Alright
@CBH99 and
@Navy_Pete here's the scoop.
BLUF: 1. The number being thrown around ($400mil) is no where near the actual number associated with what actually "happened".
2. It was not in any way the liberals "stealing" money or even "giving money to themselves".
Summary:
1. "Sustainable Development Technology Canada" (SDTC) is a private company that was founded motr than 20 years ago, and Parliament set up this organization as a private foundation. This means that it's an organization in the private sector and is not owned by the government. The statute makes clear that SDTC is not an agent of the Crown. In this regard, it is totally unlike a branch of department of industey, a Crown corporation, or even a third party that might act as their agent to deliver a program on our behalf.
2. SDTC receives the funds that it will give out to programs from "Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada" (ISED). When SDTC was founded, there was a "contribution agreement" that laid out how SDTC was supposed to conduct the process for evaluating bids and choosing which programs to give money to. This agreement included things like having a board of directors that evaluated and voted on bids, having a "member council" that decided who would be on the board of directors, and having a comprehensive conflict of interest program. However, much of the day-to-day decision-making on how the organization should operate and exactly how its programming should work is, by design, in the hands of the SDTC board and management team.
The "so what" to this is that they money being given out by SDTC to grant applicants was in no way the "liberals" giving away money to themselves or their friends.
At issue:
It was found by the AG that there were 186 cases where conflicts of interests were identified between the members of the board and the projects being proposed to them for grants. In 96 of those cases, the board members at issue followed the proper procedure and recused themselves from the votes. The total of these grants was about $259million. Again, this was the process working properly. Conflicts of interest were identified, and the appropriate actions were taken.
In 90 cases, however, board members with conflicts of interests were identified, but for whatever reason they did not recuse themselves, and voted on the applications. The total of these grants was about $76 million.
The so what here is that the "dollars at issue" here is nowhere near the $400 million being tossed around by right wing pundits.
Now, does that mean that that $76 million was "stolen" or "given to themselves", or "given to themselves with no work being done"? Nothing I could find would indicate so (so far, but this is probably as far as I'll go). Think about it. First, unless the votes by those with conflicts of iterest were the "deciding" vote on whether to approve an application, then the conflict of interest had no actual effect on whether money got granted. Second, even if those votes were the deciding votes, there is no evidence that the money went to applicants with "not worthwhile" projects or who didn't actually use the money as intedned/squandered it, etc. It MAY have, but I haven't found anything to say so, and even if it did, that would mean that, taking into account everything above, that the amount of money actually "wasted" or "misappropriated" was FAR below even the $76 Mil number above. Does that make it OK? Absolutely not, hence the whistle blower involved, the Audit, the committee meetings, and the fact that the SDTC was DISSOLVED because the government determined that the extreme arms-length nature of the organization did not meet modern Canadian standards for oversight of a company that handles that much tax payer money.
CONCLUSION: And THAT is why the media isn't covering this more, because it's a nothing burger.
www.thecanadianpressnews.ca
338canada.com
