Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I had left off at the rationale for the individuals. This is of concern, and today with the NRC it was quite disturbing as well, because it appears that the new SDTC is still the old SDTC. It is still independent and reporting to the minister, through a different board of three different people, but it has the same management and no evidence of real change. This is why we wanted to have the NRC here today. It was to get a sense from them about how they were going to run it and whether they have been running it and what they've been doing to prevent the challenges that SDTC has, as identified by both the Ethics Commissioner and the Auditor General, yet today we see that the process hasn't even started. It's still the same old green slush fund, which had 186 votes out of about 400 that were conflicted, according to the Auditor General.
The Auditor General said there were over 400 votes, but the Auditor General didn't actually go through all of those votes. The Auditor General went through a small sample size of 226. Of those 226, 186 were conflicted, so 82% of what went before this board were conflicted payments to companies in which those same directors had an interest. There's quite a list of some of them that the Auditor General had given us, in addition to what was in the report.
It seems that every time we have a witness or have a report by an officer of parliament, it uncovers more and more. It's not that this is all of it. As we know, the House of Commons voted for a production of documents order on the Liberal green slush fund. That production of documents order required every government department and SDTC to turn over their documents to the law clerk of the House of Commons so that the law clerk could turn those over to the RCMP.
We now know, from letters received before this committee, that the law clerk has written to the Speaker informing the Speaker that the Prime Minister's own department, the PCO, gave direction to all government departments to actually redact elements of any documents they have, using the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act changes, although he points out in that letter that there was no such restriction put in the House of Commons motion that passed with the majority of members in the House of Commons. The House of Commons motion is supreme on this. It's not restricted by any act of Parliament, yet the Prime Minister's Office clearly interfered through the PCO in trying to prevent the information from getting out.
That's why this committee, the public accounts committee, which examines the Auditor General's reports on the expenditures of money, needs to have an expanded study on the Liberal green slush fund. We know that where there's smoke, there's fire. There's probably a lot more going on here than the 226 projects the Auditor General looked at out of the billion-dollar Liberal green slush fund.
As a result of that, we need to ask these directors who are involved in the current transition, as well as those who are named in the Auditor General's report, for more clarity before this committee. We need to ask that the Auditor General herself do a more extensive study of what's been going on in the Liberal green slush fund than she did in her selective sampling, her random sampling, of projects.
I would hope that all committee members support that we get to the bottom of this, because right now, we don't know if anything's changed.
The NRC doesn't know if anything's changed, contrary to what the minister said. The minister said that as of the date, the NRC has control and it will be up to this pristine level of accountability, yet the minister himself has not met once—not once—with anyone in the NRC to figure out how the heck this thing's going to get cleaned up. In the 40 months that Minister Champagne was the minister during SDTC, he did nothing, even though an ADM who reports to him sat in every meeting where this happened. He did nothing until it made it into the media. He did nothing through all the parliamentary hearings, and his only response has been that he is going to transfer it to the NRC and that this will clean it all up. He cares so much about it that he hasn't even met with the NRC to see what they're doing and to give direction, and neither have his staff.
I think it's essential that this committee keep examining this to get to the bottom of the issues that have been raised today and raised also by the Auditor General and the Ethics Commissioner.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.