Last month, Annette Verschuren, a well-connected Liberal insider and Trudeau-appointed Chair of the Green Slush Fund was found guilty of breaking multiple ethics laws after funneling over $200,000 taxpayer dollars to her own companies. Despite pleading ignorance, Canada’s Ethics Commissioner determined that Verschuren should have “reasonably known” that her companies would benefit from her actions, and that she used public funds to benefit “her private interests”.

Canada’s Auditor General also found that under Verschuren’s watch, Liberal-insider Board Members gave over $330 million dollars to companies they have interests in. Further, the Auditor General identified over 180 cases of conflicts of interest involving Board Members. Andrée-Lise Méthot—a good friend and former employer of Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s Environment Minister—enriched her company with more than $50 million from the fund.

The Auditor General further revealed that Verschuren funnelled an additional $2.6 million to companies in which she owns interests.

Trudeau’s Minister of Innovation, François-Philippe Champagne, is responsible for overseeing the activities of the Green Slush Fund. He sent an official to observe every single meeting where Verschuren and other corrupt Board Members voted to enrich themselves. Trudeau’s Minister turned a blind eye to this corruption and is therefore complicit in it.

Given the findings of the Ethics Commissioner and Auditor General, my Conservative colleagues and I demanded emergency summer hearings to get to the bottom of this corruption. However, our efforts were blocked when NDP and Liberal MPs voted to delay hearings.

Despite this, Conservatives have been doing everything possible to get to the bottom of this Sponsorship-Scandal-level corruption. We have forced a motion calling on the RCMP to investigate self-dealing at Trudeau’s Green Slush Fund, and we will continue to pressure Trudeau’s government to answer for this massive corruption scandal.