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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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