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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 136

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 136 - Nov/28/22
Hon. Marco Mendicino (Minister of Public Safety, Lib.)
  • Nov/28/22 2:26:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we take all threats of foreign interference very seriously. That is precisely why we created not one, but two independent committees, which have confirmed the results of both the 2019 and 2021 elections. We will continue to provide all the tools that the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security needs to protect our democratic institutions.
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Context: House Hansard - 136 - Nov/28/22
Mr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC)
  • Nov/28/22 6:31:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the last time we visited this topic, we were talking, of course, about the Minister of Public Safety's claim that police had asked for him and his government to invoke the Emergencies Act. We know now that this was not true. This is pretty consistent with the government. It is part of a pattern, a pattern of disinformation and a lack of transparency. Since the minister made that false claim, we have heard the stories of the ArriveCAN app. We have more than $54 million spent on this app, which wrongly sent thousands of Canadians into quarantine. It could have been built for many orders of magnitude less, some say hundreds of thousands of dollars, some say, at most, $1 million, certainly not $54 million. We cannot get the details. The Liberals will not even tell us who did the work. They will not even tell us who the subcontractors are. While we wait for the government to slowly produce invoices for us, and as parliamentarians and Canadians pore over that data, I will note one of the hard-working staff members who has been on my team for years. He is tireless in his pursuit of the truth and answers and accountability, a great Canadian, Jordan Johnston from Victoria-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. Everyone back home should be really proud of the work Jordan does. He was poring through the information the government gives us in drip, drip, drips. We see a lack of transparency from the government at every opportunity. It promised in 2015 that it would be open by default, but it is anything but that, whether it is with the minister's false claims on the police requesting that the government invoke the Emergencies Act, which was really just used as a way for the government to punish people it disagreed with, or with the ArriveCAN app. It does not want to tell us which Liberal insiders got these contracts. It does not want to tell us who got rich on the arrive scam. We are going to keep asking the government for answers. We are going to keep demanding accountability. It looks like it is going to keep misleading Canadians and providing disinformation to throw us off the trail of whose pockets are being lined and who is getting rich on these contracts. My question to the government is very straightforward. It goes back to the promise it made in 2015. It speaks to the times we have heard the Prime Minister say that the story in The Globe and Mail was false, or the stories in the newspaper of late about what the Prime Minister said about having been briefed about foreign interference in our elections, when he will not tell us which 11 candidates were receiving cash from communist China. He will not tell us. He says those stories in the media are false. The Liberals are not being straightforward with Canadians. We want transparency. Canadians deserve it. Conservatives demand it. When will the government finally be transparent with Canadians?
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