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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 275

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 5, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 275 - Feb/5/24
Mr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC)
  • Feb/5/24 6:14:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Prime Minister and his NDP-Liberal government, it is so distressing to see the state of disrespect the government has fostered for Canadians who have fallen on hard times. Canadians are lining up at food banks in record numbers; there are two million a month, and a third of food bank users are children. The government is fighting in full defence of its $54-million arrive scam. This is the scandal, of course, that saw the two-person shop, GC Strategies, pull in $11 million with its operation that did no IT work, pocketing millions of dollars. They did it at a time of crisis in our country. A global pandemic had been declared, and there were a couple of yoyos in a basement forging the resumes of contractors to try to land a government contract. More than two-thirds, 70%, of the subcontractors they said they were going to use did no work on this $54-million government boondoggle. The scandal of the ArriveCAN app had senior government officials lying before a parliamentary committee. Contractors who worked on the ArriveCAN app are under RCMP investigation. We know that, in less than a week's time, the Auditor General will be releasing her findings on the ArriveCAN app. A parliamentary secretary in the House previously was talking about the tens of thousands of lives that were saved by this app. This was later admitted to be pure conjecture based not on fact but just on emotion and to defend the indefensible. The app wrongly quarantined and put people under house arrest, did not properly safeguard the biometric health data of Canadians, and, of course, did nothing to safeguard Canadian tax dollars. The government spends wildly and blindly. The costs to Canadians are incredible, and the effects of those costs are devastating. The government is going to spend tens of billions of dollars more just on servicing the debt this year than it does on the underfunded Canadian Armed Forces. Canadians are rightly outraged by the scandal, and it is incomprehensible why the NDP-Liberal government continues to try to defend this. We know that the chief information officer for the government may have destroyed four years' worth of relevant information, seven gigabytes of data and 1,700 emails. It was not until Conservatives forced the issue to be studied at the government operations committee that we finally saw real action taken and real attention paid to this. We want answers from the Auditor General. We want an apology from the government. When are we going to get back the money that the government misappropriated?
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Context: House Hansard - 275 - Feb/5/24
Mr. Michael Barrett
  • Feb/5/24 6:23:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is a lot to unpack there, but I will give a couple of quick numbers: 10,200 people wrongly and illegally quarantined by the broken app, which cost $54 million, an absolutely failure not worth defence. We are not going to take any lessons on lobbying from a government that has a minister, the hon. member for Oakville, whose husband worked for a company that received tens of millions of dollars while she sat in cabinet. We have seen the current government reward Liberal insiders for eight years on the backs of Canadians. I have not heard a single Canadian in any of my meetings say, “Tax me harder.” That is what the Liberal government seems to think: “We meet with everyone. Taxes are fine.” That is absolutely preposterous. Removing the carbon tax would help restore affordability to food prices and energy prices. People need to be able to heat their home and feed their family. That is why we are going to axe the tax, focus on technology and cut the Liberals.
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