Mr. Speaker, before going into more detail about the subject of today's debate, I would like to remind the House about what the Prime Minister said when he came to power in 2015. He made all kinds of promises about doing things differently. People tend to forget.

When the Prime Minister came to power in 2015, people said it was really a new era of hope, promises and dreams for Canadians. We all remember that. He walked in here acting like some sort of saint. He was a saint of a man. He was picture perfect. It was the dawn of a new era. The Prime Minister said he would act for the good of Canada and Canadians. However, it did not take long for him to fall back into old Liberal habits, but multiplied by 10 or 20. In fact, it is immeasurable. We have lost count of all the scandals and the money involved.

It was clear that, once again, there were systems in place to to enrich the Liberals' cronies. We saw examples of their friends profiting from the federal government's largesse. Let us not forget that we are talking about taxpayers' money. I heard someone speaking earlier about the sponsorship scandal that happened back in the day. That was a $40‑million scandal, one that led to the Liberal government being defeated by the Conservatives, because the public was so upset by the scandal. However, considering what we have been living under for the past nine years, that was nothing. It is hard to imagine, but the sponsorship scandal was small potatoes compared to everything we have seen over the past nine years.

Unfortunately, some people seem to have gotten used to it. We are currently dealing with a $400‑million scandal, but so many billions of dollars have been wasted over the past nine years that people feel like $400 million is not such a big deal. We are talking about $400 million. That is 40% of a billion dollars, but today's billions are yesterday's millions. To some, $400 million may not sound like a lot of money, but I think it is.

Let us come back to what the Prime Minister promised. At the time, he said he would do a lot for the environment, that the Liberals would really change the way things were done. That is how we ended up with this green fund thing. Instead of helping the environment, it helped friends of the Liberal Party of Canada. That is what happened. That has been proven. That is the scandal. We are not making this up. It is not a Conservative Party fabrication. It has been demonstrated and proven.

The Liberals are asking why we Conservatives are not letting this go, why we keep talking about this. What should we do? Should we simply drop it and say that their friends received $400 million, but we will move on, it is no big deal, it is just taxpayers' money and we do not care? That is not how things work for people with morals.

The green fund is officially called Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC. As we know, the Auditor General found that this fund was being used as a slush fund for Liberal friends. There is a recording of a senior official speaking out against the Prime Minister for inappropriately awarding contracts worth $390 million.

The Auditor General also found that SDTC gave $58 million to 10 ineligible projects that, in some cases, could not demonstrate an environmental benefit or the development of green technology. Another $334 million was paid out in 186 cases to projects in which board members had a conflict of interest. The Auditor General made it clear that the blame for this scandal falls on the Liberal government, which did not sufficiently monitor the contracts that were given to Liberal insiders.

The Speaker ruled that this Liberal government violated the order of the House requiring the government to turn over the documents related to this scandal to the police so that it can pursue a criminal investigation.

Last week, a journalist summarized this situation in the National Post. I will tell the House what he wrote. He was informed that the Liberals are still refusing to be transparent with Canadians. Here is what he wrote: “Withholding the information is significant because it appears to fly in the face of the Speaker's ruling...that the government likely had no right to do so”.

The article goes on: “The Liberal government is still providing redacted documents and withholding others on the so-called 'green slush fund' from the House of Commons nearly one month after [the] Speaker...scolded it for doing just that. In a letter tabled in Parliament Monday, Commons Law Clerk Michel Bédard told MPs that he had recently received new documents from three government departments relating to Sustainable Development Technology Canada”.

The article goes on to say that, “In all three cases, information was withheld.... In June, three opposition parties banded together to pass a Conservative motion ordering the public service, the auditor general and SDTC to provide all documents on the latter to Bédard. The motion did not provide for any information to be redacted or withheld. The 'unprecedented' motion then called on Bédard to provide the documents to the RCMP.... 'The House has clearly ordered the production of certain documents, and that order has clearly not been fully complied with,' [the Chair] said in a Sept. [26] ruling.”

The article continues: “Because of that, [the Speaker] found he 'cannot come to any other conclusion but to find that a prima facie question of privilege has been established' and suggested the issue be sent to a committee for further study. In other words, [the Speaker] found the government had likely violated the Commons' 'absolute and unfettered' constitutional power to call for information.... In a report published in the spring, Auditor General Karen Hogan concluded that one out of six projects funded by [SDTC] that she audited were ineligible and that the organization had serious governance issues. On the day her audit was published, the government announced it was abolishing the fund and folding it into the National Research Council.”

This part of the article from the National Post published on October 21 provides a nice summary of what we have been saying for the past two weeks now. We are not letting this go because there is a clear, specific scandal and we have a government that is hiding and wants to keep hiding the information and is not sharing it with the police. The government can say what it wants, but there are enough facts to prove there is a scandal. Now we have to take this further. That is where we are.

What is more, testimonies at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts about SDTC revealed a lot of information about Liberal corruption. A whistle-blower told us the following:

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.

...

The true failure of the situation stands at the feet of our current government, whose decision to protect wrongdoers and cover up their findings over the last 12 months is a serious indictment of how our democratic systems and institutions are being corrupted by political interference. It should never have taken two years for the issues to reach this point. What should have been a straightforward process turned into a bureaucratic nightmare that allowed SDTC to continue wasting millions of dollars and abusing countless employees over the last year.

...

It's because 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.

If only this latest scandal involving $400 million in taxpayers' money being redirected to Liberal insiders was an anomaly for the government, then Parliament could move on to something else. I am saying that, but I am not so sure. As I said earlier, $40 million was missing in the sponsorship scandal when the government ended its term in office. We are at $400 million for this scandal alone, not to mention the billions of dollars that were wasted in other scandals.

The Auditor General has her work cut out for her because it never stops. Every time she looks into something, she ends up writing a scathing report.

I do not think that the Auditor General has published even one report in recent years that said that there was nothing to see and that everything was fine. There is always a problem. Last week, she confirmed that her office was launching an investigation on GC Strategies. Does everyone remember that? As I was saying earlier, memory has a way of fading quickly in our Parliament and around the Hill. However, we remember GC Strategies and the little ArriveCAN app.

The Auditor General is starting her investigation because, as we know, the Liberal government has given the people behind GC Strategies $100 million since the member for Papineau became Prime Minister. Many of those contracts were sole sourced, which means that government representatives awarded multi-million contracts directly to that company.

For the ArriveCAN app alone, GC Strategies pocketed $20 million in taxpayer funds when it should have cost just $80,000. We talked about that at great length last spring, and it is not over. Accordingly, the Auditor General agreed to audit all payments received by GC Strategies as well as all Government of Canada contracts awarded to the company outside the ArriveCAN fiasco. Oddly enough, ArriveCAN was just one among many other contracts that the company received since this government took power in 2015.

GC Strategies and its partners became multi-millionaires under the Liberal government. They admitted that they were paid up to $2,600 an hour for recruitment and that they invoiced the government as many as 1,500 times a month. It must be something to have a company like that, a company that can invoice the government 1,500 times a month and hire a full-time employee to do nothing but send out invoices. If no light bulbs went on in anyone's head at that point, this country has one heck of a problem.

GC Strategies was founded in 2015, as I said, and started receiving contracts within a few weeks. We have the dates. It was a few weeks after this government came to power on November 4, 2015. In the past year alone, more and more revelations have come to light about the unethical behaviour of those folks. They bragged about their close ties to government officials and were hauled before the bar of the House of Commons to answer questions after refusing to appear before a committee.

Earlier this year, the RCMP raided the home of GC Strategies founder Kristian Firth as part of the investigation into the ArriveCAN app. Canadians deserve a government that will treat their tax dollars and the public purse with respect. Only common-sense Conservatives will continue to fight to get to the bottom of how the Prime Minister gave millions of dollars to this shady company.

This brings me to the green fund scandal, the slush fund, the $400 million that was given to friends. The Auditor General is about to begin her investigation into GC Strategies, which, over the past nine years, with the new company, has been awarded $100 million in contracts, oddly enough, including $20 million for the notorious little ArriveCAN app.

This also leads us to rethink everything that has happened over the past nine years. Here is what history will remember about this Prime Minister's record: a legacy of scandals. At least, that is what I will remember. If I were to write a book, it would be the story of scandals, plural. The title would be something that talks about this Prime Minister's legacy: scandal after scandal after scandal.

I want to go back in time. Let us think of the Aga Khan's island. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner issued a report. I think this was the first time ever that a Prime Minister was the subject of a Ethics Commissioner report in which he was directly blamed.

Then, the Prime Minister fired the justice minister, Ms. Wilson-Raybould, because she did not help SNC-Lavalin circumvent the law. We spent weeks and months talking about the SNC-Lavalin scandal in the House. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that, but Ms. Wilson-Raybould has not, and neither have I.

There was the WE Charity scandal. That amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. WE Charity is the organization that used government money to directly help the Prime Minister. I am not going to go into the details, but that is another one.

Another scandal that kind of slipped under the radar happened during the pandemic. At the time, as the Conservative Party's procurement critic, I was responsible for monitoring procurement files related to what was going on in the midst of the pandemic.

What the government did was take Canada's PPE stockpile and send it to China. At one point, when I said we were going to need that stuff, people told me I was racist. I do not know what that has to do with it, but whatever. We sent our PPE to China. What happened next? Two or three weeks later, we ran into problems. We needed PPE, but we no longer had it because we had sent everything to China.

What did the government do next? They made new friends. Who could forget Tango Communication Marketing and the Brault family, the sponsorship scandal and the $80-million contract to bring masks in. When the masks arrived, they were garbage. People could not even use them. What did the government do about it? They said, oh well, the money has already gone to the Chinese. The second scandal we heard about after that is that it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to destroy the $80 million worth of masks that were never used. The scandals just keep piling up.

Among the government's friends is former MP Frank Baylis, who offered to supply 10,000 ventilators for $226 million during the pandemic. Everyone said we did not need 10,000 machines. After all, we do not have 10,000 emergency rooms in hospitals to operate them. On top of that, the market cost to build those machines should have been $100 million less than that. In committee, Mr. Baylis was asked how he justified charging Canadian taxpayers $226 million for machines that should have cost $125 million at most. The committee heard all kinds of answers, including that it had to do with administrative costs or the cost of keeping staff on. It was nonsense, and everyone knows it. Despite that, the money was paid out, and taxpayers footed the bill.

We could talk about McKinsey, which suddenly started getting over $100 million in contracts for things like writing phony reports that served no purpose. We tried to understand why, but we could never grasp the point of it all. Even though an extra 100,000 employees had been added to the public service and experts were at the government's disposal, ready to offer it advice and submit proposals on various policies, the government chose to give the money to its friends, the McKinsey gang.

There has been no shortage of scandals. Eventually, they all blend into one mind-boggling mess. As I said earlier, memories fade, unfortunately. Today, this is where we are, after nine years of this government. When the Prime Minister took office, he told us that he was going to be perfect, the best in the world, that Canada was back, and that everything was going to be great. After nine years of this government, it is hard to fathom how we reached this point.

The country's debt has doubled. The interest alone costs $50 billion a year. Now we have another scandal in which $400 million was given to friends for a program that was supposed to help the environment. This is like the election promise to plant two billion trees. The Liberals claimed to be so green that they were going to plant two billion trees. People who heard that on the news said it was a good idea. I do not know how many trees they have planted so far, but it is nowhere near two billion.

Back to the green technology program. Conservatives are in favour of green tech. Conservatives support investing in green tech to protect our environment. However, instead of doing things that help people, as the Prime Minister promised in 2015, the government gave $400 million to its friends, who did nothing with that money. That is money wasted.

We know that we are going nowhere with this government, and that is why we are at the point where this government must go. I have another 10 pages of scandals. It gets old after a while, but we have a duty to remind everyone of all of this. If we do not do it, no one will, and people will forget. That is why we are here today, to keep the pressure up and to stay the course. We must never accept corruption. We must never accept the idea of giving out millions of dollars, maybe even billions over the course of nine years, left and right to Liberal friends. When we ask why things cost more, we cannot accept “because that is how things work” as an answer. This needs to stop.

I can confirm that a Conservative government will restore order in this country. It could be in the coming weeks or in the coming months at most, or so I hope. A Conservative government will put a stop to giving people millions of dollars. When we ask the government why this is happening, we can no longer accept the answer that that is just how it is and that we need to move on. This needs to stop. Let us hope that there will be a change in government soon.

Pierre Paul-Hus

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