“Where are my tax dollars going？”
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Summary
The Liberals have a $1B slush fund to help fund green tech projects. Michael Barrett, MP for Leeds, Grenville, Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes and the Critic for Ethics, joins us to talk about it and much more.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm
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your host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton, Kawartha Lakes, Brock, with
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new content for you every single Tuesday. On today's show, we are talking about the
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Liberals' $1 billion slush fund, so please like, comment, subscribe, and share this program.
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Of course, if you want Pierre Polyev to be the next Prime Minister, eyes and ears have
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to see and listen to the message here, because you're not getting it from the mainstream
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media, so you can listen to it, tell your friends, download it on platforms like CastBox,
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iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify. So to talk about that slush fund, much, much more, we
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have Michael Barrett, a good friend of the show, coming back on once again, the Member
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of Parliament for Leeds, Grenville, Thousand Islands, and Rideau Lakes, also the Critic
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for Ethics. Thank you for joining us. Always a pleasure to be here. I got your
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writing right, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, you knocked it out. See, there we go. Yeah, better than any
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of the speakers in the House are able to. Absolutely, see? That's not what I'm
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auditioning for, though. So, billion-dollar slush fund, the Liberals have this green
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technology slush fund. You've been going at it hard at Committee, trying to expose.
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Well, we'll talk about the $200,000 gift, but let's talk about the slush fund. What
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is it? What's going on? What are you doing at Committee? So, Sustainable Development
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Technologies Canada has a billion taxpayer dollars and a Liberal-appointed board chair who is supposed
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to be funding, you know, green tech startups. Whistleblowers came forward about a year ago
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and brought their concerns to the Prime Minister's department, the Privy Council office. Well,
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they referred them to the industry minister's office. And the... So, it was a big priority. So,
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big priority. Huge priority. Big priority. And the industry minister then received an independent
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report that they had asked for from a company called Raymond Shabbat Grant Thornton RCGT. And
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this report sampled just a small number of projects. So, the slush fund has funded hundreds
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of projects. They sampled about two dozen. And they found $40 million in ineligible payments that
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were made. So, funding that was not appropriate for the contribution agreement as it's set out
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by the rules that they have with the government of Canada. So, on just a handful of projects,
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they found $40 million. It identified gross mismanagement and conflicts of interest.
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So, we had them in committee. And of course, there was a lot of resistance from the Liberals about
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about getting these officials to come to committee. And within a two-week period, we had the Auditor
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General investigating, even though the minister said there's nothing to see here. We have the CEO,
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who has now resigned under the Auditor General investigation, the cloud of that.
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Then, I wrote to the Ethics Commissioner, the Interim Ethics Commissioner, identifying a problem
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with, you know, you talked about this $200,000 number. And so, I wrote a letter to the Ethics
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Commissioner. And the Ethics Commissioner says, yep, we're going to launch an investigation into the
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Liberal-appointed board chair, Ned for Sharon. And she resigned on learning that she's now under
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investigation, which it doesn't get her away from the light of it. So, that's within two weeks. The
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CEO and the board chair both resigning, Auditor General and Ethics Commissioner investigation.
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And the industry minister said he has full confidence in the process and the board and
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doesn't want anyone to worry. They've got this well in hand, only $40 million.
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So, this board chair decides we're going to move a motion to give her company $200,000 in contracts.
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Yeah, a little more than $200,000. And she said that it's fine. She didn't break any rules.
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She asked her lawyer and her lawyer said, yep, that check will clear.
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Gotcha. So, I guess everyone, you know, $40 million, some questions around that. I guess
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she thought, well, might as well try to get my company some of this action.
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Yeah, what's a couple hundred thousand dollars between friends, right? And when pressed, we also
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learned that the company that she controls, that she directed this $200,000 plus to, she then
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Well, she would say so. And of course, this is a blatant conflict of interest. At the very least,
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it's the appearance of a conflict. But this stinks to the high heavens. And that's why
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a fact-finding exercise that was done, that RCGT report, found tens of millions of dollars in
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ineligible payments. And it's important to note, Jamie, that when the Auditor General,
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the Deputy Auditor General came before a committee a couple of weeks ago, the Liberals said, well,
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you know, this fund existed when they were conservatives in government. So, your audit's
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going to cover that period, right? And he said, absolutely not. The Auditor General investigated
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the Sustainable Development Technologies Canada through to 2017. Everything we're talking about
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has been part of the umbrella of corruption, scandal, waste, and mismanagement of Justin Trudeau
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and his NDP Liberal government. That's exactly what this Auditor General report's going to look at.
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And the Ethics Commissioner is specifically targeting Trudeau's hand-picked chair. This is a
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liberal corruption problem. And it's part of this pattern that we've seen, of course, that I've
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been on the show to talk about many times. Too many times.
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Too many times. So, we have a slush fund given out to all these companies, $40 million with a big
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question mark around it, as we kind of dig deeper into it. Canadians are struggling. Canadians are
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hurting. There's a lot of misery out there, all created by this government. And we have proposed
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solutions for pretty much all of the problems that this government has created. At the same time,
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liberals just continue to do what they do best, be liberals, and just dig into the cookie jar.
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This is unbelievable. It really is unbelievable because there's a blatant conflict of interest
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where you have the board chair who moves the motion herself, didn't just passively vote or just
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sit on her hands and not raise her hand when it was time to award her own company and herself this
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money, but move the motion. And this is beyond... This is really what it looks like after eight
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years of Justin Trudeau. Because you said Canadians are struggling, and these insiders continue to get
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paid. They get paid if they're former Liberal MPs. We saw that with contracts for ventilators that no
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one ever ordered or used. We've seen this with contracts for the small business minister's
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BFF. She awarded consulting contracts that are found guilty of breaking ethics laws. We see this
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time and time again. And it starts from the top down. Justin Trudeau found guilty twice of breaking
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Canada's ethics laws. But it always comes back to Liberals and Liberal insiders getting paid and
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Canadians paying the price. And it's happening at a time when they can least afford it. It's heartbreaking.
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It's heartbreaking to see the numbers on paper about food bank usage. But I know that over our
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constituency weeks and every time that we're in our community, we see firsthand people in our community
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and we hear from them who are struggling. People who are working one job, two jobs, and going to the food
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bank because of the policies of Justin Trudeau's government. And it's devastating for them to see
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this kind of corruption and insider dealing. Well, out of the $400 billion that was created
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out of thin air, half of which the parliamentary budget officer confirmed that had nothing to do with
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COVID but was couched in the language of COVID. Had the Liberals stuck to some fiscal responsibility
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through the crisis. The inflation misery that we're feeling, we're experiencing right now that
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are hurting, as you said, regular, normal Canadians might not have been so bad, but the Liberals just
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could not help themselves. No, and it's stacked. It's one set of bad fiscal decisions stacked on top of
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others. And so their inflationary spending, which didn't address the needs of COVID like they claimed
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it had, but has been evidenced that that was not the case. And it's made all the worse by their
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inflationary carbon tax, which they continue to hammer Canadians with. And the price at the grocery
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stores are just out of control. And the fight has been on to get private members' bills passed,
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to have farmers exempt from the carbon tax for things like grain drying and heating and cooling
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on their farms. And the Liberals are doing everything they can to block it. But we know
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that it's going to help take pressure off of food prices. We know that. And they are ideologically
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opposed to doing that. They claim that this is all about doing the right thing for the environment,
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except when it's exposed to be a political agenda item. And they saw that it was causing them
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political pain in Atlantic Canada. And that's why they exempted oil heat from their carbon tax.
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It's ludicrous. It's 100% political. And it is driving pain for millions of Canadians.
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It's not about helping people at that point. If you are taking off the tax because you are going to
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lose potential seats in certain parts of the country, that's not about helping people. It's not about
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going, well, we understand people are struggling. You can't feed your families, maybe not pay the
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mortgage or being evicted from your apartment. It's about, well, we might lose the next election.
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We can't have that. So let's take away our policy, our key priority that they said was going to save
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the planet. They're taking it away for a few years until after the next election. And then those in
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Atlantic Canada and elsewhere that are struggling now, they will feel the increased price when it comes
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back. And they've said, and this undermines their entire argument, that 80% of Canadians get back
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more from the carbon tax rebates than they pay into it. Well, if that were the case,
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why do they need to take it off? Why are they exempting the dirtiest form of home heating from
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the carbon tax if people are better off for paying it? So aren't they actually, by their own logic,
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taking money out of people's pockets? Of course, that's not what's happening. This scheme that they
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have trying to dupe people into thinking that they're getting back more than they pay in,
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it just goes back to the route where they believe that money comes out of thin air, that people can
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draw more out than they're actually- And there'll be no consequences when you create currency,
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when you expand the money. Well, that's right. It's a part of a series of
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of broken political promises by Justin Trudeau. They said the budget was going to balance itself,
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and now Canadians are being crushed, crushed by debt servicing costs in this country,
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costing tens of billions of dollars. And the pain is real every day. And all the while,
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corruption runs rampant in liberal Ottawa. I think this is the fundamental difference,
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one of the many fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives, right?
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Conservatives want you, the individual, to have as much money as you can while obviously funding
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certain government services, but then being able to make your choice based on what's best for your
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situation. The liberals would like to take as much money as they can get from you and then decide
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what you then qualify for in terms of grants, in terms of credits, that type of thing, right?
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In Atlantic Canada, they're saying heat pumps are the way to go, right? Right or wrong,
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wrong. That's for the individual to decide. But at this point, it's the government that has said,
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this is the one and only path that we want you to follow. And if you do, you get some money.
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Well, and they claim that it's always done in this wealth redistribution scheme that they're
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taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. But as evidenced by scandal after scandal,
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tens of millions of dollars, we saw that they racked up massive consulting costs to ask consultants
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about how to save money on consultant spending. And this year, the liberal government, though they
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promised that they would reduce spending on consultants, will have spent more on outside
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consulting agencies while having the largest public service in history. So they've never spent more
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on consultants and they've never had more public servants. So it's baffling. But why is the money
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going to these consulting firms? Because they're insiders. These are friends of the prime minister.
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These are friends of the liberals. So it's not about giving money to the have-nots. It's about giving money
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to the have-nots. They always want to improve the standing of their friends and liberal insiders,
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their donors. And yeah, I'm sure there's the donations back at some point, I'm sure, or in some
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fashion, some way, volunteers, who knows. Before I get on to the next topic, what is next at committee
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as you investigate this green billion-dollar slush fund? What are you doing next? Well, we need more
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information. This all came to light because of whistleblower revelations. So we're going to
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look to have the whistleblower come before committee. We've got to get through the interference of the
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NDP liberal government so that we can actually get it on the committee agenda. It's incredibly
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important. But since we first brought this forward, conservatives brought this motion forward
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at committee, and we fought tooth and nail to have hearings on this. Like I said, we have an Auditor
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General investigation after I wrote to the Auditor General. We have an Ethics Commissioner
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investigation after I wrote to the Ethics Commissioner. We have the CEO who's resigned
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and the board chair who have resigned after we questioned them at committee. So we're going to
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have to hear what the whistleblower has to say. I'll leave you with this, Jamie. When we asked the minister,
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Philippe-Francois Champagne, if he'd read the 300-page dossier that was given to the ministry by the
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whistleblowers, he said, no, no, I haven't read that. Why would you waste his time with that?
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Why? Because he knows what it says, that his buddies and buddies of the liberal prime minister
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are taking Canadians for a ride. Liberal insiders get paid, Canadians pay the price, and we're going to keep
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digging. Well, actually, Canadians are paying the price, mortgage rates. People are struggling with
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the new refinancing that's coming up and will come up. Let's cue up cut three. We have a little
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exchange in the House of Commons between our leader, Pierre Polyev, and the prime minister,
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Justin Trudeau. Let's cue up cut three, and we'll discuss in just a second.
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And now one-fifth of all Canadians are actually unable to pay the interest on their mortgages. Their
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mortgages are growing in size. When they renew, it will be at a bigger principal at a higher rate.
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How many Canadians will go bankrupt, and will we have a mortgage crisis when that happens? Yes or no?
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The Speaker, we know Canadians are struggling right now. I heard from a mom from Oakville who actually
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said that her mortgage prices, mortgage costs went up the same amount as her child care costs
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came down. Thank God they cancelled each other out. But people should be doing better than that.
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That's why we're going to be able to continue to be there for Canadians.
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What's the solution in another government program? It's unbelievable. How would it touch
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this prime minister? And this is their plan. They're going to borrow more money to shell out to Canadians
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who are hurting because of the policies. It's exasperating to listen to Justin Trudeau talk about
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this. I know that we're on the verge of a fall economic statement, and we'll have a budget soon
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thereafter. I get asked all the time, I'm sure you do too. Well, what are your solutions? So we hear what
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your problems are with the Liberals. Our solutions are very straightforward, and I am certain that in
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tomorrow's fall economic statement, and I'm certain that in the upcoming budget that the Liberals aren't
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going to take the path of least resistance to get the answer. Why? Because they're common sense
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solutions. And our common sense solutions are very straightforward. Less bureaucracy so that we can
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build homes, but his answer is always about programs and bureaucracies. It's big government and bigger
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government. Two speeds. Exactly. And they're carbon tax. Not only are they keeping the carbon
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tax in place for the majority of Canadians on the majority of things, which is driving up the price
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of heating homes, feeding families, putting gas in the car so people can get to work at doctor's
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appointments. They aren't just going to keep it on. They're going to raise the price of everything.
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They're going to quadruple that tax. So it's unbelievable. They also need to stop their inflationary
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spending. The problem is that they don't know that they have this problem, and the best thing that
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they can do is to just stop spending. If they have something else they need to spend money on,
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they need to do exactly what people do in their households, what people in our communities do,
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what we do in our own households. If you have a new dollar of spending, you have to find a dollar
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of savings because there's a limit every single month. And they don't understand that, and they
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just keep spending the cupboards bare. Well, that's common sense, and common sense isn't
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too common in the Liberal Caucus these days. Let's quickly talk about the fall economic statement that
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we've got to get out of here. It's coming down in just a few hours. So let's queue up cut number two.
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It's the finance minister and all our wisdom here talking about which he's going to do. Let's play cut two.
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Next Tuesday, I will be delivering our government's fall economic statement. Our fall economic statement
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is based on a responsible fiscal plan that allows us to invest in what Canadians need right now.
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That is why the fall economic statement will be focused on two key challenges, making life more
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affordable for Canadians, and taking further concrete action on housing. We know this is an
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urgent priority for Canadians, and we believe that at the heart of this issue is supply, supply, supply.
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Well, I'm not sure if you're going to be addressing the supply issue if your bureaucracy is bigger than
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it's ever been in Canadian history. At the same time, you're not going to, as you said a few minutes
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ago, tackle the affordability crisis if you're continuing to borrow to pay your air fingers cold
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priorities. Yeah, exactly. They continue to raise taxes on Canadians when they can least afford it,
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and they're borrowing money for programs that aren't going to address the needs that Canadians have
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today. And my goodness, I have never seen so many photo ops and press releases to address a problem.
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It took them the better part of a year to spend a nickel or to announce the spending of a nickel out of
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their so-called housing accelerator fund, and they'd built nothing. They'd built no houses. So it concerns
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me to hear that they're going to talk about opening the floodgates of spending so they can get things
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built when, you know, more than a year after they announced this housing accelerator fund. And of course,
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this comes from the prime minister who, in the last couple months, four months, said that housing isn't
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even a federal responsibility. That's because he's failed to deliver on his successive campaign
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promises to address the housing crisis in this country. And, you know, frankly, his policies,
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you know, are driving that housing crisis. And I don't expect to see real solutions, common sense
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solutions in the economic update from the finance minister today. So, you know, we're going to keep
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pushing, you know, we've heard from, you know, our leader, Pierre Polyev, the common sense solutions
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that this liberal government can adopt. We know that they're not going to, you know, pick up the
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conservative, all of our conservative ideas and say, okay, let's march forward with this. But my goodness,
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just stop raising taxes on Canadians. That's something that they can do today. If they want to tackle
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affordability, that should be the top line in, you know, in the minister's announcement later today.
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You know what? We're not going to spend anything new and we're not going to raise any taxes. And,
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you know, we'll have a new budget in the spring. And I don't know if their NDP dance partners would
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be okay with that. Oh, my goodness. I know there would be tens of millions of Canadians who would
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see that light at the end of the tunnel if they heard that. But I don't think they're going to see
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that kind of common sense and better until we have the opportunity to take it to the polls.
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I can't agree with you more. As you know, the guests always get the last word and we are pretty
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much out of time. Michael Barrett, the floor is yours. Well, you know, it's a pleasure to be here
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always, Jamie, and have the opportunity to share this message with Canadians. Waste, corruption,
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scandal, and mismanagement, it's been the hallmark of this NDP Liberal government. And after eight
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years, it's on full display yet again why Justin Trudeau is not worth the cost. And we're going to bring
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home accountability for Canadians. So I encourage everyone to stay tuned and share this message with
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their neighbors because it's so important that we expose this government for who they are.
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Michael Barrett, thank you very much for coming on. The Member of Parliament for Leeds,
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Greenville, Thousand Island, Arita Lake's also the Shadow Minister for Ethics.
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Thank you for your time. Thank you for yours as well. Remember, we have new content for you every
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single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Like, comment, subscribe, and share this program. I guarantee
00:22:46.840
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00:22:57.720
remember, low taxes, less government, more free. That's the blue.