Former Liberals’ green slush fund chair maxed out donation to Carney’s campaign
Conservative MP Michael Barrett accused Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney of a conflict of interest after he received a campaign donation from a “disgraced ex-boss of the Liberal...
Author: Quinn Patrick
Conservative MP Michael Barrett accused Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney of a conflict of interest after he received a campaign donation from a “disgraced ex-boss of the Liberal green slush fund.”
The donor in question is former chair of Sustainable Development Technologies Canada’s board of directors Annette Verschuren, who resigned from the Crown corporation in November 2023.
Her resignation came as the federal ethics commissioner launched an investigation into a potential conflict of interest.
The probe was in response to $217,000 of COVID-19 payments SDTC distributed to NRStor, a company that Verschuren is the CEO of.
“Who backs Carbon Tax Carney? A Trudeau appointee who broke ethics laws—and she’s a max donor! The disgraced ex-boss of the Liberal green slush fund is all in. Conflict of Interest Carney? He’s just like Justin,” wrote Barrett in a post to X Sunday.
Verschuren donated $1,750 to Carney’s campaign on Jan. 21, the maximum legal contribution for an individual.
Verschuren was grilled at the House of Commons’ ethics committee in 2023 for her role in granting NRStor two rounds of Covid-19 payments totalling $217,000.
Verschuren did not recuse herself from the board meetings in which SDTC granted NRStor the relief payments despite the potential conflict of interest.
Verschuren told the ethics committee that she received legal advice that she was not obligated to recuse herself from the vote to distribute the Covid-19 relief payments.
SDTC and its leadership were being heavily scrutinized at the time, after multiple news reports revealed significant corporate mismanagement.
In response to whistleblowers from SDTC reaching out to the government and complaining about corporate mismanagement, the federal department Innovation, Science, and Economic Development commissioned a report from Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton to investigate the matter.
True North spoke with an SDTC whistleblower and conducted an independent investigation which found that SDTC had given tens of millions of dollars to companies to which its former and current board members have financial ties.
Further, SDTC fired employees who presented their concerns about the corporate mismanagement they witnessed.
The Raymond Chabot report uncovered a number of problems with SDTC’s governance, including the funnelling of money to companies in which board of directors members had personal or financial interests, several violations of SDTC’s contribution agreement with ISED, and failures of SDTC’s human resources policy.
The Auditor General also found 90 instances in which SDTC’s Board of Directors had violated conflict of interest policies by voting on or participating in discussions about a company they had previously declared a conflict of interest with.
These 90 cases were connected to projects that totalled nearly $76 million in funding from taxpayers.
The scrutiny placed on SDTC culminated in SDTC’s long-time CEO Leah Lawrence resigning from her position after what she called a “sustained and malicious campaign to undermine” her leadership.
RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme confirmed that the federal police force is still actively pursuing its investigation of the scandal last fall.
“We did receive the documents and investigations are ongoing so I’ll limit my comments to that,” Duheme told reporters in October.
Carney’s campaign did not respond to True North’s request for comment.
So when environmentally aware Liberals get together and they come up with ideas to spend taxpayers money on world-saving projects, none of them have, by pure coincidence, their fingers in commercial operations based on environmental concerns? I'm sure they all have a picture of Al Gore on their office desk.