Thank you, Chair.
It's hard to follow my colleague from Calgary Forest Lawn. He's in the neighbouring riding, and he's getting a big chunk in the redistribution of the riding I represent currently, which is the second-largest riding in Canada by population size, so I'm thankful for the extra help.
I want to go back to comments made by Mr. El-Khoury. I have some more articles by independent journalists that I want to refer to on the public record. Also, I've had the time to look up a few comments that Liberal members of Parliament have made about the carbon tax. I thought I would quote them on the record, because I think you'll find that these comments agree with our position that the subamendment should pass. These particular Liberal members of Parliament actually agree with the idea that the carbon tax is unpopular, and that should be put to the public. The public will choose to throw out those politicians who still support the carbon tax.
Mr. El-Khoury has said that his hope was for a future without tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and a bunch of other natural disasters, and he was tying it all into the carbon tax. We've had the carbon tax now for close to a decade, and we have had hurricanes. We have had wildfires. We have had all types of natural disasters. I'm just wondering at what price all of these will go away so I can go back to my constituents and tell them how punishing it must become, how ridiculous it must be, how radical it must be in order for all of those things to go away. It's just a ridiculous argument.
Nowhere in the IPCC report does it say such ludicrous things, that you can somehow, through a carbon tax, stop nature from taking its course, stop nature from damaging what we have. Actually, if you look at the statistics on how many human deaths have happened over the last century, they go down. The richer a country becomes, the better it can afford climate-resilient infrastructure to prevent those deaths. It's right in the IPCC report. I just find it completely ridiculous.
Mr. El-Khoury also commented that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and then he accused the Conservatives of having that as our plan. Well, I'm looking around at how many Liberals connected to the government have gotten richer. There are a lot. There are a lot of cronies out there who have gotten rich over the last nine years and who have been able to extract what we call “economic rent” from the government. I was busy going through some of those people who seemingly are about to make a fortune, have made a fortune or are interested in making a fortune, and they seem to be running out of time. If this subamendment passed, Chair, I'd be worried that some of them wouldn't get their chance to go and make their case to the government so that they could perhaps extract more economic rent out of the government and maybe get another $200,000 for their company.
I'm going to bring up the Sustainable Development Technology fund, what's now been named “the green slush fund”, from which a billion dollars of taxpayer cash was misspent, over $100 million of which was spent corruptly. I want to remind those at this table, Chair, of one particular case, because it's fresh in my mind, that of Annette Verschuren, who was personally appointed as chair by the minister at the time. She was the chair of this board and was at the board meeting at which the board voted for over $200,000 to go directly to her company. That's not me saying it; that's the Auditor General. There have been investigations. There have been parliamentary inquiries into this, all related back to exactly what the subamendment is about.
So when we're talking about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, I see a lot of Liberals getting really rich, really fast, and the government, the cabinet, facilitating it, making it easier, just opening themselves up to blatant corruption in that case. That's just one example.
Now we have the latest news that Telesat Holdings had $2.14 billion afforded to it for a program, and when people inquired online about how much it would cost to get a different private sector option out there, it was over a billion dollars less. It's interesting that the heads of Telesat Holdings are good friends with Mark Carney. Mark Carney, a gentleman who is deeply connected to the Liberal Party of Canada, is now on an economic task force seemingly doing government policy work but not on the government dime, which is also interesting, seeing that he is the chair of Brookfield, an investment company, and stands to gain substantially from some of the decisions that are about to be made by the government.
I want to draw attention specifically to Liberal budget 2024, in which there was open talk about forcing pension plans to invest directly in capital projects in Canada. I thought that the Canada pension plan, especially, was about seeking the highest returns so that retirees, who were forced to pay into it, can get the return on the investment that they made. They are compelled to make that retirement saving, and the goal of the CPP should be to ensure that there are enough benefits, enough cash in the fund to pay out those hard-working retirees.
However, now I see there's a $50-billion fund being put together by another Liberal, someone connected directly to that political movement who is on an economic task force—personally appointed by the Prime Minister, no less—but is not in the Prime Minister's Office. That is really interesting, because I guess he won't have access to all that Finance Canada data—unless he will. It's a $50-billion fund, which was reported by The Logic, an online publication that tracks Canadian tech and business news. In here, it says that Brookfield is looking to take advantage of this 2024 Liberal budget announcement that would see the pension funds being forced to invest. It's a $50-billion fund: $36 billion would be originating from Canadian pension funds, and then $10 billion from taxpayers, and Brookfield would commit $4 billion. How generous of them. That's really interesting.