44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 6, 2023 11:00AM
- Feb/6/23 2:20:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it has been eight years of the Prime Minister's out-of-control spending that even Liberals are starting to notice, Liberals like Bill Morneau, who said that the federal government ”lost the agenda”; and Mark Carney, who called inflation homegrown. These are not just random Liberals, as the Prime Minister says. They were some of the Prime Minister's biggest defenders.
They want to know, and Canadians want to know, when will the Prime Minister show some humility, admit responsibility and end his reckless inflationary spending?
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- Feb/6/23 2:22:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight long years under this Prime Minister, taxpayers are coming to the realization that this country is being mismanaged. Across the country, families are suffering because everything is more expensive. Part of the reason everything is more expensive is that this government is spending money like crazy. For example, consulting firm McKinsey got $120 million in government contracts, but nobody—not the Prime Minister, not ministers, not public servants—can tell us what for.
In what universe does a government increase the national debt by spending $120 million on contracts without knowing exactly why?
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- Feb/6/23 2:23:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the pandemic.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed that $200 billion of the additional $500 billion spent during the two years of the pandemic had nothing to do with the pandemic.
Another expenditure was a $173-million investment in a company called Medicago. On Friday we learned that Japan's Mitsubishi Chemical Group was closing Medicago completely. The federal government put in $173 million without first checking whether the vaccines developed by this company could be used.
Why is the Prime Minister spending Canadians' money recklessly, without checking things first?
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- Feb/6/23 3:03:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is astonishing to think that we are going to lose $750 million and we should be accomplices to that. It is shocking.
Clearly, the government has become dependent on outside spin doctors for new ideas because, guess what, it does not have any of its own. It is exhausted and hopefully it has given up. Who is paying the price for all the Liberals' foolishness? Canadians are. There has been $104.7 million spent on contracts gifted to McKinsey, all because the Liberal government cannot be bothered to do its own work. When can Canadian people expect a full accounting for this ridiculous spending?
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- Feb/6/23 3:05:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very thankful for that response, because we do have an ideology on this side. That is to stand up for Canadians.
After eight years of spending, the Liberal government is out of money and Canadians are out of patience. Let me cite a few examples of the Liberals' crazy spending: $2 billion to a company that does not even exist, $100 million to the Liberal friends and of course to the Liberals' buddies at McKinsey, and also up to $750 million to a company that is now going out of business and shutting its doors. When will the government stop spending and give Canadians a chance to thrive?
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- Feb/6/23 4:25:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I arrived here today ready to debate the matter at hand. The feedback I got from my constituents was about where the $100 million-plus went that the government has wasted on one consultancy over a handful of years. This is something Canadians are seeing right now.
I hope the hon. member across the way will see that addressing the way the government is spending or wasting taxpayers' funds is part of our job in the opposition here. It has risen to the level where the public is very concerned about where the government is spending all the taxpayers' money.
Will the member across the way address how high this number has to go before he thinks it should be of concern to Canadian taxpayers?
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- Feb/6/23 6:25:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo. Before I begin, I do want to recognize a life well lived, the life of Mr. Rex Renkema, of Kamloops. He passed away over the holidays. Mr. Renkema was a mentor to me. He was a pioneer in the legal field, in my view. He was well respected by his colleagues, both at the bar and in the community. He had an incredible impact on my career and the careers of others. I obviously wish his family all the best in this difficult time. May perpetual light shine on Rex Renkema.
With that, I have just a few minutes to speak on this topic. One of the first places I want to start is when it comes to money. As the Leader of the Opposition just eloquently pointed out, when we break down the amount of money that went to consultants, it would equal, if I understand the math correctly, about $1,000 per family. This is a Liberal government that frequently does cartwheels over the fact that we are giving $500 to people to help them with a mortgage or we are giving $600 for this or a few hundred dollars for that. The Liberals frequently accuse Conservatives of really not caring about the middle class, and yet here they are giving the equivalent of $1,000 per family to outside consultants. That, to me, is something that deserves a measure of inquiry, and a significant measure of inquiry at that.
However, let us go one step further. The reality is that the public service has growth by approximately 30% under the Liberal government. Not only do we have a ballooning public service, we have a government intent on spending as much as it can, as quickly as it can, on whatever it can. Part of that spending, wherever it can spend, is on these consultants. Consultants should really be a mechanism of last resort.
We should not be calling external people in on contract, and generally contracts are paid at a much higher level than a salary, when we have people who could do the job already. I am mindful of the fact that on occasion there needs to be an external contract. There might be somebody with a significant area of expertise that the government needs to retain.
The problem is this, when we are literally spending billions of dollars on contracts, in this case $120 million on one firm, one has to ask why we are not going through our public service. Why is it that with a public service that has expanded by 30% in the last few years, we in Canada cannot take care of these things? These are fundamental questions that we need to ask. After all, if every Canadian family were to open their wallet, $1,000 of that money would be going not to the salaries just of the public service but, above and beyond that, directly to pay external contractors.
In my view, this requires an independent inquiry by somebody like the Auditor General, not the government itself. As has been raised before, the government has done whatever it can to shirk responsibility. Jody Wilson-Raybould was prepared to blow the whistle on the government, to say things were not right and were not fair. As the attorney general, in my view an independent minister of justice, that was her job. She stood up to the Prime Minister. She was supposed to be this country's highest lawyer. What happened? She was not in the job very long afterwards.
SNC-Lavalin shows us that we need a measure of independence here when we consider where this money went and how it got there.
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- Feb/6/23 7:03:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, last week, I found out that the government spent $6.7 million in fiscal year 2022 to house 10 people at a Calgary area quarantine hotel, which works out to about $670,000 per person. I asked a very simple question in the House: Was anyone fired for this? The government did not even acknowledge that this was a problem. I want to say why this is a problem, just so that, before I ask the question again, my colleague opposite understands.
First of all, fiscal year 2022, which was April 2022 onwards, was after most of the world had already lifted virtually all COVID restrictions. This was after the Government of Canada and most provincial governments and municipalities had eased COVID restrictions. This was after the government's own panel of experts said that the quarantine hotel was not necessary. This was after months of the government refusing to show any data that home quarantine could not provide the same capacity of preventing the spread of COVID that hotel quarantine did. There was no justification for this expense.
This expense was incurred even though the government had the option to end the contract with these hotels with a 30-day notice period. It did not end these contracts until after this outrageous amount of money had been spent. To me, this boils down very simply to an incompetent government that is not doing its job. It is not monitoring public expense, and at a time when inflationary spending is creating a cost of living crisis, every penny counts. The government cannot afford to be spending the same price as a beautiful two-bedroom home five minutes away from this hotel on a program that there is no justifiable reason to have. There was no justification to spend that amount of money, particularly in fiscal year 2022.
When I asked the question in the House, and I remember it vividly, the minister did not even say, “This was a problem and we should have ended it. I am looking into it to make sure this is not happening in other hotels, and I assure the Canadian public we want to be good stewards of tax dollars. I will fire somebody over this. Somebody deserves to be fired over allowing waste like this to happen.”
In the ensuing week since this exchange happened, we found out that it was not just happening at this one Calgary hotel. There were dozens of hotels across the country where this type of waste happened in fiscal year 2022 after COVID restrictions had been lifted.
I am just going to ask my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, the question again: Has somebody been fired over this waste?
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