Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak on behalf of the residents of the beautiful riding of Simcoe—Grey.

As members know, last week was a riding week, and there were couple of celebrations that I was fortunate to attend. The first was the 40th anniversary of Jan Trude's first Tim Hortons. Jan owns all the Tim Hortons's in the Collingwood catchment area. It was a great anniversary. Forty years is pretty incredible, as is what Jan does for the local community, whether it is the hospice, the hospital or the Georgian Triangle. She also donates money every year for golf tournaments and is always there with products when people need them.

The other celebration I would like to highlight quickly was for Honorary Colonel Rory MacKinnon. I am fortunate to have Canadian Forces Base Borden in my riding, and he is now the honorary colonel for 16 Wing. I went to the change of appointment ceremony and I congratulate Rory. He will do a great job and will represent the people in our armed forces very well.

If I asked someone back in my riding of Simcoe—Grey if they had heard about the Liberal scandal in which the Liberals gave hundreds of millions of dollars to friends and insiders, the one with all sorts of conflicts of interest, the one in which Liberal cronies figured the rules did not apply to them, the one that produced perks and profits for Liberals and their friends while many Canadians struggle just to put food on the table, do members think that person might be able to guess which one it was? I suspect they would ask which of the many Liberal scandals I was talking about That is because for nine years, we have seen this behaviour time and time again. Canadians are finding it harder to get by, but for Liberals and their insider friends, the times have never been so good. Through scandals, mismanagement and insider deals, Liberal friends have enjoyed an endless buffet of Canadian tax dollars.

Maybe my constituent would have guessed I was talking about WE Charity. We all remember WE Charity. Sometimes it feels like forever ago when it comes to Liberal scandals. However, WE Charity almost got $1 billion from the Liberals, untendered, to administer the short-lived Canada student service grant program. The Prime Minister himself stated that WE was the only possible option to administer such a program, despite the number of public service executives growing by 42% since the Liberals took power and 50,000 new bureaucrats being hired just from 2015 to 2020. Now it is more than 100,000 new hires since the Liberals took office.

Despite 50,000 new people on the public payroll, somehow only an organization that had spent almost half a million dollars to hire the Prime Minister's own mother and brother, not to mention prominently featuring the Prime Minister at events targeting youth, could handle this billion-dollar program with almost no strings attached. One can spend half a million dollars and get a billion-dollar return. Only friends of the Liberal Party would get that type of return on investment.

“What about SNC-Lavalin?” my constituent might ask. It is another classic case of Liberal corruption for our feminist Prime Minister.

Members will recall that SNC-Lavalin spent $1.9 million to host Muammar Gaddafi's son on a visit to Canada in 2008. The RCMP were watching, and it turns out that was just small potatoes. By February 2015, the RCMP pressed charges alleging that between 2001 and 2011, SNC-Lavalin had paid $48 million in bribes to government officials in Libya. The charges also alleged that the company defrauded Libyan organizations of $130 million. However, luck, once again, was on SNC-Lavalin's side, because shortly after all of these charges were pressed, the Liberals came to power.

After 51 meetings with senior officials and $110,000 in donations to the Liberal Party later, the Prime Minister agreed to change the Criminal Code to allow SNC-Lavalin to get away with fraud and bribery charges. Here we go again: only $100,000 in donations to make almost $200 million in corruption disappear. That is a great return on investment for friends of the Liberal Party.

It was not the WE Charity scandal and it was not the SNC-Lavalin scandal. What about the Aga Khan? That was one of our first reminders that the rules the rest of us follow do not apply to the Prime Minister.

On December 26, 2016, while most of us were dealing with food hangovers from Christmas dinner the night before, the Prime Minister and his family hopped on his jet and headed down to Nassau, Bahamas. Then they got a lift from there in the Aga Khan's private helicopter over to his private island so they could have a bit of rest and relaxation. Conveniently enough, a few Liberal friends were also visiting. The member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount and her husband, who is a childhood friend of the Prime Minister, were there, as were the member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl, a groomsman at the Prime Minister's wedding, and his husband.

What did this quaint New Year's getaway for a few old Liberals cost? It cost $271,000, almost five years of salary for the average Canadian. That is not to mention the $50 million of federal funding given to the Aga Khan Foundation, a registered lobby group, in just the previous year.

We would think that for that kind of donation, the vacation would have been for free, but I guess for the Prime Minister and the few Liberal friends who attended, it was. Imagine spending 50 million tax dollars for the invite and another 271,000 tax dollars for a vacation that regular Canadians can barely ever dream of. It is another great return on investment for the Liberals who were lucky enough to get the invite.

Incredibly, though, the present scandal we are talking about is not WE Charity, SNC-Lavalin or the Aga Khan's private island getaway. My constituents may guess it must be the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scandal. That one almost slipped my mind. There seem to be so many that it is hard to keep track. Let us recall it.

In 2015, if a billionaire and adviser to the government of the Prime Minister's favourite basic dictatorship were asked to get in the good books of the Liberal Party, what would they do? They know the Prime Minister's father had an admiration for Communist dictators like Fidel Castro and Mao, and they know there is a foundation named after the former prime minister that is actively seeking donations, since the previous Liberal government gave it a generous $125-million endowment. They also know that the foundation is stacked with Liberal cronies and regularly meets in the Prime Minister's Office. Conveniently enough, they know that the Chinese Business Chamber of Canada is hosting a posh fundraiser in Toronto, where they might be able to get some face time with the Prime Minister and his brother. What would they do? They would hop on a jet from Beijing to Toronto and commit to dropping $1 million in exchange for future considerations. That means $200,000 for the foundation, $750,000 to Pierre Trudeau's favourite alma mater and $50,000 on a statue of the elder Trudeau himself.

CSIS says that China interfered in the 2019 and 2021 elections, both taking place after the donation was made. It could be a coincidence, but what if it was not? Taking $1 million in donations to help sway two elections in one's favour seems like a good return on investment that I think even the Liberals would be truly impressed with.

Amazingly, though, this is not even the scandal we are here to talk about today. Nor is it about former Liberal MP Frank Baylis, whose consortium got $237 million to build ventilators that may or may not have been delivered. Nor is it about GC Strategies, which the Auditor General has announced she is investigating for more than $100 million in often sole-source contracts it received from the Liberal government. Members may remember that for the arrive scam app alone, GC Strategies pocketed $20 million, and that was for no work. That was for an app that was supposed to cost only $80,000. It is certainly nice work for those who can get it.

Today, I am here to talk about what may be the dooziest of all Liberal scandals, which is saying something. I am here to talk about Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Maybe members know it better by its unofficial name, the Liberal billion-dollar green slush fund. They may have heard something about the green slush fund recently, but in case they have not, let me provide a bit of background.

Sustainable Development Technology Canada is a federally funded not-for-profit that approved and disbursed over $100 million in funds annually to clean technology companies. It was established in 2001 by the Government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology Act. It supported projects that develop and demonstrate new technologies that address issues related to climate change, air quality, clean water and clean soil. It was an arm's-length organization from the government.

By all accounts, SDTC was doing good work for its first few years under its Stephen Harper-appointed chair, the Canadian technology leader Jim Balsillie. However, in 2018, former Liberal industry minister Navdeep Bains had concerns regarding Mr. Balsillie's public criticism of the Liberals' privacy legislation. Those concerns continue to be shared by many Canadians and many in the House.

Now we know that the Liberals do not tolerate dissenting options, so Bains manoeuvred to put Annette Verschuren in as CEO, even though she was already receiving SDTC funding through one of her companies and in an immediate conflict of interest. In fact, the minister, the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council were warned of what risks would be associated with appointing somebody who was already in a conflict. They were told that the fund had never had a chair with interest in companies receiving funding from SDTC. Bains appointed her anyway. He also appointed two other very controversial board members who went on to engage in unethical behaviour in breach of the Conflict of Interest Act by approving funding to companies in which they held ownership stakes.

It is said that the new chair and board members began to oversee an environment where conflicts of interest were tolerated and managed, not avoided, as they be. Board members regularly awarded SDTC funding to companies in which they themselves either held stocks or positions. It really was corruption on a staggering level.

By January 2021, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry was appointed after Navdeep Bains declined to run for re-election. In November 2022, whistle-blowers raised internal concerns with the Auditor General about unethical practices at SDTC. The Privy Council was briefed by these whistle-blowers about the allegations shortly thereafter and commissioned two independent reports. In September 2023, the whistle-blowers took the allegations public and the industry minister finally agreed to suspend SDTC funding.

This was followed shortly thereafter in November 2023 by an audit of SDTC by the Auditor General. Fast-forward to June 2024, and the Auditor General's report was released. It claimed severe governance failures at SDTC. Just what did the Auditor General's report find? Are members ready for this? It found that SDTC gave $58 million to 10 ineligible projects that did not even produce green technology or contribute to emission reductions and $334 million, over 186 cases, to projects for which board members held a direct conflict of interest. There were 186 cases, and no one flagged that there were that many conflicts of interest. It is unbelievable.

SDTC gave $58 million to projects without ensuring that contribution agreement terms were even met at all. The Auditor General also made it clear that the blame for the scandal falls on the industry minister who “did not sufficiently...monitor” the contracts that were given to Liberal insiders. I am wondering if perhaps the industry minister was maybe too busy organizing his own leadership campaign to keep an eye on the money or the department that he was giving money to. That is certainly not very responsible.

Let us dig a little deeper. There is the Minister of the Environment, who, after being arrested by Toronto police but before joining the Liberal cabinet, served as a strategic adviser for a venture capital firm called Cycle Capital from 2009 to 2018. The founder and owner of Cycle Capital, Andrée-Lise Méthot, sat on the board of the green slush fund. While she was on the board, she helped give $114 million to companies that she herself had invested in. Thanks to her strategic voting and the hard work of her strategic adviser, who had 25 meetings with the Prime Minister's Office and the industry department, the value of Cycle Capital strangely tripled.

When she finally left SDTC in 2022, Méthot was awarded for her great work and went on to join the Canada Infrastructure Bank's board, another Liberal debacle. While there, she helped get $170 million of infrastructure bank money for a company owned by the chair of the green slush fund, the aforementioned Annette Verschuren. We really cannot make this stuff up. We could make a movie about all this corruption. I should add that, according to the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Minister of the Environment still has a passive interest in Cycle Capital. We do not know how much he owns, but we do know, whatever he does own, the company tripled. That is a really good Liberal return on investment, if members ask me.

Not to be outdone, green slush fund board member Guy Ouimet admitted in committee that $17 million of green slush money went to companies he himself had a financial interest in. He said that this is a small amount of money. It might be for Guy, but for the residents in my riding, that is a lot of money.

How about those who are actively being punished by the government, which is desperate to raise revenue to pay for all of this corruption? These are people like Katie, a farmer in my riding, whose family also runs a grain drying and storage operation used by other local grain growers. She got a hold of me this week, actually. Her family, so far, has paid a total of $151,781.02 in carbon tax, plus $19,731.53 in HST, for a total of $171,512.55. The Liberals like to say that most Canadians get back more than they pay in carbon tax. If that is the case, Katie is still waiting for her $200,000 cheque.

That is what angers people about these scandals. In just this speech today, I have highlighted over two billion dollars' worth of Liberal corruption and mismanagement. Those are tax dollars for hard-working Canadians. We need to find where this money went. People deserve answers and need to be held accountable. That is why, on June 10, we asked for the production of various documents related to SDTC—

Terry Dowdall

$507,690.00