National
How Rick Perkins and Larry Brock Revealed a $330 Million Cover-Up While Liberal MPs Run Damage Control
The True Cost of Letting Corruption Slide
Canada’s government is rotting from the inside, and if you needed more proof, look no further than Public Accounts of Canada (PACP) meeting 143. What we witnessed was a showcase of blatant corruption, institutional incompetence, and Trudeau’s Liberal elite running a racket—this time under the guise of environmentalism and “clean tech.” Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), the so-called green tech fund, has turned into nothing more than a green slush fund used to enrich Trudeau’s cronies while taxpayers foot the bill.
Let’s break it down: Trudeau’s government has turned what should have been a platform to invest in cutting-edge green technology into a cash pipeline for Liberal insiders. The PACP meeting laid bare how $330 million of taxpayer money flowed into conflicted projects approved by board members who had ties to the very companies benefiting from these funds. This isn’t negligence—this is corruption, plain and simple.
The Heroes of Accountability: Larry Brock and Rick Perkins
Two Conservative MPs stood out during this farcical hearing, and thank God they did. Larry Brock and Rick Perkins relentlessly grilled Marta Morgan, the bureaucrat who’s supposed to be in charge of overseeing SDTC. Let’s be real, though—Morgan’s job isn’t about fixing anything. Her role is to protect Trudeau’s insiders, to dodge questions, and to ensure that Canadians never find out the full extent of how deep this rot goes.
Larry Brock didn’t mince words when he compared the SDTC corruption to the Sponsorship Scandal, the Liberal boondoggle from the early 2000s that took down the Martin government. In this case, billions of dollars earmarked for clean technology are being funneled into projects tied to people sitting on SDTC’s board. “This is the sponsorship-style level of corruption within the government, the likes of which we haven’t seen since that scandal,” Brock declared.
Brock’s comparison is spot on. The Sponsorship Scandal was about buying influence with taxpayer money, and SDTC is no different. What’s worse is that this time, it’s all happening under the guise of fighting climate change. Trudeau’s Liberals have mastered the art of using high-minded rhetoric about the environment to hide what’s really happening—a cash grab for Liberal-friendly businesses.
Then there’s Rick Perkins, who absolutely took Marta Morgan to task. He demanded answers about why the SDTC board hadn’t taken steps to recover the $330 million in conflicted transactions. Let’s not forget that Annette Verschuren, former SDTC chair, was found guilty by the Ethics Commissioner for approving $220,000 in funds to her own company. Perkins didn’t hesitate to ask Morgan why the board hadn’t moved to recover this money, despite months having passed since the findings came to light.
“Why have you not taken steps to recover money for the taxpayer? The mandate is there—why aren’t you acting?” Perkins asked pointedly.
Morgan’s response? The same old bureaucratic doublespeak we’ve heard for years. “It has taken a few months for the board to get up and running… We have engaged legal advice,” she said, failing to provide any real answer. That’s not oversight—it’s stonewalling.
Morgan’s Evasion, Liberal Corruption Laid Bare
Morgan’s refusal to answer basic questions about conflicts of interest or the recovery of misallocated funds is exactly what you’d expect from Trudeau’s bureaucrats. When Perkins asked which law firm was advising SDTC on recovering taxpayer funds, Morgan dodged. She refused to name the firm, hiding behind vague references to “ongoing processes.” But let’s be clear here—this is all about protecting the same insiders who enabled this corruption in the first place.
Perkins saw right through it. “Are you getting legal advice as to what process should be followed to recover money? Yes or no? And if you say yes, which law firm is giving you that advice?” he asked, exposing the depth of the cover-up. Morgan couldn’t answer. Why? Because naming the firm would likely reveal the same old swamp creatures, still entangled in this corrupt web of green grift.
This isn’t about oversight or accountability—this is about Trudeau’s Liberals using every trick in the book to protect their insiders.
Redactions, Non-Answers, and Bureaucratic Cover-Ups
But it wasn’t just about recovering money. Larry Brock highlighted the heavily redacted documents that SDTC provided to the committee. He slammed the government for hiding the truth from Canadians, calling the redactions a deliberate attempt to cover up the depth of the corruption. “No small surprise that government departments heavily redacted hundreds of pages… the opposite of transparency and accountability!” Brock exclaimed, expressing the frustration that every taxpayer should feel.
It’s infuriating but not surprising. Trudeau’s Liberals love to talk about transparency and openness, but when push comes to shove, they’ll redact every piece of evidence that exposes their corruption. They know the truth is damning, and they’ll do anything to keep it hidden.
Brock also pressed Morgan on why SDTC continued to take legal advice from Osler, the very firm that helped facilitate the conflicts of interest at the heart of this scandal. Perkins had hammered her on this earlier, and Brock followed up, demanding an explanation for why SDTC hadn’t cut ties with a firm so deeply implicated in the corruption.
Morgan’s response? You guessed it—another non-answer. “Processes are being followed, and we’re looking at legal structures,” she mumbled, refusing to explain why the same law firm that helped create this mess is still providing legal advice. It’s absurd, but it’s par for the course in Trudeau’s Canada.
Liberal MPs Like Iqra Khalid: Protecting the Swamp
Let’s not forget Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, who swooped in during the committee to do what she does best—protect Trudeau’s swamp. Rather than asking tough questions or holding the government accountable, she focused on soft issues like governance improvements and the future of SDTC. Khalid didn’t once mention the $330 million in misallocated funds or the conflicts of interest that allowed board members to enrich themselves.
Instead, she harped on future reforms and administrative improvements, as if that would somehow wipe away the corruption embedded in this system. Khalid is playing a role that every Liberal shill plays—pretend everything is fine, talk about process, and hope that Canadians forget about the billions of dollars being wasted.
The Bigger Picture: SNC-Lavalin Was the Warning
This SDTC scandal is bigger than just the misallocation of funds. It’s a pattern of corruption that’s plagued Trudeau’s government from day one. If you look back, SNC-Lavalin was the canary in the coal mine. That scandal showed us exactly what Trudeau is willing to do—protect his corporate friends at all costs. Trudeau went so far as to pressure his own Attorney General to interfere in a criminal case to help SNC-Lavalin avoid prosecution for bribery.
Back then, Liberal voters shrugged. Trudeau got away with it, and now we’re seeing the consequences. This green slush fund is what happens when corruption goes unchecked. Liberals have become emboldened, knowing that they can use virtue-signaling about the environment to enrich their own, all while claiming they’re saving the planet.
This is what happens when corruption slides.
From the Fraser Institute
By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari
Canada’s rivers are vital to our environment and economy. Clean freshwater is essential to support recreation, agriculture and industry, an to sustain suitable habitat for wildlife. Conversely, degraded freshwater can make it harder to maintain safe drinking water and can harm aquatic life. So, how healthy are Canada’s rivers today?
To answer that question, Environment Canada uses an index of water quality to assess freshwater quality at monitoring stations across the country. In total, scores are available for 165 monitoring stations, jointly maintained by Environment Canada and provincial authorities, from 17 in Newfoundland and Labrador, to 8 in Saskatchewan and 20 in British Columbia.
This index works like a report card for rivers, converting water test results into scores from 0 to 100. Scientists sample river water three or more times per year at fixed locations, testing indicators such as oxygen levels, nutrients and chemical levels. These measurements are then compared against national and provincial guidelines that determine the ability of a waterway to support aquatic life.
Scores are calculated based on three factors: how many guidelines are exceeded, how often they are exceeded, and by how much they are exceeded. A score of 95-100 is “excellent,” 80-94 is “good,” 65-79 is “fair,” 45-64 is “marginal” and a score below 45 is “poor.” The most recent scores are based on data from 2021 to 2023.
Among 165 river monitoring sites across the country, the average score was 76.7. Sites along four major rivers earned a perfect score: the Northeast Magaree River (Nova Scotia), the Restigouche River (New Brunswick), the South Saskatchewan River (Saskatchewan) and the Bow River (Alberta). The Bayonne River, a tributary of the St. Lawrence River near Berthierville, Quebec, scored the lowest (33.0).
Overall, between 2021 and 2023, 83.0 per cent of monitoring sites across the country recorded fair to excellent water quality. This is a strong positive signal that most of Canada’s rivers are in generally healthy environmental condition.
A total of 13.3 per cent of stations were deemed to be marginal, that is, they received a score of 45-64 on the index. Only 3.6 per cent of monitoring sites fell into the poor category, meaning that severe degradation was limited to only a few sites (6 of 165).
Monitoring sites along waterways with relatively less development in the river’s headwaters and those with lower population density tended to earn higher scores than sites with developed land uses. However, among the 11 river monitoring sites that rated “excellent,” 8 were situated in areas facing a combination of pressures from nearby human activities that can influence water quality. This indicates the resilience of Canada’s river ecosystems, even in areas facing a combination of multiple stressors from urban runoff, agriculture, and industrial activities where waterways would otherwise be expected to be the most polluted.
Poor or marginal water quality was relatively more common in monitoring sites located along the St. Lawrence River and its major tributaries and near the Great Lakes compared to other regions. Among all sites in the marginal or poor category, 50 per cent were in this area. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region is one of the most population-dense and extensively developed parts of Canada, supporting a mix of urban, agricultural, and industrial land uses. These pressures can introduce harmful chemical contaminants and alter nutrient balances in waterways, impairing ecosystem health.
In general, monitoring sites categorized as marginal or poor tended to be located near intensive agriculture and industrial activities. However, it’s important to reiterate that only 28 stations representing 17.0 per cent of all monitoring stations were deemed to be marginal or poor.
Provincial results vary, as shown in the figure below. Water quality scores in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta were, on average, 80 points or higher during the period from 2021 to 2023, indicating that water quality rarely departed from natural or desirable levels.
Rivers sites in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. each had average scores between 74 and 78 points, suggesting occasional departures from natural or desirable levels.
Finally, Quebec’s average river water quality score was 64.5 during the 2021 to 2023 period. This score indicates that water quality departed from ideal conditions more frequently in Quebec than in other provinces, especially compared to provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and P.E.I. where no sites rated below “fair.”
Overall, these results highlight Canada’s success in maintaining a generally high quality of water in our rivers. Most waterways are in good shape, though some regions—especially near the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence River Valley—continue to face pressures from the combined effects of population growth and intensive land use.
This is a special preview article from the:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policy is often chaotic and punitive. But on one point, he is right: Canada’s agricultural supply management system has to go. Not because it is unfair to the United States, though it clearly is, but because it punishes Canadians. Supply management is a government-enforced price-fixing scheme that limits consumer choice, inflates grocery bills, wastes food, and shields a small, politically powerful group of producers from competition—at the direct expense of millions of households.
And yet Ottawa continues to support this socialist shakedown. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters supply management was “not on the table” in negotiations for a renewed United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, despite U.S. negotiators citing it as a roadblock to a new deal.
Supply management relies on a web of production quotas, fixed farmgate prices, strict import limits, and punitive tariffs that can approach 300 percent. Bureaucrats decide how much milk, chicken, eggs, and poultry Canadians farmers produce and which farmers can produce how much. When officials misjudge demand—as they recently did with chicken and eggs—farmers are legally barred from responding. The result is predictable: shortages, soaring prices, and frustrated consumers staring at emptier shelves and higher bills.
This is not a theoretical problem. Canada’s most recent chicken production cycle, ending in May 2025, produced one of the worst supply shortfalls in decades. Demand rose unexpectedly, but quotas froze supply in place. Canadian farmers could not increase production. Instead, consumers paid more for scarce domestic poultry while last-minute imports filled the gap at premium prices. Eggs followed a similar pattern, with shortages triggering a convoluted “allocation” system that opened the door to massive foreign imports rather than empowering Canadian farmers to respond.
Over a century of global experience has shown that central economic planning fails. Governments are simply not good at “matching” supply with demand. There is no reason to believe Ottawa’s attempts to manage a handful of food categories should fare any better. And yet supply management persists, even as its costs mount.
Those costs fall squarely on consumers. According to a Fraser Institute estimate, supply management adds roughly $375 a year to the average Canadian household’s grocery bill. Because lower-income families spend a much higher proportion of their income on food, the burden falls most heavily on them.
The system also strangles consumer choice. European countries produce thousands of varieties of high-quality cheeses at prices far below what Canadians pay for largely industrial domestic products. But our import quotas are tiny, and anything above them is hit with tariffs exceeding 245 percent. As a result, imported cheeses can cost $60 per kilogram or more in Canadian grocery stores. In Switzerland, one of the world’s most eye-poppingly expensive countries, where a thimble-sized coffee will set you back $9, premium cheeses are barely half the price you’ll find at Loblaw or Safeway.
Canada’s supply-managed farmers defend their monopoly by insisting it provides a “fair return” for famers, guarantees Canadians have access to “homegrown food” and assures the “right amount of food is produced to meet Canadian needs.” Is there a shred of evidence Canadians are being denied the “right amount” of bread, tuna, asparagus or applesauce? Of course not; the market readily supplies all these and many thousands of other non-supply-managed foods.
Like all price-fixing systems, Canada’s supply management provides only the illusion of stability and security. We’ve seen above what happens when production falls short. But perversely, if a farmer manages to get more milk out of his cows than his quota, there’s no reward: the excess must be
dumped. Last year alone, enough milk was discarded to feed 4.2 million people.
Over time, supply management has become less about farming and more about quota ownership. Artificial scarcity has turned quotas into highly valuable assets, locking out young farmers and rewarding incumbents.
Why does such a dysfunctional system persist? The answer is politics. Supply management is of outsized importance in Quebec, where producers hold a disproportionate share of quotas and are numerous enough to swing election results in key ridings. Federal parties of all stripes have learned the cost of crossing this lobby. That political cowardice now collides with reality. The USMCA is heading toward mandatory renegotiation, and supply management is squarely in Washington’s sights. Canada depends on tariff-free access to the U.S. market for hundreds of billions of dollars in exports. Trading away a deeply-flawed system to secure that access would make economic sense.
Instead, Ottawa has doubled down. Not just with Carney’s remarks last week but with Bill C-202, which makes it illegal for Canadian ministers to reduce tariffs or expand quotas on supply-managed goods in future trade talks. Formally signalling that Canada’s negotiating position is hostage to a tiny domestic lobby group is reckless, and weakens Canada’s hand before talks even begin.
Food prices continue to rise faster than inflation. Forecasts suggest the average family will spend $1,000 more on groceries next year alone. Supply management is not the only cause, but it remains a major one. Ending it would lower prices, expand choice, reduce waste, and reward entrepreneurial farmers willing to compete.
If Donald Trump can succeed in forcing supply management onto the negotiating table, he will be doing Canadian consumers—and Canadian agriculture—a favour our own political class has long refused to deliver.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal. Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
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