Why has Parliament's work been paralyzed for more than a week?
CBC
The House of Commons has been at a standstill for more than a week as a dispute over releasing documents related to the government's failed green technology fund continues to gum up the works.
The Conservatives are trying to force the government to release all documents related to the now-defunct Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), a federally funded arm's-length body that was launched in 2021 to hand out taxpayer money to promising clean tech firms.
The Conservatives want the RCMP to investigate alleged wrongdoing at the SDTC and say police need these documents to do so.
The Liberals, meanwhile, say the government has released some of the documents already and the question of whether to disclose more should be studied further by a Commons committee.
They also say it would be unconstitutional for the government to produce documents for MPs to hand over to police without going through the appropriate legal channels.
In the meantime, as MPs squabble over what should or should not be released, Parliament is getting almost nothing done.
The SDTC's past chair, Annette Verschuren, has acknowledged she participated in approving more than $200,000 in grants to her own company.
But the problems at SDTC went much deeper. Back in June, Auditor General Karen Hogan reported that the organization had violated its conflict of interest policies 90 times, awarded $59 million to 10 projects that were not eligible and frequently overstated the environmental benefits of the projects it funded.
She found "significant lapses" in the $1-billion fund's governance.
The SDTC was so poorly managed and beset by scandal that Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne shut it down earlier this year and rejigged the government's strategy for funding technology to help fight climate change.
In June, the Conservatives introduced a motion demanding that the government turn over all SDTC documents to the Commons law clerk within 30 days. The clerk, in turn, would turn over those files to the RCMP for a possible criminal investigation into this troubled fund.
MPs passed the motion before rising for the summer break.
Not all of the government's documents were handed over to the clerk by the specified deadline.
That led Conservative MP Andrew Scheer, the party's House leader, to claim in September that parliamentary privilege had been violated because the government was not complying with a clear directive approved by MPs.
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