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House Hansard - 326

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 326 - Jun/6/24
Hon. Andrew Scheer (Regina—Qu'Appelle, CPC)
  • Jun/6/24 10:29:46 a.m.
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moved: That the House order the government, Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) and the Auditor General of Canada each to deposit with the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel, within 14 days of the adoption of this order, the following documents, created or dated since January 1, 2017, which are in its or her possession, custody or control: (a) all files, documents, briefing notes, memoranda, e-mails or any other correspondence exchanged among government officials regarding SDTC; (b) contribution and funding agreements to which SDTC is a party; (c) records detailing financial information of companies in which past or present directors or officers of SDTC had ownership, management or other financial interests; (d) SDTC conflict of interest declarations; (e) minutes of SDTC's Board of Directors and Project Review Committee; and (f) all briefing notes, memoranda, e-mails or any other correspondence exchanged between SDTC directors and SDTC management; provided that, (g) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel shall promptly thereafter notify the Speaker whether each entity produced documents as ordered, and the Speaker, in turn, shall forthwith inform the House of the notice of the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel but, if the House stands adjourned, the Speaker shall lay the notice upon the table pursuant to Standing Order 32(1); and (h) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel shall provide forthwith any documents received by him, pursuant to this order, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for its independent determination of whether to investigate potential offences under the Criminal Code or any other act of Parliament. He said: Mr. Speaker, after nine years, it is clear that the NDP-Liberal government is not worth the cost or the corruption. The Auditor General delivered a shocking report this week that outlined a history of wasted money, conflicts of interest, and possible illegal and criminal activity in funnelling taxpayer funds to Liberal-friendly board appointees' own companies. Let me just set the context. Right now, Canadians are living through complete misery. Government-caused inflation leading to high interest rates means that Canadians are hit with a brutal double whammy of not only having to pay higher prices at the store but also higher interest payments on their debt, everything from lines of credit to mortgages. They are paying more for the goods they buy and for the money they owe. This comes after the Prime Minister promised Canadians that interest rates would stay low for a very long time. The Prime Minister also promised Canadians that he was going to go into debt so they did not have to. It is cold comfort now for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are facing default on their mortgages, as those rates keep rising, pushing people out of the homes that they have lived in for years. In many cases, there are tragic stories of people moving back in with their parents because they have lost the ability to stay in their house. This is all caused by wasteful government spending, pushing up prices and forcing the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates at the fastest pace in Canadian history to combat that inflation. The government will tell us that it is not its fault. The Prime Minister loves to spread blame around. He is always looking for people to pin responsibility on, anyone other than himself. The Liberals say ridiculous things like there is global inflation, as if inflation was kind of like the weather, where we might have a warm front move in off the gulf and we might have some pesky inflation plaguing Canadians. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary problem. It is always caused when governments print money that they do not have out of thin air, flooding the economy with brand new cash without any growth in economic activity to justify that expansion of the money supply. When the Conservatives point that out to the Liberals, they say that, in fairness, Canada was going through a pandemic and that they had to spend all this money to keep Canadians safe. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found that 40% of all that extra spending had nothing to do with the pandemic. Now, slowly but surely, we are learning what actually happened. The Liberals used the excuse of a pandemic to line the pockets of their friends and waste taxpayer money, not only during that critical period of the pandemic but also in the years that have followed. When Canadians are begging the government to get inflation and interest rates under control, the government keeps borrowing billions and billions to spend, spend, spend, not benefiting Canadians but lining the pockets of its friends. I have so much to say that I do not think I am going to fit it all into my slot, so I am going to share my time with the hon. member for South Shore—St. Margarets, Madam Speaker. I know that he has been working hard on this file. He is one of the members of Parliament who rolled up his sleeves and pored through documents, vigilantly looking for waste of taxpayer money. On this side of the House, we know that Canadians work so hard for the money they earn. The least they can expect is a government that respects the value of that hard work and their tax dollars. I will run through a few of the greatest hits of Liberal corruption during the pandemic. We will remember the time the Prime Minister tried to funnel a billion dollars to his friends at the WE organization, an organization that had paid members of his own family hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. We will remember former Liberal MP, Frank Baylis, who suddenly, without having experience in the field, developed a medical fabrication company that did not actually produce anything, getting sole-sourced contracts from the government. In the past few months, we have learned more and more about the arrive scam app, where the government ballooned costs for IT services without any accountability or oversight of where that money was going. It is clear that the Liberals use crises and attempts to fulfill noble causes to hide the corruption that they have become so famous for, and now we have an example. The Liberals talk about the crisis that Canadians are facing. They try to justify all their wasteful spending and all their massive tax hikes on the backs of existential threats coming from climate change. However, now we know that their efforts to improve the environment have nothing to do with lowering emissions, but everything to do with doling out cash to people who have supported the Liberal Party in a very real way. Let us look at what the Auditor General found: $76 million in taxpayer money was paid out in direct conflict of interest. That means there were people on the board, people who made the decisions about where the money would go, who should have recused themselves because they had a financial interest in some of the companies that would get contracts. In fact, the Auditor General found, and through investigations at committee we also found, that there were government representatives in almost all the board meetings when these decisions were being made. There cannot be any excuse the government has that this corruption was happening in some kind of arm's length way. They were in the room when they were being warned there were conflicts of interest. They were in the room when the decisions were made. They were in the room when they found out the companies getting the contracts were at least partially owned, if not entirely owned, by members of the board themselves. For Canadians who are following this story, basically what the government did was with respect to an existing agency, SDTC, which, by the way, had been fulfilling all its governance requirements up until 2017. Then something peculiar happened. Former minister Navdeep Bains did not like something that the chair of that board said, something about protecting the privacy of Canadians. That rubbed Navdeep Bains the wrong way, so he fired that chair and he appointed one who would be much more co-operative with the Liberal government. That is when the problems started. The chronology is stark. When he was minister, Navdeep Bains went on to appoint another five controversial board members who engaged in unethical and illegal behaviour by approving funding to companies in which they held ownership or held seats on the board. There are examples of those officials sitting on the board as observers witnessed 96 conflicts of interest, but the officials did not intervene. We have examples from the Auditor General's report of $59 million being paid out to projects that did not qualify. I want to read what the Auditor General said about that. She said, “These projects were ineligible for funding because, for example, they did not support the development or demonstration of a new technology.” The entire point of this agency, the entire point of this funding mechanism, was to incubate, to find potential technologies that might help reduce emissions and clean up particulate matter from the air. The whole purpose was that the agency would grant some of the funds to scale-up some of these innovative technologies. What the Auditor General is saying is that in the agency's own project applications, there is no proof that there would be any benefit to the environment, not that it had tried and failed, not that it hoped that some new technology would work and despite its best efforts it was not fruitful. That happens all the time in the world of scientific innovation and inventions. People take ideas, they test them and sometimes they do not work. They learn from that and they go on to the next thing. In this situation, the applications themselves could not even point to any environmental benefit. There were $6 million charged to taxpayers for projects that were not even built; over $123 million in misappropriated funds; and as I mentioned, over 180 conflicts of interest with the funds. Here we have an example of Canadians suffering through one of the biggest cost of living crises since the Great Depression. Mothers are watering down milk to feed their children; people are moving back in with their parents; and single moms are working two, maybe even three jobs just to tread water, not with any hope of getting ahead but of just keeping a roof over themselves and their family. While all this is happening, while the Prime Minister is claiming that every single penny he needs to scoop out of the pockets of taxpayers must go to all this spending, we find out that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted, that there were massive conflicts of interest and that we have another example of Liberal corruption, where the Liberals reward their friends instead of respecting taxpayer dollars. That is why this motion is so important, so we can get all the information handed to the RCMP, because this is so serious we believe this warrants a police investigation.
1860 words
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