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Context: House Hansard - 286 - Feb/27/24

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/27/24 12:31:28 p.m.
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Again, this is a point of debate. I would ask members to please quote the section on points of order they are referencing in order for us to ensure they are actual points of order. The hon. member for Calgary Centre is again rising on a point of order.

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Context: House Hansard - 286 - Feb/27/24

Mrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC)

Feb/27/24 1:38:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to stand in the House of Commons to speak on behalf of the people of Calgary Midnapore. I think everyone has had a situation in his or her life such as going through the grocery store, putting items in the cart, getting to the checkout and having to remove items. Maybe it was a crazy night out. Maybe it was eating too many candies after time with friends or family. We have all had a situation in our lives where, as we are at with arrive scam today, we have asked ourselves how something even happened. How this even happened is the big question for today. That is why we, official opposition members, are asking the Liberal government to table a report by March 18 showing the complete costs of arrive scam, and to this date we have no idea what those really are, and to collect and recoup all the funds paid to contractors who did no work. We know there were many, and certainly one in particular. We have this opposition day motion before us today because Canadians are asking how this even happened. ArriveCAN was an application that was supposed to cost $80,000. This is what a group of individuals who spent a weekend replicating the application said it could be done for. Lo and behold, the indicated price of this increased to a couple dozen million and then, more recent, we found out that this app had cost $54 million; that is $54 million for an application that individuals said they could have built for $80,000. Recently, with the report of the Auditor General, we found out it cost a minimum of $60 million, and we are not even certain that is the total amount because of the poor documentation done by the government, which speaks to its incompetence. The main vendor behind this is the infamous GC Strategies, the two-person company working out of its basement, which we originally thought was paid $11 million. After the Auditor General's report, we found out it was closer to $19 million. Again, we are not entirely sure because the documentation is not there to even prove that is all it was paid. It was recently released in the press that this company, this two-person company working out of its basement and not even doing any work, has been given a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts by the NDP-Liberal coalition, by the Liberal government, which is an incredible amount. Within the arrive scam application and its vendors, we have the possibility of collusion, of price-fixing and certainly inflation of prices, all of these things. One of my colleagues, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, questioned the witnesses. He asked them over and over again what they did and they could not even respond. They were unable to answer the question. GC Strategies was also determined to have forged résumés in an effort to get these contracts. We all know the penalty for doing this, for example, if one is applying for a private position, or applying to a university or forging a transcript. These things are unheard of, yet it was done by this vendor, which was paid a quarter of a billion dollars by the Liberal government. We have the destruction of documents by the chief information officer at the time of arrive scam. One cannot even make this stuff up. Again, how did this even happen? Canadians are wondering that. It gets worse. The head of the CBSA did not even report the RCMP investigation of GC Strategies to the Auditor General, who found out about it in The Globe and Mail. The government is so dysfunctional that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Then we have the integrity director within the CBSA investigating the situation. We are seeing what happens time and time again. The government is investigating itself. I am not sure where this holds up to be evident. I certainly would love the opportunity, and I think many people would, where we determine ourselves whether we have done wrongdoing or not. Unfortunately, democracy is not supposed to work this way and Canada is not supposed to work this way, but this is the way the arrive scam is. Therefore, again, how did this even happen? Those who have evaluated what happened here, and we have not even gotten to the RCMP investigation, have not found good things. We had the procurement ombud review of arrive scam and his words were very damning. He found that out of 41 ArriveCAN-related procurements, 23 contracts were issued using a competitive process, but 31.7% of all contracts were non-competitive, sole-source contracts, which is one-third. It is terrible. We also found that 43.5% of contracts were from disincentive bidders using lower rates and encouraging bidders to pick a less risky hire rate. Members may have also heard that GC Strategies, this firm that we have talked so much about in the House of Commons, even won a bid because it wrote the terms to win the bid. It was making up the rules so it could win the bid. It goes on and on. I will point out everything we see with the arrive scam. We see the incompetence of the government. We see the government not accepting responsibility. We see the complete lack of respect for the taxpayer and no value for money here, and I will talk about that a bit more in a minute. As a microcosm of the government and how it has spent the last close to nine years now, the arrive scam is, sadly, a microcosm event. It gets worse after the review of the procurement ombud who gave the arrive scam a failing grade. Two weeks ago, and the Liberal government did not want this to happen, we had the release, finally, of the Auditor General's reports. Whatever excuse the Liberals tried to use for the arrive scam, such as the crisis situation, she said that it was not an excuse to not get value for money for the Canadian taxpayer. We found that 18% of invoices submitted by contractors did not have supporting documentation. We know now that task authorities were issued and paid for while not even having tasks assigned to them. Essentially, people could have been paid for work that they did not even complete. It is absolutely unbelievable. In addition, in the Auditor General's report, $12.2 million could not even be associated to ArriveCAN, or the arrive scam. This amount is unbelievable. We also found in her report that per diem rates were $1,090 per day compared to the $675 comparable IT positions in other departments. It is just astounding that these things could happen with the arrive scam, that there could be such blatant disregard for the taxpayer. However, this is happening by the Liberal government in this day and age. It is a government that just had a $23.6 billion deficit between April and December of last year, a government that is sending over a million Canadians to food banks and a government that is allowing one in five Canadians to skip meals. The arrive scam is a complete microcosm of the government and this failure. The good news, as we found out today, is that the RCMP investigation has now been extended to include the arrive scam, which is a big victory for us on this side of the House, our tenacity in our quest for the truth, our not wanting to give up on finding the truth for Canadians and on getting value for them. However, the final question that remains, which I started my speech with, is how did this even happen?

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Context: House Hansard - 286 - Feb/27/24

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/27/24 1:50:04 p.m.
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I am hearing no. I just want to remind members that if they are seeking unanimous consent, it is always good practice to consult with the other parties before trying to seek that unanimous consent. The hon. member for Calgary Midnapore.

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