will continue to uphold the trust of Canadians.” Honestly, I do not know how he keeps saying this with a straight face.
He also said, “This is important to all Canadians, and we are following the rules because we know that people need to have confidence in their government, in their ministers, and in how political parties operate. That is why we are always transparent, accountable, and open about our fundraisers.” I think my colleagues have talked about the fundraisers and how well that has gone for him. The “cash for access” with business owners and millionaires from communist China is yet another scandal that has been a part of the .
The said, “We in the Liberal Party and this government, have always believed that sunshine is the best disinfectant.” That is a classic. He went on to say, “That is why we have moved forward on openness and transparency in ways that, yes, perhaps open us to a few more attacks from the members opposite, but ultimately create the confidence that Canadians must have in their...institutions”.
He does not seem to be so excited about being held accountable by the opposition today, which is a lot different from where he was in 2015.
He then went on to say, “We will continue to take very seriously the trust that Canadians placed in us by remaining open, transparent and accountable to the opposition and to Canadians.” If he were so committed to working with the opposition, to ensuring that we had access to the information that our constituents are demanding, why has he had such a quick change of heart? Why is he trying to hide the documents that Canadians deserve to see?
The also said:
I believe in sunny ways. I believe in staying focused on Canadians, and that is exactly what we're doing. I believe that sunshine is the best disinfectant. Openness and transparency is what Canadians expect. That is always what we will always stand for.
I respect the member opposite tremendously for his responsibility to ask difficult questions, and to press the government on it. I am going to stay focused on doing the right things the right way, and ensuring our team is doing that....
I could go on. I have a long list of comments that he has made over the years.
I cannot pass this one up: In 2019, he said, “Under my leadership, we have raised the bar on transparency.” I have no idea how low the bar was, or he thought it was, if this is as far as we have gotten and this is what he thinks. In fact it was not as hard as I thought it would be, but I had my staff look up how many times the has said the word “transparency” in the House. In Parliament, he has said the word “transparency”, and talked about how important it is, more than 400 times.
However, now secrecy and obfuscation are the hallmarks of the Liberal government. Like I said, the 's statement should be “A promise made is a promise about to be broken.” All of this begs the question, “What are the Liberals hiding?” How bad is this?
I know that the questions from my colleagues say that we are infringing on the Charter of Rights if we try to ask for the information. I would love for the Liberal members to go back to their ridings this week and say to their constituents, to their face, “Hey, you don't deserve to know how bad this scandal is because we're just here protecting your charter rights.” Give me a break.
I will leave members with this, a great thought from the member for : When I get robbed, I don't form a committee to discuss it. When I get robbed, I call the police.
The police deserve to see the information. Canadians deserve to see the information, because the level of the scandal and the robbery of Canadian taxpayer dollars needs to be brought to light. The Conservatives will continue to fight until it is found out.
:
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity.
For the parliamentary secretary across the way, I thought he would be more grateful. A couple days ago I promoted him to deputy House leader, but evidently I got that promotion wrong. However, I assure him that these are indeed my words, and I stand by them with great confidence.
Canadians, who are barely scraping by, see this waste $400 million of their hard-earned taxpayer money, and he wonders why nobody has confidence in him or his NDP-Liberals. I look around. These same Canadians see crime, chaos, drugs and disorder on our streets. They see a who offers up bail, not jail, for violent repeat offenders, causing violent crime to skyrocket 50%. Hate crimes are up 251%. More than 100 churches have been burned and synagogues have been firebombed. We do not even hear a pin drop from this government on any of this. It is a national disgrace.
Canadians see drugs flooding our communities and a government that offers up drugs rather than treatment and recovery. They watch a spiralling, flailing, out-of-control go to war over nicotine pouches, but when it comes to fighting the drug overdose crisis, the leading cause of death for B.C. kids, he refuses. In fact, this government fuels the crisis further with its taxpayer-funded drug dens, and 42,000 lives have tragically been lost from the drug crisis in our country since 2015.
We recently saw at the health committee a parent of one of the victims who bravely spoke out against the government's so-called safe supply experiment. When asked what her message to this was, she asked, “How can you have 'safe'...and 'drugs' in the same sentence?” It does not make sense. Those two contradict each other deeply. How can this government continue to consciously fund this program? This disastrous experiment needs to be stopped before more lives are lost needlessly.
Canadians also see an who has delivered nothing to clean up our environment. He has only brought in higher taxes on working people. His policies are as weak as the paper straws he is forcing us all to use.
Sadly, as I return to discussing the government's ethics, I look around and see NDP-Liberals in this chamber who do not even recognize the damage they have caused. They truly believe they know best. They have all the answers, even when Canadians have to suffer because of it. They think they can wave a magic wand and undo these last nine years, promising the world and yet letting down Canadians each and every time.
Today we see NDP-Liberals paralyzing Parliament over documents showing Liberal insiders stuffing their own pockets with taxpayer dollars. This week, we saw the government House leader call this investigation a “witch hunt”. How is it a witch hunt when 400 million taxpayer dollars are at stake? If this government has nothing to hide, why not hand over the documents?
The story changes by the week. Last week, Liberals told Canadians they had already handed the documents over to the RCMP and not to worry at all. This week, they say the Charter of Rights will go down in smoke if they dare show a shred of transparency. It is funny how that works.
The Ethics Commissioner appointed by this government has found the chair of the fund in violation of the law. The Auditor General, also appointed by this government, says there were 186 conflicts of interest involving Liberal appointees giving millions of dollars to their own companies.
The would rather put all of his government business on hold to hide whatever is in these documents. This is corruption unlike we have ever seen before in this country. As I speak on Liberal corruption, I have to reflect on the current state of their leadership.
In quiet moments, even Liberal MPs admit they are counting down the days. They are just wishing this would take his proverbial walk in the snow. They know his days are numbered, and they are quietly placing their bets on the next man in line, Mark “carbon tax” Carney. Our friend from likes to quip that every circus needs its carny, but Canadians know better than to fall for this bait and switch. They have seen this movie before, one corrupt Liberal swapped out for another, with the same disastrous results.
This is not a circus; it is the government of this country.
When this appointed Carney as a Liberal adviser, he made sure the role was shielded from any pesky conflict of interest rules. There is no accountability and no oversight, just Liberals protecting their own. However, this cozy arrangement is now facing some well-deserved scrutiny, especially after Carney's investment fund, Brookfield, where he serves as chair, has come knocking on the government's door for $10 billion in taxpayer dollars—