44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 18, 2023 02:00PM
- Oct/18/23 2:49:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is actually the government that is promising over $10 billion of cuts right now, because it suddenly woke up and realized that it was bankrupt. When we were in office, we managed to balance the budget while growing health care spending every single year and, in fact, growing it faster than the current government. However, today the biggest threat to the health of Canadians is homelessness. People are losing their homes because the Prime Minister has doubled the cost of housing.
Will he realize, with people living in parking lots, that after eight years he is just not worth the cost?
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- Oct/18/23 3:08:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over and over, the Liberal-NDP government promised interest rates would not go up, but after eight miserable years of the Prime Minister, Canadians know that is not true. Mortgage defaults and forced home sales are on the rise.
Lindsay is one of hundreds who wrote to me to tell me about her skyrocketing mortgage rate. She is paying an extra $1,250 a month. She does not have an extra $1,250 a month.
The Prime Minister is just not worth the cost, so when will he stop his inflationary spending so Canadians like Lindsay can keep their home?
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- Oct/18/23 3:10:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal government, the deficit continues to rise. In March, the finance minister said that this year the deficit was going to be $40 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer just told us that she was off by at least $6 billion.
Earlier this month, in a Senate committee, finance officials could not even say what the Liberal-NDP government is spending on debt interest charges.
The Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost, so when will the Prime Minister come up with a plan to balance the budget so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Oct/18/23 3:20:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of bad policy, this government continues to fuel inflation with uncontrolled spending. Today, we learned that Quebec has won Canada's inflation game for the fourth month in a row.
Groceries, housing, gasoline, everything costs more, courtesy of the Liberals, backed by the Bloc Québécois. Experts are not expecting things to return to normal anytime soon.
Can this government finally offer Quebeckers concrete solutions, put an end to out-of-control spending and abolish the carbon tax?
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- Oct/18/23 3:30:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will not take any lessons today from that side of the House. When the Conservatives were in power, they actually cut spending to fall below 1%. Let me be very clear: Military members and their families are our top priority. We are taking steps to ensure that they are supported. In budget 2022, we invested $55 million in residential housing for CAF members. We will be there for our troops. We will always support them.
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- Oct/18/23 6:31:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with my esteemed colleague from Terrebonne.
Here we are again to talk abut the ArriveCAN app. There would not have been so many questions—logically—if there had not been any problems, including with the contract.
I will not argue the reasons why the Conservatives decided to bring the report to the House now and ask for three hours of debate. I will not go there. I am not in their shoes and do not intend to be, ever. Rather, my goal is to raise the problems that cropped up with ArriveCAN and help make concrete improvements to procurement practices and the customs and practices of the machinery of government.
It is a question of efficiency. It is also a question of saving money, the money that helps create programs and applications—ArriveCAN in this case. It is not money that grows on trees. It is money that comes from taxpayers. It is our money from our taxes. Let us not forget that we are nothing more and nothing less than trustees of the tax money that taxpayers pay the federal government every year.
As trustees, we have a duty to manage this money responsibly. Was the ArriveCAN app developed in a responsible way? We have a duty to ask the question, because what we see and what we know so far is that it was not done either responsibly or well. An application initially expected to cost $80,000 with updates ended up costing $54 million. That is some increase.
An app designed to make it easier for people to get through certain border controls on arriving in Canada is not a bad idea. This is the 21st century after all, and if we can cut through the red tape to help things run more easily at the border, so much the better. “More easily”, however, does not mean less securely. We need to ensure both.
The problem with ArriveCAN is much the same as with other contracts. In the case of ArriveCAN, two guys won the contract. They said they knew people, so they assigned some of the work to others. The committee realized that no one really knew whether everyone had gone through security screening or whether due diligence had been done. There are a lot of questions that have not been answered. We were told yes, it was done, but it was more of a yes to get us off their backs. We do not want that kind of a yes. We want a definite “yes, that was done”. However, we are still not not sure about that yet. We are talking about an app that stores personal information, and the government is not sure that the people who developed it had the necessary security clearance.
This is not the first time this has happened. My colleagues spoke a bit about it earlier. Think about the WE Charity, for example, or the contract awarded to a non-existent company. That company did not exist 10 days before it was awarded a contract. It was founded by two guys. As soon as they got the contract, what did they do? They gave the $237 million to Baylis Medical, which belongs to a former Liberal MP who lost his seat in 2019, if memory serves. A $237-million contract was awarded to a company that existed for only 10 days. I already said it, but the Canadian dream is not bad. Not just anyone would be able to pull that off. I am not sure whether Rockefeller himself managed anything like that.
Once again, we have two guys who got awarded a contract and gave it to others to develop an application, supposedly because the federal government could not find one person among its 340,000 public servants who specializes in application development. It is 2023. This happened in 2020. That is a problem, and that is what I want members to think about. How is it that 1% of the population works for the federal government and that not one person in that 1% of the population specializes in application development?
Our public servants are trained. They have security clearance. They are capable of doing the work we ask them to do at a lower cost and in a much safer way.
We are currently faced with a situation involving allegations of identity theft, fake resumés, contract theft and fraudulent billing. That is not trivial. Where are the controls that should have been applied when this contract was being awarded or monitored? Given the allegations filed with the RCMP, there is no trace of that. How is it that officials who knew that the RCMP was conducting an investigation failed to inform the Auditor General?
Nothing is clear or transparent about the situation with ArriveCAN and other contracts. This needs to be said loud and clear. People do not want secrecy, they want transparency. We are not asking for the app's source code. We want to know where, how and on whom our money is being spent and who is spending it.
With ArriveCAN and in the consultations we did in committee—the powerful Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, as the committee chair would say—we heard from unions, university researchers and civil servants. We were astounded to learn that the unions had not been consulted, even though their members were the ones who were supposed to be making sure that things were working and following up with people at the airport. They were supposed to ensure that everything moved quickly so that things did not drag on and there were no delays. However, they were not consulted at any stage, either in the development of the app, the request for the exact need at the borders, or even the updates. At no point were they consulted, yet they were the ones who had to help passengers, use the ArriveCAN app and live with it on a daily basis. It seems to me that it would make sense to include the end users when developing an app.
As I have already mentioned, this was a private contract. There was no due diligence. Who are these guys? Who are the other parties involved in the contract? Are these people solvent? Are they reliable? We do not know. It seems to me that this expression has come up a lot in my speeches over the past four years. We do not know because we never get an answer. The people we are asking do not have any answers either.
No due diligence was done to determine whether the app could be created and managed internally. The government did not even ask whether anyone could create an app. A contract was awarded immediately. It does not take 15 years to ask whether we have in-house developers. Normally, when someone is hired, their skills are well known. With the millions of dollars we spend on IT in Canada, no one ever tried to find out whether there was anyone capable of developing apps. ArriveCAN has simply brought to light a whole host of problems inherent in the federal machinery, and those problems need to be dealt with at the source.
People might wonder why we are taking three hours to discuss a committee report. However, this committee report is just one small tree in a forest, and we cannot forget to see the forest for the trees. Here, the forest is the current federal government's inability to assume its responsibilities towards its own public servants, towards its citizens, and towards—
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