CCI Response to the Auditor General’s Report into SDTC

In response to the report into Sustainable Development Technology Canada released today by the Auditor General of Canada, CCI Director of Federal Affairs Nicholas Schiavo issued the following statement:

“Sustainable Development Technology Canada was set up with a mandate to promote clean technology in Canada, and this remains a worthy economic objective for the federal government to pursue. Today’s Auditor General report into SDTC offers valuable scrutiny into the way the organization has been run, and it should prompt serious discussion in Ottawa about where to go from here.

“However, clean technology is the best possible way for us to tackle the serious threat of climate change without forcing individuals to accept a lower standard of living. Moreover, clean technology is poised to be one of the most important economic opportunities of the 21st century. Canadians can either develop the innovations that help enable a low-carbon economy and profit from those innovations, or we will be forced to buy technologies from around the world, and we will all be poorer for it.

“The bottom line is that Canada has incredibly promising innovators commercializing technologies that can meaningfully help reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change globally. These innovators have relied on support for SDTC in the past, and if the federal government is no longer in the business of supporting clean technology companies as the result of governance failures at SDTC, we will all be poorer for it.”

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Media Inquiries:

James McLeod
Director of Communications
jmcleod@canadianinnovators.org

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