Mr. Speaker, what the House is debating today is astounding, mind-numbing corruption under a Liberal government kept in power by the NDP.

This government is also supported by the Bloc Québécois.

We are talking about the billion dollar green slush fund, known as Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It was set up in 2001 to provide financial assistance to green technology companies that were looking to be commercialized. This was a worthy objective, and Conservatives favour technological breakthroughs that help the environment. That is the way to do it. We do not support a carbon tax that hurts Canadian companies and Canadians. The carbon tax is a tax plan, not a climate plan. Conservatives have called for a carbon tax election, which the Liberals, Bloc and NDP have said no to, not just to us but to Canadians.

In 2017, the Auditor General produced a report and gave the SDTC a clean bill of health. The SDTC at that time was under the chair who was appointed by the Conservative government. Fast-forward to today. Thanks to whistle-blowers, who had access to information within the government and the SDTC, a web of corruption, of Liberal-friendly individuals and firms, has been exposed, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. The Auditor General has released a new report examining 226 out of 405 transactions. She found, out of the 226, that 186 of them had conflicts of interest totalling $330 million, or 82%. Extrapolating from the entire amount that was given out by SDTC, that equals about $800 million of expenditures that were conflicted.

What do we mean by conflicted? It means that the people on the board who were appointed received personal benefits. Their companies received personal benefits from the transactions. It really undermines a lot of the expenditures that the Liberals make. We have to, as the opposition, as taxpayers, second-guess almost everything that they are doing. We start scratching the surface and wonder about the connection to a Liberal-friendly individual or company. We have seen it throughout. In 2019, the Minister of Industry at the time, Navdeep Bains, appointed a chair who, he was told, had a conflict.

I will continue on the next sitting of the House.

Marc Dalton

$664,317.00