'Outright incompetence': Whistleblowers secretly recorded civil servant slamming federal green fund

Doug McConnachie laid out his unvarnished thoughts on Aug. 25, unaware his words were being caught on tape.

Commenting on a fact-finding report he'd just received, the assistant deputy minister at Innovation came down hard on the senior leadership of Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), a foundation in the middle of a five-year, billion-dollar funding deal with Ottawa.

"There's a lot of sloppiness and laziness. There is some outright incompetence and, you know, the situation is just kind of untenable at this point," he said.

Speaking with a member of a whistleblower group, McConnachie predicted a fiery reaction when his minister at Innovation, François-Philippe Champagne, would get briefed on the report.

"The minister is going to flip out when he hears the stuff and he's going to want an extreme reaction, like shut it all down," predicted McConnachie.

Back in late August, the whistleblowers who had filed a complaint against SDTC still hoped for a management overhaul and the launch of a full-fledged investigation. In their complaint filed early in the year, they alleged a series of conflicts of interest and a number of potential cases of mismanagement of public funds at the foundation that subsidizes Canada's cleantech sector.

In one of many taped conversations, McConnachie fuelled their hopes, saying there was a consensus in the federal bureaucracy that SDTC's management team was on the outs.

"It's unlikely that certain members of the board, or the entire board, and executives are going to be able to continue to serve. Like they've kind of lost the confidence. So really, the discussion will be the mechanisms for getting them out," he said in late August.

WATCH | 'There's a lot of sloppiness and laziness,' civil servant says of federal green fund in secret recording:

More than two months later, however, the SDTC management team and board of directors remain in place.

The government has even called on them to implement a series of reforms in response to the whistleblower complaint and the investigative work of Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, the external firm that produced the report into various shortcomings at SDTC.

In short, the very people who were in the crosshairs of the public service at the end of August were entrusted this fall with resolving the issues that arose under their reign.

In response, the whistleblowers provided Radio-Canada/CBC with hours of recordings of conversations with senior officials in a bid to force a change in the government's approach.

So far, the whistleblowers believe the government served them a number of "broken promises" and instead tried to contain the damage from their complaint, with no real intention of getting to the bottom of things.